A Gainesville, Georgia, talk show host returning from visiting our troops in Iraq wrote a letter to the New York Times disagreeing with the paper's pundits' conferring on Cindy Sheehan, mother of a fallen soldier, the status of "absolute moral authority" regarding our involvement in Iraq. With sensitivity, Martha Zoller wrote that many mothers and fathers of fallen heroes, with equal moral clout, support our mission in Iraq.
To her surprise, this southern gal received a bundle of e-mails from the New York City area calling her a "Nazi" and "concentration-camp capo," the latter a pejorative used often by Jews referring to that small number of their brethren who collaborated with concentration camp Nazis. It's not a term one generally hears thrown around on the streets of Provo, Utah.
What could possibly be Nazi-like, capo-like, in simply expressing a sentiment that buttresses the opinions of families who've lost children yet still support the war? Actually, nothing! What such name-calling may show is a pre-dispositional belief, from upbringing, within a core of the liberal/progressive community that white, Southern Christians - majority American types - are inchoate Nazis.
Almost every policy advancing the cause of American nationalism is seen as grounds for using the N-word, Nazi, reminiscent of leftist race-baiters who stand ready to spring the R-word, Racist, on anyone who has an honest disagreement with their views on such issues as affirmative action.
It has become a conditioned response, a form of "gotcha-ism," that verifies nothing but a paranoid fantasy. It is a disposition in search of facts upon which to hang its attitudinal hat. It has come to this: what is a Nazi? Anyone who disagrees with the political opinions of a New York liberal. Who is a racist? Anyone who disagrees with the latest power-grabbing, social engineering scheme of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or the NAACP.
With real racists and real Nazis playing such a horrific role in each group's collective past, many are strangely eager to manufacture 21st century versions as an ongoing means of cementing a particular racial or ethnic identity. But because in reality there are today so few Nazis and racists here in America, the terms have been defined-down to mean: "those who disagree with our politics."
So now George Bush, historically a friend to Israel, is what? A Nazi. Tom DeLay, the first U.S. Congressman to arrange a Passover Seder for Jews in Soviet Russia - a Nazi. Martha Zoller, a Southern talk show host whose daughter's high school is putting on a production of "Fiddler on the Roof"? A Nazi. All because they espouse policies neither acceptable nor fashionable within the more internationalist, liberal political fraternity.
These terms are being abused more now than ever precisely by people living a blessed life in America free of Nazism and widespread racism. Perhaps these children and grandchildren of the historic actual sufferers invoke it so repeatedly as a way of securing ownership over these terms - as well as sustaining the solidarity and emotional gratification in continuing "The Fight Against."
In addition to those who derive political advantage from such labeling, others bask in smug moral superiority and never-ending judgmentalism. They bestow on themselves the sainthood of "I'm-not-One-so-I'm-better-than-you." The more often and the greater the range of political issues on which to demonize others, the more often the halo of superiority appears on the accuser.
There is a more sinister dynamic here: a desire to control the political agenda, to enforce a hegemony of political thought. Knowing the good will and fair-mindedness of the American people, the name-callers attempt to make guilt-ridden and silence the great middle as well as conservative spokesmen. After all, who wants to be called racist or a Nazi?
Funny how the pro-Sheehan, Upper West Side "anti-Nazi" crowd is rallying around a woman who has blamed the Jews for our War On Terror and has called for the removal of Jews from Israel to make it an Arab state. What can be more Nazi-like than such a position? Evidently, Nazi-like rhetoric, when coming from the Left, is acceptable to "progressives."
Those who abuse these terms betray the genuine suffering at the hands of real Nazis and racists experienced by their ancestors. They are themselves guilty of harboring a bigotry and prejudgment (yes, prejudice!) against those they've been taught to despise from early on. America needn't jump nor change its policies to satisfy the name-callers who long ago lost their credibility.
