Socialism-bashing Texas Republicans blame ‘Leftism’ for Holocaust
Texas Republicans took Holocaust Remembrance Day as an opportunity to blame their political enemies for the Holocaust in a bizarre Facebook post warning “Leftism kills”. All because the Nazis had ‘socialism’ in their party name.
The Harris County Republican Party appeared to blame six million Holocaust deaths on Leftism in the post, which was quietly edited to remove the offending line before being deleted altogether after a tsunami of backlash that reportedly included death threats.
Harris County (Houston, Texas) GOP on Holocaust Remembrance Day: “Leftism kills.” pic.twitter.com/MCbZo2QKMW
— Bobby Blanchard (@bobbycblanchard) January 28, 2019
No doubt fooled like many before them by the presence of the word “socialist” in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, they failed to look past an increasingly common Republican talking point – or run a cursory internet search – to learn that the Nazis used the word “socialist” to draw more working-class support to their movement and distinguish themselves from a similarly-named party.
“The Nazis identified themselves as National Socialists. The name of the party was the National Socialist Workers party,” insisted Harris County Republican Party communications director Vlad Davidiuk at first.
No words @HarrisCountyRPNazis are as far from the left as you can get. They are far-right fascists. The use of the word Socialist in their name was to gaslight the gullibleI suspect you know that and are intentionally gaslighting and spreading hate yourself
— genX resist (@GenXresist) January 29, 2019
“Leftism kills” was then removed, though – Davidiuk emphasized – only because “we don’t want a statement from us to be a distraction” from remembering Holocaust victims. “However, that withstanding, history recognizes that the Jews were killed by the Nazis and the Nazis were officially the National Socialist Workers Party,” he could not resist adding, digging the hole that much deeper.
Come on, people:First they came for the ________First. Remember who they came for first? Look it up.....The socialists, they came for the socialists first. Nazis murdered the lefties first because the left would have stopped them otherwise.
— Sam Brougher (@Azuaron) January 28, 2019
After reportedly receiving a death threat at their headquarters, the group finally removed the post altogether on Monday, but they couldn’t resist one last attempt to ram their proverbial foot down their throat with a post that claimed the death threat proved their original point.
While he admitted the phrase and its timing were “inartful,” Party chairman Paul Simpson doubled down on the message, warning against the “dangers of ideologies that demean the value of individual human lives to the collective. That includes socialism in all forms, whether 20th-century German National Socialism or today’s glossed-over socialism.”
Nazism is a right wing movement. As the son of holocaust survivors I respectfully request you stop peddling lies in the name of my murdered family members. Here’s a Hint - North Korea isn’t a republic, the sun doesn’t actually set, and egg creams have no eggs.Learn some history
— thew23 (@thew23) January 29, 2019
The word “socialism” seems to work as an allergen for some people on the political right in the US. Just last week, conservative commentator Ben Stein compared Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist, to Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. In reality, Socialism and the Nazis have as much in common as guinea pigs with Guinea or pigs.
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