Americans Are Confronting an Alarming Question: Are Many of Our Fellow Citizens Nazis?
By SASHA CHAPIN at NY Times Magazine
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/magazine/americans-are-confronting-an-alarming-question-are-many-of-our-fellow-citizens-nazis.html
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It has long been a standard of political argument to liken your foes to the Third Reich — enough so that, in 1990, an annoyed attorney named Mike Godwin proposed what’s now called Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” This was intended as a critique of the level of argument on the internet. Now, as we half worry that swastika-wavers might seize some contemporary political power, such comparisons don’t seem quite as fanciful, as evidenced by a recent tweet from Godwin himself: “By all means, compare these [expletive] to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.”
One problem with calling American extremists Nazis is that the word carries an inevitable outlandishness. Nazis have a unique place in the cultural imagination; their image is a singularly terrifying and ridiculous thing. Applying that label to the alt-right runs the risk of making them seem like exotic cartoon villains. But the men and women marching in Charlottesville weren’t exotic; they were people’s neighbors, colleagues and study buddies. The racism of the Nazis wasn’t particularly exotic, either: The uncomfortable truth is that Nazi policy was itself influenced by American white supremacy, a heritage well documented in James Q. Whitman’s recent book “Hitler’s American Model.” The Germans admired, and borrowed from, the “distinctive legal techniques that Americans had developed to combat the menace of race mixing” — like the anti-miscegenation laws of Maryland, which mandated up to 10 years in prison for interracial marriage. At the time, no other country had such specific laws; they were an American innovation.
What term, then, is the right one? None — fascists, white nationalists, extremists — fully encompass the men and women in this mass. Watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center have spent decades tracing the intricate ideological differences among various fringe sects: neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, Klansmen and so on. Yet when these impulses collect into one group, it’s impossible to arrive at a simple, low-syllable explanation of their particular ugliness.
But that’s precisely why “Nazi” was, originally, such a useful word. It was never intended as an incisive diagnosis. It was a snappy, crude, unfussy insult, repurposed and wielded by people the Nazis intended to dominate, expel or kill. It contains a larger lesson, which is that we do not have to engage in linguistic diplomacy with people who want to destroy us. We don’t have to refer to them with their labels of choice. There is a time for splitting hairs over the philosophies of hateful extremists, but there’s also great value in unambiguously rejecting all of them at once with our most melodious, satisfying terminology. “Nazi” is not careful description. But careful description is a form of courtesy. “Nazi,” on the other hand, has always been a form of disrespect.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Using AM hate radio, the clergy, the NRA, Fox News, and most recently the alt-right blogosphere (Infowars, Breitbart, Prison Planet, etc). Then comes along Trump who copied his campaign strategy straight out of Hitler's playbook, emboldens the white supremacists / white nationalists / neo Nazis, and BOOM! You have a perfect storm waiting to happen, and we got a taste of it in Charlottesville. 
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