I am going to mention Bill Maher but this is not about Bill Maher, so don't tune out yet, OK?
I am also going to mention Nazis. This actually is about Nazis, but it's about a broader point. I ask you to read and consider this carefully.
Last night, Bill Maher interviewed former US Vice President Al Gore. Maher challenged the use of the term "Nazis" and "Hitler." He effectively said "You can't say that" without going quite so far as to outright forbid it—likely because, you know, he claims to be a free-speech absolutist. Still, you can't say that.
That's what they all say.
Everyone says it: You cannot use the term Nazis.
My question is: Why?
Wait, no; that's not quite right. My response is: That's wrong.
And it's not wrong on principle. It's wrong pragmatically. Here's my rationale.
Ten years ago, in 2015, as I heard presidential candidate Donald Trump's then-alarmingly and newly divisive rhetoric, I knew that I heard clear echoes of Adolf Hitler's speeches. And then I heard that his first wife Ivana Trump said Donald kept Adolf Hitler's writings beside their bed. And then Donald Trump was endorsed by former KKK 'grand wizard' and American Nazi David Duke, and then by American Nazi Richard Spencer, who told ABC News's Juju Chang that Trump would usher in a race war in the United States. (That was a decade ago, and these extremists generally were presented by the media as wacky novelties, not as dangers. And that’s when I lost faith in the media.)
Tell me now why we can't say "Nazis."
No. No, wait. We're not even halfway there yet.
So I wrote this little essay a decade ago—A DECADE—in November of 2015 to process my thoughts. My conclusion was, yeah, this is actually a real threat to the entire nation. I called it "The Dangers of Dismissing Donald Trump's Hateful Rhetoric." Not a work of genius, just honest, clear-eyed observation. That's what I thought, anyway. Today, I must say I am proud of myself for having had the courage to write down what I knew I was witnessing, knowing that the passage of time could prove me wrong and despite all people saying, “That’s crazy. You are not allowed to say that even if it is what you see.”
Sarah Kendzior shared my little essay on Twitter and said that people should take the warning seriously because it is serious. An editor from a major, influential national political magazine replied that "any comparison between 1930s Europe and the US is hyperbolic and something we would never consider publishing." And here we are.
A decade has gone by now and some things have happened, in case you have not noticed.
For example, Donald Trump was elected, American Nazis celebrated and demonstrated and claimed the US is their country, and then when he was voted out in 2020, his followers attempted to overthrow the United States government with a violent insurrection as he and his family watched with eager anticipation on television screens.
Apropos nothing, Adolf Hitler attempted to overthrow the German democratic government in an event called the Beer Hall Putsch, which failed. Hitler fled but was found and arrested. He was put on trial. The trial coverage made him a celebrity by way of infamy, and it galvinized support for him. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to prison. From prison, he dictated his influential 'Mein Kampf'—influential to Donald Trump, according to his first wife, anyway—which served as his political platform. It served him well politically.Now we come to a crucial point. This is the point I make to all people with whom I discuss "the Nazi thing." Almost no one digests it.
The you-can't-say-Nazis! taboo effectively is based in the notion that many innocent people died and were tormented during the Nazi Germany-orchestrated Holocaust that it feels disrespectful to those people ever to compare anything else to the Nazis or Hitler or World War II.I would argue that that alone is a reason not to pretend this never can happen again. Yet, the rallying cry "Never Again" that has been familiar to me all my life seems to have morphed from a call for vigilance to a special identifier that "no matter what ever happens, even if it is an exact replica of what happened before, we must assert that this is the worst thing that ever happened and nothing can ever be compared to it, ever, no matter what, or else you are a monster." That's dangerous. That has gotten us to where we are.
This point seems never to be absorbed by people when I make it, but the German Nazi party was not only a murder-and-torture factory and it was not even designed to be that as far as I know. The party existed for a long time—as long as Trump has been a politician, notably—before it came into power, before it took over and remade the German government, before it invaded other nations, before it established concentration camps, and before it turned those camps into death factories beyond anyone's worst nightmares. The death camps mostly occurred at the end of the Nazi reign. The reign was much longer. What happened during that reign?
Hitler and his cronies staged an attack on the government that they claimed was a threat to the nation. They argued that Hitler must be given totalitarian powers by the German parliament temporarily because only he could save the country. They told their legislative body to turn over all power to Hitler and it did. Hitler never gave back that power.
Hitler told the Germans they were great and they needed to weed out the weak by addressing social contaminants including disabled people, gay people, Jewish people. In other words, the German government identified the smallest, most socially disempowered groups to target with hatred and harm. The German people didn't love that at first but they became accustomed to it within a year and then they were mostly all in on it, although some chose not to pay attention and looked away. The Nazis arrested and disappeared those people to prison camps, where they had no civil or human rights, and once they were gone, they were never seen again.
Many everyday German people said they had no idea about the existence of concentration camps and especially death camps. Some evidence suggests that most of those everyday German people are lying.
I think those German people probably are lying and also are not lying.
I think those people are in legitimate denial. I think they cannot face the reality of what happened in their nation, cannot make sense of how it happened, and absolutely cannot accept that they possibly could be in any way complicit in those atrocities happening. But they were. And here we are.
The Nazis were evil because of mass murders they committed.
But were the Nazis evil only because of those as-yet incomparable mass murders? No, not only.
The Nazis took over Germany with a campaign of aggressive and cruel hatred directed toward the most vulnerable populations in their country.
Don't tell me there's no valid comparison here.
David Duke.
Richard Spencer.
Confederate flags, swastika arm bands and MAGA hats worn and carried by the same people during violent racist demondtrations in Charlottesville, Virginia and then in a coup attempt on Capitol Hill. Trump as always was not held accountable despite ‘concerned’ member of Congress such as the perpetually complicit Susan Collins, but his puppet followers who participated in that coup attempt in his name? Sentenced to prison by a court of law—and then freed by Trump and celebrated by him after the corrupt US Supreme Court awarded him preemptive immunity from all his next crimes. Did Trump free these people because he is loyal? Or does he just need people who have proven their loyalties to him to be available to carry out the next coup while his family watches in remote safety on television screens?
The Nazis obliterated an existing democracy. Are you telling me there's no valid comparison there? I have been to the US Holocaust Museum a half dozen times. I have read Elie Wiesel’s writings. I have read biographies of people such as Marc Chagall, who the Nazis hunted with the goal of murdering him for existing. I have seen Schindler’s List. I know about Auschwitz and Dachau. In college, I was in a history class with an older woman who said she had been born in a concentration camp and smuggled out, somehow sent to New York where she was raised. I understand the horrors of the Nazi death camps. I also understand that those death camps, as paralyzingly and surrealistically nightmarish as they were, were only one component of the Nazi regime. I pray that component is never replicated. I pray the American public snaps out of its trancelike denial and will acknowledge that so much of what preceded those camps already has been replicated in the here and now. Open. Your. Eyes. And then open your mouths and say what you see. If you 🙈🙉🙊, then you allow evil to proceed unchecked.
Do you understand your role in this?
It’s a question you would ask any German in 1940 if you had the chance, wouldn’t you?
Do you understand your role in this?
The Nazis decreed that some human beings are subhuman, not deserving of human rights previously guaranteed to them by federal law, and they began to violate those rights little by little until demented doctor Josef Mengele was cutting open live, unanesthetized children and gassing families en masse and Nazi soldiers—formerly 'very fine people'—casually shot grandmothers, infants, small children, puppies, anyone who was different or vulnerable at all in the face simply because they wanted to and there were no consequences.
Before they did that, the Nazis arrested and imprisoned dissenters. They arrested and imprisoned public officials. Yesterday, a judge was arrested for protecting a migrant person from being arrested and sent to a foreign concentration camp, which is unambiguously unconstitutional and illegal but which does not matter. The Supreme Court justices who ordered the Trump administration to follow the law are the Supreme Court justices who have shredded the Constitution to make him a “king above the law.”
Bill Maher is the kind of free-speech absolutist Mark Zuckerberg is—one who decides what absolutely can and cannot be said. Zuckerberg, following Trump’s lead, set new Meta policies that effectively encourage both political disinformation and hate speech targeted toward women and LGBT people, including Nazi-like dehumanizing claims that transgender people are subhuman. But when a Meta whistleblower published a book recounting her experiences working with Zuckerberg and some alleged illegal actions of various Meta executives that endanger national security, Zuckerberg wielded the power of his vast wealth to gag her, including attempts to prevent her publisher from selling her books.
Maher is a similar kind of self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” who invokes his and others’ rights to make jokes about any person or even to use hate speech—he often says “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” such as when he happily gave his platform to semi-covert Nazi and Milo Yiannopoulos, whose fame was made by another occasional Maher guest Steve Bannon—but who absolutely condemns anyone, even a comedian like Larry David, who make fun of him, and who says that we cannot invoke the term "Nazis" because the Holocaust was a uniquely evil event in world history.
We must use the term to try to ensure that the Holocaust does not happen again. Never again.
We also must use the term because aside from the death camps, everything else is dangerously close to being a one-for-one repeat of history.
People like Maher—and make no mistake, in this case he is in the absolute majority—are unwittingly begging for us to sit by silently as the next worst thing is done and we all accept the social taboo of not being able to call it what it is.
Well, it is what it is.
Plenty of German people chose to look away and just live their lives, and those people are vital gears in the horrific clockwork that made Nazi Germany so efficient.
If you cannot open your eyes and see the astonishing comparisons between what is happening now in the United States and in 1930s Germany, before there were any known death camps, then you either don't know history or else you are in denial.
Wake up.
We stil have the collective power to stop the worst from happening, but time is running out.
*I wrote this on my phone at 3:00 a.m., so please forgive any typos.
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