This week Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee brought the Nazi comparison back to Washington, comparing Republican messaging on health care reform to “a big lie, just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie and eventually people believe it.” This has made for an amusing sideshow, if only because the Tea Party stance on health care is that Obama is a Nazi.

From a Tea Party Billboard in Iowa. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/ 07/13/politics/main6675861.shtml

Of course, the Nazi comparison is nothing new to politics, and it is no surprise that this issue came to the forefront of American politics during the Bush presidency. Bush was a lightning rod for Nazi comparisons and was criticized by the Left for many wrongs, including the method by which he ascended to office, the use of propaganda to start a foreign war, state-sanctioned use of torture and the construction of an extra-judicial prison system with a centerpiece at Guantanamo Bay. In defense, Bush employed a political tactic that had long been perfected by Karl Rove (and is a favorite of Fox News): the tu quoque. A tu quoque is a logical fallacy where one party tries to discredit the other party by accusing them of being guilty of the same thing. Essentially, it is the Pee Wee Herman response, “I know you are but what am I!” Thus, rather than respond to the substance of the critiques leveled against them, in 2004 the Bush White House countered with an ad that interspersed images of Hitler with Democratic politicians. In 2008, Bush employed the tactic against Obama, accusing him of “appeasement,” just like “other U.S. leaders back in the run-up to World War II who appeased the Nazis.”

The Tea Party has taken this use of logical fallacy even further to change the meaning of words and concepts, a social practice known as a semantic inversion. The classic example of a semantic inversion is the appropriation of the word “nigger” by the African American community. The Tea Party have emulated use of such a semantic devise consistently, as with Glenn Beck’s “civil rights march” on Washington and the attempts to identify Naziism with left-wing politics, when it was in fact a right-wing political movement. And yes, *litmus test*, only an idiot would argue that Naziism was leftist (the Nazis had bloody battles against Communists in the streets of early 20th century Germany and claimed that Communism was run by the Jews). This claim is made all the more absurd by the fact that Obama is African American, and the Nazis espoused highly racist eugenics theories.

Perhaps the most extreme example of a Right-wing semantic inversion is Glenn Beck’s three-day special attempting to identify the left-wing financier George Soros with Naziism, even though Soros is the son of a Jewish doctor and a Holocaust survivor. The special went under the caption “The Puppetmaster,” a highly charged racial term that dates back to Nazi claims that political leaders in Germany, and later America and Britain, were puppets of the Jews. One Nazi pamphlet published in 1932, for example, read, “Led by Jewish puppet-masters and cunning journalists, the KPD [German Communist Party] has lured some of the workers betrayed by the SPD with its promises. The KPD uses its boundless agitation against any kind or ordered state to turn the commune of its supporters into enemies of the state.”

Another cartoon from the German humor magazine Fliegende Blaetter shows a highly racialized sterotype of a Jew acting as puppet-master of Roosevelt and Churchill. Compare this to this right-wing blog cartoon below.

While Beck’s “The Puppetmaster” propaganda backfired when it was uniformly denounced by Jewish groups as Holocaust denial, it demonstrates how brazen the right wing has become with social boundaries.

So, while the Nazi comparison was once merely a political device for the right wing to escape accusations of war crimes, it has now become a chauvinistic epithet to denounce political leaders. After all, what is more un-American than being a Nazi? This Nazi accusation connects so well with the ideological perspective of the Tea Party because the far Right is defined more by what it opposes than by what it believes. They are anti-immigration, anti-government, anti-tax, anti-Obama, and anti-health care. And where Obama possesses characteristics that are not inconsistent with Tea Party values, the far Right negates those values: Obama is not American because he has no birth certificate, he is not Christian because he is in fact a secret Muslim. Because the Tea Party is defined by this process of othering, it needs a fixture to oppose and a label that encapsulates the antithesis of their belief. In this instance, Obama is the fixture, and the label is “Nazi” (after all, racial epithets are too taboo to use against Obama).

While the Anti-Defamation League has consistently taken the stance that comparisons to Nazi Germany should not be used in American politics, this poses a clear problem when the actions of politicians and the media really are antisemitic. This was the case with The Puppetmaster, and it put the ADL in the position of criticizing Beck without accusing him of neo-Naziism. And you can easily guess how Beck responded to the ADL’s rebuke: with a tu quoque, saying that the ADL would only “destroy themselves.”

The truth is, there are certain things that are “just like the Nazis,” and antisemitism is one of them. While the Nazis did in fact formulate both health care policy and issue propaganda, they also drove in cars. So does that mean that if you go for a drive, you are driving a car just like the Nazis did? Or that if you wear a black coat, you are wearing a black coat just like the Nazis? Of course not. There are certain characteristics that define Nazi fascism. Among those are genocide, political terror and running a police state. Torturing detainees and maintain secret, extra-judicial prisons (and I will put down my credentials as a lawyer when I say this) also is “something the Nazis did.” We have a duty to discuss these issues in an air of openness and seriousness, and we should take the semantic manipulations of the Right very seriously. While Steve Cohen may have been wrong to criticize Republican exaggerations of the health care bill, he was not far off the target.