The Holocaust Memorial Museum

I just went to see Glenn do his book signing at CPAC where there were bloggers, journalists and reporters galore! From there, I went to the Holocaust Museum to look at the exhibits. As a psychologist, I found the exhibition on “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race” the most interesting. The Nazi emphasis on health and fitness was certainly intriguing–while it sounds good in theory, it reminds me of why I feel upset with all the fitness gurus in this country with their propaganda that makes smokers seem like outlaws and those who eat at McDonald’s one step away from a heart attack and lifelong reliance on the health insurance system. It is all about more government control–even to the point of telling people how to eat and exercise. Heck, I ate at McDonald’s on the trip up and it was fairly healthy. br /br /The National Socialist Party is an amazing representation to me of the worst characteristics of the authoritarian mixed with far left leaning propaganda. While the far left sometimes likens the right to Nazi’s, it seems to me that Hitler also had traits of the left–I guess that’s why they called it the National Socialist Party. One of the displays in the Deadly Medicine exhibit mentioned a quote from Hitler that I did not write down–but the gist was that the goal of the National Socialist Party was to have children as its top priority (in a 1938 speech, Hitler proclaimed the mother to be the most important citizen in his state) and that the selfishness of the individual was to be overlooked for the good of the collective society. Sounds very much like a form of socialism to me.br /br /My question is, why do so many of the left tout Nazism as a creation of the right when there were so many traits of the left embedded in it’s theology?br /br /Update: a href=”http://eddriscoll.com/archives/008563.php”Ed Driscoll /ahas more.br /br /Update II: Wow, a href=”http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/02/totally-not-analogy-for-our-glorious.html”these guys /athink I am calling them terrorists and Nazis. I didn’t have that in mind at all–but it’s interesting that they think I did. Can anybody say, guilty conscience?br /br /Update III: Reader Ardsgaine in the comment section gives a lesson in logic to Tboggians: br /br /All Nazis were socialists.br /br /All socialists are leftists. br /br /Therefore, all Nazis are leftists.br /br /And she ended with the question, so why do the leftists call the right Nazis?br /br /Now, if you had a basic philosophy class in college, you probably remember how this works. The statement “all Nazis are leftists” does not imply that all leftists are Nazis. It just means that some leftists are Nazis. It’s the same as with “all horses are mammals.” You can’t flip it around and say that all mammals are horses. Got it? Or should I sketch you out a Venn diagram?