Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Just like him

You know who else spoke to schoolchildren? Hitler!
I am not going to compare President Obama to Hitler.

Until the next sentence.

However, we can learn a lot from the spread of propaganda in Europe that led to Hitler's power. A key ingredient in that spread of propaganda was through the youth," wrote a blogger at the AmericanElephant.com blog, where the subject of the day was a national "Keep-Your-Child-at-Home-Day."

"Totalitarian regimes around the world have sought to spread their propaganda and entrench their power by brainwashing the children. I guess it's easier to indoctrinate a six-year-old instead of fighting a 26-year-old or being challenged by a 46-year-old in the voting booth," the blogger wrote.

But as Pat Buchanan has taught us, Hitler was not all that bad. He was just misunderstood. So, don't force Obama to kill you and everything will be ok.

h/t here and here.

2 comments:

John P. Araujo said...

The thing I don't get is why Buchanan even deals with the "what if?" What if Hitler had turned left instead of right? What if Churchill had said yes instead of no? What if Patton had breakfast that morning instead of skipping it?

So what? What's more important is *what actually happened*. Whatever Hitler might or might not have done is irrelevant. What HAPPENED is that Hitler helped bring about the worst atrocity in human history. He and his fellow megalomaniac dictator Joseph Stalin helped end the lives of millions of people.

To try to deal with the "what ifs" is to ignore the lessons of what actually happened. We can go on forever second-guessing why Hitler did this or why Roosevelt didn't do that - it won't change a damned thing on what actually went down.

Buchanan has the benefit of hindsight that no leader at that time had, so it's easy for him to second-guess their decisions. I dare say that had he been one of the critical decision makers at that time, he would have had his own share of blunders that we could be criticizing today.

John P. Araujo said...

Oops. This comment was meant to go with the previous blog entry about Buchanan.