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Larry David: My Dinner With Adolf

Don2 (Don1 Revised)

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For the record, I don't necessarily agree with either of them, Maher or David. I DO think it is important to talk to the other side, but I do not think most of what Maher says coming out of the meeting is correctly analyzed. For example, when he talks about how different Trump was in person, he pretty much is praising him, but this strikes me as disturbing because it means there is a huge level of dishonesty and/or propagandizing going on.
 
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Hysterical! :rofl:

Of course, by spring 1939 Hitler hadn’t committed most of his crimes — which, I think, is the point.
 
Bill Maher should talk to Bill Maher.


“I can separate the man who’s always been gracious to me, always been nice to my family, we were on Celebrity Apprentice every day together for over six weeks,” Rivera said.

“Who gives a sh** if he was nice to you at Thanksgiving, Geraldo? I’m not trying to be an a**hole to you. You’re a smart guy. This befuddles me. I looked up to you,” Maher said.

 


Appearing on Piers Morgan’s talkshow Uncensored on Thursday, Maher said: “First of all, it’s kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews … It’s an argument you kind of lost just to start it. Look, maybe it’s not completely logically fair, but Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil.”

Again, Bill Maher should talk to Bill Maher.


 
Personally, I think Hitler comparisons are often fair, mostly but not always, when the person being compared hasn't finished with all the authoritarian, Hitleresque things they want to do yet. Here's an example: comparing Hitler himself before the Holocaust (while he was planning it and making moves to take control) with Hitler after the Holocaust was in-process is fair. We shouldn't say something like "that's an insult to millions of Jews!!!111" and I hope that just about everyone would agree with that.

Now when we compare someone other than young Hitler, like say, Trump, to Hitler we're really comparing him to some Hitler not quite in the previous state, after he's already killed millions but where he wants to do so and where he's setting up the authoritarian state to go about the fascism. We could draw many parallels between a younger Hitler, like say, when the first few people were being disappeared, and Trump. Hitler even tried an insurrection himself that failed, just like Trump's, so that's another one. You could look at all the Otherism he engages in, too, that's another thing, and the way he is changing institutions and virtually creating a ministry of propaganda*.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that people who try to use the millions of dead Jews argument to stop Hitler comparisons when they're legitimate are the ones who are being insulting to Jews.

*There's a lot there about a ministry of propaganda, and it really deserves its own thread.
 
Go ask the folks at any holocaust memorial or museum what their purpose is, and one of the first things you will hear is "To ensure that nothing like this ever happens again".

That purpose cannot be served by ignoring the early moves towards a society like that of 1930s Germany, where such things become not only possible, but predictable.

The problem with history is that it happens much faster than reality. Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and opened his first concentration camp the same year; But it wasn't until late 1941 that the first extermination camps began operating.

That eight year period of slowly increasing awfulness allowed the German people time to normalise each new step towards the full horror of industrial scale genocide.

But at school, we read about the entire process in half an hour; One minute Hitler is being gifted the Enabling Act powers; The next minute smoke is rising from the chimneys of crematoria across Germany and Eastern Europe, as trainloads of victims are brought to their deaths from across the entire continent.

It feels shocking, sudden, and obviously dreadful, and we ask "Why didn't ordinary, decent, everyday Germans rise up in their horror at this and overthrow the evil regime?".

The answer is staring us in the face, right now.

It doesn't start with death camps, mass rounding up of victims, and the total horror of the 1940s; It starts with a relatively small camp, somewhere out of the way like Dachau or El Salvador, where the rulers send criminals, or at least undesirables - people who most citizens won't stand up for - to protect society against an emergency, an existential threat from outsiders intent on destroying all that we true citizens have worked so hard to build.

The point being, that as the folks at the memorials and museums can tell you, if only there had been serious opposition as soon as the criminal justice system was first side-stepped, as soon as due process and the right to a fair trial was denied to anyone, then the whole thing might have been averted.

But the regime is always careful to push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour just a tiny bit - and then to ridicule anyone who objects, as a fearmongering and unpatriotic fool. Then they wait until the mild scandal has been forgotten, and push a tiny bit more.

One day, they grab undocumented immigrants. A little later, some citizens get taken "in error", but are not returned when the "error" is revealed. Then some judges are sacked or moved, to stop them from making a fuss. Then a judge or a journalist gets arrested. Then some more citizens get taken - but they aren't real citizens, because their parents were immigrants...

It might take a few years before everyone is accepting of the normality that people who don't look sufficiently like "one of us", or who are of the wrong religion, will be rounded up and taken away. But those years were filled with a bombardment of propaganda about how dangerous foreigners and Jewish Muslim terrorists are to the Reich USA. So nobody's up in arms about it (except a handful of traitors and troublemakers, who are also being taken away, for the good of the country).

The regime put a lot of effort into making the whole descent into genocide as boring and normal as possible. They want people to feel as though making a fuss would be ridiculous. Are you really going to make a big fuss over a few terrorists getting locked up, just because they weren't given a chance for their greasy lawyers to have them released on some technicality, to endanger your family?

Heaven forbid we be rude to a cold blooded killer. A cold blooded killer that entered the USA illegally. Is “cold blooded killer” an epithet to you? I expect so.

Why do you want gangbangers and criminals to be allowed to remain in the USA?

A couple of hundred gangbangers have been removed from the USA is exactly the same thing as murdering 8 millions jews? Asinine.

Why do you want gangbangers and criminals to remain in the USA?
 
The Swizzle quotes are particularly apropos.

That’s why I think David set the satire in spring 1939 — months before World War II and the worst of it actually began, but after a years-long track record of HItler repeatedly doing a bit more, and getting away with it … a bit more, and getting away with it … a bit more … etc. It’s sobering to think how easily he could have been stopped as early as 1936, when France could easily have rebuffed his remilitarization of the Rhineland.

As Trump could have so easily been stopped if he had been indicted immediately after trying to overturn the 2020 election.
 
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