My hat tip to Ron Moore, of the Boston Examiner, for being so quick to pick up on this [Ron Moore article]:
The anti-Obama group, Our Country Deserves Better PAC, has announced that it will launch an advertising campaign featuring a video claiming that Obama is using tactics common to Hitler’s Germany. An audio teaser video (below) has been released as a fundraising tool to buy time to air the ad.
The ad lists a series of actions including the report ordered by the Bush administration on right wing extremists released by the Department of Homeland Security after Bush left office. They quote an un-named Congressman saying, "They proposed a civilian security force and an American congressman warned it was exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany."
As Moore details, one of the movers behind the PAC, is Howard Kaloogian who, back in 2006, ran for Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham's CA congressional seat. Kaloogian's campaign website ran a photo it claimed as from oh-so-peaceful Iraq. The photo actually was from Turkey, and that's the level of truth in advertising we should expect from this new ad campaign as well.
[below: new one-minute YouTube serves as fundraiser, to put itself on TV and radio]
Obviously there's a problem with publicizing this, because that may just promote the "Obama equals Hitler!" viral meme, spread it, and actually help out the fundraiser.
But on the other side of the equation, the US right has plenty of dedicated media broadcast capability to promote this, so we shouldn't assume that Our Country Deserves Better PAC's ad will simply choke from the stench of its own noxious, rancid, putrid miasma of ludicrous hyperbole. And, as Keith Olberman has detailed, even members of the United States Congress, such as Reps. Ron Paul and Paul Broun, have drawn the Obama-Hitler comparison. Glenn Beck has claimed Obama plans to become a tyrannical president for life.
What worse is that these comparisons fit into a widely distributed anti-government conspiracy genre believed by millions of Americans. A dedicated search on YouTube on the terms "Barack Obama" and "Hitler" produces less than 2,000 hits, but the Obama=Hitler! claim serves as shorthand, for many on the far right, and especially the Christian right, for "Obama may be the leader of [or in league with the future leader of] The New World Order!"
83,000 anti-Obama New World Order conspiracy videos can't be wrong... Can they?
Try searching on YouTube for the terms "New World Order" and "Obama" ; you'll get over 83,000 hits, most of them videos suggesting that Barack Obama either is the antichrist, or is in league with the antichrist and is scheming to impose upon America a satanic police state in league with a one world government that will be ruled by the antichrist.
Typically, such conspiracy theory names Jewish bankers, Illuminati, Freemasons, the Catholic Church, liberals,"secular humanists", communists, atheists, gays, environmentalists, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, and the United Nations, as being part of the vast, shadowy conspiracy to impose an evil "New World Order".
This style of paranoid conspiracy theory helped motivate Holocaust Museum shooter James W. von Brunn, and it helped inspire the rise of the militia movement, and rightwing acts of terrorism, during the 1990's. In short, one of the central objectives of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC ad may well be to incite rightwing extremism and rightwing violence.
[Note: the following is satire]
What can we do ?
Well, for a start, I thought it would be useful to start generating a list of similarities between Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler, so we can objectively get to the heart of the matter.
How is Barack Obama like Adolf Hitler? Let us count the ways:
- As was Adolf Hitler, Barack Obama is a mammal, an air-breather, bipedal, and featherless. As was Hitler, Obama is a member of the species Homo Sapiens Sapiens. But, that's just the start. The comparisons get much scarier...
- Like Adolf Hitler, and is rumored of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Barack Obama has legions of jackbooted thugs who have been mercilessly beating and clubbing opponents of the Obama Administration, in the streets, by the thousands if not the hundreds of thousands. All across America, city and town streets are empty. Fear reigns.
- Like Hitler, Barack Obama is charismatic, pious, self-deprecating, humble, physically attractive, and has organized a paramilitary army of fanatical minions willing to assassinate opponents by the score, destroy key government buildings in "false flag" operations, and burn down all the synagogues in America.
- Like Hitler, Barack Obama has achieved control of the media, which daily spews counter-factual regime propaganda. Only a few outposts of truth, such as Fox News and only a few brave and morally upstanding white heterosexual American citizens, such as Senator John Ensign, governor Mark Sandford, and media celebrity Rush Limbaugh, still stand for truth and the American way.
- Like Hitler, Barack Obama has risen to power by subverting the democratic process. Given the immense, overwhelming second-term popularity of president George W. Bush, there is no way Barack Obama and his hellish hordes could possibly have won the 2008 election except to have committed vast electoral fraud, probably with the help of satan-worshiping poll-workers who in their basements at midnight secretly sacrifice kidnapped children to the devil.
- Similar to what happened in WW2-era Nazi Germany, the Obama Administration is laying in place eliminationalist plans to round up and kill entire sectors of American society: maligned groups, especially fundamentalist Christians, that are being so viciously publicly demonized that Barack Obama has chosen some of their leaders, such as Pastors Joel Hunter, T.D. Jakes, and Rick Warren, as prayer partners, advisers in matters of faith, and as advisers to the Faith Based Initiative. But, it's all a trap; secretly, according to startling, terrifying and un-sourced Internet rumors, the administration has ordered that Chinese boxcars outfitted with leg shackles and guillotines [purchased during the Clinton Administration, according to numerous web sites] be taken out of mothballs for the great round up and slaughter.
- As was Hitler, Obama is secretly gay and partly Jewish. In a 2003 sermon, broadcast internationally on Christian TV and radio networks, Christians United For Israel founder and Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee described Hitler's true origins: homosexual and "partly Jewish". In his 2006 book Jerusalem Countdown, A Prelude To War, plump megapastor Hagee also claimed Hitler was descended from what Hagee described as a line of genocidally murderous "half-breed Jews" whose lineage traced back to Esau and the Edomites of the Old Testament. So, it stands to reason that if Barack Obama is just like Hitler, then he's probably secretly gay and partly Jewish too. Obama's African-American, sure, but people forget there are lots of African Jews. And, having an attractive, apparently loving, and dedicated wife, and fathering children with her, is obviously no obstacle to being a closet case; look at Ted Haggard.
- Like Hitler, Barack Obama has ruthless ambitions for the territorial expansion of the United States, which includes plans to invade Canada and Mexico, for Lebensraum.
Daily Kos member Blue Aardvark has contributed an impoprtant list of additional comparisons:
1. Like Hitler, people cheer at Obama's speeches. Unlike McCain's speeches, where they yawned, or Palin's, where they screamed death threats.
2. Like Hitler, Obama believes in a strong national defense.
3. Like Hitler, Obama is proud of his country.
4. Like Hitler, Obama is a failure as a painter, having rejected modernism. No one has seen his paintings because they are so bad.
5. Like Hitler, Obama is a stellar basketball player. Few recall Hitler dunking over Neville Chamberlin at a pick-up game during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but the psychological advantage gained thereby was crucial in the subsequent negotiations in Munich.
I rest my case.
But I'm only one person, and surely readers here at the Daily Kos can collectively best my puny efforts to catalog the frightening parallels between America under Barack Obama, and Germany under Adolf Hitler.
It's your democratic duty, I'd submit, to do so and with alacrity. We must wake the nation, folks. This has happened before. Time is short.