In my last diary,Learn from Nazi Germany: The Republican Path I made a point using the last days of the Third Reich as an example, that conservatives would do the blame game until nothing was left. And then they still wouldn't stop.
Some readers took exception with the Nazi analogy. I want to address that because I actually lived with people who had been Nazi party members.
My point today is that Republicans are not monsters, but then again, neither were the Nazi's.
This was thirty years ago. I was seventeen when I left and eighteen when I returned home. This is how I came to live with Nazi's.
I was a foreign exchange student for a year with the program Youth for Understanding in what was then West Germany from the summer of '77 to the summer of '78. My host family lived in Hamburg and yes, they had been bona fide National Socialists. The mother had been a Hitler youth in fact and was still quite proud of it.
When we think of the Nazi's we think of Kristallnacht, total war, torture, medical experimentation and of course, the systematic murder of six million Jews. What we don't think about are the vast numbers of ordinary people who permitted and even encouraged this to happen.
The incredible brutality overshadows the sheer ordinariness of the regular party members. Most Germans might not have known about the concentration camps, but it could not have been done without their reactionary mentality. It was a mentality very similar to true blue faithful Republicans. The analogy is fair not because Republicans are such monsters, but because the Nazi's were so ordinary. It was the accumulation of their poor choices, based on hate and fear that led to a catastrophic world crisis.
For example, late one night, I was having an interesting political discussion with my host father, Herr Schmidt, who had already downed a few beers, when he finally blurted out something that had been on his mind: It was thirty years ago, but I remember it as clearly as if it was yesterday even though I can't remember other details from that time nearly as well. He said:
Something just HAD to be done about the Jews. They were taking over the nation. They were controlling the banks. We needed to do something.
And there it was on the table. An unrepentant Nazi still clinging to an idea that had produced nearly unheard of suffering and pain. I said nothing at the time. I was basically a guest in his house and had been for months. it was only years later when I thought over that moment that I could put it into perspective.
I also said nothing when I heard this comment from my host mother:
They exaggerated the killing of the Jews you know, it wasn't really that bad.
They didn't want to believe in the Holocaust, so they didn't. As I said, these people weren't monsters, they were just ordinary folks. He was an electrician who ran his own business and his wife managed their small lights and lamps shop. They made a reasonable, but not extravagant living.
They were just normal people living their lives. They didn't have horns and breathe fire, they didn't serve up baked baby for dinner and nothing about them suggested that they were evil. In the entire time I stayed with them I certainly never thought of them that way. In fact, they were good neighbors. They were part of a group of people that looked out for their street. They were very decent to me.
Yet they held beliefs that seemed rational to them, but which in retrospect were terrible. They were the kind of beliefs that one could expect to find in any true blue conservative. Put the words "abortion clinic" in place of Jew and you have a position any American right wing Christian would have. (Something just HAD to be done about the abortion clinics. ) The intent is the same, even if the actions are not as violent. But perhaps that's only because they're not in control.
Can we imagine these Right Wing Christians storming through the gay Castro district of San Francisco, beating up gays and smashing stores? Yes, the only thing stopping them is the very real threat of punishment. Take that away and they'd be out there with baseball bats in no time. We have only to look at how they deal with abortion clinics to see what they're capable of.
And like the Nazi's these Christian folk do not breathe fire either. They're probably good to their neighbors and do a lot of decent things. They just have some beliefs that would be enormously destructive if let loose.
We must never let that happen.
The main lesson of the Holocaust, as told to me by a survivor many years ago, was that ordinary people can commit terrible atrocities. We have already seen what happened at Abu Ghraib prision. We have Gitmo as well to remind us that comparisons between Nazi's and Republicans are not so far fetched. Ordinary people making irrational decisions based on their fears can lead to catastrophic results.
The idea that we can never compare anyone to the Nazi's because they were so incredibly evil is nonsense. I think we must make the comparisons because if they did nothing else, they provided a road map to a worst case scenario of conservatives in power.