Calling Arnold a Nazi

I don't think we should do this. Ever.

I think my opposition to Schwarzenegger is self-evident, but this sort of stuff makes me the slightest bit sick: Get it? He's Austrian, right, and Hitler was Austrian, and we don't like Hitler, right, and he was a Nazi, and we don't like Arnold, so let's call Arnold a Nazi and make other people not like him.

This isn't us. We don't compare African-American opponents to Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe; we don't compare Asian opponents to Mao or Hirohito or Pol Pot; we don't compare Latino opponents to Ricky Martin. We don't do it.

Even though, as has been widely reported, Arnold's father was a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), it doesn't matter. The sins of the father can't be visited on the son.

Arnold, for all his faults, is no Nazi. He's the opposition, not the enemy of our way of life. Calling our electoral opponent a Nazi trivializes the depravity of the Third Reich and denigrates the memory of those whom it brutalized — including, by the way, the German and German-speaking peoples who were forced to live under its totalitarian excesses. At best (for us) it's smirking; at worst it's downright callous.

On a more practical note, it's not going to change anyone's mind, and it may well work in the other direction. So let's not do it.

All that having been said, he really shouldn't say any more stuff like this (from Pumping Iron):

I was always dreaming about very powerful people - dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, be for thousands of years remembered.

But, you know, who wasn't a steroid-addled megalomaniac gay icon in the 70s?

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Calling Arnold a Nazi

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