August 6, 2009: Industry Speaker: Health Care Reform Would Emulate Nazi Holocaust

An anti-health care reform protester carries a poster depicting President Obama as Adolf Hitler. [Source: The New Republic]An anti-health care reform organization, Patients First—a subsidiary of industry lobbyist group Americans for Prosperity (see May 29, 2009 and August 6, 2009)—holds an anti-reform rally in Pueblo, Colorado.
Obama's 'Final Solution' - The keynote speaker tells the assembled crowd that Democratic health care reform will mandate physician-assisted suicide: “If this new Obama-care program comes to fruition, when you reach 65 and every five years thereafter, you’re going to have a counseling session with some federal airhead. Part of this process is called end-of-life counseling and part of the end-of-life counseling can be an end-of-life order. Adolf Hitler issued six million end of life orders. He called his program the final solution. I kind of wonder what we’re going to call ours.” The speaker compares the Obama administration to the regimes of despots Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Pol Pot, and then tells the audience to “go to offices of members of Congress and put the fear of God in them.” [TPMDC, 8/7/2009; ColoradoPols (.com), 8/7/2009; MSNBC, 8/10/2009]
Commentator Blasts Nazi Comparisons - MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow later says: “Put the fear of God in them—because what Obama is doing with killing all these people like Sarah Palin said, that’s like what Hitler did and you know what Hitler deserved. This is the rhetoric that corporate-funded, GOP-allied groups like Americans for Prosperity are funneling through which they set up to look like grassroots organizations to get people to go ‘put the fear of God’ into elected officials.… What has started as rowdy and rude and mean-spirited disruptions has turned, in some cases, into actual violence, with several hospitalizations for minor injuries and some arrests being reported at health care town halls last night (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, and August 6-8, 2009). What’s also evident is that the anti-reform rhetoric increasingly is invoking specific references to Nazis and specific comparison of President Obama to Adolf Hitler.… You know, there are people alive today who barely survived the Holocaust. And there are many people alive today whose whole families were killed in the Holocaust. Nazism is not a metaphor for a political policy you disagree with. Used deliberately as a strategy to characterize a political opponent, it has a very specific resonance with people looking to justify violence. The implication of conjuring up the Third Reich is that, in the case of someone who’s identified as a Nazi, as a modern day Hitler, violence against that person, even murder, would not only be seen as justified, it might be celebrated. This rhetorical strategy sets the stage for political violence that the perpetrator could hope would be praised. As such the idea of assassination, other kinds of political violence are always in the subtext. And you know, sometimes assassination isn’t even in the subtext. Sometimes it just bubbles right up to the surface.” [MSNBC, 8/10/2009]