Is No One Stalin?

If We're All Hitler, No One Is Hitler

In the 2024 election cycle we heard over and over that Trump is Hitler, but somehow we never heard that Harris is Stalin. Why is that? After all, compared to Stalin, Hitler was an amateur in the mass murder department (though one might argue that he ran out of time.) Somehow the NAZIs are the eternal reference point for what is seen as institutional evil, but never the massively murderous Communists. This is part of our tendency to forgo facts and rational thought for emotional arguments. Many arguments amount to claims of knowing the innermost thoughts and motivations of others.

Do not pay attention to any arguments that boil down to “I know what he is thinking and what his true motives are.” Do not make such arguments yourself.

That is basically making an argument based on information that the writer cannot have, and there is a lot of that going on, especially on social media.

“All propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas . . . Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd.” ~ Adolf Hitler

Arguments are made concerning ideas and policies that come down to “he is a bad person, therefore his motives are bad, he really wants...” fill in the blank. Arguments made based on knowledge a person cannot have should be payed no attention. Needless to say, calling one’s opponents NAZIs is an example of this idea, without even the “logic” of pretending to know the opponents “real” motives. At the time of this writing Trump’s opponents claim to be aware of what he or is not thinking, such as saying he has no plan in the Iran conflict, when they do not know what he thinks, but then it’s not confined to one party.

Speaking of mass governmental killings, there was a lot of it in the twentieth century. My short essay thereupon:

Republican presidents are routinely called “Hitler,” as indeed are conservatives in general. They stopped short of calling Eisenhower Hitler, but only just, maybe because he was instrumental in helping to remove said person. We have a strong “boy who cried wolf” effect, wherein one tends to take for granted that criticisms by the Left are invalid even when they aren’t, while leftists see criticisms from the right in the same light. One tends to dismiss criticisms of Trump on the assumption that the criticizer is simply the victim of the “Orange Man Bad” psyop. It’s gotten to the point where anyone freedom oriented or not down with the Communist ideology is called Hitler, and we are expected to forget that NAZI was an acronym for the “National Socialist German Worker’s Party,” an organization of Leftists.

We need to recognize the difference between an emotional argument and one based on facts and logic, and I think we can partly at least blame the schools for dropping critical thinking. Students should be taught to recognize propaganda and techniques of manipulation. An excerpt from my essay on some things schools might teach:

Methods of control: Students should be taught what types of techniques are used by the politically powerful to increase their power and push in the direction of total authoritarian control. What methods have been used through history, giving historical examples, do the powerful use to control the populace? Classroom exercises would be in order, wherein students think up what kind of subterfuge they could use if they were kings and queens, how they would recognize it and how to counter it. By devising the schemes themselves people would be cognizant of such things for the rest of their lives. People often don’t recognize them for what they are when they see them. The series The Hunger Games might be illustrative. (My opinion is that military veterans are more likely to recognize them than others, but individuals vary.)

“National socialism is the determination to create a new man. There will no longer exist any individual arbitrary will, nor realms in which the individual belongs to himself. The time of happiness as a private matter is over.” ~ Adolf Hitler

There always seems to be an idea among Leftists that they can remake human nature in the way that the soviet Union was going to create the New Soviet Man; we can just tinker on your psyche like you’re an old jalopy.

How about we all make it a personal policy to not go about calling those we disagree with names? It’s both immature and unseemly, and I’m all for getting our national discourse on as adult a level as possible. Much like dress standards move the culture of an organization in a professional direction, a marketplace of ideas kept on a professional level will produce more professional level thought and discussion

“We have to put a stop to the idea that it is a part of everybody’s civil rights to say whatever he pleases.” ~ Adolf Hitler

He wasn’t much on the Second Amendment, either.

Putting a stop to everybody’s civil rights to say whatever he pleases sounds like what calling everyone Hitler is all about. Of course the epithets don’t stop there, you’ve got your “basket of deplorables,” your “bitter clingers clinging to their guns and religion,” and your “ignorant, simple minded and easily fooled.” It’s about claiming that these are the people you don’t want to be mistaken for. Why use logic? Emotional arguments are about short circuiting thought by creating emotional turmoil with the hope that true thinking won’t intervene.

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.” ~ Philip K. Dick

In case you don’t recognize the name, Phillip K. Dick wrote the stories which were the basis for the films Minority Report and Total Recall, plus a few others.

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” ~ Philip K. Dick

Stay Brave, Stay Free