North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Says Hitler Is Being Taken Out of Context

[Eugene]

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Says Hitler Is Being Taken Out of Context (New Republic)

Mark Robinson also encouraged people to read more works from Hitler and other dictators.

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson thinks that dictators such as Hitler and Mao are being taken out of context, and their work is worth reconsidering.

Robinson was one of the speakers at the second annual summit for Moms for Liberty, a far-right “parental rights” organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center recently categorized as an extremist group. Other speakers at the Philadelphia event included 2024 presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and Asa Hutchinson.

https://newrepublic.com/post/174101/north-carolina-mark-robinson-hitler-taken-out-of-context

______________________________________________________________________

Moms for Liberty Speaker Says It's Time to Start Re-Reading Hitler, Stalin, & Mao (Jezebel)

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) suggested at a prayer breakfast for the fascist "parental rights" group that dictators are being taken out of context.

While speaking to the crowd gathered for Moms for Liberty’s “Blessings of the Liberty Breakfast” event on Sunday, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) said it’s time to “start reading” some of the quotes from homicidal dictators like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin rather than automatically criticize Moms for Liberty having quoted Hitler in their June newsletter. I cannot stress enough how this Nazi referencing took place on a Sunday morning at what was essentially a prayer breakfast with a Rabbi present.

“Here’s the thing,” Robinson said. “Whether you’re talking about Adolf Hitler, whether you’re talking about Chairman Mao, whether you’re talking about Stalin, whether you’re talking about Pol Pot, whether you’re talking about Castro in Cuba, or whether you’re talking about a dozen other despots all around the globe, it is time for us to get back and start reading some of those quotes.”

https://jezebel.com/moms-for-liberty-speaker-says-its-time-to-start-re-read-1850606573

[Effete Snob]

1. Well, Hitler didn't mention anyone being LGBT, so it's safe for the kids

[barbtries]

14. they did persecute and kill them.

https://time.com/5953047/lgbtq-holocaust-stories/

maybe Robinson would like to bring that back as well.

it just does not get better with fucking republicans; i'm exhausted.

[NowISeetheLight]

41. A Black Man?

Wonder what Hitler would've done with him?

[barbtries]

42. don't even have to guess.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/afro-germans-during-the-holocaust

they persecuted and murdered Black people as well.

[Celerity]

49. that fucking Uncle Ruckus would get the Zyklon B 'shower' under the Hitler regime no matter how much

Nazi ass he kissed.



NC Lt. Governor Mark Robinson slams media company for cartoon depicting GOP as KKK members

[NowISeetheLight]

59. Fits

If the sheet fits....

[Hekate]

46. Their coded patch on their prison uniforms was a pink triangle.So yes, he tried to wipe them out too

There were quite a number of categories of humanity that he and his ilk found worthy of extermination, Jews just being the largest group murdered.

The list:
https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/nazi-persecution/

[Effete Snob]

64. Yes...

The OP is about Hitler's books.

As the same people ban books which mention LGBT subjects, I noted that there is no such reference, to my knowledge, in a book written by Hitler. Hence, it would survive the book bans which these same folks support.

If you dispute that fact, then please identify the book written by Hitler which contains such a reference, so that I might learn something I didn't know.

[Hekate]

65. Visit the site at the link I gave you. I made my point.

[Effete Snob]

67. Your point is a non-sequitur

There is nothing at the link which contains a relevant cite to a book authored by Hitler.

You apparently did not understand that the people who insist on banning books with any LGBT reference are okay with Hitler's works because he apparently does not treat the subject in any of his books, as far as I am aware.

If you are aware of a book written by Hitler which brings up the subject, then I'd be interested to know what book that is.

[Permanut]

76. I'm not seeing a reference in the OP to Hitler's books.

[Effete Snob]

77. .

"Mark Robinson also encouraged people to read more works from Hitler..."

Here is what he said, and an edited version of what he said:

Link to tweet

In the less-artfully-edited version, he goes on to denounce "the dirty, despicable, awful things that those communist and socialist despots did".

That part was cut off of the quote everyone is riffing on.

[Demsrule86]

60. What are you talking about...they were sent to the same camps as the Jews...and instead

of yellow stars wore pink Triangles.

[Effete Snob]

63. Quote which book to which you are referring

Yes, I am aware of that.

The relevant context is book banning.

The person featured in the OP is referring to Hitler's books.

To which book are you referring?

[Demsrule86]

71. They burned books.

[kimbutgar]

2. So he thinks it's not wrong that Hitler killed millions of people ?

Jews, gays, disabled people and those against his hate?

[gratuitous]

10. See, now there's that "context" thing

Everybody just gets hung up on that whole Holocaust thing and the torture and the total war and Final Solutions and so on and so forth, and we all just get bogged down in the minutiae of the one of the worst persons ever to walk the earth. Just unfair, it is!

[wryter2000]

13. Did he make the trains run on time?

That’s not easy to do.

[dchill]

34. Nah - that was Mussolini.

[IronLionZion]

44. That was propaganda

Fascists claimed they made the trains run on time. If anyone disagreed, they would just kill them.

[IcyPeas]

26. These days it's becoming apparent that it's okay to murder certain people.

They keep defending the indefensible

[Lonestarblue]

27. Well, that's the other side of the Holocaust since Republicans think you gave to present both sides.

This man makes me want to vomit!

[Lunabell]

3. Wow.

And there it is. No hiding it, just out there.

[peppertree]

29. No doubt about it.

And no surprise to those of us who grew up in the Deep South.

I remember hearing even "nice," educated people rationalize Hitler.

"He would've succeeded - except that the Jews were against him, and they got FDR to fight him."

Things to that effect.

[cilla4progress]

4. FREAK SHOW

[Joinfortmill]

5. What an obscenity

[bullimiami]

6. A black Republican Hitler apologist. Well.

[Unwind Your Mind]

48. Right?

[electric_blue68]

50. Now THAT'S something you don't see every day!....

Eeeeeks!

What on Earth is he thinking?!
(more or less rhetorical)

Just..... wow!

[Celerity]

56. Porkchop Goering

[Behind the Aegis]

7. What bigot!

I wonder if he thinks David Duke's comments on race "are taking out of context"? What an asshole!

[Effete Snob]

75. Here's more of what he said....

Link to tweet

As noted in The New Republic:


https://newrepublic.com/post/174101/north-carolina-mark-robinson-hitler-taken-out-of-context

"But the originally shared clip cuts off what Robinson says next. 'It’s time for us to start teaching our children about the dirty, despicable, awful things that those communist and socialist despots did in our history,' he continues."

[Behind the Aegis]

84. Thanks for the link. I liked....

Still, despite Robinson’s explanation, it’s pretty hard to justify quoting Hitler in anything other than historical context. For an example, look no further than Moms for Liberty. An Indiana chapter of the organization got in trouble two weeks ago when it quoted Hitler in its newsletter. The Hamilton County, Indiana, chapter didn’t even try to hide that it was a Hitler quotation, citing the Nazi leader just under the text. The group apologized and first tried to add context to justify using the quotation. But when the blowback grew, they quietly removed the quote altogether.

[Effete Snob]

85. It was that incident which he was addressing

I’m not sure that it is understood that they believe the educational establishment to be the Nazis.

Their whole schtick is based around the idea that public education consists of “indoctrinating children” in what they portray as oppressive ideology. So, yes, they intend the Hitler quote as a warning of what they perceive the other side is up to - which is what Robinson was specifically addressing here.

Their perspective is incorrect, but neither he nor they were citing Hitler with approval.

That’s not helpful to the social media outrage generation machine, so it’s simpler just to say “THEY QUOTED HITLER”.

Sure, they removed it, which is a lot simpler than spending the rest of their lives explaining that the quote was meant as a “warning” about what they believe their political opponents are up to.

[Behind the Aegis]

86. I think you are giving them too much credit.

But, c'est la vie.

[Effete Snob]

87. Well, the alternative is a little odd

Clearly, the video was artfully edited to cut off the remainder of his comments. So, someone made a deliberate effort to do that. He refers to Hitler et al as “despots” and “despicable” in reference to the newsletter quote in question, which is what he was addressing.

So, to believe they were originally endorsing or quoting Hitler with approval requires one to also believe they did a complete 180 in their opinion of Hitler in a week or so, and none of their membership considered that odd. One might think that if they did consider themselves Hitler fans, that they wouldn’t back down from a public endorsement of Hitler.

However, it does serve a larger agenda for as many people in US politics to keep calling one another Nazis, so that the word, and the concept, is drained of meaning by its constant use. The more it is trivialized, the easier it is to repeat.

[keithbvadu2]

8. Yes! Read them. Know your enemy.

I forget who said that.

Probably several people throughout history.

If you don't know your history, you're bound to repeat it.

[yardwork]

9. Yeah, he's nuts. We know. And he could be our next governor.

[Initech]

11. What a piece of shit!

[wryter2000]

12. Just once I wish people would ask idiots like this

So, what’s the correct context?

[Effete Snob]

74. His answer would probably be...

...the rest of what he said:

https://newrepublic.com/post/174101/north-carolina-mark-robinson-hitler-taken-out-of-context

"But the originally shared clip cuts off what Robinson says next. 'It’s time for us to start teaching our children about the dirty, despicable, awful things that those communist and socialist despots did in our history,' he continues."

[wryter2000]

79. LOL

But that's no context to what he said about Hitler. A context might be, "But we have to understand the state of the nation the Nazis found themselves in and all the good they did." And it would be, as Arte Johnson used to say on Laugh In, "Shtupid."

[Effete Snob]

82. I was simply quoting the rest of what he said

That is exactly what he said.

There's a video:

Link to tweet

[Solly Mack]

15. Garbage. Sick garbage.

[everyonematters]

16. This guy is probably going to be the Republican nominee for governor.

His political instincts are the worse that I have seen. I don't think that he was trying to defend or apologize for the dictators; he was trying to defend the Moms for Liberty, but what he said was really stupid. I can see the campaign ads now.

[Stuart G]

25. I believe that this Ass***e just destroyed his political career.

[lastlib]

17. I suspect he agrees with Mao one at least one thing:

"Political power flows out of the barrel of a gun."--Mao Zedong.

[malthaussen]

62. See, that's one of those quotes he's talking about...

... (sarcasm). Mind you, I believe that ultimately Mao had a point, the barrel of a gun is far more simple than "the consent of the governed," and don't the coercive authorities in the USA have firearms aplenty to enforce the law? Did not firearms secure the political power to break away from Great Britain in the first place? Do not arms secure our nation even today? (by several magnitudes of overkill).

So there is a little "broken clock" to the statements of chaps like Mao. They may suck as people, but that doesn't mean they can't occasionally be right.

Using one of them as an authority to back up one's own opinions is a different thing, however. There are few ideas that are truly unique, and whom one chooses to quote to make a point tells us, perhaps, more about the speaker than the quote.

-- Mal

[LoisB]

18. Gee, Mr. Robinson, how do you think you would have fared under Hitler?

[lame54]

19. What does he mean by " their work"?

[Scottie Mom]

20. What the holy fuck?

My Dad was in WWII -- in Germany when the concentration camps were liberated. He saw the shit that Hitler did.

You want me to reconsider this. WHAT THE HOLY FUCK??????????

Hell is too good a place for those who consider re-thinking Hilter. Fuck 'em...royally.

[dalton99a]

21. Seriously sick fuck

[CRK7376]

37. Why does my state have these crackhead stupid Republicans??????

My wife and I along with our 3 adult children will be voting against Peckerhead Robinson. Why my state?

[Red Mountain]

40. Agreed

Why us?

My only hope is that this nutjob doesn't get the repuke nomination.

The national shame of this brain damaged obscenity being considered a viable candidate in our state would be avoided.

[BlackSkimmer]

61. Dude, I've been alive long enough to remember Jesse Helms.

We won't mention John Edwards.

But NC is far back in the line of nutcase politicos. WAY back.

[wryter2000]

81. They're everywhere

"Peckerhead"

[LuvLoogie]

22. Tool

[Stuart G]

23. Perhaps this ass**le should watch a movie "...Night and Fog"

Maybe then he will shut up. .... Gruesome killing of Jews in a Prison Camp

[aggiesal]

24. Another episode of ''GQP Not Hiding Their End Goal'' ...

Next episode coming to a GQP legislature near you.

[3catwoman3]

28. And exactly what context should we use...

…when “reconsidering” the evil wrought by these monsters?

[slightlv]

30. This is another right wing idiot

who should have his American rights rescinded and deported to a dictator-controlled autocracy. One way, and on the no fly list from now until he dies. I'm tired of these idiots shooting off their mouths. And, if they truly believe what they say, they have no place in our democracy. They're against the founding fathers, their against our countries. We HAVE to start understanding that America is at war - not with a foreign country, but against those who want to turn our country into a fascist state.

[dalton99a]

31. Kick

And there was another group Hitler targeted that Ye may be less familiar with: Black people. Hitler thought Black people were inferior and “dirty.” Black Germans were sent to concentration camps, Black children were forcibly sterilized and African American and African French prisoners of war were often subjected to worse treatment by German captors, including summary execution, according the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In Hitler’s 1925 book “Mein Kampf,” he used the derogatory term “Rhineland bastards” to describe children born of marriages between German women and African men serving in the French military. He repeatedly called interracial relationships between White and Black people a “sin against God” and called their progeny “contaminated” and “infected with lower humanity.” In 1937, Hitler approved the forcible sterilization of approximately 500 biracial Black children, a fact kept hidden until 1979, when German historian Reiner Pommerin exposed the plot.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/12/02/hitler-kanye-west-black-germans-holocaust/
https://archive.ph/oNO0y

[struggle4progress]

32. "Let's not overlook all the positive things the Nazis did, like

beating people to death for not giving the Heil salute, using small Spanish towns for Luftwaffe bombing practice, gassing WWI invalids or folk with birth defects, and killing POWs in vacuum chambers!"

I'll happily nominate Mark as Oceangate's newest submersible pilot

[prodigitalson]

33. the bon mot of pol pot

great coffee table book

[WVreaper]

35. Please take this out of context

Fuck you.

[Rhiannon12866]

36. Given his crimes against humanity, I don't think that's possible...

[allegorical oracle]

38. This ignorant man is an example of not educating people in history...not just the

doomed to repeat it factor, but the spreading of lies and myths in the meantime.

As an aside, wonder if Robinson knew that tfg reportedly had/s a book of Hitler quotes and was trying to ingratiate himself with the drumpfian crowd.

[area51]

39. Taken out of context, my ass.

I'd love to see the Moms for Hitler run out of every town they're in.

[IronLionZion]

43. Dictators are the real victims here. Dude wrote a whole book about his struggle

So they killed a few million people. Nobody's perfect. It could happen to you too if you killed millions of people. Both sides.

[BComplex]

45. The Koch brothers bought "influencers" in North Carolina during the Tea Party fiasco.

They dug in deep here, and things have continually gone downhill since.

[Hekate]

47. The Klanned Karenhood are disgusting

They can kiss my rosy Irish ass.

[BlackSkimmer]

53. He is a black man. nt

[DFW]

51. Right. Taken out of context.

Concentration camps were originally only meant to be summer camps, and the V-1 and V-2 missiles send to bomb London were only meant as CARE packages.

There‘s some Republican context for you.

[Kid Berwyn]

78. Precisely.

Other than to convict him for crimes against humanity, there should be no context in which to ever quote Hitler.

[Buns_of_Fire]

52. Obviously, they were just misunderstood.

And the killings? Well, we've all been to parties that got a little out of hand, right?

[treestar]

54. Hitler laid out everything he was going to do in his book

So it might be time to reread it to see if anyone is following his playbook.

But that's a different reason for reading it.

[Effete Snob]

73. That's actually the reason he gave

But the video clip cuts off the rest of what he said.

Link to tweet

As noted in The New Republic:


https://newrepublic.com/post/174101/north-carolina-mark-robinson-hitler-taken-out-of-context

"But the originally shared clip cuts off what Robinson says next. 'It’s time for us to start teaching our children about the dirty, despicable, awful things that those communist and socialist despots did in our history,' he continues."

[treestar]

88. Hmm, interesting

though he was trying to defend the use of a quote by Moms for Liberty - as if their use of a quote was meant to show Hitler's wrongness.

[Effete Snob]

89. ...

Their whole schtick is based around the idea that public education consists of “indoctrinating children” in what they portray as oppressive ideology. So, yes, they intend the Hitler quote as a warning of what they perceive the other side is up to - which is what Robinson was specifically addressing here.

Their perspective is incorrect, but neither he nor they were citing Hitler with approval.

That’s not helpful to the social media outrage generation machine, so it’s simpler just to say “THEY QUOTED HITLER” and join the social media outrage.

Sure, they removed it, which is a lot simpler than spending the rest of their lives explaining that the quote was meant as a “warning” about what they believe their political opponents are up to.

There is a lot wrong with this group, but they were quoting Hitler as a warning. But the game on social media is - no matter who you are - to put your opponent in the Nazi box and then there is no need to engage with any opposing political idea since everyone is screaming “Nazi” at everyone else, this draining the word of its meaning.

If you believe otherwise, then you have to deal with the fact that he used the words “despot” and “despicable” to refer to Hitler in front of this same group (in the part of the video that was intentionally edited in order to change his meaning) and they must have changed their beliefs awful fast.

But the fact remains that someone made that intentional video edit to deliberately convey a false impression.

[treestar]

90. I agree - engaging with the idea is apparently too hard

for some and so they go the easy route, ad hominem. Just show the person with the other idea is an awful person - then they must be wrong, regardless of what the underlying issue is.

[Cyrano]

70. It's more likely he would have been running a concentration camp

[BeckyDem]

58. To read about dangerous demagogues ( Hitler/ Trump ) is important. The "context " danger here is

absolutely sickening. Sickening and dangerous, Moms for Liberty must be exposed and pushed back on at every turn.

[sarcasmo]

66. Mark letting us know he is pro Hitler.

[Kid Berwyn]

68. A Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina said Hitler quote "was taken out of context"?

Mark Robinson should have resigned from office the same day.

Fucker can look for a job with Clarence Thomas' NAZI-loving billionaire buddy.

[live love laugh]

69. Well Hitler was groomed by US racism of people like that governor. Soooo

[TxGuitar]

80. ? they had their own home grown racism

I doubt Hitler before WWI or in the years just after knew or was exposed to much about the US. Why do you say that?

[live love laugh]

83. Hitler praised America's progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship.

Last edited Thu Jul 6, 2023, 10:40 PM - Edit history (2)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler

Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton). ... Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as “the nefandum, the unspeakable descent into what we often call ‘radical evil.’ ” But the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it.

...


The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

...

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. ... Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.

...

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

[jcgoldie]

72. The "context"...

… is murdering 6 million innocent Jewish people. What other context is relevant in light of that?

[peggysue2]

91. Oh, yes. Poor misunderstood Adolf!

He loved his dogs, too. Remember that because it's an example of Hitler's shriveled heart and soul having room for puppies.

Just not humans, specifically humans he detested and murdered like Jews, the disabled, political opponents, intellectuals, etc. (the list was long as we all know).

As predicted, Moms for Liberty walked back the Hitler quote with a non-apology, and then queasy defenders try to soften the blow, tell us what they were 'really' trying to say and/or suggest we consider things other than the blatant quote. And let's please forget the repeated actions of Moms for Liberty, as in banning books and academic curriculums including subjects they do not like, subjects that offend their sensitive fee-fees while underscoring their bigotry. Let's muffle and redirect the justified outrage from the group's malevolence in a flurry of words that almost sound reasonable because the whole exercise is to have us think of something else, anything else than the actual public offense.

The Lt. Governor could have denounced the group's overstep, but then (I suspect) accepting a speaking engagement at the the hate group's sponsored 'prayer' breakfast would have made a well-earned criticism somewhat awkward, rude.

Birds of a feather!

I'm sick of these people. All of them! I'm sick of their excuses, apologies and the endless misdirection from the sheer hate and rage that's boiling beneath the surface. And when it erupts into public view?

So do the PR stunts like this one:

Look over here, people. The view is so much better, so much more reasonable and comforting.

In the end, we'll be remembered for what side we took in this era of chaos and repeated attempts to destroy democratic institutions.

Lt Governor Robinson has willingly chosen his side.