Friday, September 9, 2011

The Panda Bear on the Abuse of the Word Nazi

The political rhetoric in the United States has gotten emotional, nasty and cruel.   The Panda Bear thought this extreme rhetoric started from the right but currently the Panda Bear thinks its coming from all sides of the political spectrum.   What she finds most disagreeable is how both the right and left are just throw the term "Nazi" around to describe a political opponent.   The Panda Bear would like to start a movement to keep the term Nazi to refer to the Nazi party of Germany.  

As readers of the Panda Bear Blog may know, that the Panda Bear's mother(Mother Panda) grew up in Germany in a city called Breslau now called Wrocław which became part of Poland after WWII.    Mother Panda lived under the Nazis from 1932-1938.  When the Panda Bear was growing up, Mother Panda always complained about jokes about the Nazis.   To her the Nazis weren't funny-they were people that wanted to kill her and did kill members of her family who stayed in Germany.  Mother Panda knew of both Jews and non Jews who opposed Nazism who were killed just after Hitler after Hitler took power by the Nazis.  Though, it is a flawed source, the Panda Bear was reading in Wikipedia, that Breslau was a section of Germany that supported Hitler from the beginning.     Panda Mother says she remembers many people seemed to embrace Nazism without any outside pressure to do so.   Growing up, in this kind environment my mother's family had to pay close attention to the political term "Nazi" and what this means in terms for her and her family's safety.

In Merriam Webster's Dictionary , one definition of Nazi is an overbearing person.   The Nazis were more than domineering people-they were cold blooded killers who murdered many people in Europe.
Here is a link to Wikipedia's explanation of the term Nazism and what it means.  Neither George Bush or Barack Obama are Nazis under this definition even though their opponents call them by that name.  In fact Obama would not even be eligible to be a member of the Nazi party since he is part Black and the Nazis believed in white supremacy.

The Panda Bear in future blog posts will describe what she believes the improper use of the word "Nazi" and how she feels it is diluting and misrepresentating what the GermanNazis truly believed and did.

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