Sunday, June 1, 2008

Soul Mates

Among today’s intellectuals, pseudo and otherwise, Hitler is the standard against which moral depravity is measured. Part of the reason for that is that he lost the war he started, and was not one of the victors who could write history to suit himself. Certainly Stalin was every bit as morally depraved as Hitler, but he got away with his atrocities. Pol Pot may have been worse, and his genocide was in our own time. Historically, when it comes to genocide, Tamerlane, Genghis Kahn, and Hannibal make Adolf look like a piker. As far as depraved cruelty, any number of medieval warlords are Hitler’s equal and more. One fact to remember, the Nazis were defeated by the British and American leaders who recognized the evil for what it was and did not indulge in euphemistic characterizations of what the Nazis really were all about. Nor, of course, did they pull their punches in waging war against Hitler.
Political correctness is nothing more than euphemism on steroids. At its worst it tends to make evil palatable. Even at its best, it stifles clarity. Clarity can be offensive, particularly to those who espouse the idiocy a plain speaker is being clear about. The whining and sniveling about actually using the correct term (shudder) "Islamic fascists" is reminiscent of the shrieks and howls that Ronald Reagan’s correct characterization of the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire caused among the left. Perhaps President Bush’s making it clear who our enemy really is will cut through the doubletalk and help relegate the Islamic fascists to the ash heap of history where they belong – along with their Soviet soul mates.