Hitler was Member No. 7 of the National Socialist German Workers Party.

The Bolsheviks started out as about 15 out of a meeting of 27 Russian Social Democrats about ten years before the two Russian Revolutions of 1917.

Of course, the teabaggers' relatively greater size (still a small minority of the population) is not in itself an indicator that they are a threat to seize control of the state and start detaining their designated enemies and traitors. But they do see everyone who isn't with them as traitors, and they accept in principle that any means of dealing with traitors may be necessary and acceptable. Like the Nazis, they believe they are locked in a death struggle with liberalism.

More importantly for the moment, every fart they release is being blasted everywhere. Even when treated critically, they are being given legitimacy as the current political opposition by the machinery of the corporate media (with Murdoch's "Attack on America" providing unlimited direct financing). Their popularity may have peaked for now, but their extremism has only begun to find expression.

Listen to Palin barking about the ignominy of having a constitutional lawyer in the White House, instead of a "commander in chief" with the will to wage (more) war. She's playing John the Baptist for a modern American nazi movement. (I am not among those who fear she will run for president, but rather that she and her cohorts will find the right Man on Horseback to rally behind.)

There's nothing inevitable about history, but to say the fire is currently limited is a rather short-sighted response.

This is a continuous war that started with Darwin's theory of evolution in this country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism

This was certainly the case with Hitler.

I once translated an excellent essay by an art critic who read the Nazi ideology (which was indisputably shaped by his personality) as the reaction of a frustrated traditional artist of limited talents against the modernist world view: secularism, rights-based individualism, ideas of equality before the law, non-heroic bureaucratic modes of authority, bourgeois aesthetics jazz music, the goddamn Cubists, etc. In his telling, Hitler's frustrated narcissistic need as an artist turned to the political world as an alternate canvas, and remaking Germany and Europe became his attempts at a masterpiece. It was one-dimensional (actually a chapter of a textbook on the history of modern art!) but illuminating nevertheless.

you only need the support of 20% of the population. We know the wingnuts have 30%.

the tea-baggers seem to be a contrived movement created by hucksters.

for example, palin isn't an ideologue, she's in it for the dough. she has no idea what she believes, thats why she keeps crib notes written on her palm.

Which is to say, its ideology was defined through the reaction to a grab-bag of perceived grievances (some real, all misrepresented) and a bottomless sense of victimization by a diverse number of mortal enemies, the Jews and Communists of course at the forefront.

Don't underestimate the teabaggers for either their irrationality OR their coherence. Their message beneath the many gaffes and logical twists is actually very simple, and rooted in a long-running ideological strain of American paranoid nationalism and bellicosity.

And he's worming his way back into the public eye.

Also, not all early Nazis were ideologues. They all had their own reasons for joining the movement - some were motivated by greed, others by power, others by extreme nationalism, others by hatred of the 'other'. Heydrich, who created the death camps, was not anti-semitic as such, unlike his boss, Himmler. He was tasked with eliminating the Jews, and he invented the death camps to do so. He was interested in designing systems, not in people. That he was driven by a desire for efficiency rather than hatred did not make him any less monstrous - to my mind, it makes him more so.

Palin is stupid and greedy. That's what makes her dangerous. Smart and greedy is also dangerous, but that at least can see potential consequences of it's actions. She is ripe for being used by the ideologues.

You'll all see. You'll all see.

And forced his evil plan to mutate every form of plant life on earth upon us all. :scared:

How did you get in the adult section?

You're talking to everyone here, seeing as it's a public board, and as you're targeting this for the usual juvenile no-brains harrassment (probably not in this case due to subject matter but just so).

Hey, Happy Valentine's Day.

As for your OP, it's silly.

Yes, the early Nazis were, like the tea party, a small group of ineffectual losers. So are all the thousands of other stupid little parties of ineffectual losers out there who warrant no serious comparisons to Nazis.

instead of acting like a juvenile little dick who clutters everyone's way with meaningless heckling? You're welcome for the lesson, for all the good it will do.

At least I think most people got it.

Do you understand this post? Or do I have to dumb it down for you as well?

Just like in the Weimar Republic, where the NSDAP was ridiculed and Hitler was seen as a buffoon, our Weimar moment cannot happen for superior folks like yourself because -- as you clearly believe -- America is a special exception, unique and different from all human history, and the U.S. cannot have a Weimar moment, in your view.

But I understand, you're just doing your job. Disruption & misdirection & the like. I was once just like you, employed to disrupt boards like this. Almost 1 in 5 here are. And it works.

Note that I did not say this:

Hitler was small.
The Tea Party is small.
Therefore the Tea Party are like the American Nazis.
Beware, beware.

That would be the argument implied by HighFructose's mockery in post 5 above, but certainly I didn't make it.

Rather, I began by using examples that falsify the converse idea, that small is necessarily harmless. Small is neither harmless nor harmful. Then I stated my actual argument about the parallels I see, which are not magical and have nothing to do with surface similarities but with an underlying social psychology of reaction, which can be found all around the world and in many ages of history.

And the point was to warn against those who would laugh off the teabaggers, when their violent anti-intellectualism takes to the podium and calls for war and the iron fist as the means to restore a fictional past age. That is exactly what was happening at the teabag convention. They're not yet at the level even of past American phenomena like the KKK and the white reaction to civil rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s, but they're explicitly looking back on that example in particular with nostalgia.

In this I'm not saying there's anything inevitable, rather that the teabaggers see nothing but enemies and traitors in the rest of society, and gradually are whipping themselves up for what they believe will be a final struggle for survival. That's the same sort of self-image that the Nazis tapped into in their own time and place.

Your point about effectiveness is fallacious insofar as it's a term with variable meaning. Many groups that could have legitimately been called incompetent, ineffective, and stupid were able to rise in power anyway: by giving people what people want, by serving powerful interests, and by using brutality and shock. The Nazis prior to the takeover in fact were constantly "ineffective" and buffoonish, but it was more important that they were willing to beat and kill their political opponents in the street, and to make up any lie in the service of gaining power. The teabaggers are only murmuring about and not yet doing the former, but clearly they've arrived at the latter.

The evidence of "powerful interests" is obvious enough in the teabaggers' case, who are being financed and in part led directly by the Murdoch empire and given a constant platform both at FOX and in the rest of the corporate media, despite their size, stupidity, "ineffectuality," etc.

They're farcical, but this is not a joke.

on her infamy - she doesn't care to actually be president - that's too hard for her. But if she can fashion herself into a kind of kingmaker, whose endorsement can mean life or death, then she would LOVE to be in such a spot.

another idiotic comparison of "group/person A" to Hitler/Nazis.

Brilliant.


It would seem that in recent years, people on both sides of an issue/struggle claiming that "God is on our side" has been replaced with "the other side is just like Hitler!"