Our political quote of the day comes from Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham who looks at how the left and right over the years — and particularly this year — have hurled charges of being-like-the-Nazis or being-like Hitler.
First, he gives examples of the overripe and polarizing polemics on both sides, and then he writes this:
Now the subject of President Obama’s health-care plan has given us yet more examples to add to this sorry list (Rush Limbaugh is a particularly vivid entry). Given the enormity of the evil perpetrated by Nazi Germany, it seems reasonable to suggest a moratorium on the deployment of Third Reich imagery and language in domestic political conflicts that, while important, fall immeasurably short of Hitler’s territorial ambitions and his Final Solution.
I am not suggesting that we forget the past and consign Hitler to history. Quite the opposite: we must always, always remember. That a seemingly civilized nation in the center of Europe committed such crimes is a perennial reminder that the human capacity for evil is bottomless. The further we move in time from the events of the Second World War, the more remote it all seems, as though the rise of National Socialism, the persistence of American isolationism, the cynicism of the Soviet Union, and the appeasement chic of the British upper classes are relics of an ancient era. But these forces are not antique. They are permanent. It could all happen again tomorrow—all of it.
That is why the example of Hitler should not be invoked lightly or often. In this case, less is more; to deploy Nazi imagery as a matter of course diminishes one of humankind’s most potent lessons of its meaning and its power. The summer of 2009 has not been our finest hour on this front.
I hate to use the word but:
Ditto.
And an extra “ditto” as someone who had huge chunks of his family — men, women, children– brutally murdered by the Nazis.
FOOTNOTE: As a news junkie, I am a huge fan of all the news magazines. In fact, my father, the late Richard Gandelman, did extensive printing for Time-Life and I visited that building in NYC often with him as a kid. Newsweek recently underwent a major design, in an attempt to try a business model that it hopes will be more attuned to the new media and the nation’s sagging financial environment. I actually like the new Newsweek better than the old Newsweek. It has largely abandoned the weekly coverage for more in depth and analytical pieces. This post is written on the last evening of a week in New Mexico, where I performed at a fair. And I had my Newsweek with me and wound up reading it cover to cover. HIGHLY recommended.
But the operative question is: will this business model (which assumes readers read a lot of the in depth day to day Internet coverage or watched it on cable and perhaps even read one of the country’s shrinking and news-delivery-tardy daily newspapers) work?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.