Wretchard has a lengthy essay in The Belmont Club on history in general, and Hitler and the Nazis in particular. He makes the point that very few know what Hitler and the Nazis were like. One example:
The facile comparison of Hitler to the modern leftist bogeymen du jour lends itself to distortion. Most people are tolerably familiar with the Third Reich's oppression of homosexuals. But relatively few know that a special badge was minted in Dachau for assignment to the Jehovah's Witnesses: the purple triangle.
and
That Nazi medical experiments were carried out on Jews is common knowledge. But what about Roman Catholic priests? Hitler was remarkably even handed in his treatment of religions.
At the risk of sounding like a first-year philosophy student, I've taken to asking people in various arguments to define their terms. For example, if someone comes up with the "Bush = Hitler" line, I might ask him what Hitler meant to him. If he sees Hitler only as someone who locked up a few Jews and made war on other countries, then I can see how he could make that equation. Chances are, no one equating Bush and Hitler believe Bush has done, or wants to do, all the things Hitler was documented as having done in Wretchard's essay.
History repeats itself because nobody listens.
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