In the heat of political argument, right-wingers (both conservatives and libertarians) sometimes call their left-wing opponents “communists”. This is at once both childishly superficial and deeply wrong: communists were and are history’s foulest murderers. Stalin’s forced starvation of the Ukraine ranks close to the Nazi Holocaust as the most evil act of all time, and the continued existence of communist prison camp “countries” (North Korea, Cuba) in my view pushes the Communists just a nose ahead of the Nazis in the race to the bottom of hell.

The end of the cold war led a lot of Westerners to think that the evil fanaticisms of the 20th century were gone. But the events of Sept 11 made it clear that evil still exists in the world: does anyone doubt that if the hijackers had had the opportunity to murder 3 million, rather than 3 thousand, they would have shied away? Since then, I have made a personal decision to refrain from hyperbolizing about the moral defects of my political opponents. Chretien might be a corrupt ward-heeler and a liar, but he is not a dictator. Sheila Copps and Glen Clark might be shallow mediocrities and narcissistic buffoons, but they are not communists.

I suppose a number of right-wingers continue to make this mistake, however: one hears of Clinton being labeled a traitor, for instance. But it seems to me that it remains the Left who show no restraint in labelling conservatives as Nazis.

Arnold Schwarzeneggar has been called “Der Gropenfuhrer” by one LA columnist, after the Nazi rank “Ubergruppenfuhrer”. CNN even had the gall to point out that Arnold hails from Austria, “like Hitler”.

In Canada, this outrageous character assassination lives on in the ranks of the provincial NDP in Saskatchewan. In the lead up to the current provincial election, some NDP political staff made a party-wide call for cartoons satirizing the right-wing Saskatchewan Party and its leader Elwin Hermanson.

You can see one of the cartoon submissions here, a product of the fruitful mind of Carlo Binda, NDP communications strategist.

The Sask Party leader is clearly depicted as a Nazi guard, herding NDP supporters into a cattle car.

It goes without saying that this hideous misrepresentation is an attack, not only on Elwin Hermanson and his supporters, but also on real Holocaust victims. Calling Hermanson a Nazi serves to trivialize the almost unimaginable suffering the real Nazis caused. Unfortunately, this sort of trope is all too common on the Left. It is hard to know which is the worst part of this error: do they really think the Saskatchewan Party is a Nazi Party? Or do they not have any clue what the Nazi Party did?

It is likely a bit of both.

As political movements in Canada have regressed toward the mean–all parties now support socialized medicine, all have tried to balance budgets and rein in teacher’s unions, etc etc–the political rhetoric has become more heated. It is as if, in the absence of real policy differences between them, political partisans have to invent differences which are as outrageous as they are imaginary. Perhaps it is my right-wing bias, but I believe the Left are more the guilty party in this.

Hardly an election goes by without the right being smeared as racist murdering monsters: cross-burners (as Liberal Hedy Frey would have it), Nazis (per California democrats and Saskatchewan NDPers), KKK lynch mobs (ask the NAACP’s Julian Bond), and so on. But it is the Nazi characterization which is the most disgusting–as if it is really possible to rank these vile slurs.

Does the Left really imagine that Canadian (or American) right wingers are capable of this? Or this? Or this?

It’s disgusting. The NDPer who drew the cartoon has lost his job, as has another staffer who suggested that Hermanson should be depicted as tattooing the arms of NDP voters with numbers, the way Nazis tattooed the arms of their Jewish victims.

Political mockery is one thing. But calling someone a Nazi ought to be as unacceptable as using that other “N” word.