Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’re hearing this epithet, invective, smear, slander, “Nazi, Nazi, Nazis, Hitler,” all the time now. We’re accustomed to it as conservatives. It seems almost every time there was a Republican president in office, the Left smeared him as a Nazi.
Remember President George W. Bush? We were told by George Soros, the dean of the Yale Law School that he was Hitler-like, that he had Nazi propensities. I think a minister in the German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel called Bush a Nazi. And now with President Donald Trump, we hear that slander even more.
What are Nazis? Nazi is referring to a political party between 1920 and 1945, just 25 years, that, in the ashes of the defeat of World War I and the Great Depression, it played on the fears of Germany and it created something called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Nazi, that’s the abbreviation. And its aim was to substitute nationalism and race for class, so they could compete effectively with communist socialists.
So, they didn’t say, “We’re not socialists.” They said, “We are socialists, but we’re national socialists and we are, essentially, a big union of German workers and we believe in the singular racial purity and superiority of the German people. And we’re going to get back what we lost to the Depression and war, war costs that we had to pay for, remittances to the winning side, reparations, etc., and the loss of World War I and the humiliation that that incurred.”
So, in that period, Adolf Hitler became their chief spokesman. He convinced the German people to go to war. They were successful between Sept. 1, 1939, until about 1943, when they literally took on the whole world, especially the United States and the Soviet Union, in addition to Britain and the defeated allies of Western Europe.
They lost, but in the process, 70 million people were killed. And more importantly, in some sense, at least 6 million—I don’t mean more importantly in number of deaths, but in the intent. These were not part of the war dead. They were a systematic effort to destroy European Jewry, the Roma, and some Slavic people, 6 to 7 million of them. That was what Hitler did, and he justified that.
So, ever since, that word “Hitler” or “Nazi” is equated with mass death. And nobody in the United States within the political realm ever praises Hitler or the Nazis in general. Indeed, we fought them and many of our grandparents died fighting them, victoriously so.
So, what are we hearing? Mostly, it’s from the Left, Left, Left. They call everyone Hitler. They’ve called Trump every aspect of Hitler, a Nazi. We hear it all the time. But what’s new now is that there is a small segment on the right that, while not proclaiming to be Nazis, of course, or Hitler, they are referring to World War II in general and specific aspects of Nazism and Hitlerism, not in a negative sense.
Most notoriously, Nick Fuentes has recently said that he had admired Hitler and he admired some of the things the Nazis had done.
There are revisionist historians on the right that have been showcased who think that it was a mistake of the United States to fight Hitler in World War II, that Josef Stalin was the greater peril. But they go beyond that. And to make that revisionist case, which is hard to make, if not impossible, they have to demonize the heroes of the Allied movement, from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to Winston Churchill.
So, what am I getting at? For the first time in all of our lives, we are seeing people openly, overtly—not very many, but they have a larger audience, it seems, every couple of months—who defend Nazism and the horrors that followed from Adolf Hitler’s career.
And so, it’s very incumbent upon us that we know what the Nazis were, when they rose, what they caused, how we defeated them, and how an American elected president or mainstream political figures, even if we don’t agree with them, are not Nazis, are not Hitler-like. That is a given. That’s what we assume, but we have never in our lives seen anybody speak of Nazis, except maybe the Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi Party, in favorable terms, or at least non-judgmentally. We are now.
It has to be stopped, condemned, so that this does not become an orthodoxy on the right.
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