NYC Letter: That Didn't Take Long -- Mitt Hitler

Day 1,219 of CHOPE

UPDATE 05.28.12: Welcome, ¡No Pasarán! folk (see codicil to post).

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"Do you think this is an accurate analysis? Outside of the whole killing Jewish people thing."

MITT HITLER
Vote For Avatism*
[Picture source: Council of Conservative Citizens via Loop 21]

So asks Maurice Garland at Loop 21. [Pause.] Gosh, Maurice, we dunno. It's hard to get around that "whole killing Jewish people thing".

MITT ROMNEY-AS-ADOLF HITLER
POSTERS POP UP IN CALIFORNIA

May 17, 2012 (Loop21) - Somebody is having a lot of fun with Photoshop. Posters of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney being depicted as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler are popping up in California.

The creator of the poster has yet be identified, but one of the first sites to post this photo are blaming the "radical left" for it.

Do you think this is an accurate analysis? Outside of the whole killing Jewish people thing.

[Hat tip: Carine]

We cannot tell if Mr. Garland asks in earnest or tongue-in-cheek or with that doe-eyed disingenuity of the left. "Accurate" is the left's favorite weasel word to legitimize scurrilous and untrue attacks by -- the left. Where one might expect the question to be, "Is this fair?", the left poses the question, "Is this accurate?" as in, "Does this represent what you think?"

Fairness requires consideration of the facts, objective proportionality, and honesty in the conclusions drawn. It is to honest discourse what the bulls-eye is to archery, the sole objective. Accurate, as the left employs the term, is anything but. A claim can be wholly false, but speak to some intuition or received notion of or advantage (e.g., fake but accurate) for the left that then justifies it being treated as if true. It is to dishonest discourse what the grenade is to the battlefield, a proximity weapon. It only needs to be lobbed in the vicinity for its fell task.

So is Mr. Garland satirizing the left or speaking as the left putting the question to itself?

We would ask the question, "Is this fair?"

Is there anything in Mr. Romney's past or character or presidential platform that is conceivably coincident with or remotely equivalent to or even thinly suggestive of the person Adolph Hitler? [Pause.] Whatever your politics, the fair answer is "no".

Hitler, of course, is the first smear to hand for the low-intellect activist. The Hitler smear is meant precisely to associate its target with "the whole killing Jewish people thing" because that is as much Hitler as these people know. It's never an allusion to "the whole Sudetenkrise thing" or "the whole Zbrodnia w Ciepielowie thing" or the larger "Polenfeldzug thing".

There is a double purpose to the Hitler smear, the obvious defamation of its target and the less obvious trivialization of "the whole killing Jewish people thing". The disproportionality cuts both ways. It giganticizes some imagined moral flaw in its target on the level of "the whole killing Jewish people thing", while its metonymical preposterousness diminishes the point of comparison. This second effect plays to the anti-Semitism rife among the ranks of the left (and this). The left supporting the Palestinian cause sees devitalizing the Holocaust, emptying it of its moral horror, as a crucial step toward the delegitimization of Israel.

The world is not without those who in deed and intent compare with Hitler or the Nazis. But many of them are heroes of the left (and here and here and here and here) and therefore beyond taint.

The left has bred an intellectually stunted following. They are limited to what can be fitted on a placard and who believe name-calling settles any argument in their favor.

CHOPE.

The intellectually infantilized left.

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* What is "avatism"? Our guess is "avatism" is a misconstruction for "avatarism", the phenomena of avatars. In Hinduism, an avatar is the appearance/re-appearance of a deity. So here Mr. Romney is an avatar, or latterday manifestation, of Hitler.

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UPDATE 05.28.12: Erik Svane at ¡No Pasarán! picks up the story as a jump-off-point to deride the left's use of Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies to close down argument.

You're having an interesting argument, a good back'n'forth, and you are hearing all the arguments in favor of peace, of non-intervention; at one point you segue into the dangers of a peace candidate becoming, willingly or otherwise, another Chamberlain at Munich, and getting ready to cite arguments brought up at the time (1938), some of them extremely similar as those being brought up now, and the (sneering) leftist you are talking with lets out a shout: Time Out! Ha Ha! Godwin's rule! Conversation over! You nixed it!

... As is quite clear, leftists are giving free rein in evoking the Third Reich and the Führer, and that, not in regards to reasonable arguments but regarding name-calling and insults: for the left (American or international), Reductio ad Hitlerum is par for the course — describing conservatives (or Americans generally) as fascists and (neo-)Nazis, invoking Greed-Über-Alles and the specter of genocide, and painting square mustaches on the photos of George W Bush, Mitt Romney, etc…

Godwin's Law is a formulation of an observed occurrence. It has no political or forensic application, no more so than, say, Newtonian physics. The left's ambush citation of the law speaks to (A) its skim-and-repurpose approach to information (and this), (B) an inability to preserver in argument, and (C) that nagging dissatisfaction with its own positions.

Posted by Damian at May 27, 2012 08:45 AM