This is all around the internet today, but still worth a look. Obama decries “senseless violence” of Holocaust. National Review Online says, not so fast!
Nazism may have been an ideology to which the United States was — and to which the president is — implacably opposed, but it is hardly “senseless.” By the early 1930s, the Nazi party had hundreds of thousands of devoted members and repeatedly attracted a third of the votes in German elections; its political leaders campaigned on a platform comprising 25 non-senseless points, including the “unification of all Germans,” a demand for “land and territory for the sustenance of our people,” and an assertion that “no Jew can be a member of the race.” Suffice it to say, many sensible Germans were persuaded.
Oooookay. Everyone on the internet also agrees that the obligatory response is to quote The Big Lebowski: “I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” I had thought that by firing Derbyshire, NRO had rid itself of anyone likely to pen the above-quoted sentences, but evidently not. Eliana Johnson is on Twitter; you twitterers can tell her what you think of her views on Nazism. I hate Yale Nazis.
Crazy people often regard themselves to be the only sane ones in the room.
To suggest that Hitler and the Nazi Party’s plan to exterminate all of the Jews in Europe was “sensible” — simply because they were able to rationalize a justification for it — is … well, CRAZY!