Watching the endless cultural misunderstandings between the Vlaams and the Turks is a source of equally endless amusement, if not serious thought on the parallel political questions.

Let’s just say that weeks during which I don’t unintentionally insult a student are fairly unusual.

Is it okay to tolerate a system that maldistributes healthcare based upon the profit motive of doctors, hospitals and drug makers and the ablity to pay while largely disregarding efficacy and need? Because it is the invisible hand making the decision to ration care and I cannot be held responsibe, this is okay?

Lets be mindful and vigilent about past crimes and potential future abuses, but don’t bury the ethical and moral dilemmas posed by our current system (and a flawed reform package) by labeling our opponents as fascists.

Thousands of people are needlessly exposed to infections, complications and death each year because our system has perverse inentives to provide more care even when evidence based guidelines and efficacy do not support treatment.

And then lets talk about denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and ability to pay. But that is okay b/c it doesn’t happen to people who go to Williams or live in my neighborhood.

We have decades of experience in the rest of the developed world with what we mostly mislabel as socialized medicine. Surely there are better and more relevant examples that can be used than Nazi Germany? Is ephling really suggesting moral equivalency btween Pelosi and Hitler, Speer, et al?

If you can’t make an insightful comment about healthcare reform without equating the speaker of the house with the architects of the Holocaust, you are a troll.

It is offensive. And not nearly as offensive as the tone of this dscussion.

Ephling –
Meanwhile, you keep referring to this “definition” from the Holocaust Museum, (and refer to a “savage” attack — a little perspective, please) and yet I was part of a faculty seminar at that institution, and that definition is intended as the first, not the last word at the museum. The Holocaust Museum does not in any way deny that those non-Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis were not part of the Holocaust — indeed, that museum has exhibits on them. And the Holocaust Museum is not always the final word on these things. But most importantly: Why the hell do you get to claim the Holocaust Museum or Vad Yashem as your own?
Then you go off on this random tirade in which you think that providing another series of turgid definitions is the last word, despite the fact that myriad Holocaust scholars disagree. But if I cite those I’m burying you with footnotes. Ken has put me in a hell of a position here, because if I cite things, people who know stuff and the like, I get to look like an “ass” (because Ken is allowed to call names, you see) but if I don’t, then we let what amounts to plagiarism on top of shoddy argumentation go unchallenged.

As for my “agenda,” well, you imply one, but cannot quite explain what it is. So tell me: What “agenda” are you claiming for me? I’ll tell you — my agenda is to not ignore the hundreds of thousands of Nazi victims who don’t fit your definition. And my agenda is to continue to insist that the current health care plan does not decide who lives and who dies and to maintain that the juxtaposition with the Holocaust, and its myriad victims, is at best inapt and at worst blatantly offensive. And if you are saying there is no juxtaposition, then why was the first comment to this post yours, and why did you in your first sentence in the first comment in response to a post pretty much solely about the Holocaust write: “Wow finally a discussion about Pelosi’s heathcare system.” How the hell can you then deny making the comparison?

dcat

I thought the quote from Pastor Neimoller that headed this post was a telling reference to the responsibility of organized groups to recognize and speak up sooner than later on actions and values which they see as anathma. I was thinking that the college probably rightly applies this responsibility to the awarding of the Bicentennial medals.

That is why in Neimoller’s writings, God is asking him where he was in 1933 to 1937. And the famous quote “First they came for the Communists, but …”.

Well, I am on Medicare after all, but I only had the flu shot for old guys, not the one for younger people and kids!

Responsibly yours in Hood River.

http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206419.pdf

Holocaust
(in Hebrew, sho’ah), the name used in English to refer to the systematic
destruction of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.
The word Holocaust comes from the Greek word holokauston, which is a
translation of the Hebrew word olah. During Biblical times, an olah was a type
of sacrifice to God that was totally consumed or burnt by fire. Over time, the
word holocaust came to be used with reference to large-scale slaughter or
destruction.
The Hebrew word sho’ah, which has the connotation of a whirlwind of
destruction, was first used in 1940 to refer to the extermination of the Jews of
Europe, in a booklet published in Jerusalem by the United Aid Committee for
the Jews in Poland. The booklet was titled Sho’at Yehudei Polin (The
Holocaust of the Jews of Poland)… Although the
term is sometimes used with reference to the murder of other groups by the
Nazis, strictly speaking, those groups do not belong under the heading of the
Holocaust, nor are they included in the generally accepted statistic of six
million victims of the Holocaust.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy this, but the sun went down before I got out of the tube (that’s sometime about 4pm here) and I can, perhaps, find … ah, well, ah…

So let’s make it quick:

1) ephling, though an occasional commentator, does not seem a random passerby or a troll. He (or she) does not deserve to be dismissed out of hand, or insulted.

2) if you read an author such as Bartov, it is clear that the events which led to the rise of the National Socialist State in Germany, and the Holocaust, included a conjunction of state-controlled health care, psychiatry/psychology, and a dismissal of the value human beings. There’s something to discuss and explore here and, ahem, there’s a difference between “health care reform” and whatever the heck is occurring in Washington.

3) (@Alex:) Getting to like Minnesota? I absolutely adore it. I’ve now spent enough time among the Vlaams, to realize that the Catholics among them are really Lutherans, at least in manners. And I suppose there are some questions that overlap, here, too.

Gosh. I was about to say, arguing is one thing, disrespect is another. Then I remembered that there is this line in one of books JeffZ mentioned, that says that insulting someone without knowing that you’re insulting them, is far worse than insulting them intentionally.

P.S. Never use “the Socratic Method” on a Lutheran woman at Williams. Really. Trust me on this one.

dcat

It is an insult to memorialize the handful of anti-societal trouble-seeking JWs alongside the SIX MILLION Jewish Holocaust victims given that Jehovah’s Witnesses view the Jews much as did the Nazis.

During that same time period, there were more Jehovah’s Witnesses arrested and jailed in the United States than in Germany. In fact, from 1941 until 1945, approximately 4500 American Jehovah’s Witnesses “elected” to go to prison rather than serve in the U.S. Military and go fight against those same Nazis who were committing those atrocities. Approximately 3000 of those 4500 American JWs were even offered “conscientious objector” status, in which they were offered “non-combatant” work as a substitute, but 99% of those JWs refused to even help that much.

COMMENT MODIFIED BY POST AUTHOR PENDING FURTHER REVIEWS

My apologizes for my classmates’s manners. I don’t know what’s come over him. The chip seems to keep falling off his shoulder. I do, however, after sleeping on it, see your point.

Derek,

Congratulations on joining David in a competition for chief ass of ephBlog. (“Look, I can bury the newcomer in … citations!”) It is a very, very small (negative) hill to climb but you’ve done it.

“Wow finally a discussion about Pelosi’s heathcare system. Let the government decide who lives and who dies. The rest of us will bear silent witness to the power of the state for speaking out will not be tolerated.”

as tyhe first comment in direct response to a post explicitly about the Holocaust, well, you invite the ire of those of us who see the anlogy for what it is.

YOU asserted: “The murder of the so-called incurables took place in 1939 and was not aimed at Jews and is considered by none to be part of the Holocaust.” That is completely wrong. And I can bury you in citations if you want. I also participated in a seminar on holocaust and genocide studies at the Holocaust Museum in January and can assure you whose side of this debate they would take.

Keep digging.

dcat

Front page United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005143

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. “Holocaust” is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived “racial inferiority”: Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

I can understand wanting to stop a big program… I can understand that big gov wastes a lot of hard earned money… but please, don’t justify such nonsense off of the sacrifices of your ancestors, or even yourself. A lot of folks have members of their family who fought in wars…

Do you really believe that government run health care equals mass murder? I mean… really?

Post something that makes sense if you care so much about it.

No need to prove the historical point by replaying the scenes.

No one is “blaming Christians,” and this discussion is perhaps better continued after a pause for reflection.

About page 50 (before and after a bit) in Bartov, should do.

dcat

dcat

He discussed the issue at some length. 11 July 1995, after all, was the last time mass murder occurred on European soil– and we still have no institutions in place, to prevent it.

“The way the UN works, is that you declare a war, and then you declare a cease-fire, and then the UN sends troops.”

“There are those who want to say the past is the past and that we should forget and look to the future. But I believe that Europe must look back to this event, and ask why and how…”

Surely I am misquoting and re-framing my source,– however.

Ephling- You sound like an extremist with that kind of rhetoric. Using the holocaust as a metaphor for government run/supervised health care? Shame on you mate. You too, should visit Dachau.

http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/11/09/why-we-fall-for-fast-news/

I would swear that Ethan is visible about :46 seconds into Greenpeace’s promo video from the 10th in Berlin, but evidently not. His idea of a dangerous feedback loop between online media and audience, however…

http://www.youtube.com/v/cthEUzxidb8&hl=en_US&fs=1

(I haven’t found much time to translate some of this and the other speeches)

The left column, though brief, is representative. I found it hard to find anyone who seemed to like Merkel, for whatever that is worth. I will certainly not repeat some of the accusations that go around about Merkel– but a hard look at the political economy, as in most nations, is in order.

Germans, of course, often laugh at the thought that the United States calls itself a nation– certainly not in the German sense of the term. (At this point in the conversation with a German, I look to the ceiling, scratch my whiskers and mumble something like ‘Na, dieser alter, sehr gefahrlicher Begriff von Nationalismus.’ It takes a little care to pronounce the ‘t’ as if it were a ‘z’ in German.)

I was also, last week, somewhat surprised when a member of the left, in Rhinelander dialect, explained to me what I took to mean that two individuals has been shot by the Welfare service this year. After all, it would make perfect sense in the US– but I blinked at her a few times. (Oh! That’s how they say starb around here!).

I tried not to laugh in her face, that two people, in all of Germany, starved to death last year– and that the number, is a matter of national concern.