Lashing Out at Critic for Nazi Remark

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Lashing Out at Critic for Nazi Remark
49
Wed, 08-19-2009 - 11:38am

You go Barney!!!


Rep Barney Frank SLAMS Women Comparing Obama To Hitler At Town Hall


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWwyjwmYMEs


 


Barney Frank Lashes Out at Critic for Nazi Remark
"On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Frank retorted

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/NATL-Barney-Frank-Lashes-Out-at-Naz-On-What-Planet-Do-You-Spend-Most-Your-Time--53684352.html











Barney Frank's partner is a surfing enthusiast.

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Rep. Barney Frank, drawing jeers and cheers at a fiery town hall debate, fired back at critics of President Obama's health care reform plan and launched into a sharp-tongued tirade against a vocal detractor who compared the plan to "Nazi policy."


"On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Frank retorted.


"You stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis," Frank fumed. "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it"


Frank fielded questions on topics from health care reform to federal bank bailouts and didn't back down from critics who opposed overhauling the health care system during a fiery town hall in Dartmouth, Mass., on Tuesday night that drew roughly 500 people and was among one of the most heated yet. 



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iVillage Member
Registered: 06-11-2009
Fri, 08-21-2009 - 4:15pm

You are nicer than I am. I don't think age is any kind of excuse for throwing out those kinds of phrases. It is a trivialization of the horrors of the Holocaust. Absolutely NOTHING that is happening right now in this country can be compared to Nazis or Hitler.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-08-2009
Fri, 08-21-2009 - 4:20pm
Godwin's Law - you lose the debate.
Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Fri, 08-21-2009 - 4:47pm

Exactly. It's scary how quickly and easily people throw out comparisons to Hitler and it cheapens the horror of the time. Too many Americans are forgetting the past, or even worst, choosing to ignore what really happened under Nazi Germany.

When I was volunteering at a school event, I asked a man who had food (that I baked!) to remain in the cafeteria because that was the school rules. He proceeded to call me a "Nazi" in front of his kids. What kind of example is he setting for his kids??? And, what do these crazies at townhall meetings really understand about what they're saying and how ignorant they come across? It's embarassing for America.











Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Fri, 08-21-2009 - 4:49pm

"However, some of the socialistic ideas suggested by this administration would shorten the lives and lower the standard of living for several generations of Americans."

How? It seems to me that ensuring people have access to health care would actually improve people's lives. Do you believe that people who don't have health care right now just don't deserve it?











Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Fri, 08-21-2009 - 4:54pm

Yeah, Hitler, dictator, socialist, providing health care for citizens. It's a gumby-like stretch. Hitler was not a socialist, despite what conservatives have been fed to believe. Maybe the word "socialist" appears in the name of the party but it was far from that in reality:

http://atheism.about.com/b/2005/10/31/hitler-socialism.htm

Hitler & Socialism
Monday October 31, 2005
Many conservatives insist that the Nazis were an example of a 'socialist' government as part of their effort to discredit socialism and leftist policies in general. This is rather like using the example of East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, to discredit democracy: it demonstrates the speaker's inability to comprehend reality.
Silent Bob explains how and why the Nazi party was not particularly socialist:

The idea that workers controlled the means of production in Nazi Germany is a bitter joke. It was actually a combination of aristocracy and capitalism.

Technically, private businessmen owned and controlled the means of production. The Nazi “Charter of Labor” gave employers complete power over their workers. It established the employer as the “leader of the enterprise,” and read: “The leader of the enterprise makes the decisions for the employees and laborers in all matters concerning the enterprise.” The employer, however, was subject to the frequent orders of the ruling Nazi elite. After the Nazis took power in 1933, they quickly established a highly controlled war economy under the direction of Dr. Hjalmar Schacht.

Prior to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, worker protests had spread all across Germany in response to the Great Depression. During his drive to power, Hitler exploited this social unrest by promising workers to strengthen their labor unions and increase their standard of living. But these were empty promises; privately, he was reassuring wealthy German businessmen that he would crack down on labor once he achieved power.

The Nazis abolished trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike. An organization called the “Labor Front” replaced the old trade unions, but it was an instrument of the Nazi party and did not represent workers.

According to the law that created it, “Its task is to see that every individual should be able… to perform the maximum of work.” Workers would indeed greatly boost their productivity under Nazi rule but they also became exploited. Between 1932 and 1936, workers wages fell, from 20.4 to 19.5 cents an hour for skilled labor, and from 16.1 to 13 cents an hour for unskilled labor.
It’s true that the Nazis tried to develop an ideology of socialism — one based on Christianity, in fact. Part of their party platform was the idea that the public need should be put before private greed, and this principle was part of the statement of how they were a Christian political party:

“We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession. It fights the spirit of Jewish materialism within us and without us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our Volk can only take place from within, on the basis of the principle: public need comes before private greed.”
In reality, though, Nazi policies did not reflect anything that looks like socialism. How can anyone describe a government that abolishes the right to strike or engage in collective bargaining as “socialist”? Mere opposition to “Jewish materialism” or “Jewish capitalism” doesn’t make one a socialist.

Nathan Newman explains a recent example of how unionization is suppressed in America: unions picketing a company aren’t allowed to ask other unions to support them and refuse to work as well:

Most progressives don’t fully understand that if a union asks other workers to help them during a strike, they have often broken the law. That act of speech-- asking for help -- is an illegal act.

You hear people prattle on about American Exceptionalism-- that US workers are individualists and company-oriented, which is why we don’t have broader labor unity or general strikes as you often see in European countries.

The answer is far more prosaic. In the US, the First Amendment has been declared null and void at the workplace door and any attempt to ask for labor unity is a crime. It’s really hard to have broad-based unity when you can’t ask for it without finding yourself in court.
American conservatives are concerned that this nation not come too close to the “socialism” of Nazi Germany, but it is the laws which work against collective bargaining and union activity which cause America to begin to resemble Nazi Germany, not any so-called socialist policies of this or that leftist group. Socialism might be an exceedingly bad way to organize an economy, but criticizing the Nazis is not the way to make this point.











iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Fri, 08-21-2009 - 8:13pm

All sturm und drang.

Jabberwocka

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-30-2002
Fri, 08-21-2009 - 9:21pm

Well, at least your link has appropriate analogies of the mentality and type of folks



iVillage Member
Registered: 06-11-2009
Fri, 08-21-2009 - 9:49pm

This is a good article that you should read before invoking the terms Nazi/Hitler in reference to health care (or really, anything else, too).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32372258/

Health care debate turns vile with Nazi analogy
Right-wing loudmouths distort history, diminish true evil of the Holocaust

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D.

Rush Limbaugh and those invoking the Nazi analogy to attack President Barack Obama’s effort to reform health care in America are not “insane” as David Brooks pronounced on last Sunday's “Meet the Press.” Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and the rest of the loud-mouthed right wing are, when they even hint at an analogy to the Nazis in talking about Obama’s health reform effort, engaged in something far worse than insanity. They are engaged in the vile evil of Holocaust denial.

For some time now, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has held the title of the world’s most dangerous anti-Semite due to his denial that the Holocaust occurred. Limbaugh and his ilk who have been throwing around references to Adolf Hitler, National socialism and Nazi medicine without hesitation have surpassed the danger posed by the Iranian president. They are offering a false view of why the Holocaust happened. Their flagrant, deliberate and invidious distortion of what happened to medicine in Nazi Germany must not be allowed to stand. Not just because health reform is too important an issue but also because the truth is too important to let ignoramuses destroy it.

At the end of April, 1945, my father found himself at the gates of a very awful place. Having been one of the first residents of Massachusetts drafted into the army, he had spent the past three years fighting his way through North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France and into Germany. Over the years I have heard a variety of stories about his heroic service in those campaigns. But he has had very little to say about what he saw or felt when, as a Jewish American soldier, he found himself staring at the few emaciated survivors of the Dachau concentration camp.

The only single comment he has ever offered about that experience was uncharacteristically curt, “We took no more prisoners for about two weeks.” Those who know my father, who at 88 just spent an emotional weekend at the World War II Memorial, know that sentence is completely out of character for the man who spent his entire life as an admired and beloved healer — a pharmacist in Framingham, Mass.

My father’s war experience drew me to try and understand what had happened at Dachau. I have spent nearly 30 years trying to understand how the most scientifically and medically advanced nation of its day could have conducted the mass murder of so many Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and pacifists.

Contrary to what Limbaugh and other Holocaust deniers would have you believe, German medicine and science were not brought into the Nazi party once Hitler took power. They fueled the fire for what became Nazism with bigotry proffered as science.

What distinguished the doctors and scientists of Germany pre-Hitler was that so many of them were firm believers in racial hygiene — the view that the Aryan race’s very existence was threatened by inferior peoples such as Jews, blacks and Slavs. They felt the only way to protect their "race," a concept that itself made little biological sense, was to prohibit reproduction with inferior people and, ultimately, to destroy them. It was racism masquerading as science that formed the basis for Nazi science and medicine right down to the gas chambers and ovens that my dad found himself staring at in 1945.

Racism was at the core of Nazi medicine. Racism and a bizarre form of genetics that saw all manner of human frailty and weakness from prostitution to alcohol abuse to petty theft as highly heritable. When Hitler set out to kill the handicapped and the mentally ill he did it to protect the genetic future of Germany. When the "useless eaters" were targeted for euthanasia it was because of the threat they posed to the genetic health of future generations. When Nazi doctors mandated abortion it was to eliminate "mongrel" babies. When Nazi doctors analyzed how many of your ancestors had to be Jewish for you to be a Jew or when they killed all manner of Slavs, it was to remove these dangers from undermining the public health of the Reich.

Limbaugh, Beck, Palin and other Holocaust deniers ignore the core racist evil of Nazism. They reach for preposterous analogies between counseling people about living wills and the forced, involuntary mass murder carried out in the name of racism in concentration camps.

When the right wing, in their distaste for the President's push to reform a heath care system that even the American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical industry recognize has to be fixed, suggest that the disabled will be targeted, or that the elderly will be killed or find themselves without health care due to rationing by government bureaucrats as happened in Nazi Germany, they marginalize the gross evil that was the racial bigotry that fueled Nazi programs to euthanize, sterilize, experiment upon and torture people in places that were in no way connected to hospitals, clinics or nursing homes.

There is plenty to debate about health reform. But there is nothing to debate about the contemptible introduction of references, direct or oblique, to Nazi Germany. To do so is to engage in Holocaust denial. To do that is, as those Americans of the greatest generation who died or were injured fighting the Nazi menace well understood, inexcusable.

Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Fri, 08-21-2009 - 9:50pm
You know, it is too bad that the extremists on both sides get all the attention when the moderates get ignored. As I've said before, I think there are problems with the health care as it is being pushed through, a little too much too fast (but then, I have the luxury of health care coverage) but problems of Nazism and socialism isn't any of them. I don't remember conservatives calling Bush a socialist for expanding medicare or for taking control of banks? But, the extremists who compare Obama to Hitler are the ones who are ruining it for the moderates who have legitimate concerns (as martininsushi said--she's against Obamacare but does not believe in calling him Hitler because of it). And, I think Cindy Sheehan and people like her similarly did a disservice for people who were against the Iraq War. If only they'd go away, people who have articulate thoughts could be heard. Right now, the lunatics are running the show.










iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 8:59am

"Barney Frank would be a right hand man in Nazi Germany."


You're obviously not aware that Barney Frank is a gay Jewish man. In Nazi Germany Frank would have been exterminated on both accounts being Jewish & gay.


See posts numbered 11 & 13 in this thread they might help you understand that socialism & Fascism are entirely different.

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