Circa75.com -- Brought to You by the People Who Got So Offended at that Prospective MoveOn Ad Quoting Hitler

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Posted by gustav at 01:01AM, Thursday, December 04th, 2003

Brought to You by the People Who Got So Offended at that Prospective MoveOn Ad Quoting Hitler

Anyone who still has doubts about the idols of the right might be interested to know that Bill O'Reilly and his guests are busy quoting Hitler these days. The question is, do they even realize it?

Eschaton has a transcript from last night (March 31, 2004)'s O'Reilly show. I'm still trying to track down a transcript on Fox or Billoreilly.com -- does anyone know whether they have such things? In the mean-time, I'll quote the transcript from Eschaton (I did verify on the billoreilly.com site that these guests did in fact appear):

O'REILLY: I don't care about the - colonel, I don't care about the people of Fallujah. You're not going to win their hearts and minds. They're going to kill you to the very end. They've proven that. So let's knock this place down.

COWAN: Let's get out of the way and let Iraqis knock it down, so we don't lose any more American lives.

O'REILLY: I don't believe - I absolutely don't believe they can do it. General, how do you see it?

VALLELY: Well, we've got to do it together. We've go to do it quickly. We've got to sanitize that whole city. And keep in mind, Bill, you set an example when you go in there to do that. And when do you that, you get respect. And that's why you go to be tough.

O'REILLY: All right, general, is there any.

VALLELY: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) clean it up.

O'REILLY: .you know it, the colonel knows it. The colonel and I are disagreeing on the tactics, but we know what the final solution should be. Why hasn't the U.S. command done this? And why do they continue to absorb the level of terror that is coming out of -- this isn't a big town. We're not talking about Cincinnati here. Right? It's not a big town?

O'Reilly is talking to Fox News military analyst (General) Paul Vallely (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,37307,00.html). Those of us with any knowledge of 20th Century history might be a little alarmed by two phrases here. The first is "Sanitize that whole city." Sanitize, like cleansing, has a bit of baggage associated with it, extending at least to the Nazi's use of the German "Reinigung" -- meaning cleansing -- in the context of "cleansing" the Reich of Jews, Poles, cross-breeds, gypsies, homosexuals, artists, and dissidents of all kinds. Those of use who lived through the 1990s might also remember the fad of ethnic cleansing that swept across southeastern Europe led by such style mavens as Slobodan Milosevic, and all the happiness and peace that brought -- all the lives it saved. The second phrase is "Final solution," which comes straight out of Hitler's campaign book, where it referred to completely exterminating the Jews.

Am I the only person in America to find it bogglingly frightening, that the rah-rah crowd for the Right, for Bush's little war, evidently without even realizing it, quotes der Führer himself, employing the same phrases with the same connotations to advance, evidently, the same goals? In the context of a country we invaded against the will of the rest of the world (with the exceptions, ironically enough, of England and Poland), this is really fucking sick. Think Poland, 1930s, and the Final Solution for those icky ethnic Europeans and Jews. Only now it's Arabs.

Just don't publicly compare and contrast these guys to Hitler. Using his favorite little phrases is one thing; showing them employing such phrases and then showing Hitler doing the same isn't. They can't deal with the criticism.

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