There is a meme circulating on Facebook that sends me to the moon. I hope by the time I’ve finished this, you have the same problem with it I do. Here’s the meme:
I’m not writing this to be pro-Hilary, certainly not to be pro-Hitler. I’m trying to be pro-truth.
The first question you should be asking is whether or not Hitler said that. According to Snopes, it is unlikely Hitler or Hilary said the quotes below their pictures. Snopes gives it a “False”.
That’s inventing “facts”, but that’s not my problem with it.
The meme is yet another example of playing the Hitler card. The Fallacy Files calls this “reductio ad Hitlerum” or “argumentum ad Nazium”. One’s opponents are wrong because their ideas are the same as the Nazis. Or their behavior is the same as the Nazis. Somehow they are the Nazis reborn and their leader is a new Hitler. It’s also called Godwin’s Law, “Any internet conversation allowed to continue long enough will be about the Nazis.” Lewis Black did a great job of explaining this in “Glenn Beck’s Nazi Tourettes”.
- “It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Except there’s only one degree. And Kevin Bacon is Hitler.”
- “Hitler had a mustache. Mother Teresa had a mustache. Mother Teresa is Hitler.”
That’s absurdly misguided reasoning, but that’s not my problem with it.
The next great point comes from, of all people, Glenn Beck. You see it in Lewis Black’s video. How can you compare your particular issue to the Nazi’s systematic extermination of more than six million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and anyone who opposed them? Do these people really think their “suffering” is in the same category? I’d invite them to be openly Christian in China or Iraq, maybe it would give them a new perspective. Jacquielynn Floyd tackles this in “Robert Jeffress gets an F in History”, a column in the Dallas Morning News.
It’s very egocentric, but let me get to my real problem with this.
It has to do with the message of this particular meme. It says that asking someone to put society’s needs ahead of their own is evil. The people who defeated Hitler and liberated Europe put society’s needs ahead of their own, some to the point of giving their lives. We ask our troops to do that today whenever we send them into harm’s way. We ask our law enforcement officers to do that daily to insure public safety. On a smaller scale, we are all asked to do that when we are called for jury duty. You take a day or two out of your life to contribute to our best efforts at administering justice. We object to paying taxes, but we all understand on some level (some get this better than others) that we have to pay for roads, schools, and firefighter’s salaries. YES, there are times when evil people for evil reasons call us to put society ahead of the individual. There’s no denying that. But not every call is evil and it is dangerous to be drawn into thinking that it is. It’s also dangerous to let your opposition to Hillary Clinton cause to you throw out the good principles along with the bad.
The name of the blog is The Jabbok Ford, where Jacob wrestled with a stranger (God? an angel?) who blessed him and gave him a new name. We must wrestle with ideas, too. It’s never simple or easy, but there is blessing in the end.
At the Jabbok Ford 
Nicely said.
In my view,ours is not a culture that promotes social/civic responsibility. We celebrate soldiers and other “heroes” who put others before themselves. However, we don’t personally believe that we are our “brothers’ (and sisters’) keepers” (i.e. that we are responsible for one another’s welfare) except when we limit the scope of who qualifies as our brother and sister substantially. The very idea that we should compromise the quality of our lives even slightly to serve others we don’t really know is offensive to many; it feels unjust, I guess. To many, it certainly feels un-American.
Here’s my question to you: Can you envision our culture changing such that we value putting others before the self more? Can you imagine an America where the meme above doesn’t find a receptive audience (because people don’t object to self-sacrifice in service to society)?
That’s a hard question to answer. I think Reagan created a monster when he talked about getting government off the peoples’ backs. He was talking about deregulating business. Now we have a libertarianism that looks upon everything a government does as suspect. Unless it doesn’t. This was demonstrated by the Texas legislature as politicians preaching small government succeeded in overriding Denton’s fracking ban. We understand the good of the “party” (a collection of like-minded people) but we’ve lost our vocabulary of what constitutes the common good or why it matters. The only place I hear that comes close to that kind of language is in the military. My parents’ generation had a sense of it, but it was developed during World War II, when the entire nation had to make sacrifices for the war effort. I think it would take either an event of similar impact or a leader with JFK’s or Reagan’s charisma to bring it about. I think some churches do it well, but the dominant evangelical narrative of the individual getting right with Jesus works against an idea of the common good.
Something to watch for in the Millennial generation.
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