Preventing People From Dying is Just Like Genocide

[Joanne98]

These photos from the teabagger rally of Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) have thankfully been getting some exposure:

The sign says “National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau Germany – 1945." I first saw this item via Richard Blair of All Spin Zone. Distributorcap also has a brief item on this, and notes, "This was no Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin event - this was an event sponsored and pushed by the Republican leadership in the House and Senate - including Eric Fucking Cantor." Richard's post has contact information for Bachmann, Boehner and Cantor.

There's a point at which idiocy isn't funny, and being outrageous isn't so much offensive as it is grossly irresponsible and dangerous. It’s not as if there aren't legitimate criticisms of various health care reform proposals. But this isn't about respectable, 'different points of view' when one group is claiming that a government measure – one that could help people – is the same as one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated. One has to be pretty idiotic, or crazy, or irresponsible, to claim that giving people health care – which might save 22,000 – 45,000 lives a year, or more – is just like genocide, mass murder. And it's not as if this is an isolated incident, since this type of crap has been around for months now. This merely may be the most prominent example yet. It's sad that the light of day and being at the United States Capitol doesn't dissuade Michelle Bachmann, the Beck and Limbaugh fans, and the teabaggers from this poisonous bilge. Perhaps it only eggs them on.

I already linked an August post, "Deny Me Health Care or Give Me Death" in the previous post, and I have several more on the Holocaust. (Then there's more comically inept Holocaust references by right-wingers.) Sometimes Nazi analogies are appropriate, and sometimes they are irresponsible. I'm just very sick of the cavalier comparisons to Hitler and Stalin, especially when they're aimed at pretty centrist, establishmentarian politicians by far right authoritarians. It's all the more absurd when one considers - which group exactly is running around screaming about the dread menace of those who aren't real Germans, err, Americans, in our midst? This crap is dishonest, irresponsible, idiotically ahistorical, and just disgusting.

In late October, Scott Horton published a powerful short piece called "A Trip to Chon Tash" about novelist Chingiz Aitmatov and Aitmatov's struggle to deliver "a critical view of the legacy of Soviet rule in Central Asia and his native Kyrgyzstan." In 1938, Stalin had Aitmatov's father and 136 others among the intelligentsia murdered. This pattern will sound tragically familiar to those who know the history of Stalin. (Robert Conquest's book The Great Terror gives an overview, and I heard some heartbreaking stories in Russia during my brief study there.) In his piece, Horton visits the memorial erected near the pit where the bodies were buried (emphasis mine):


>>>>>

What transpired in Chon Tash occurred dozens of times across the vast frozen expanse of the Soviet Union, part of the policy that historians have come to call “decapitation,” the systematic murder of intellectuals and political leaders because of Stalin’s fear—part paranoid delusion and part real—that they would present some threat to him. Stalin’s object in dealing with the “nationalities” was to leave them leaderless and docile, and he was prepared to reach to the most brutal tools to achieve this.

In his novel , Aitmatov turns to the ancient Turkic legend of the mankurt. The head of a man taken prisoner is shaved and the moistened skin of a camel is applied to it. He is then sent into the desert, where the drying of the skin produces horrible torture. If the prisoner survives, his personality is destroyed by the process, and with it any recollection of the past. He is reduced to subservience to his master. The mankurt may look outwardly like a human being, but he is not. Aitmatov’s message, which struggled to escape censorship, was plain: this was what Stalin had done to Central Asia. And for Aitmatov, the lost memory was never more poignantly presented than in the fate of his father, a fate he learned only after the Soviet Union fell and the truth could be told.

Saturday was a brilliant autumn day in the foothills of the Alatoo Range of the Celestial Mountains. I traveled to Chon Tash to visit the memorial, ringed with blood-red roses, still in bloom after the season’s first snowfall. I went to pay respects to Chingiz Aitmatov, who died in June of last year leaving instructions that he be buried alongside his father at the site of that Stalinist act of terror. The sun shone with special intensity and the sky was cloudless. The willow birch trees had not yet released their golden leaves. A brook rustled in the valley below, and stately tall cypress-shaped pine trees could be seen on the hills above. A group of military cadets were there for an oath-taking ceremony held directly above the ground from which the remains had been excavated, and the message of the setting was clear to all: don’t forget the great wrong that can occur when the power of the state is wielded brutally and the spirit of the law is disrespected.

The crimes of the old regime were on exhibition to those swearing an oath to uphold the new order. In the museum at the site the possessions of many of the victims were displayed with some biographical details. Documents from the archives of the NKVD/KGB showed the trappings of legal formalism that accompanied the brutal deeds, every murder judicially authorized with a sentence stamped and sealed. The execution of the sentence was scrupulously documented. And on one wall was a simple display that spoke powerfully: a portrait of Stalin, and below it a skull, resting on stones taken from the pit.

In America today, the name and image of Stalin are invoked heavily by fringe critics of Barack Obama. The critics disagree with his policies on health care and see in it the basis for increasing power of the state. The role the state will play in the healthcare system is a legitimate political issue on which well-informed citizens can have different views. But the comparison to Stalin makes clear that these critics really have no inkling of who Joseph Stalin was, what he did, and why his name lives in special infamy at hallowed spots like the pit at Chon Tash. This frivolous use of his name and image cheapens our nation’s political dialogue, and it is also a mark of disrespect to his victims. And it points to the fundamental crisis of which Aitmatov wrote so powerfully: the failure to know the past, to be informed by it, and to distill guidance from it. The age of the mankurt, alas, has not passed.

Continued>>>
http://vagabondscholar.blogspot.com/2009/11/preventing-people-from-dying-is-just.html

[mucifer]

1. Was this just one crazy person's sign or was it mass produced?

I feel that it's something I have to know.

That sign makes me physically ill. I'm Jewish and I want to know if this was only one sign or if it was mass produced.

I've been to many left wing rallys over the past few decades and I've seen some offensive "reagan is hitler" type signs (tho nothing that comes NEAR that Dachau sign.)

[Igel]

2. It's what crossed my mind.

But that's just a bit of critical thinking--wanting to know who, exactly, produced it and what they meant by it.

It's much easier to simply say that since it was at a primarly anti-Obama healthcare reform protest that everybody must have had the same views.

Consider the Obama-with-Hitler-moustache sign. A day or two ago some Larouchites were arrested for handing them out in Toronto. That's where you get them--from Larouche supporters and his PAC. In many--perhaps all--cases when there were such signs at protests any adjacent signs either figured characteristic Larouchite slogans or explicitly pro-Larouche slogans. In fact, much of the "Obama as Hitler" rhetoric is still "catapulted" by Larouche supporters, even though some's been picked up by other people that have seen it. Still, it's easier to assume that since everybody was there at the same protest they all had the *same* views, and because it's politically expedient all "Obama is Hitler" rhetoric folk are just conservative repubs. As though Larouche was remotely Republican. You'd expect investigative journalists to find this kind of stuff out, but that's not of interest to them, it would seem.

We spot the flawed logic when it hurts us but not when flawed logic helps us. Look at anti-war rallies (etc.) that anarchists and the occasional loon show up at. The easy assumption is that everybody that shows up at such rallies are anarchists or loons. Of course, we know better because we can think critically. Well, at least when it benefits us. We're always the absolute masters of critical thinking, even if it's when we whip it into submission, shackle it, and gag it so it can't utter a peep.

The problem is that Larouche apparently is against the House bill or the exact same reasons that many DUers are. He wants a single-payer bill. (In a purely probabilistic universe such accidents are bound to happen.) In his view, by allying himself with the insurance companies (oh--and the Queen of England) Obama is fascist, and since all political rhetoric in Larouche-world is couched in hyperbole the minimum possible comparison is with that ol' uberfascist, Hitler. So while Larouche and tea partiers are opposed to the same legislation, their course of action beyond defeating that legisation would be diametrically opposed.

Since the "Dachau 1945" poster "hyperbolicizes" the rhetoric even more, I can't help but ask: "Is this yet another Larouche poster?" and "Is this another case where people with rather opposite sides are simply at the same time and spot in space because of a chance confluence of views?" No answer, sorry. Critical thinking doesn't always get you to the answer, which is fine because that's not its job. My pathetic Web searches have turned up nothing. But it looks mass produced--and I can't help but note that while I've seen the poster in a dozen places, it's *always* been so closely cropped that all the context comes from the caption.

[BillDU]

3. Why?

Why is this leach feeding off of taxpayers money?
Why doesn't she give up her taxpayers funded medical care if she doesn't want others to have it?
That would be a noble protest.
Imagine the headlines..
Congress woman gives up publicly funded health care to protest publicly funded health care.
So....
we're waiting....