Personally, I don’t think that McCain‘s Britney ad was edited to make Obama look like Hitler. But it’s a little disingenuous for Daniel Larison to argue, seconded by Ross Douthat, that there is either no basis for liberals thinking that conservatives would try to make an implicit comparison. After all, it was Ross who said this in response to the suggestion.
If your candidate is going to stage enormous rallies in front of tens of thousands of chanting Germans (with monuments to Prussian military might in the background) in the middle of his Presidential campaign, it isn’t the GOP’s fault if the footage comes out looking a little like Hitler at Nuremberg.
So no, no one’s comparing Obama to Hitler, they’re just saying speaking to large crowds of Germans is something Hitler would do, so it’s not conservatives fault if people make an unprompted association. Not that conservatives are prompting. It’s not like a prominent conservative like Charles Krauthammer would say something like this:
KRAUTHAMMER: I’m not sure — I don’t think he got a bounce. I’m not sure it was his intention. You don’t get a bounce out of standing in front of 200,000 Germans at a rally who are chanting your name. Bad vibes sometimes, historically.
Still, Larison argues, it’s liberals who are showing condescension towards Germans, because in fact they’re the ones comparing modern Germans to Nazis.
Besides being paranoid, the idea that McCain’s genuinely weak “Celeb” ad draws from Triumph of the Will is remarkable for something else: its implicit contempt for modern Germans. It is not much better than the pro-war German-bashing that took place during 2002-03 when war supporters frequently complained that the Germans had lost their former enthusiasm for conflict. Both treat Germans in an essentialist way and try to reduce them to the most cartoonish stereotypes, as if a cheering throng of Germans in Berlin, c. 2008, must necessarily conjure up associations with Nazi rallies.
It’s not really paranoid for liberals to suggest that conservatives would try to make comparison visually that they have become extremely fond of making verbally. In this case, it’s just wrong. But it’s mistkane Larison to argue that liberals are the ones showing contempt for modern Germans, since conservatives have, for a while now, been making the very comparison he finds so abhorrent and contemptuous of the German people. And Ross quotes Larison approvingly, just a day after just having suggesting the comparison is somewhat inevitable.
–A.Serwer
