Gingrich: People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.”

from salon.com

Tuesday, Dec 13, 2011 10:00 PM 02:48:09 UTC+1000

Apocalypse Newt

Gingrich's bizarre obsession with civilization-ending threats


Credit: AP/Wikipedia)

Newt Gingrich has changed a lot of positions over his many years in public life, but there are a few things about his worldview that are consistent. One is an obsession with apocalyptic or civilization-ending threats, often paired with the idea that Gingrich himself is alone (or nearly so) in recognizing the scale of the danger and in being equipped to deal with it.

My favorite example of this genre of Gingrich studies is a 1994 interview in which he declared “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.”

That line became an instant classic for Newt aficionados; less well-known is that Gingrich elaborated on the theme — at length — in the same interview, conducted by the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

“I see evil around me every day,” he says. He cites the widespread slaughter from Bosnia to Washington D.C. The German tourist killed by what Gingrich calls “a savage” from the urban jungle of Miami.

“We are at the edge of losing this civilization,” he says. “You get two more generations of what we had for the last 20 years and we’re in desperate trouble …

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Gingrich also sees the supposed rise of Shariah in America as a threat to “Western civilization.”

“Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence,” he said in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute last year. “But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Sharia.”

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