Contra Godwin
Writing in Slate, Diane McWhorter discusses the causes and effects of our curious and frankly dangerous reluctance to even consider the worst historical parallel there could be to our own state of affairs:

The taboo is itself a precept of the propaganda state. Usually its enforcers profess a politically correct motive: the exceptionalism of genocidal Jewish victimhood. Thus, poor Sen. Richard Durbin, the Democrat from Illinois, found himself apologizing to the Anti-Defamation League after Republicans jumped all over him for invoking Nazi Germany to describe the conditions at Guantanamo. And so by allowing the issue to be defined by the unique suffering of the Jews, we ignore the Holocaust's more universal hallmark: the banal ordinariness of the citizens who perpetrated it. The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today's America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It's that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny.

The analogies between then and now don't need to be exact to have been and continue to be deeply troubling -- see McWhorter for a detailed listing if you need it. As the Israeli historian Avi Schlaim once put it, the question is not whether we're the same as Nazis; it's whether we're different enough.

If you tape over half your rear view mirror, you're going to be missing a lot of traffic behind you, closing fast.

Via Jim Henley.


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EDIT, 12/4: italics shifted from "whether" to "same." The precise quote: "The issue isn't whether or not we are the same as the Nazis, the issue is that we aren't different enough."

UPDATE, 12/12: Welcome, Sideshow visitors! Comments are always welcome. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:01:00 PM -- |    

 
"Before we actually lose a city"
Displaying the shameless chutzpah characteristic of the GOP, Newt Gingrich used a First Amendment award dinner in Manchester, New Hampshire to warn that a "different set of rules" would be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet.

Gingrich then went on to say what might just happen if we don't take his advice:

We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade.

Why wait a decade? Heck, put his party in charge and add a hurricane, and that's already happened. But it's "tougher" and more "thought provoking" to shred the Bill of Rights than it is to do sissy stuff like build levees right, safeguard ports, conduct constitutional law enforcement, and put experienced, competent professionals in charge of disaster prevention, response and relief.

Via Jim Macdonald ("Making Light") -- with the New Orleans rejoinder by two of the first three commenters. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:56:00 AM -- |    

 
Heh. Indeed.
Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: “Miss Israel,” Yael Nezri, who is a private in the Israeli Army, has been given permission not to carry a rifle, because it bruises her legs, which interferes with her modeling career. I believe Dick Cheney used the same excuse to get out of Vietnam.

(Also, on 11/16: Last night, at the American Spectator’s annual dinner, Rumsfeld praised Milton Friedman, “who’s still going strong.” Within hours, Friedman was dead. Coincidence? I think not.)

WOLF BLITZER interviewing David Frum (CNN Late Edition): Are you concerned, though, about the membership of this Iraq study group, David Frum, given their histories, the so-called realist as opposed to the neoconservative, the idealist school of thought?

FRUM: I think it is -- I'm with Ken. I'm not sure how helpful any of those terms are.

digby ("Hullabaloo") --- It's certainly not helpful to David Frum and the rest of the neocons, is it?"

It Sucks to be Creepy Neil and the Other One --- eRobin's ("fact-esque") headline for this, by George H. W. Bush (AP's Jim Krane, via Yahoo!), about Dubya 'n Jeb: "I can't begin to tell you the pride I feel in my two sons." Gee thanks, Dad.

Bush: US Committed to Finding New Synonyms for Civil War -- Launches Operation Noble Euphemism (The Borowitz Report) ---

President George W. Bush said today that he would not allow a civil war in Iraq to erupt on his watch, and said that in order to prevent that from happening the United States would aggressively search for new synonyms for the phrase "civil war."

In order to seek out the most sanitized alternatives to that phrase, the president announced that he was launching an ambitious new mission called Operation Noble Euphemism.

Showing his trademark steely resolve, Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House that the US was prepared to hunt down every last thesaurus on Earth and would not quit until the job was done. As if to demonstrate the high priority he was placing on finding new synonyms, Mr. Bush said that the government would spend $12 billion, most of which had been previously earmarked to find Osama bin Laden.

And finally, enjoy this Ramirez cartoon; I do, a whole, whole lot.



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NOTES: "Noble euphemism" via Jim Henley. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:15:00 AM -- |    

 
Your two cents, please
After five years of writing, I'm finally running out of space on this site -- I had to move a bunch of old images and photos to Photobucket -- so I'm going to pull up stakes sometime over the next several months and move to a dedicated site, i.e., thomasn528.com or something like that.

I'm also considering sprucing up and improving the look and performance of the site. So I'm looking for recommendations both for hosting sites and blogging software, and/or for online discussions of same. I know that some readers (hi, Gary!) have been annoyed with slow loading times, but maybe that's not all, so here's your chance to get it all off your chest.

I'm thinking of going to smaller font and three columns, like most other blogs. I might use a third column for title feeds of other sites like leftyblogs Maryland or of the comments here, some kind of "currently reading" list, and/or a "quick hits" list like "Particles" and "Sidelights" at Making Light. I might like to tag my posts with keywords like "wal-mart," "germany," "village idiot," and so forth. I'm guessing that all suggests a site supporting PHP or something like it; I assume the right software -- Moveable Type? -- makes that easier than it sounds, but at any rate I'd need some "help for newbies" to make it work. I'm also wondering whether I should set up individual pages for each post, and the "next" and "previous" post navigation aids many blogs have.

While I'm at it: do readers use the "digg," "del.icio.us," and other "social bookmarking" tools I'm seeing at places like firedoglake (the colorful row of icons at the bottom of individual posts)? If you blog yourself and include "digg this" etc. for each post, do you see new readership coming from these sources? (For that matter, can you see that? Should I care?) I don't use them myself, at least not yet, so I'm curious what other people think. What about "spotlight"?

So have at it in comments: what changes would you like? What layouts of other blogs do you like? How absolutely-perfect, wouldn't-change-a-thing is this one? Etcetera. Thanks! posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |