When a period of great change has come along in the past century or so, some Presidents have chosen to promote the idea that American patriotism is something more substantial than watching a fireworks display or wearing a flag lapel pin. While many thousands of brave young American men and women sacrifice even their lives to fight wars in far-off lands, many millions more do little or nothing to help their fellow Americans.
In the past, when America has fought wars or endured periods of crisis and turmoil, there was a sense of shared responsibility and purpose. We would not just fight the people who wished us harm, but we would also make every effort to do what's right on the homefront. No such sacrifice has been asked or expected of those of us who have not personally, directly been affected by the 9/11 tragedy or the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Back in the heat of the presidential campaigns, both Barack Obama and John McCain stood for the principle that Americans can and should do more. As far back as I can recall, John McCain stood for the idea that Americans should work for causes greater than their own self-interest. Perhaps that is why he was so reviled for so long by the right wing of the Republican Party, which stands for no such ideal. Likewise, Barack Obama laid out plans to expand upon the AmeriCorps program that had been successful in engaging young people to help out those less fortunate here at home.
An excerpt from what Obama said:
Today, AmeriCorps -- our nation's network of local, state, and national service programs -- has 75,000 slots. And I know firsthand the quality of these programs. My wife, Michelle, once left her job at a law firm and at City Hall to be a founding director of an AmeriCorps program in Chicago that trains young people for careers in public service. And these programs invest Americans in their communities and their country. They tap America's greatest resource -- our citizens.
And that's why as president, I will expand AmeriCorps to 250,000 slots and make that increased service a vehicle to meet national goals like providing health care and education, saving our planet and restoring our standing in the world, so that citizens see their efforts connected to a common purpose. People of all ages, stations, and skills will be asked to serve. Because when it comes to the challenges we face, the American people are not the problem -- they are the answer.
So we are going to send -- we're going to send more college graduates to teach and mentor our young people. We'll call on Americans to join an Energy Corps to conduct renewable energy and environmental cleanup projects in their neighborhoods all across the country. We will enlist our veterans to find jobs and support for other vets, to be there for our military families. And we're going to grow our Foreign Service, open consulates that have been shuttered, and double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 to renew our diplomacy.
We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.
We need to use technology to connect people to service. We'll expand USA Freedom Corps to create online networks where Americans can browse opportunities to volunteer. You'll be able to search by category, time commitment, and skill sets; you'll be able to rate service opportunities, build service networks, and create your own service pages to track your hours and activities. This will empower more Americans to craft their own service agenda, and make their own change from the bottom up.
The greater point, self-evident as it is when placed in context, is that America's security does not rely solely on military options. It also relies on diplomacy, of doing good works to spread the idea around the world that America stands for compassion, humanity, democracy, empowerment, and decency. The idea that we're not just a bunch of frontiersmen looking out for our own self-interest, but that we also have a sense of shared purpose with those at home and abroad who need a hand.
For anyone to equate the notion of volunteerism and public service with the Nazi era secret police or the Soviet secret police is beyond an outrage. Yet, that's the meme that's been picked up by the more batshit insane cretins still polluting the Republican base. Whether it's domestic terrorist G. Gordon Liddy looking forward to domestic concentration camps serving "ham hocks and turnip greens", or the detestable Ann Coulter explaining how "frightening" Obama is,, or whether it's the ignorant and apparently subeducated Georgia Congressman Paul Broun saying this:
It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force. I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.
That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist.
And he topped it off with this:
We can't be lulled into complacency," Broun said. "You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential."
Well, Congressman Broun, you just did compare him to Adolf Hitler.
It's not, incidentally, "exactly what" Hitler's Nazis or Leninist/Stalinists did. It is more comparable to what FDR did, or what JFK did. There will not be brownshirts marching through the streets, hurling bricks into the windows of Jewish shops. There will not be stormtroopers cordoning off Jewish ghettoes or marching them off to camps. There will not a Hitler Youth compelled to serve an Aryan master race. There will not be NKVD or KGB operatives listening in on your phone calls, bugging your home, paying your neighbors to inform on you, or compelling you to join a revolutionary brigade of some form or another.
For any thinking person to equate what Obama has done, or what he's proposing to do, with the worst crimes against humanity is not only sickening, but saddening. I didn't like Bush or what he did, but I didn't call him Hitler. I may have disagreed with the breakdown in constitutional liberties that took place in the wake of 9/11, but I didn't equate Bush with the Gestapo. I may not agree with the unconstitutional camps set up in Guantanamo Bay to indefinitely hold combatants without trial, but I didn't equate it with Auschwitz. I may not think that it was legal or right for American investigators to send detainees to countries whose rules on the use of torture were less strict than our own, but I didn't equate the government with Stalin.
I invoke Godwin's Law all the time, and I've called the similar tactic of bringing up Stalin as "reductio ad Stalinum". Hitler and Stalin are as relevant to what's going on in domestic politics as are Mickey Mouse and Humpty Dumpty.
If you want to know what it was like to live under Hitler, read this:
When they opened the doors in Auschwitz... we didn't know, we didn't know anything.... wire, with chimneys smoking, with Germans, and it was only morning. And then these men We only knew we could see it looked like hell, like nothing we had ever seen. With [prisoners] with striped clothes who kept saying – give the babies to the older women. And unfortunately, my mother was only 46, 44, and my mother took a child from a Dutch woman – a young woman who had given birth in prison. She was 22 I think, a beautiful woman.... I had already my mother with a baby, my brother Maecel and me were walking together. And they thought the baby was mine... and I was already going with my mother towards the crematorium right away, when suddenly he [Mengele] shouted I should come back. So my mother also came back. And he said – "You go this way, [and I said] to the left," you know. So I said no, I don't want to leave my mother, I want to stay with my mother. And he said: "No, no, no, no, no, you go with the young people and your mother will go with the children. You're going to a work place, and they're going to work where its not so hard." My little brother, my mother and the baby went towards the crematorium, which we didn't know was the crematorium, we just knew they're going in a different direction. When I started to cry and wouldn't go, he took me by the arm and gave me a push – "Go this way!" I didn't know what was happening, I could only see my father on the right and one brother... and everything went so quick that I didn't know if I was in a madhouse or if I was seeing reality.
If you want to know what it was like to live under Stalin, read this:
In 1929 Stalin introduced a policy for the liquidation of Ukrainian kulaks as a class and the policy was legalized by the Soviet Central Committee in 1930. Anyone with a Ukrainian national consciousness was branded an "enemy of the State" by Stalin’s regime. This initial campaign was geared toward kulaks who resisted turning over their private farmland to the Soviet collective. Those kulaks were dealt with through massive arrests and deportations to forced labor camps, often to the concentration camps in Siberia. Those who were not arrested or deported were subject to the brutal terror of Stalin’s police and oftentimes firing squad executions.
Despite the arrests, police seizures of their property and livestock, and even death sentences, the kulaks continued to resist being subjugated by Moscow. Stalin reacted by imposed unrealistically large grain quotas on Ukraine in 1931. As planned, Ukraine was unable to deliver on the grain quotas because although it produced 27% of the entire Soviet grain harvest it was accountable for 38% of the Soviet quota. This intentionally unrealistic goal allowed Stalin to take draconian measures to penalize the kulaks for their failure to meet the quota, and thus Stalin’s artificially imposed Famine in Ukraine began.
In 1932 Ukraine’s borders were sealed to outside world. In order to limit the famine to Ukraine, the Soviet police established checkpoints along all railroad lines to prevent any of the starving Ukrainians from entering Russia and anyone traveling from Russia from bringing food into Ukraine. In essence, Ukraine became the world’s largest concentration camp.
Stalin ordered massive quantities of grain and agricultural products to be exported out of Ukraine to feed the rest of the Soviet Union and for foreign export. This, along with Stalin’s ban on food imports into Ukraine, left insufficient reserves of food in Ukraine to feed the population. Kulak villages that were considered uncooperative or underproducers were blacklisted and completely blockaded. Anyone found to have foodstuffs in their possession was subject to execution, or in extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for no less than 10 years in a Soviet concentration camp. It was standard practice to be sentenced to 10 years in a concentration camp for being in possession of a potato or a handful of wheat kernels.
But if you want to be taken seriously in any way, shape, or form, do not equate anything that the United States has done in the past 20 or 40 years with either totalitarian regime. Disagree with our policies as strenuously as you wish, but to suggest that Obama wants to commit genocide and institute a totalitarian state is one thing and one thing only - sad.