Obama, Du Bois and Hitler: "Qui tacet consentire videtur" ("Silence gives consent")

This post is by Dr. Amy Bass, associate professor of history at The College of New Rochelle and author of Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois and Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete.

History is never about the past. It wasn’t then. It isn’t now. In the midst of a lot of people who don’t seem to understand this, Barney Frank does. His confrontation in August with Rachel Brown of the La Rouche Youth Movement demonstrated how the national debate on health care reform, which was increasingly getting crushed by Sarah Palin’s spurious claims of “death panels,” would take the high road. Comparing Obama’s stance on Medicare expenditures to Hitler’s Aktion T4 strategy in 1939, Brown asked Frank how he could “continue to support a Nazi policy.” Frank’s reply to her question – “On what planet do you spend most of your time?” – drew laughter. But it was his continued response that gave me hope for a brief and shining moment that sanity was going to prevail:

Yes, you stand there with a picture of the President defaced to look like Hitler, and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis. My answer to you is, as I said before: It is a tribute to the first amendment, that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to have a conversation with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.

If only it had ended there. But clearly it didn’t. In subsequent weeks, the Nazi analogies continued, the images of Obama as Hitler proliferated, new images of Obama as the Joker — meaning Obama in black (white) face – surfaced anonymously and then quickly became its own T-shirt industry, bumper stickers emerged with the sarcastic “Obama Makes Marxism Cool Again,” a little speech urging kids to stay in school got labeled indoctrination, and "socialism" became a dirty, dirty, dirty word.

I have watched this unfold with shock and awe, looking at the pages of my upcoming book, Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois, and wondering how this could still be happening. The book began as a small project – an article, I thought, an easy follow-up to my first book. A look at why Du Bois wasn’t more famous in the place where both he, in the late 19th century, and myself, in the late 20th century, had grown up. It was a project that would give me a chance to do some work while visiting my parents in the beautiful Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. It would be a chance to have some fun with history. Let’s find Du Bois in his hometown of Great Barrington. Let’s give him his due in this lovely place.

And then I came across what I now still think of as The Quote: “It's like building a statue of Adolf Hitler. The man was a Marxist as far back as 1922 and we oppose a monument to a Communist any place in the United States.” The speaker was Harold J. Beckwith, a past commander of the James A. Modolo Post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Great Barrington. It was not surprising to see a VFW member opposed to a memorial recognizing Great Barrington as the birthplace and childhood home of Du Bois. Many such folks had come forward to argue against the proposal made in the late 1960s by a small group of summer residents and locals. Was he really a local figure?, some argued. He deserted the U.S. for Ghana, others pointed out. He was a Communist, most agreed.

But Hitler? Really?

(KEEP READING)