Reply #132: Raises a point

[Jack Rabbit]

The Nazis' evil was something that went beyond their treatment of Jews. Since Aryan was a phony abstract construct in the first place, they could have just as easily included German Jews as members of the master race as excluded them.

Even if the Nazis had treated Jews as equal to all other Germans and welcomed Jews into their ranks, they still would have been bent on world conquest and their order still would have been based on some sort of unnatural hierarchy in which they would have asserted the "right" to brutalize conquered people abroad and any political opposition at home. They still would have had to be stopped.

As it was, anti-Semitism was the central selling point of the Nazi program. It is more correct to speak of 11 million Nazi victims -- the total number of non-combatants who were systematically murdered by Hitler's regime -- but that does not change the fact that over half were Jews and that about two out of every three Jews who lived at the start of the war in lands that came to be occupied by Nazis were dead by the time the death camps were liberated. It was Jews who were the victims of systematic legal discrimination from the start of the Nazi regime; these laws were passed after Hitler became Chancellor but before he had consolidated his political power into what we have come to think of it.

If a political faction comes to power with a program based on an artificial social hierarchy, one should be very, very suspicious. These are people who probably will need to be dealt with sooner or later. That is something we should have learned from World War II.

Personally, I bristle every time a neoconservative speaks of democracy in favorable terms. It is Orwellian language. Neoconservatives, like Nazis, believe in an artificial social hierarchy; that is inherently an affront to democracy. True, it is a hierarchy based on something other than race (they aren't white supremacists) or religion (they aren't Iranian-style Islamic republicans), but on wealth which is mostly inherited, not earned. They believe that wealthy elites should have more say in the running of society and the rest of us should be dependent on their sense of noblesse oblige. We have now seen in Iraq that the neoconservatives will use military force to spread their anti-democratic system and will brutalize those who are even suspected of opposing it.

Every bit as much as Osama and al Qaida today or the Nazis of sixty years ago, the neoconservatives need to be stopped. We are too wise to fall for the false dichotomy of being with the neoconservatives or with the terrorists. We are democrats and we are opposed to both.