Monday, January 24, 2011

More "Hitler the lefty" madness -- this time, from a lefty!

This is a small addendum to our previous post, which offers a reply to this much-discussed piece about the lack of truly left-wing (paid) bloggers. One of the commenters offers this observation:
Whatever the case there are two "lefts": the socialdemocrats (who brought Hitler to power) and the communists and anarchists for fought till the last man.
It's not nice to muck with history. Not nice when Glenn Beck does it, and not nice when others do it. History is not filking; you cannot simply make it up.

The Social Democratic Party (the non-communist liberal party) did not support Hitler at any time during the Weimar Republic. The SPD was, in fact, the greatest stumbling block Hitler had to overcome during his rise to power. An SPD newspaper nearly destroyed the Nazi movement when it came across letters demonstrating Roehm's homosexuality. After becoming dictator, Hitler outlawed the SPD and had some of its leaders killed.

In the past, I've argued against Godwin's law. Here's the Cannon codicil: Godwin's law should be rescinded, but only for those who are willing to do their fucking homework.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been away handling situations for a few days and couldn't read your posts.

I've now read the last four posts and I've got to say:

It's good to see you back in the fight.

Barbara

dakinikat said...

I dunno. I get more confused all the time. Maybe, it's because a lot of these 20somethings came from school environments where the emphasis was something other than critical thinking and the scientific method. I'm also thinking many don't have any genuine roots to hard scrabble folks. Both of my kids have grandfathers with graduate degrees. I had grandfather with a college degree and the other quit school at 13 to take care of his family who had been abandoned by his father. The only way he got a good life was a job in the railroad with a strong union presence. You got me where these obvious historical rewrites come from ... maybe they're deliberately confusing things by ideological blinders or they could just be intellectual dilettantes and asshats!