Children of Darkness and The Big Lie

Sarah Palin's (and now Michelle Bachmann's) recent mangling of American History is especially abrasive to me and I have to assume many people with more than just a passing interest in and knowledge of our past. Personally, at this stage she really is nothing, a distraction from what the real evil is up to, those who actually have some power. This could change if the current media frenzy continues and she is somehow able to acquire a position that will harm others. I know that many people in my position have sworn to ignore Palin for this very reason, but it reminds me of many primary sources I read on the rise of Hitler and the Nazis that wanted to get a few thoughts down. I don't want to suggest that the governquitter is going to seize power and start concentration camps or anything like that, or that primary sources of the machtergreifung actually reflect what she or other republicans are doing, but there is a similar flavor that I could never argue in my scholarly writing.

Here is one clip of her rewriting history, one of many not that it matters. How many of her followers are going to come away from that thinking "I did not know the Revolution was fought over the right to bear arms, this is something I value highly as well, that Palin's alright." I don't have specialized knowledge in the Revolutionary Era to really argue it differently, but I will say that this, at its heart, was not a battle for the individual's right to have a firearm it was a battle for collective rights. The colonists, first leaders like Samuel Adams and others, were beginning to identify more with their fellow Americans than as subjects of the British Crown and part of the Empire. Individual rights were an important aspect of this, but not the crucial one, but that Americans wanted to be free collectively to chart their own course and rejected the right of remote Parliament to infringe on their sovereignty.

Collective (or community) over individual is something conservatives have a hard time recognizing, just as my friend often notices the difficulty conservatives have understanding "gross" vs. "net" as in if the Ryan plan to voucherize Medicare succeeds, the gross cost of health care for seniors will not change (actually will increase) but cost to government will drop and net spending by government on Medicare will decrease. Conservatives do not understand government as "us" but as just one more instituition in American society, government is not a collective expression of the society's needs and concerns but a thing that takes in money and gives it out to corporations.

Why this is a problem is somewhat covered by this post by MMFA, Palin makes a dumb comment that contains some lucky guesses and the conservative media is right there to back her up. Here are some further links I found, I'll leave it up to you to decide if there are similarities.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/hitlerlie.html

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/oss-profile-03-02.html