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Here is some perspective from Germany, the prime exporter of horrible history in Europe: Tom Perkins is now disqualified from any meaningful discourse. Comparin

Here is some perspective from Germany, the prime exporter of horrible history in Europe: Tom Perkins is now disqualified from any meaningful discourse. Comparing some hate-mail you recieve to what happened in 1938 amounts to a declaration of complete intellectual bancrupcy. There are some pocket-tricks of discourse which can be forgiven. This is not one of them. My house is next to a memorial commemorating the place where there used to be a Synagogue which was severely vanalized in 1938 and subsequently confiscated and destroyed. The Jews of my home town were later deported to death camps. I attended the memorial service at the site on the 75th anniversary, a few months back, with a reading of eyewittness accounts and all. Do you know why most of us only know a little bit about what happened that day? Because consuming too much of the (readily available) information existing about it will throw you into despair, which is something anybody who starts reading about it soon finds out. That is how bad that day was. Comparing himself to Pogromnacht! Fuck this guy. Not his "class", but him specifically.

rdl 13y ago
"The Nazis were special" is totally the wrong lesson to take away from the horrors of WW2. "Never again" doesn't mean "this could never happen again", but rather "we will never let this happen again." I have no problem with pointing out parallels between other events and things which, in the past, had horrible outcomes. Excessive and crippling war reparations are (rightly) avoided because of the example of the rise of the Nazis. (As well as unfairness to those who didn't directly take part). Central registries of minority or disfavored groups can be wisely opposed on the basis of what the Nazis and others did with those registries on coming into power; even today the German postal system has some protections lacking in the US system for that reason. Rwanda, rather than the just the Nazis, is a great example of the risks of a political incident either manufactured or exploited to wage wars (civil or of conquest) and trample on civil liberties (including right to life); 9/11 and the disproportionate and ineffective US domestic and international response might be a fresher example still. It is the violence, combined with scale of the Seattle WTO through Occupy, which is potentially relevant here; the google bus incident is a sideshow, but in the same general category. It certainly isn't Germany 1938, but inequality creates the kind of precondition for violent change, on the right or left, that has been tragically exploited in the past.

rdl 13y ago

"The Nazis were special" is totally the wrong lesson to take away from the horrors of WW2. "Never again" doesn't mean "this could never happen again", but rather "we will never let this happen again." I have no problem with pointing out parallels between other events and things which, in the past, had horrible outcomes. Excessive and crippling war reparations are (rightly) avoided because of the example of the rise of the Nazis. (As well as unfairness to those who didn't directly take part). Central registries of minority or disfavored groups can be wisely opposed on the basis of what the Nazis and others did with those registries on coming into power; even today the German postal system has some protections lacking in the US system for that reason. Rwanda, rather than the just the Nazis, is a great example of the risks of a political incident either manufactured or exploited to wage wars (civil or of conquest) and trample on civil liberties (including right to life); 9/11 and the disproportionate and ineffective US domestic and international response might be a fresher example still. It is the violence, combined with scale of the Seattle WTO through Occupy, which is potentially relevant here; the google bus incident is a sideshow, but in the same general category. It certainly isn't Germany 1938, but inequality creates the kind of precondition for violent change, on the right or left, that has been tragically exploited in the past.