by hilzoy
They actually went there:
"Pennsylvania Republicans are disavowing an e-mail sent to Jewish voters that likens a vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to events that led up to the Holocaust."Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008," the e-mail reads. "Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let's not make a similar one this year!""
The Pennsylvania Republican Party claims that this mailer went out without their authorization, and that they have fired the consultant who was responsible. That consultant, however, says this:
""I had authorization from party officials" to send the e-mail, Rudnick said, but he declined to say who had signed off on it. "I'm not looking to drag anyone else through the mud, so I'm not naming names right now," he said."
***
There are things you should not say unless you really, really mean them, and events you should not invoke lightly. Saying that voting for Obama, or for McCain, or for any of the major party candidates in my adult lifetime, would be a mistake that is in any way "similar" to underestimating the horror of the Nazis is one of them.
We should never forget what the Nazis actually did, or what the Pennsylvania Republican Party has seen fit to invoke so lightly; and we should not dishonor those who were murdered by using them to score cheap political points.
And if you go on to the immediately previous front-page post at TPM, it links to a Mark Levin post at NRO the subtext of which is also about comparing Obama's campaign to a fascist movement, though at least the couple of paragraphs I skimmed before leaving in disgust did not impute schemes of genocide.
Posted by: Warren Terra | October 26, 2008 at 01:56 AM
It seems amazing that any Jewish policy adviser would do anything other than rip that out of the hands of the others in the room and ram it into the shredder.
Posted by: GNZ | October 26, 2008 at 03:15 AM
Can someone petition the Supreme Court to invoke Godwin's Law and declare Obama to have won the election now?
(Joking aside, this is a revolting tactic.)
Posted by: Tsam | October 26, 2008 at 04:02 AM
The only comforting thought about this is that there has to be a special place in Hell for these people.
Posted by: MeDrewNotYou | October 26, 2008 at 04:17 AM
This is why I quit reading Thoreau, at Unqualified Offerings, after he started his regular practice of referring to Transportation Safety Administration employees as "thugs" of the "Gestapo," the "Mukhabarat," the "Stasi," the "Die Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit," and so on. Spoiled kids who can't tell the difference between death camps and dumbass bureaucracies have a major perception and ethical blindness.
Posted by: Gary Farber | October 26, 2008 at 04:26 AM
I wonder if this will make Charles Bird write a similar post for Redstate?
Hm?
Posted by: Jesurgislac | October 26, 2008 at 04:27 AM
For Sarah Palin's church, another Holocaust is a feature, not a bug.
Posted by: canuckistani | October 26, 2008 at 11:52 AM
Odd thing is...
The Nazis are underrated for their murderousness, about as much as Alex Rodriguez is sometimes underrated as a baseball player because we take their extremes of performance for granted sometimes.
Adam Tooze did a great job of demostrating that these guys were completely off the evil scale...
I think Godwin's law invites too many stupid debates to be worth its while, but in a serious real-world context, one really need not compare people to the Nazis unless they at least comes close, like the Japanese in China or Pol Pot or something.
Posted by: shah8 | October 26, 2008 at 12:39 PM
"Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let's not make a similar one this year!""
I object to the idea that "our ancestors" (mine included) "ignored the warning signs." Lots of them did not. But anti-immigrant sentiment, not just in the US, prevented them from escaping. If the US and western European nations had been more willing to accept Jewish immigrants from Germany, and especially Poland and Russia (the less assimilated "ostJuden"), many lives would have been saved.
It was xenophobia, more than ignoring warning signs, that produced the tragedy.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov | October 26, 2008 at 10:18 PM
And by the way, those who did minimize the Nazi threat were not just being pollyannas.
During WWI Germany occupied much of Poland - then a part of the czarist empire. Conditions under this occupation were fairly benign, and Jews, specifically, enjoyed much better treatment that they had under the czars. It was not irrational for Polish Jews to look back on that period - a mere twenty or so years earlier - and conclude that much of what was coming out of Germany was just political rhetoric.
Remember that they were not living in the 21st century US, but in a generally anti-Semitic society, where discrimination and oppression were facts of everyday life. The question was not, "are the Germans anti-Semitic," but "are they worse than the Poles?"
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov | October 26, 2008 at 10:48 PM
"The question was not, 'are the Germans anti-Semitic,' but 'are they worse than the Poles?'"
Whom Bernard neglects to make absolutely clear, were pretty damn antisemitic.
Posted by: Gary Farber | October 26, 2008 at 11:22 PM
Sublink:
But there's so much more, including the post-war antisemitism.Posted by: Gary Farber | October 26, 2008 at 11:27 PM
Interwar Poland was a *very* fucked-up operation--especially during the run-up to the Hitler-Stalin pact. A lot of it was just really nationalist Poles who thought they had leeway into being macho pigheads...
I don't think anyone who's read much in the war is all that unawares of the extent of polish antisemitism in the face of two rather genocidal neighbors fighting in its territories...
Posted by: shah8 | October 27, 2008 at 02:29 AM
Gary,
Thanks for the comment. I didn't do enough to emphasize Polish anti-Semitism, which was quite severe in its own right, even before the rise of the Nazis.
Anti-Semitism was an important and overt issue in Polish politics. It was an explicit part of the platform of one of the major parties, the National Democrats, or "Endeks." The Endek leader, Roman Dmowski, was an explicit anti-Semite, and probably the second most important Polish political figure, after Pilsudski, in pre-WWII Poland.
This is probably way more than anyone wanted to know about all this, but the assertion that the "Jews ignored the warnings" is ill-informed and ignorant in and of itself, without reference to the Presidential campaign.
And of course the comparison with Jewish support for Obama is odious.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov | October 27, 2008 at 11:01 AM
I see that a group of Pennsylvania Republicans are trying again. I think they're trying to compare him to Chamberlain, so no Godwin points, but still, eew.
(Via TPM)
Posted by: abi | November 01, 2008 at 01:18 PM