Fascist - There are few

Fascist - There are few things that infuriate me as much as casual invocation of tokens of the Nazi era - referring to someone as a "Nazi" or a "Fascist" lightly, as political rhetoric. Same for calling something a "Holocaust" that doesn't involve the wholesale industrial murder of an entire race; it's crying wolf. As Hindrocket notes on "Powerline", these terms have become meaningless from casual overuse. You know the suspects; college kids who think they're scoring a rhetorical coup when they call someone who disagrees with them a fascist; a pundit, frustrated with the success and reach of talkradio, calling the hosts and their audience Nazis. It's not the sort of thing that, in a just world, would be invoked cynically or shallowly.

Of course, the Schwarzenegger "Nazi" flap has been exactly thatl. The Democrat strategist who figured it would be a good idea to lightly link the former bodybuilder with Naziism deserves to lose this election, as far as I'm concerned, for that reason alone.

Especially given that the truth appears to be quite the opposite. Powerline has the skinny on this:

When Schwarzenegger was growing up in Austria, "Nazi" wasn't just an epithet. There really were neo-Nazis who took to the streets much as their fathers had done thirty years earlier. Now, several individuals who knew Arnold as a teenager have come to his defense, pointing out that he not only denounced Nazis--easy to do when, as in America, they do not exist--but actually battled them.

Powerline refers to a couple of articles, including this piece in the Guardian. Money quote:

``It's absurd. It's 100 percent wrong that he could have ever liked Hitler,'' Marnul said at his gym, whose walls are plastered with photographs of Schwarzenegger, who began training there at age 15.

Marnul's interview with AP was the second refutation of claims Schwarzenegger had Nazi sympathies.

On Friday, the Austrian magazine NU, which caters to the alpine nation's Jewish community, quoted former politician Alfred Gerstl as describing how Schwarzenegger and some companions once ``hunted down'' neo-Nazis who had gathered outside the office of a teaching institute run by an avowed anti-fascist.

The polls over the weekend showed that the smear doesn't seem to be sticking. That, alone, is proof that world isn't entirely unjust. Whatever Schwarzenegger's qualifications for the job - and I have the same misgivings about not only Schwarzenegger but the "at least he's better than Bustamante" philosophy that many conservatives to - nobody deserves that sort of accusation unjustly.

Especially when the story is being pushed by a biased media and a group of yellow hacks.

Posted by Mitch at October 6, 2003 06:01 AM