>Once and for all, it is time to put an end to this knee-jerk,
>counterproductive screaming about Nazis and Hitler and Eichmann by
>lefties, or would-be lefties. It cheapens the memory of the
>Holocaust and demeans anyone who uses it, besides automatically
>condemning them to being ignored by most of the people they are
>talking to.
And another thing it does is that it makes it easy to whitewash the crimes of American imperialism. You don't have to be very far to the right, to put it mildly, to be offended or annoyed by the little Eichmanns remark. From that offense-taking, it's not a long distance to travel to dismiss any criticism of U.S. behavior - the murder of millions in Indochina, of a million or more in Iraq, of scores of thousands in Latin America - as over-the-top Nazi-baiting. It's precisely because U.S. behavior has been so egregious that it's important to be careful in the language you use to describe it. Churchill has given aid & comfort to apologists for imperialism, which is a pretty awful offense. He's made it very difficult to talk seriously about the responsibility of the citizenry in a bourgeois democracy.
Doug