Outrage is something the left specializes in, and it is always selective. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer found out Tuesday just how far Democrats and liberals will go to manufacture that outrage. During his press briefing, Spicer implied that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was more immoral than Adolf Hitler, because “You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”
For the sake of rational discourse, it is worth cutting through the cacophony of craziness that Spicer’s comment sparked and analyzing the hypocrisy behind it, along with the historical falsehood of portraying the German dictator as the worse man who ever lived.
It can be noted that Spicer should not have made the comparison in such a careless fashion. Clearly, he was pointing out that Hitler did not use chemical weapons on the battlefield, nor did he bomb civilian areas with chemical munitions. Had Spicer chosen his words more carefully, this would have been much less of a story.
The aforementioned outrage over the Assad-Hitler comparison, however, is based on selective editing, willful disregard for Spicer’s clarification and not a small dose of blatant historical inaccuracy.
Think Progress, which is nothing more than an organization devoted to disseminating progressive propaganda, even went so far as to say that the press secretary praised Adolf Hitler. Knowing full well that many people read headlines without reading the articles below them, Think Progress published an account of Spicer’s remarks Tuesday, but headlined the article “Sean Spicer praises Hitler for his restraint, falsely claims he never gassed his own people.”
Read any mainstream media account of Spicer’s comment and one would believe that he did not revisit the comment or attempt to make any clarification. Time magazine – to its credit – is one of the few publications that did post video of the press secretary, after some prompting by reporters, stumbling through an explanation of his Hitler comparison:
I think, when you come to sarin gas, there was no…he (Hitler) was not using the gas on his own people the same way Assad is doing…but I’m saying in the way that Assad used them where he went into towns, dropped (chemical weapons) down to…the middle of towns….so, the use of it. I appreciate the clarification.
The press and social media backlash against Spicer’s comment ignore his revision of the remark, as clumsy as it was. Most of those criticisms also ignore the fact that the Holocaust was not directed exclusively at Germans; thus, backing up Spicer’s point that Hitler did not ‘gas’ his people. Out of the estimated six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, less than 180,000 were German. That fact does not trivialize the horror of the Holocaust. It does, however, point out that Spicer’s comparison was between a man who allegedly uses chemical weapons on his own people in their homes, and a man who rounded up people whom he did not consider true Germans – along with millions of foreign Jews – and systematically murdered them in camps, using poison gas.
Several uninformed celebrities piled on, with little regard for historical accuracy. Barbara Streisand tweeted “Sean Spicer should be fired for saying Hitler did not use chemical weapons on ‘his own people.’ You mean 6 million Jews don’t count?” Streisand clearly does not understand that the overwhelming majority of those Jews were not Hitler’s ‘own people.' Perhaps this is splitting hairs, but, perhaps, Streisand just insulted the memory of the millions of non-German Jews slaughtered by the Nazis.
Then again, it could just be that Streisand knows nothing about history – and cares even less.
According to a Townhall report, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has demanded that Spicer be fired for "downplaying the horror of the Holocaust." Democratic politicians and their leftist supporters care nothing for trivializing the horrors of Hitler’s Germany, however; it is hardly possible to count the number of times those on the left compare their political opponents to Nazis. The President himself has been compared to Hitler; doesn’t that trivialize the horror of the Holocaust?
Doesn’t such a comparison really say that nothing Hitler did was any worse than what Donald Trump has done?
It is time to stop making comparisons to Hitler. Although he was a socialist, Hitler has been misrepresented by liberal – and communist – historians as being the leader of a rightwing ideology. It’s why he is so vilified, even though communist dictators, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, killed many, many more people. During his time as leader of the former Soviet Union, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of some 20 million of his people – including millions of Jews – and that figure does not even include those slaughtered by the Soviet military during World War II. Mao Tse-tung is said to have killed approximately 60 million people – most of them his fellow countrymen.
The comparison of any modern American leaders to Hitler – or to any other dictator – shows appalling ignorance and a complete disregard for millions upon millions of innocent victims, of all colors, nationalities, and religions. The deliberate misinterpretation of Sean Spicer’s intent, in order to score some cheap, political points, is reprehensible and those who are jumping on this particular bandwagon should be deeply, deeply ashamed.
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