Tag: Adolph HItler

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Elon Musk clarified something that has been bothering me for some time. I was always wonder how Hitler could kill so many people. I mean he was just one man. It seemed highly unlikely, at least to me, that Hitler could dispatch six million Jews all by himself. But, then, Elon Musk comes along to explain that actually Hitler didn’t kill anyone, it was civil servants that did the actual killing.

WTF. Really, like this somehow absolves him. I do have to give him some credit for looping in the true evil here — civil servants. Not Hitler, but civil servants. Hitler is a misunderstood genius much like Elon Musk while civil servants, if left to their own devices, are likely to commit genocide.

This is why when people try to explain that Musk is a genius, I flinch. A smart man would see the problem here. People keep calling me a Nazi. Every time I start talking about Nazis I get unflattering headlines. Maybe I should stop making any comments about Nazis and, in this way, I will stop getting so much bad press.

That he fails to understand this problem and continues to step in it belies his genius status.

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I was worried that I was becoming too numb to the daily Trump outrages. I would see them but reacting to them seemed difficult. There is only so much nonsense you can take before tuning it all out. He is going to take over Greenland, then the Panama Canal, then Canada. I repeat CANADA. Then he renames the Gulf of Mexico. I just am unable to be outraged every day.

Then last week occurred. I am glad to report Trump has jolted me back into outrage.

Correct me if I am wrong but is he is making the case for Putin being the injured party for the Russian invasion of the Ukraine? Are we talking about the same Russian invasion? I know it was a couple years ago but my memory is very different than Trump’s. It was all on television for about a month. Now Trump wants me to change my mind without offering any compelling evidence to do so.

Even more shocking, and let me tell you I am pretty damn shocked at this point, is that the whole Republican Party, even formally strong Ukraine supporters, are mad at Zelenskyy for not being sufficiently servile to Donald Trump. They aren’t saying that Zelenskyy is wrong but that he didn’t have the good sense to grovel while his host was spewing nonsense. Bad manners and all that.

Despite the fact that J.D. Vance and Trump started this little slugfest and expected Zelenskyy to sit quietly and take the punches. They made the choice to publicly dress down Zelenskyy in public. Zelenskyy isn’t the type of guy to back down from a fight. Ask Vladimir Putin.

But Trump picked a public fight and he got one. His guest behaved badly. Well, yes, after his host called him ungrateful in front of the television cameras. There is also a certain etiquette on how you treat your guest. Not embarrassing your guest is near the top of that list.

Trump is being calculated and shockingly transparent here. He wants to distance the US from the Ukraine. He has begun the process. So, in a few months, I guess, we will abandon the Ukraine, despite Russian aggression, despite Putin being a dictator who kills his opponents, because Zelenskyy hurt Trump’s feelings.

If you are looking for Hitler comparisons, and I know you are, try this one. Trump is in the Neville Chamberlain role. Putin fills in for Hitler and Zelenskyy is Eduard Benes, the Czechoslovak leader in 1938. Trump will encourage the partition Ukraine to bring peace to Europe while doing nothing of the sort. At least, Chamberlain thought he was bringing peace to Europe. Trump doesn’t give a rat’s ass about peace in Europe.

Well, at least, I got out of my numbness and am back to outrage. That is something.

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The recent recopening of war in the Middle East also reopened discussions on what is morally acceptable behavior during a war. It is a difficult topic because people’s opinions shift depending upon what war you are fighting, who is fighting it and whether you are winning. In the Catholic School I attended I received two very different messages about war from the same teacher. Sister Mira thought the Viet Cong were cowards because they hid among the Vietnamese people and fought a guerrilla war. They should fight on a battlefield like good soldiers instead of engaging in guerrilla tactics. She alao admired the ingenuity of the Minute Men during the American Revolutionary War because they avoided open warfare with the better armed British forces. They would attack the British were they could and then retreat into the vast American countryside to avoid being caught. Which sounds very much like the Viet Cong were doing. So your moral decisions about war depends on which side you are on — rebels you like can use guerrilla warfare, rebels you don’t like shouldn’t.

War is a problem ethically. War is violent. War kills innocent people. It is hard to justify killing a small child but, if there is a war going on, there is a pretty good chance that a small child is dying somewhere because of it. It is unavoidable. Now these killings can come in different ways with varying degrees of culpability. There is a difference between killing a child through dropping a bomb on his house and slitting the child’s throat in his bed. But still the child is dead in both cases. An innocent died because of the war you are waging. How do you stop someone like Hitler without killing innocent children. The truth is you can’t.

No matter how just the war is in the general sense, specific acts are going to go wrong. Should you stop fighting Hitler because you want to limit your fighting to actions that won’t kill children? Morally speaking — how many children will die if I fight Hitler and how many children will die if I fail to fight Hitler. It is a horrible choice but one that has to be made.

This is why war is to be avoided it if at all possible. It is a moral quagmire. Perhaps when a nation is considering war, instead of demonizing the future enemy, people should consider the question is this worth killing innocents to get what we want? And if the answer is yes then go into it accepting your soldiers will face this dilemma. Possibly this will make people act better but I doubt it.

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Moms for Liberty, a right wing group, recently quoted Hitler. It created a great deal of commotion. So much so that Lt. Gov. Robinson came to their defense. His awkward finesse was basically that just because Hitler and Mao were wrong about a lot of things doesn’t mean that they weren’t right about some things. As the old saying goes, a stopped clock is right twice a day. This doesn’t mean you should rely on that clock in any way.

As a rule of thumb, I think if you have a quote from a serial killing authoritarian and you want to use that quote as support for a position you are espousing, take a deep breath and, after regaining your senses, find another quote from someone less controversial, and when you are considering Mao and Hitler, this would be almost anybody, and use that instead. But never use the quote from the dictator. NEVER. It will only bring you heart ache.

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Elon Musk has compared Justin Trudeau to Hitler so we can all take hims a little less seriously. Any time that someone compares a person to Hitler you pretty much know that they stopped making sense and that all reasonable argument with this person is done. Musk believes Trudeau is Hitler because Trudeau mandated COVID vaccinations and declared a national emergency due to the truckers blocking Canadian roads and bridges.

While Trudeau has been behaving like Hitler, Canada still has a functioning legislature and a vocal opposition leader who daily challenges Trudeau. Canadian Courts are functioning. The truckers, as a matter of fact, are still actively protesting. He has not shut down opposition presses. Nobody has been sent to a concentration camp. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there are no concentration camps yet in Canada at all. Canada still hasn’t invaded Poland or started a world war. But give Hitler, I mean Trudeau time, I am sure this will all happen in time.

Trudeau is trying to clear the roads and bridges that some protesters have blocked. These trucker’s actions are illegal and Canada’s government has every right to remove them. Now you may disagree with Trudeau about the vaccine mandates. Protest away, Trudeau isn’t stopping you unless you are blocking public thoroughfares. Trudeau maybe many things but Hitler is not one of them.

And just so you know, I feel the same way about Donald Trump. Trump may have some fascist tendencies but they pale when compared to Hitler. Until January 6, Trump worked through democratic institutions to get what he wanted. Those institutions held firm, resisted his actions and thwarted him. Even though he thought he was wronged and still complains about it, he left the White House on inauguration day and Biden became President. It wasn’t pretty and he behaved badly but he failed spectacularly to meet the high standards of evil that would merit a comparison to Hitler. It is, as it should be, a difficult standard to meet. The best example of someone who deserves the Hitler comparison is Pol Pot of Cambodia. Pol Pot rounded up his opponents, set up camps to house them and killed millions of Cambodians who’s only crime may have been possessing a college degree. Trudeau isn’t even Pol Pot at this point much less Hitler.

You have to ascend to a certain level of evil to deserve a Hitler comparison. Most people never come close. Trudeau is not Hitler. Trump is not Hitler. Instead of laying out a more nuanced argument, Musk resorted to name calling in the hopes that this comparison would move his audience to a quick agreement that something must be done about our local tyrant. I am afraid it only weakens whatever argument he was trying to make because, really, if you think Justin Trudeau is Hitler then what else can he be wrong about?