That's what Biden compared Josh Hawley's speech to. It's an obvious attempt to smear a dissenter to the Leftist Narrative (NLD - Non-Leftist Dissident) as a quasi-Nazi.
But, Oh NO! We are told that he didn't CALL Hawley a Nazi, so that's completely NOT a Nazi reference. Just a not-so subtle effort to imply it.
In this linked article, Biden's actual words from long ago are quoted:
“They’re part of the big lie, the big lie,” Biden said. “I was being reminded by a friend of mine, and maybe you were with me, I can’t recall, when we told that, you know, Goebbels and the great lie, you keep repeating the law, repeating the lie. Well, there was a print that when Dresden was bombed, firebombed, there were 250 people that were killed — was it 2,500 people that were killed? And Goebbels said no, 25,000 — or 250,000 were killed. And our papers printed that. Our papers printed it. It’s the big lie.”
So, according to Biden, that number was less - MUCH less - than what Goebells had said?
Funny, that. Wikipedia says that 25K WAS the number - more or less - of dead Germans. But, given Biden's rambling, imprecise way of saying this, I'll cut him some slack on the number, and go with that last figure.
But, was the German press completely wrong?
It seems that two different meanings of casualty were conflated. In the first - the 20K to 25K direct victims, Wikipedia and Infopedia agree - that number was confirmed by actual bodies.
That higher number? May have included the huge number of refugees that resulted from the bombings - some estimates were around 200,000 Germans.
Over time, that mangled number may have been the source of many of the reports. It's pretty clear that the number of dead in the attacks was in the tens of thousands, not hundreds. But, given the way that many of the participants on BOTH sides of the war exaggerated their numbers, it's easy to see how people could have become initially confused, then later hardened into their position.
The thing is, Nazi references are most often used to smear NLDs with moral equivalence, and silence them. Acknowledging that the history is, at times, not clear, and that truth was bent on all sides, is discouraged.
Is Trump a Nazi?
Don't be ridiculous! Smearing him, and his supporters, is merely a strategic move.
Refugees are not casualties. Casualties are killed, wounded and missing. All the info I've read on Dresden state approx. 25,000 German civilians were killed and/or missing (presumed burnt up or buried). There is no real mention of the injured numbers. I think they may have been too busy trying to pin the "Worst War Crime" award on each other. They also peg refugees at about 200,000 but who knows?
ReplyDeleteThe term "Nazi" has all the precision and utility of the word "badness." It's astonishing that it is the one word that has come out of the grisly 20th century that is the perfect distillation of human depravity. Maoism, Stalinism, Pol Potism mere hiccups on the path to earthly nirvana.
ReplyDeleteAs I like to point out, post-war Europe eventually coalesced around the anti-democratic, imperious E.U. so as to avoid for all time the evils of the total Nazi state. Yes, of course. Europe just absolutely needed a political megastructure led by an appointed commissioner and commission.
Oh, and naming the building housing the E.U. parliament after the communist, Altiero Spinelli, was a neat touch.
It is amusing, Col. since the commies killed a ton more innocents than did the Nazis. I think the American Jewish contingent with their "Never Forget" mantra and things like almost every TV show and such depicts Nazis or Nazi-ish bad guys. (Of course that could be due to mostly Jewish producers?). We only got a brief reprieve during the 60's and 70's Cold War era when the Russians were the bad guys.
ReplyDeleteCertainly to me the reason they seldom depict commies as bad guys is because they ARE commies! That's why my go-to name for leftist dogs is "F'n commie". That would include anyone to the left of Tucker. Either one is with us or one is against us.