The absurdity of it all from a glittering Goldberg.

Almost 60 years after his death, world politics bristles with his name and memory.

Why? Because of so-called 'Holocaust denial'?

Adolf Hitler, please stand up and accept your Right of Reply!

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/printjg20030905.shtml

'Bush equals Hitler' adds up to holocaust denial
Jonah Goldberg 

September 5, 2003

We may be living in the worst period of Holocaust denial since the
Nuremberg trials. I'm not referring to the twisted morons who insist that
the Holocaust never happened the way the Monty Python guys insisted the
parrot wasn't dead. I'm referring to the legions of Holocaust deniers in
the Democratic Party, on the Web, on college campuses, in the mainstream
press and, most acutely, in my e-mail box every morning, who reduce to the
Holocaust to a triviality.

In America today - never mind Europe and the Middle East - ostensibly
sophisticated and enlightened people see nothing particularly controversial
about comparing George Bush to Adolf Hitler and the United States of
America to Nazi Germany.

The examples are everywhere. Vanity Fair magazine asks if Richard Perle and
Joseph Goebbels were "separated at birth." Whole Web sites are dedicated to
the most astoundingly stupid and superficial comparisons between George
Bush and Hitler (they both liked dogs, for example).

At every event protesting war, Bush, America, this, that and the other
thing, one can find pictures of various administration officials in SS garb
or bearing Hitler mustaches. On the Web, leftwing forums like
Democraticunderground.com overflow with insubstantial people bolstering
their self-esteem by pretending to "speak truth to power" to the unfolding
Nazification of America.

Putatively intellectual magazines, like the leftwing Nation and the New
York Review of Books, feature articles that are more measured in tone and
more nuanced in style than the hysteria one hears from C-Span callers or
rabble-rousers at Howard Dean events, but the upshot is still the same.

James Traub, writing in The New York Times last June, detailed the
trendiness of the Bush-Hitler comparison: "That's grotesque; and the fact
that it has achieved such currency among what the French call the bien
pensant is vivid proof that in much of the left, 9/11 and its aftermath
have increased the visceral loathing not of terrorism or of Islamist
fundamentalism but of President George Bush."

But no one seems willing to name this grotesquery plainly. It is, simply,
Holocaust denial (not to mention slander against Bush and America).

If your son is murdered and I claim that it never happened, I am denying
the existence of a crime. But if your son is murdered and I compare that
tragedy to losing your car keys, that is a form of denial, too. And this is
precisely what the "Bush equals Hitler" crowd is doing.

The Nazis murdered millions of men, women and children. Their victims
weren't "collateral damage" in a war, and they were not executed after a
long and fair trial. The Nazis sent their victims to gas chambers and ovens
in boxcars. Nazi scientists injected dyes into the living eyes of small
children to see if they could be made "Aryan." They made soap out of
people.

[This is trash flowing from Goldberg's diseased mind, and it is pure German hatred.  Emph. & comment added, ed]

What on earth has George Bush done that deserves such comparisons? What
could he possibly do?

If you're going to call the man a Nazi, show me the children with tattoos
on their arms. Show me the stockpiles of emaciated corpses. Show me files
cabinets full of memos detailing how Bush and Cheney plan on disposing of
millions of dead American citizens killed with poisonous gas.

If you can't show me any of these things - and you can't - then stop
calling the man a Nazi. Because when you say he's no different from Hitler,
you are also saying that Hitler is no different from George Bush. And that
means that Hitler's crimes were no worse than George Bush's "crimes." And
whatever you think of what George Bush has done or might do, if you think
any of it is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust, you are in effect
saying the Holocaust really wasn't that bad.

This isn't a partisan point. I would make the same argument if Al Gore were
president. I loathed Bill Clinton as president, but I always took pains to
chastise conservatives who compared him to Stalin or Hitler. As bad as
Clinton's behavior was, only a man in leave of his senses would compare it
to the systematized and bureaucratized mass-murder of millions of people.
The same goes for Bush.

To what should be their enduring shame, leftists have a particular problem
understanding this point. In their do-gooder arrogance, many on the left
assume that anyone who stands in their way must not be merely wrong on the
facts, but evil in their hearts. And, worse, they have a very difficult
time differentiating between evils.

My favorite example of this moral myopia comes from a few years ago. Rep.
Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said of the Contract With America: "Hitler wasn't
even talking about doing these things." And his colleague, Rep. Major Owens
declared of the new Republican leadership in the House, "These are people
who are practicing genocide with a smile; they're worse than Hitler."

If you believe such nonsense, just get it over with and say the Holocaust
never happened at all. Because at least that form of Holocaust denial
admits that if it "had happened," it would have been a really bad thing.
Saying the Holocaust is no worse than tax cuts or some such doesn't even
give the victims of Nazism that dignity.


Jonah Goldberg is editor of National Review Online, a TownHall.com member group.

©2003 Tribune Media Services