Amazing

A reader writes about my remark that likening Obama to Hitler is crazy beyond comparison:

Am I missing something? Can you explain why you see the comparison as “crazy”?

You mean besides the fact that he’s not a demented megalomaniac racist with a theory that he belongs to a Master Race fated by Destiny to rule the world by means of a massive conquering military machine, armed with the power to enslave, commit genocide against naturally inferior peoples and races, and establish a thousand year Reich in which every human being is brought into absolute subjugation to his all-conquering Will to Power?

Nothing really. What was I thinking?

Seriously, anybody who has to ask “What’s the difference between Obama and Hitler?” really needs to get out more.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m aware of Obama’s support for abortion (like, you know, the support displayed by half of Americans, not to mention the rest of the West). Yes, I’m aware that our abortion rate dwarfs the murders of the Nazis.

But see, that’s kind of the point: The Nazi murders were, for the most part, committed by a state apparatus that took good care to make sure that people didn’t know what was going on. To be sure, Germans didn’t inquire too hard either, since curiosity could give you and your loved ones a closer look at Dachau than you’d ever want. But the central point is that the State oversaw the murders by means of a small elite. In the US and throughout the West, we have perfected the art of making murder *privatized*. It’s not the state that’s overseeing the Holocaust. It’s us, the people. We do it. All the state does is help us do it more easily. Democracy in action (with a small kick start from the Supreme Court). So, yeah, there’s mass murder happening here, but that doesn’t make Obama Hitler. It’s a worthless comparison, unless you want to say that most of the West is Hitler. In which case, I have to really wonder who the good guys were in the Iraq War, since I was told that Saddam was Hitler too.

Obama’s contempt for inconvenient human life is like the contempt for inconvenient human life displayed by every human being who has ever been a willing accessory to murder. Hitler was one of these, as have been countless others. But it does not follow that every time somebody displays contempt for innocent human life, they are the same thing as Hitler. All such talk does is muddy the water and make it harder to persuade people of the evil that is being done, because no sane person could look at or listen to Obama for five seconds and regard him as the same sort of person as Hitler. What is needed is cool heads, not histrionics.