This billboard went up in some Podunk town in Iowa, the brainchild of the North Iowa Tea Party. It is so slanderous and tasteless and inaccurate that others in the tea party movement have roundly condemned it.
To me it is reminiscent of the type of propaganda posters used by Hitler and Lenin to invoke fear and suspicion among the people. Isn’t it ironic that the only “leaders” in this country trying to incite fear and suspicion among the naรฏve masses is the right?
I have yet to hear an Obama speech that hysterically accuses the right of trying to form a tyrannical estate in which we will all be oppressed and enslaved by draconian laws meant to control our every movement.
Maybe he should…
To me it is reminiscent of the type of propaganda posters used by Hitler and Lenin to invoke fear and suspicion among the people. Isn’t it ironic that the only “leaders” in this country trying to incite fear and suspicion among the naรฏve masses is the right?
I have yet to hear an Obama speech that hysterically accuses the right of trying to form a tyrannical estate in which we will all be oppressed and enslaved by draconian laws meant to control our every movement.
Maybe he should…
I can't remember where I saw this but it is absolutely dispicable. Whatever the motivation, at least some of the other Tea Bagger groups are denouncing it. Of course one of their complaints is that it's a waste of money!
ReplyDeleteI firmly believe that this kind of ugliness is going to hurt these thugs in the end. I also think this lose organization of various groups without any solid leadership is going to be what kills them in the end.
Pardon any damn spelling errors.
RADICAL LEADERS PREY ON THE FEARFUL & NAรVE
ReplyDeleteHow ironic! I had the same thought. The bagheads really should think carefully before writing a headline. Polysemantic words can lead to ambiguous interpretations. Perhaps a 12-step program for bagheads would break them of this habit.
Gee, I posted on the same thing!
ReplyDeleteTAO - Gee, I posted on the same thing!
ReplyDeleteTwo rights don't make a wrong!
It's all so depressing to have to live this part of my life during the Era of Idiocy.
ReplyDeleteWe used to be a pretty smart country.
I still think we should give them Texas and tell them to leave us all alone.
TAO! I did not know you had started a new blog! How did I miss that?
ReplyDeleteI guess we can chalk this up to great minds thinking alike. :)
I also find this depressing, dispicable but I quite agree that it is this kind of extremism that will bring them down.
At this point, we need to force dialog on the issues facing our country and the issues only.
This kind of crap keeps being perpetuated for the simple reason that the right has no answers to our troubles, they just want to be in the driver's seat because there is money to be made and power to monger.
Shaw, I'm all for giving them Texas and Arizona and even Colorado and New Mexico. Put a big fence around THEM!
It's sheer projection: much of what the Tea Party types advocate seems to me damned close to Brownshirtism: fanatical, provincial, frightened of they know not what, and therefore potentially vicious.
ReplyDeleteAt least there is one bit of good news. Tea Party candidate Rick Barber of “Gather Your Armies” fame has lost the Alabama GOP primary. With 83% of precincts reporting, Martha Roby leads by 61%-39%. Not even a close shave for the Barber.
ReplyDeleteDespicable but it was taken down today. Yeah!!!
ReplyDeleteShaw, I'm with you/it's about me! I hate dealing with aging and health issues in this kind of social, political, economic, and emotional environment. Call me selfish, but I swear I think this is screwing with my immune system. My goal now is to live long enough to die with some morsel of renewed optimism about Americans.
ReplyDeleteAnd bloggingdino is correct, I think, about projection. And about viciousness. We used to call this stuff "character disorder," a much more useful term; it's not their personalities that concern me.
The first thing I heard on the news after returning from paradise was the story about the mockery of the NAACP by a tea party shitbag, crammed full of disgusting stereotypes.
ReplyDeleteI renewed my NAACP membership on line. I joined back when Bush was trying to take away their tax status.
As I said a while ago, America isn't worth it any more.
RADICAL LEADERS PREY ON THE FEARFUL & NAIVE
ReplyDeleteI too thought that this billboard was a jab at anti-Obama fearmongers -- as in, See what this kind of stupid propaganda can lead to?
Alas, it's one level down toward the more literal interpretation. Duh.
Back when some liberals were calling Bush-Hitler, I was banned from a group liberal site.
ReplyDeleteThe site posted (by one of its co administrators) a long post about why GWB was like Hitler. Going into comparisons about Nuremberg laws and GWB's Patriot Act, etc. The post went on for two pages comparing some of the dumbest stuff, just to prove GWB was just like Hitler.
I wrote a comment trashing the comparisons and just the idea that Bush was like Hitler. They banned me from the site, which I used to write posts for.
This is all extremists crap. I don't know why Americans (the few that do) listen to it.
The same reason I don't understand why Americans listen to Rush, or Pat Robertson, or Newt, or others preaching the false motivation of fear, and worse trying to tell you that this is what God would approve of.
I would hope people were smarter than that, but I guess not, it won them a lot of elections.
Tom,
ReplyDeleteNot to be contentious, but could you explain to me how Bush's aggression against the country of Iraq, justified at home with an endless stream of lies about how the Iraqis represented a threat to our security, really differed all that much from Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Or how Bush's "detentions" for years without any evidence against the prisoner, or his routine use of torture to extract false confessions, his murder of a million innocent Iraqi civilians, etc. differ in anything but degree from what Hitler did?
I disagreed with Bush's invasion of Iraq. There was no justification for it. My opinion, the majority disagreed with me.
ReplyDeleteA million Iraqi civilians, is not a certain number, probably not even close.
Bad acts, do not equal Hitler. there is no comparison.
Hitler killed 20 million people, 5 million of which were jews.
Hitler literally had his brown shirts beat their way into political power.
The History between Saddam and the U.S. (while not worthy of invasion in my opinion) did not leave Saddam of total innocence as the countries Hitler invaded.
Read the Nurembug laws passed. Nothing like happened by the Bush administration.
We should be glad Bush was not another Hitler. Given the feeling of the American people after 9/11, they would have let him do almost anything. And much of what he did do, is now being defined as unconstitutional.
Naked aggression, genocide, brutal murders, government oppression and murder of Americans,is this what Bush did?
And of course Hitler did much worse.
You can call Bush a Hitler. I would call that comparison a uneducated, extreme, wrong, exaggeration.
Tom,
ReplyDeleteYou have deliberately misconstrued what I said, and ignored various facts.
First of all, I did not compare Bush to Hitler. I compared his aggression against Iraq to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. There are real similarities there which you simply ignored.
Second, the estimate of a million deaths came from work by Johns Hopkins and Columbia University, peer reviewed and published in the world's most prestigious medical journal. Those who want to deny these numbers quote all sorts of Bush Administration and Iraqi government "statistics" which are unscientific at best and come from grossly tainted sources at worst. I will stick with the estimate of the scientists.
Third, as to your assertion that there was a history between Saddam and the United States, that is true. It includes collaboration between Saddam and the Reagan administration, and direct aid to him in his war against Iran.
And as for the Nuremberg laws, I am not saying Bush and Cheney had a chance to do everything Hitler did, thank heaven. But in this instance I insist that there are real similarities which should make all Americans hang our heads in shame that we allowed this evil to happen without consequences.
You asked how what Bush did was any different than what Hitler did. If you can't see the difference, than you are among those uneducated.
ReplyDeleteThe million dead figure is by your own words an estimate, and will never be known.
You win Bush is Hitler.
Reminds me of the joke about the guy offering a woman a million bucks for sex. It isn't the price that makes her a whore.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't the amount of money you steal that makes you a thief and it only takes one murder to make one a murderer. Are you telling us that murdering 100,000 is of little consequence because Hitler murdered more?
Hitlerian comparisons are indeed hyperbolic when made to Bush, but the shot, although aimed past the mark, is in the right direction. The accusations of Communism/fascism and worse made against Obama are not hyperbole, not exaggerations for effect, they're simply lies for the purpose of political gain and lies told to falsely diminish the many crimes of Bush.
It is wrong to pretend equivalence.
Chicken pox isn't small pox, but it's a disease spread in similar fashion and discussions about the spread of disease are not rendered nugatory by a disparity in mortality rates.
With glib and vicious lies being told about Obama, it's not wrong to discuss the techniques of the Kampf involved in gaining, increasing and maintaining power through Chauvinistic nationalism, creation of false enemies, foreign and domestic and other things quite truly attributable to the past administration and not truly attributable to the current administration.
The big and oft repeated lie, the false reports of foreign aggressions, the raising of exaggerated domestic paranoia, the retribution against truth tellers -- and yes the unprovoked attack on Iraq was based on deliberate lies and included retaliation against those who contradicted them.
The Bush/Cheney plan to strip our oil reserves dry despite environmental concerns and sell it to foreign corporations; his collusion with foreign corporations to allow them to profit hugely from it and from the war without much tax burden have to remind anyone of Fascism, regardless of the extent and duration.
No, George W. Bush isn't Adolph Hitler, but saying he isn't the latter neither defuses the comparison nor excuses the deeds of Bush.
Captain, thanks for the eloquent comments. Now a little blather of my own.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I explicitly made it clear that I was not comparing Bush to Hitler, but only comparing his aggression against the innocent country Iraq to Hitler's aggression against Czechoslovakia. I stand by my comparison. Outright aggression like this by world powers, when left unchecked, is a big part of what breeds real Hitlers. The French and British could have easily stopped Hitler after his army moved into the Rhineland; the world paid the price for their cravenness. If Bush's imperial aspirations had not been so thoroughly mangled by his own incompetence, who knows what would have come next.
Now, the million figure is not an "estimate," it is the result of a long accepted scientific process. The much lower estimates that we hear come from parties with an overwhelming interest in having people see the number as low as possible. I stand with the scientists.
Finally, yes I can see the difference between Bush and Hitler. Can you see the similarities?
I don't have a comment any more; it appears to have all been said. However, I've enjoyed the debate.
ReplyDeleteI've been doing this long enough to be fed up with the "nobody can be compared to Hitler" defense. It's used by all sorts of people for various reasons. Some say it downplays the horror of the Nazi movement, but to me that movement illustrates the cliche about the banality of evil.
ReplyDeleteThere wasn't anything all that unique about the Fascist movement, Anti-Semitism had been inextricable from European culture for 1700 years. It was thought up by and run by and executed by ordinary people and yes, it sure as hell could happen here.
So many themes rampant today are parallels because people are the same everywhere and if one government uses those themes more than another, I see nothing wrong in pointing it out even if those themes are always there to some extent. We've mentioned several, but there are many:
The constant references to a false history.
Appeals to the primacy of one group and the alien nature of other groups.
Constant appeals to traditional values over "decadent" values and modernity.
The proliferation of scapegoats and bogeymen, some hiding amongst us and working against us.
Organized an effective propaganda agencies spreading hate, fear and disinformation, often targeted at opponents.
I could go on but you know. Sure, you can stretch it a bit and accuse any government of some of it, but some truly excel and excellence in these matters is and should be a warning and we shouldn't be ashamed of warning others.
In short, Hitler, like the devil, is part of us; of human nature. He's not a one time singularity or an exception to history. Hitler lives. Hitler must be killed over and over again.
Amen, Captain. I was about to chime in with a comment of my own, but I don't have to now. You've said it, and better.
ReplyDeleteAn excellent comment, Captain. My interest in the Nazis is not about World War II, or about Hitler, Goehring et. al. but about what led the German people to buy into the Nazi agenda. It is there that the comparisons between Germany in the post-WWI era and today's American conservatives starts to scare me. It is not the few leaders but the millions of willing followers that made Naziism rise. And I do see Republican leaders, as you so correctly point out, resorting to the same manipulative tactics that numerous right wing groups in 1920's Germany used.
ReplyDeleteSo I agree that it is largely futile to make facile comparisons of Bush to Hitler on a personal level, but that does not mean that it is wrong to look at history in an attempt to understand how one of our two political parties has gone so far off the rails.
Now, if you'd like, I would be willing to compare Dick Cheney to Heinrich Himmler, but I guess that's a whole other discussion.