Good old fashioned rant time:
You know folks, I miss the days when there were other evil caricatures. More than just Adolf Hitler. You could call somebody Joseph Stalin, or Satan’s spawn, or the bastard child of Darth Vader and Jeffrey Dahmer. I mean, the sky was the limit, you know? You could be a blood-sucking Commie bastard, a zealous Puritan Witch Burner, if you were a real nerd, you could call somebody a member of the Fourth Crusade (oops… accidentally killed a boatload of Christians instead of Muslims. Uh… my bad?).
Not anymore. Everything is Hitler. Everything is Fascist or Nazi. That’s the only evil caricature anybody uses. There’s no creativity anymore. It’s just banal and cliche. Unoriginal. Oh, well, you’re not a vegan? HITLER! You have some policy beefs with Hillary Clinton? NAZI! You thought the Walking Dead was kind of boring? FASCIST!
Enough of the Hitler. I’m sick of Hitler. Tired of Nazi. Exhausted of Fascist. I don’t even care what they call me anymore, so long as they choose something different. When I hear a Hitler accusation, I just sigh and shake my head at the irritating banality of it all. If one-tenth of the Nazi accusations were true, the entire world would be the province of Zombie Adolf, Necromancer of the Undead Reich.
The accusations don’t sting anymore. They don’t even provide a chuckle of humor, or modicum of position reassessment. Never have I changed my opinion on something because I was accused of being a Fascist. There was a time when I would attempt to rationally convince my detractor that I was not, in fact, anything like what I was being accused of. But that never worked either, and so the default state rapidly changed to anger. That insult was beyond the pale, it was utterly disgusting to refer to someone as a Hitlerite. But eventually I became too tired to care anymore. Oh yes, call me a Nazi. Whatever. Like I haven’t heard that a thousand times before.
Adolf Hitler has become worse than a bad joke. Reductio Ad Hitlerum has become the default fallacy of the the mainstream media. Trump could pick his nose, and the resulting booger would somehow be a Nazi booger. He could play golf, and it would be Nazi golf (you see, the angle he holds his golf club at when he swings looks vaguely like a Nazi salute). He could eat a pretzel, and it would be a Nazi pretzel. Adolf Hitler, you see, once picked his nose too. And I don’t know if he played golf or ate pretzels, but hey, we’re not exactly in the domain of factual argument here. It doesn’t really matter what Hitler did or didn’t do. All that matters is that if the left calls someone Hitler, they are automatically disqualified from whatever it was they were doing.
This is a geopolitical stale fart that just keeps hovering around instead of dissipating into the ether like it ought to. Somebody fan this shit out of political parlance, please. The cliche has overstayed its welcome. Time to move on and insult people differently. SJWs like diversity, right? How about some diversity of insults? Just once, I’d like to hear them call us oh… I don’t know… a Paulican heretic or something. At least that would be original.
The Nazis aren’t coming back — they never were. If tomorrow thousands of Nazis clambered out of the woodwork, and put on their SS uniforms, and marched down the street, we wouldn’t even point and laugh at them. Laughing is reserved for things that are actually funny, or worth making fun of. Our reaction would be “oh God, not these things again.” The collective eyeroll would be a disturbance visible from low Earth orbit.
Donald Trump gets a nod on the cover of Time? Well, there are intrepid Leftists who want you to know that Hitler once received that honor, also, and that this is somehow evidence for the implication Trump is a fascist. My friend Nicki dissects this intellectual turd of an argument (and note, for the record, that she hates Trump and didn’t vote for him):
That said, this level of stupid needs to be nuked from space. Trump/Hitler comparisons because Hitler was once Time’s Man of the Year too? REALLY?
Well, post World War II, Persons of the Year also included John F. Kennedy, Pope John XXIII, Martin Luther King, “American women,” “The computer,” “The Endangered Earth,” Pope John Paul II, Barack Obama, Pope Francis, the Ebola fighters, and the American Soldier. I guess they’re all like Hitler too? And is President Obama twice as bad as Hitler, because he was named twice?
What. In. The. Everloving. Fuck?
The intellectual laziness and lack of objectivity in this article is stunning! It’s also stunning that readers “upvoted” this garbage, instead of ridiculing it and relegating it to the bin, where, in a sane world, such superb dreck should reside.
Reductio Ad Hitlerum continues to get worse every year. It’s so bad that not an hour goes by without someone on my Twitter feed being accused of Nazism, Fascism, Hitlerism… whatever. Every right-of-center politician is invariably compared to Hitler. Everything is white supremacy, white nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia. Not a day goes by that I don’t see a Hitler comparison in the mainstream media.
Hitler was already a sort of cartoon villain. Nazis were the mooks of choice in Indiana Jones, cartoonishly evil villains who perpetually carried around the idiot ball. Inglorious Basterds took that up to the eleven (great movie, by the way). But now they aren’t even funny anymore.
It’s hard to imagine who is a more cliche villain at this point, Darth Vader or Adolf Hitler. If anyone put on a Hitler mustache, got on stage, and started ranting about the Jews, he wouldn’t even be laughed off the stage, or booed off the stage. Rather, people would be genuinely perplexed. They’d be asking themselves “is this retard for real? What gives?”
From now on, anybody who resorts to Reductio Ad Hitlerum will be ignored. Get with the times and figure out a more original insult. Calling somebody Hitler today is like calling them a poopyhead. And that’s real sad, when you get right down to it. Because Hitler was no joke, and his regime was one of the purest strains of evil in all of recorded history. But you, intrepid SJWs, have reduced that historical lesson to a tired old joke that isn’t even funny anymore.
That’s on you. Have fun with Trump, okay?
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