When the Hitler Comparison Fits
By James Lewis
AmericanThinker.com
Some time ago, Jonah Goldberg criticized political pundits for overusing the Hitler cliché.
He was right to – almost.
Hitler will be an example of evil for a long time to come, because he inflicted more sadistic pain and death on more innocent human beings with more malignant intent than all but the biggest butchers in history. Hitler may be the best-documented mega-criminal in history.
We need to know that, just as we need to know about Mother Teresa as an exemplar of goodness. We need saints, and we need to recognize human demons. Both exist.
This is a dark and bloody time, and the most shocking fact is how few self-proclaimed "moral people" have the guts and the clarity to say so. We need to remember evil, to grasp it when it comes again.
Today, the Hitler cliché is real again. It's no longer a cliché.
Periodically we see another ISIS murder stunt in the news, almost to the point of boredom. The only way to stay conscious of the demonic nature of ISIS is to cling to an understanding of good and evil.
If you can't discern evil in Boko Haram's killing, kidnapping, abusing, and slave-trading African children to sell to wealthy Saudis (according to one report), you're lost in the universe.
Obama's unconstitutional "arrangement" with the nuke-happy mullahs is being criticized for all kinds of reasons – but not because it is literally evil. Obama's greatest foreign policy achievement isn't just a blunder. It is the greatest retreat from clear and present danger in American history.
The "deal" empowers the most anti-humane, the most misogynist, oppressive, Jew-hating, Sunni-hating, America-hating, aggressive, imperialistic, and dangerous power-cult in the world. Even the Saudis, who also enforce strict sharia law, are scared to death of these characters.
Morally, the mullah cult equals the Hitler cult. Only the stage props are different.
Look at the basics, and see if you don't agree.
Hitler was a ruthless malignant narcissist who rose to power by scapegoating whole categories of human beings, including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals (after the SA was purged), Slavs, and all the inferior races.
So was Khomeini, and so are the mullahs now in control. The mullahs still throw homosexual men off buildings.
Hitler pioneered the use of mass media to reach tens of millions of people in an endless campaign of genocidal hatred, indoctrinating every child in Germany through the schools and colleges, and perhaps worst of all, pressuring teachers and professors with shameless success to follow the Nazi line.
The Khomeini cult and the Saudi radicals have sponsored decades of hate propaganda, paid for with OPEC oil.
Intellectual corruption is a sign of times like this. The vaunted German philosopher Martin Heidegger was a uniformed Hitler-saluting thug, just as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre worshipped Stalin and Mao. Today, some of our most prestigious university campuses are crawling with supporters of Islamic fascism and Marxism.
Tehran has even revived the Hitler salute.
Khomeinism is evil in its actions, because it is evil in its preaching.
Liberals have decided that Americans are not allowed to judge somebody's religious beliefs – unless it's a devout Christian or an orthodox Jew. Any criticism of the bloody passages of the Koran must be censored. Fortunately, there are still a few uncensored minds around.
Significantly, Obama has contemptuously dismissed the idea that the United States might beg Iran to tone down its war rhetoric for this deal. But Obama doesn't see a problem with genocidal rhetoric. His moral sense is very different from any prior president's. When FDR spoke about Pearl Harbor as "a day that will live in infamy," he actually meant that. Obama won't even speak the name of the enemy.
In our time, the worst atrocities are linked to violent Islam. But Karl Marx had his century filled with bloody butchery, and so did other murder cults.
In his life, Obama has been profoundly shaped by two ideologies of hatred: militant Islam and Marxism. As for his alter-ego Valerie Jarrett, she lived in Tehran as a child, and in her case the old Jesuit maxim seems to apply: "Give me a child before age ten, and we will have him for life."
So Jonah was only half-right.
Hitler can't be allowed to become just another cliché.
But every rational person also needs a standard of evil incarnate, or you won’t be able to understand the news today.