I truly have had a lot of thoughts swirling around in my cranium since Tuesday about this hot mess of the 2024 presidential election. Those who lean right are used to being belittled, demeaned and called names: Deplorables, Garbage, Stupid, Misogynist, sexist, bigots, racists, homophobes. We’re used to it. These shots have come our way so often, they roll off our backs with little more than a shrug. They have lost any meaning and tell us that we’ve essentially won the debate.
Where I feel the left crossed the line is when they started throwing around the term “Nazi” to describe their political opponents.
Nothing or no one in this election remotely resembled Nazism.
Throwing around that term has far greater consequences to consider.
I teach history. Have taught it for about 20 years. I read history, and I am thoroughly interested in World War II. I have tried to answer the question how one man could whip up an entire nation to follow him in committing some of the most heinous crimes in human history. How did he fool a nation?
I have read a lot on this, scores of books about the rise of Nazism in the 1920s and 30s. This reading list actually includes Hitler’s infamous and sinister Mein Kampf.
I have personally walked on Utah, Gold, and “bloody” Omaha beaches in France, visited the World War II Museum in Caen–one of the first French cities liberated by the Allies, the church in Sainte-Mare-Eglise where a soldier from the 82nd Airborne’s parachute got hung up on the steeple the night of the invasion, and Pont-du-Hoc where American soldiers had to climb a 90-foot cliff face in the face of Nazi bullets firing down upon them. I even visited a Nazi cemetery in La Cambe where hundreds of German soldiers are buried beneath black crosses.
I have visited the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., three times. And of all the horrors spoken of there, I remember most sitting in the Hall of Remembrance alongside others at the time with a series of numbers tattooed on their forearms.
Though there are people much smarter than me in this area, I know enough, and I continue to learn.
So when I hear the word “Nazi” thrown around as political rhetoric, I cringe.
Those who sling this word at anybody they don’t agree with, know little about that horrific movement.
When the term is thrown around as it has been in the last week, it minimizes and sanitizes that horror. It dishonors those who survived Auschwitz and other camps as well as those beneath the white crosses at Omaha beach.
When that term is used today to silence political opponents, it dilutes the horror of that movement.
Like the word misogynist or homophobe, it too will be overused to the point of losing its meaning.
It is time to retire that term as a rhetorical tool.
Or else we will no longer be able to recognize when it truly appears.
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