I’m prepared to believe that you don’t actually advocate murdering all illegal immigrants, but SURELY you must concede that tossing a reference to Nazi Germany into your column was bound to provoke a frenzy. Why exactly did you go with Nazi Germany, when Slobodan Milosevic’s tactics toward Kosovar Albanians seems more in line with what you’re proposing? No need to conjure up images of the Holocaust, trains, and concentration camps when you’ve got a perfectly good roster of historical examples that seem (as far as I understand you) to correspond much more closely to simple, old-fashioned mass deportation….
Why DID you use that particular example? I’m obviously not implying that you’re a neo-fascist or a racial purist. Just wondering why you didn’t instead recommend the Ottoman Empire, Milosevic, and the US vis a vis the Indians as examples, since all of them seem much closer to what you propose.
There were certainly a number of historical examples I could have used, but the one from National Socialist Germany seemed the most apt to me for three reasons. First, the number 12 million has been bandied about lately with regards to illegal aliens and I was reading Robert Wisnich’s book not so long ago, so when I read about Bush declaring how it wouldn’t work to deport so terribly many, the first thing that sprang to mind was something on the order of “for Pete’s sake, the Endlosung took less than four years and that’s half 12 million right there.”
Second, most people are woefully ignorant of history. You’d be amazed at how many people emailed to inform me that the National Socialists KILLED 6 million Jews. No, really, Mr. History PhD? Given that perhaps one in five readers could identify Milosevic or the Ottoman Empire, much less the Polish postwar expulsion and murder of one million ethnic Germans, it made sense to go with something readers would at least have heard of.
Third, I believe that the Third Way politics practiced by the Bush-Clintons and the Blair-Camerons are a modified version of the original Third Way, more infamously known as fascism. I’ve been reading a history entitled FASCISTI by Giordano Bruno Guerri in the last week and the similarities between the development of the historical cult of the nation and the modern cult of multiculturalism are striking.