Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Why is it always Hitler?

The left is off on another of their half-cocked bits of insanity comparing Trump to Hitler, because Trump used an eagle on a campaign t-shirt. The Washington Post, in the article about it, kind of admitted that the eagle was also an American symbol, but they did it reluctantly and hidden, because of course it ruins the comparison.

But seriously, why Hitler? There have been countless other bad men since the failed painter committed suicide in his bunker. Heck, on body count alone he was kind of a piker.

So, why is the left always and forever obsessed with Hitler.

Yes, yes, the second world war. Well, there have been other wars since then.

BUT, you’ll say, Hitler is the only one of the state-mass-murderers who didn’t do it in the name of communism. Waggles hand. Kind of. He did it in the name of socialism, the nationalistic kind, and yet, the left has no trouble ignoring that.

With the help of their captive press corps, in fact, they have spent a considerable amount of time convincing the world that Hitler wasn’t a socialist, not hard.

Hell and damnation, I heard a communist in my field, who passes for an educated man, claiming that Hitler/Stalin was the ultimate confrontation of capitalism and communism. Because, you know, Hitler is to capitalism as—I don’t know? Chalk to cheese?

If you assume capitalism is “free trade” (and not a made up word of the left) that was the one thing that Nazis definitely didn’t have or encourage. In fact, like the international socialists of Europe, and like our own left, people were nominally allowed to keep their wealth and business, but the government told them what to do with them, and picked winners and losers.

So, surely the left could have picked someone else: Mao or Pol Pot, or someone and proclaimed them totally not communist and then obsessed about them as the monster to watch out for. (To give kudos to a random complete idiot leftist (BIRM) she did compare Trump to Mao but that was only a facebook post, in which she showed more creativity than the Washington Post and the New York Times combined (tied together and thrown in the deep blue sea).)

Today I was watching Foyle’s War. I have been “reading” Agatha Christie books (audio) while working. And it hit me.

The left obsesses about Hitler because they’re nostalgic for WWII. It’s the last time the world made sense to them.

No one openly challenged the principle that government, the bigger the better, should do everything and control everything, from news to food distribution (and growing.) In many things, in fact, there was hardly any difference between the allies and Hitler. Well, the allies in what would become the other side of the iron curtain were doing … well, just as awful stuff as Hitler was doing.

And even here, in the land of the free, that utter bastard, FDR, was busily putting people in camps, and interfering with private business and doing everything he could possibly do to make people miserable and to bring about the glorious triumph of the state over the individual.

Which brings to WHY the left are so nostalgic.

At the root of it, fundamentally, they have to know their policies, their initiatives, their grand plans are wrong at the level and by the only metric that counts: that of impoverishing society and destroying lives, and making people miserable who would otherwise be fine, really.

But during WWII they had an excuse: everyone was doing it. EVERYONE. The only difference is that Hitler went in bigger than the other guys for ethnic cleansing. (Which is also why racism is now the left’s only and obsessively confessed sins.) And did it by the numbers and to horrifying levels.

Am I defending the bastard? Of course not.

Because the world is NOT a dispute between complete light and utter darkness, ever, yeah at the time the allies defeated the worst possible of the alternatives. BUT they did it at the cost of convincing their population that the government had the right to enslave them, to curtail their lives, to make the individual count for nothing. Which goes a long way to explain the mess Europe has become since then. (Well, again, they should have turned around and gone after Stalin next, but you can’t have everything. where would you put it? Who would dust it?)

So why does the left go back there like a dog to its vomit, from their obsession with comparing every single Republican president to Hitler, to trying to revive WWII rationing and programs, in response to various things that are to be declared the moral equivalent of war: the latest one being the “climate crisis.”

So—

Well, other than the fact that it’s fitting they’re running a demented elder for the presidency, what is the point of that?

The point is that it’s nostalgia. Nostalgia is the sin of dying philosophies. Of those who know their time has passed.

The left is involved in a ghost dance. It doesn’t mean they can’t do a lot of damage before they die, but they’ve entered that phase into which their maldaptive image of the world leads them to dig themselves deeper and deeper, every time they hit bottom. They’re now reduced to Wile E. Coyote and his clever plots, which always backfire, because he fails to account for the other side not simply going along with his imaginings.

They are, in the end, headed to the trash heap of history.

Our job is to make sure they don’t drag us along.

Be not afraid, and keep workin’.

 

Posted on According to Hoyt for July 15, 2020