Right Wingers Trivialize Holocaust In Attacking Democrats
Sometimes, it’s a real challenge to find the right words, like in the matter of Frank Niceley, a Republican state senator from Tennessee, who majored in dirt management in college, and who had some earthy advice for his state’s 568,000 homeless people: Be like Adolf Hitler.
Words that come to mind to describe Niceley include callous, insensitive, indurate and stone-hearted along with untaught, unschooled, unread and just philistine. I’d throw in trivialize, minimize, make light of, belittle and misprize.
Niceley, a good old boy and native of sleepy, Strawberry Plains, Tenn., told his colleagues in the state legislature the other day that before Hitler was the fuhrer, he found himself homeless and pulled himself up from his bootstraps or is it jackboots. Niceley offered his poorly chosen, utterly cavalier opinions as part of a debate over a plan to criminalize homelessness on public property in the Volunteer State.
Tennessee has an estimated 568,000 homeless people, the 20th worst state in the nation. Under the Tennessee plan, people camping out or squatting on public property would be arrested. Not only is the Tennessee plan incredibly cruel to the thousands of Tennesseans who find themselves homeless because of the economy or a host of other reasons but Niceley also had his facts wrong about Hitler.
“I haven’t given you all a history lesson in a while, and I wanted to give you a little history on homelessness,” Niceley said. “[In] 1910, Hitler decided to live on the streets for a while. So for two years, Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory, and his body language, and how to connect with citizens and then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books.”
It’s an interesting take on the one of history’s worst mass murderers except that it’s totally false. Hitler did not choose homelessness but having failed to gain admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, he used up his savings and ended up sleeping on park benches and begging for money. Historians noted how Hitler described this period of homelessness as the “harshest and saddest” time of his life. Bootstraps, indeed.
Republican lawmakers have invoked Hitler’s name in a variety of ways in recent years, whether it’s comparing COVID-19 vaccine mandates to the Holocaust or quoting from Hitler’s memoir, “Mein Kampf,” on the House floor about the power of using a “big lie” to mislead a gullible public.
Niceley has made a cottage industry of sorts of being a fool even before he became a state senator in 2012. In 2009, he joined other Republicans who wanted to force President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate and prove that he was born in the U.S. and not in Kenya. The birtherism lies were part of the poison that catapulted trump to the White House.
And further showing his broad base acumen, Niceley said in 2017 that carbon dioxide, emissions of which are a significant driver of climate change, is “not a pollutant.”
“It’s just as natural as oxygen,” said the man least likely to be named a Rhodes Scholar.
And once a reb, always a reb, the 75-year-old Niceley said in an interview that it was too early to say definitively who won the Civil War, basing his logic on the relocation of companies like Ford to southern states, an indication that the south is, indeed, winning the war, which I assume Niceley knows ended in 1865 with the utter defeat of the Confederacy. Or maybe he doesn’t know it.
The 34-year veteran of Tennessee politics also has argued that cockfighting is a time-honored Tennessee tradition that brings in tourist dollars. He was speaking against a bill that would have increased the fine for cockfighting from $50 to $2,500.
“They’re not bothering anybody. I don’t know what the big deal is,” said the cockfighting ally. “(tourists) buy food, they stay in hotels, they buy gas.” Yup.
In 2012, Niceley took on the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, claiming the agency had introduced coyotes to the state to control the wild deer population but that the coyotes instead have been attacking livestock. Interesting if it was true. However, it was determined that the coyotes came to Tennessee naturally and that their danger to livestock was nothing more than an urban myth.
As uninformed and dumb as Niceley may seem, his hateful, Hitler rhetoric is part of the Republican playbook that tries to link Democrats to Nazi policies. And it is being done in an atmosphere of increasing white supremacy and anti-Semitic attacks.
Last October, Connecticut State Rep. Anne Dauphinais, a rabid anti-vaxxer, compared Gov. Ned Lamont to Hitler, because of mandates that state employees wear masks to gird off COVID-19.
“He was acting like Hitler in the early 1930s,” Dauiphinais, a Republican and a nurse by profession, said of Lamont. “To date, he has not called for putting the unvaccinated in camps.” A real laugh riot, you are, Dauphinais.
Dauiphinais accused Lamont of copying the horrifying medical abuses carried out by Nazi concentration camp doctors. Referring to the vaccine as “an experimental medicine, with unknown and untold side effects,” she claimed that Lamont was using his “dictatorial powers” to “force it … onto the public at large.”
In March 2019, she helped bring prominent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a rally at the Connecticut State House where he presented false information questioning the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Her anti-vaccination stance is the latest in her support of unproven science, such as when she voted against the state’s ban on “conversion therapy,” a debunked practice carried out by unlicensed “therapists” that purports to “convert” LGBTQ young people into heterosexuals.
The Connecticut state GOP twitter feed previously ranted how Nazis were left wing because they were the National “Socialist” Party. Using such tropes and analogies to demonize the Democrats is not only false but it also besmirches the memories of the millions who were murdered in Hitler’s death camps.
The analogy has been particularly common at anti-vaccine rallies, where vaccine syringes have been placed on banners in the shape of swastikas.
In November, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Tenn., commented on social media comparisons between COVID-19 vaccination requirements and Nazi racial laws persecuting Jews.
“Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s (sic) forced Jewish people to wear a gold (sic) star,” Greene posted.
Under Nazi rule, Jews were forced to wear the “Judenstern” (“Jews’ Star”) — a yellow Star of David marked with the word “Jew” — to underline their “subhuman” status under Nazi racial laws.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., expressed his opposition to vaccinations when he tweeted a graphic in July 2020 that showed a hand with a number tattooed on the wrist, referring to the Nazi practice of tattooing serial numbers on prisoners at the concentration camps.
This past January, Massie posted a tweet attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci and featuring a quote by neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom, who was convicted on child pornography charges in 2008.
Massie has a history of controversial voting. In 2017, he was the sole House member to vote against sanctions on North Korea. He also claims there is no scientific evidence of climate change and in 2020, he voted against making lynching a federal hate crime. Massie also commented in 2020 that Kyle Rittenhouse had shown “incredible restraint” in not having killed more people in Kenosha, Wis., during protests of police violence against blacks.
In June 2020, Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Wash., was filmed wearing a home-made version of the “Judenstern” or “Jews’ Star.” Last July, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., called public health workers conducting door-to-door vaccination outreach “Needle Nazis” in a July 8 tweet that also likened the efforts to Chinese communism.
“Biden has deployed his Needle Nazis to Mesa County,” Boebert tweeted. “The people of my district are more than smart enough to make their own decisions about the experimental vaccine and don’t need coercion by federal agents. Did I wake up in Communist China?”
David Bronson, the mayor of Anchorage, Alaska, generated criticism for his response to a protestor who attended a council meeting and handed out yellow Stars of David with the phrase “Do not comply.”
When a Jewish council member, Forrest Dunbar, pointed out at the meeting that the use of Holocaust imagery was offensive, Bronson responded, “I think us borrowing that from them is actually a credit to them.”
Jim Walsh, a Republican member of the Washington State Legislature, wore the Star of David affixed to his shirt at a conservative rally last June.
“It’s an echo from history,” Walsh wrote on a Facebook page where a video of the event was posted. “In the current context, we’re all Jews.”
Rep. Morris Jackson “Mo” Brooks, R-Ala., read from Hitler’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” on the House floor on March 26, 2019. Brooks took action after special counsel Robert Mueller submitted his investigation without calling for further indictments against trump or his advisors in relation to collusion with President Vladimir Putin and his allies during the 2016 Presidential election.
Brooks conflated the German Nazi party with the modern Democratic party of the United States before using framing similar to President Trump, “For more than two years, socialist Democrats and their fake news media allies — CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, and countless others have perpetrated the biggest political lie, con, scam, and fraud in American history.”
Brooks quoted from Mein Kampf, “In the big lie, there is always a certain force of credibility because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously — even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds…they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation.” The Big Lie, indeed.