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.
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.
“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.
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.”
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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