No, this is not a "the holocaust is a myth" diary. Nor is it an attempt to create an alternative history, like saying Israel wouldn't exist and the Middle East would be very different than it is, although that would be a possibility.
No, this is a look prompted by the constant right wing whine about Durbin's comments, Byrd's comments a few months ago, and any comment that uses the word Nazi.
This is off the cuff and may ramble, but bear with me.
The holocaust was one of the great tragedies of all history, as were the gulags of the Soviet Union. No one is here is likely to disagree with that comment.
Likewise, I don't think any one here would say that the scale of what this country is doing in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or Bagram is equal to either of those crimes against humanity. And Durbin definitely did not make that equation.
But whenever any comment is made by a Democrat that compares Tactics that are used with tactics by the Nazis or Stalin, we hear the same response.
"How dare you compare us with a country that killed 6 million Jews", "Stalin killed over 3 million in the gulags, and we have not done anything like that."
Imagine for a minute that the Holocaust never happened, that 6 million Jews and others did not march to their deaths in the ovens.
Is that the only thing bad that Hitler and the Nazis did? Except for that and the unfortunate war of aggression they started against countries that were no threat to them, were they all wonderful and perfect. Were they an example for the rest of the world to follow?
Was their style of government by dictate what we want to emulate?
A couple years ago, a bank in the Chicago area send out an information folder with a story by an economic historian who in one brief comment talked about the only country not hit hard by the Great depression and which recovered ahead of all other countries. It happened to be Nazi Germany.
The negative response caused the bank to issue an apology. Again the response was based on the Holocaust.
But the point of the article is that through rigid and draconian governmental measure, Germany did, in fact, recover quicker than other countries. But it also was stated that those measures could never have been done in a truly democratic country and did not espouse those policies.
This is rambling, and forgive me for that.
My point is that, the right wing attacks on Durbin or Byrd do two things. The first is that they misquote horribly. The second is that they always fall back on the Holocoaust.
Yet the comments made by Byrd and Durbin do not mention the holocaust, nor do they say that what is happening here is in any way like the holocaust.
Nazi Germany would not have been wonderful if the holocaust had never happened. It still would have been a tyrannical state, with few freedoms for its people, with all policy based upon a rigid ideology. It still would have tortured any perceived enemies of the state, citizen or foreigner alike.
The question is, how when we talk to others, do we get this message across? We are not talking about the Holocaust, we are talking about a system of government that does not respect individual rights and believes itself above any laws.
A quick side point. I live in Illinois and when I got home from work yesterday, after spending a lot of my time on this site, my wife said to me "Durbin's gone too far this time."
I told her he hadn't and printed up the actual comments he made on the floor of the Senate.
She read them and almost started crying. She had one question and one comment.
"Why isn't it being reported this way?"
"Our son is in harm's way to defend this shit."
If you read this far thank you. Like I said, this is just a ramble off the top of my head, and maybe someone can make it sound more reasonable than I did.