Liberals Trivialize Evil

A constant theme of conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager is clarity.  Let’s agree to disagree, he’ll say, but let’s try to understand exactly why we disagree.

This week Prager is trying to achieve clarity on the meaning of two liberals (or maybe lefties) who have compared their opponents to Nazis.

First, there was Ellen Goodman who in a now famous article compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers.  She writes:

I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

As thousands of conservatives have already noted, to question the authority of a UN panel of experts is not quite the same thing as denying the evil genocide of six million Jews.  Whatever happened to the liberal injunction to “Question Authority?”

Also, there is the little problem that everything with regard to the future is uncertain.  But it is easy to appreciate that a union journalist with lifetime tenure would not understand that.

But Ellen Goodman’s tiresome use of words was mere bagatelle compared to George Soros’s comment up at Davos.  Lefty billionaire Soros said at the World Economic Forum that it was going to be necessary to “de-nazify” the United States.  As reported in the New York Times, he said:

“America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany,” he said. “We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process.”

More recently he has backed off, writing in The New Republic of a “bad choice of words.”

For clarity, we have to go to Dennis Prager.

[T]he equation of global warming denial to Holocaust denial trivializes Holocaust denial. If questioning global warming is on "a par" with questioning the Holocaust, how bad can questioning the Holocaust really be? The same holds true with regard to Nazism and the George Soros statement. Claiming that America in the Iraq War is morally equivalent to Nazi Germany in World War II trivializes the unparalleled evil of the Nazis.

 The left has enjoyed remarkable access to the public print ever since the middle of the nineteenth century.  It has abused that access in many ways, not the least in its reflexive habit of calling its enemies evil capitalists and evil fascists.

But now with the internet it has become easier to fight back.

But thoughtful counterattack and exposure of everyday calumny is the least of our project. 

What we really intend is to smash the injustice and the cruelty of the progressive project, to give ordinary people the power and the freedom to run their own lives once again.  We wish to restore to them the power and the freedom taken so ruthlessly by the progressive elite—people like Ellen Goodman and George Soros.