March 31, 2016
Source: Bigstock
The left’s grip on reality has never exactly been vise-like. But it seems to me that leftists are losing it”more than usual”over Trump. And I”m no Trump fan, to be sure. Last week I was amused to see myself involuntarily added to the Wikipedia page of “prominent individuals” who”ve endorsed Trump. There I am, sandwiched alphabetically between Conrad Black and Ann Coulter, apparently due to a previous Taki’s piece in which I called Trump “a wealthy, high-profile loudmouth with no plan to govern and no principles to guide him.”
The definition of “endorsement” appears to have changed a bit from back in my day.
But my own views on The Donald aside, there’s no question that leftists have gone plumb loco over his candidacy. After decades of calling every Republican under the sun “Hitler,” leftists have now started to believe their own slur. As Daniel Greenfield points out, every GOP presidential candidate over the past fifty years has been Hitler according to the left. And as I mentioned a few weeks ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger was Hitler when he first ran for governor of California. Many people have forgotten that the night before the recall election, soon-to-be senator Al Franken announced on The Tonight Show that, if elected, Schwarzenegger would emulate Hitler (that’s the same Tonight Show hosted by Jay Leno, who, ten years earlier, had called Rush Limbaugh Hitler). When Romney was running for president, Mormons were Hitler. Last week, when Mormon voters demonstrated their intense dislike for Trump, all of a sudden they were Hitler no more.
John McCain is no longer Hitler, but he was back in 2008, when an episode of Family Guy labeled both McCain and Palin as Hitler(s). About a year after that episode aired, I was at a birthday bash for John Romano, the former Breitbart “Big Hollywood” author who chucked the right-wing blogosphere to open one of the Internet’s largest Parisian tour operating companies (an irony, as his views on Muslims and immigrants might actually make him a “hate criminal” in the very country he now depends on for his livelihood). A lone leftist at Romano’s party was John Viener, a producer and writer for Family Guy. I asked Viener about the McCain/Palin Hitler smear, which had been inserted into the episode not so much as a gag but as a political statement.
“Yeah, we have this one writer on staff,” Viener explained, “who really, really hates Republicans. So he lobbied for that cheap shot. It wasn”t worth it to fight him. I mean, don”t get me wrong”everyone on the show hated McCain and Palin, but we didn”t actually think they”re Nazis.” And that’s how I always took the last fifty years” worth of Hitler accusations. I never thought most leftists really believed them. It’s just part of the kata, an expected countermove. Dude says “I”m a Republican,” you reply “Well, then, you”re Hitler.” It’s just theater.
But with Trump, leftists are acting like they really do believe he’s der Führer reincarnated. I think what we”re witnessing is a new twist on the Boy Who Cried Wolf, in which the boy doesn”t end up encountering a real wolf, but rather, he comes to believe his own lie. He now actually sees the nonexistent wolf he invented, thus becoming an even bigger menace to the townspeople, having transitioned from liar to zealot, from prankster to paranoid schizo.
I have a leftist friend, supersmart in all other areas of life, who has really been buying into the whole “Trump is Hitler” thing. Recently, by accident, she found herself in a thread with some of my Facebook “alt right” friends. Some of these online acquaintances have”how shall I put it delicately”a relaxed attitude toward fascism. My friend was so disturbed by having been in a thread with “neo-Nazis,” she took to her own page to lament the fact that people with such “historically discredited” beliefs still exist.
I sent her a message: “Congratulations! Now you know how it feels to be a conservative.”
My point was, conservatives living in today’s world are surrounded, pretty much in all corners of mainstream society, by leftists who celebrate communism and deny or ignore its murderous history. On college campuses, in the media, in the arts, in “community activism,” it’s just something a guy like me has had to get used to”idiots wearing Che T-shirts, extolling Marx, Mao, Lenin, and Castro, whitewashing the history of those who supported Stalin, and outright evangelizing for the most destructive ideology of the 20th century, an ideology that cost over 100 million lives.
I grew up being told by celebrated literary figures like Dr. Seuss that the differences between the communist bloc and the free world were as trivial as how one butters bread. Last week, when President Obama essentially repeated the Dr. Seuss “buttered bread” dogma during his trip to Argentina, it barely merited a shrug on my part. For 47 years I”ve had to live surrounded by people who adhere to, defend, or treat lightly an ideology with a death toll that puts National Socialism’s to shame, and I”ve managed to keep my sanity. So I have no sympathy for leftists who totally lose it when they see “fascism” and “Nazism” in the cracks and crevices of social media.
Of course, leftists simply don”t “get” Nazism/communism equivalence. Leftists have managed to blind themselves to the reality of the human cost of communism. They mentally separate communist mass murder from something like the Holocaust by convincing themselves that communist killings were all individually politically motivated. Stalin and Mao didn”t “round people up” en masse based on their identity. No, they just killed people who threatened them politically. Leftists genuinely believe that. As “history buff” and “most viewed writer” Scott Stolz wrote on the by-dummies-for-dummies Q&A site Quora, Hitler committed “organized” murders to “eliminate entire groups,” whereas Stalin and Mao merely “targeted people for political reasons, killing opponents and dissidents.”
During Stalin’s Great Terror, the lowball figure for executions was 1,000 a day. Averaging that out and accounting for time spent sleeping, Stalin would have had to be threatened politically at least once per minute during his waking hours if those 1,000 executions a day were all due to individual political clashes and disputes. Once per minute, from the time he woke up in the morning until he put his weary head on the pillow at night, poor Uncle Joe would have had to suffer someone insulting him, threatening him, or otherwise getting on his bad side. The smug leftist atheist “IFL Science” crowd, the people who love to lecture conservatives about rationalism, honestly believe that Stalin offed 20 million people because of 20 million individual slights. One per minute, at a minimum. This is what our “intellectuals” truly believe.
And it’s not just political leftists who”ve spread that nonsense. Holocaust “exceptionalism” has a lot to do with it as well. No serious Holocaust historian denies the fact that communism boasts a larger overall death toll than National Socialism. However, a rule of Holocaust history is that the Holocaust must be “unique,” and since it doesn”t have a uniquely high victim tally, historians must therefore claim uniqueness in how the victims were selected. They were rounded up “simply because of who they were,” as opposed to being rounded up individually for specific political transgressions. As the aforementioned historical dummy Scott Stolz pointed out, killing political opponents “is obviously a bad thing,” but rounding people up based on their identity “is considered worse.”
Yet every serious historian (and “history buff”) understands that the staggering body count racked up by the Soviets and Red Chinese was of course the result of “rounding people up” due to their “identity.” The Nazis sought to liquidate races and ethnicities; the communists sought to liquidate classes. This is actually quite common knowledge, and the fact that leftists keep themselves ignorant of it is a testament to the human mind’s ability to block what it doesn”t want to see and hear. Stalin ordered the “liquidation of the kulaks” in 1929 (kulaks were peasants who owned farmland, machinery, or livestock, and who employed laborers). Kulaks were executed or sent to the gulags because of “who they were.” The entire class was liquidated en masse, not because of individual transgressions. A kulak child under Stalin had no more way out than a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Poland. Along with the kulaks, Stalin killed Ukrainians simply for being Ukrainian. Ethnic minorities and Christians were also killed for “who they were.”
