When did we enter a time when some Americans can offer criticism of nazis and white supremacists only if it is immediately tempered by the "balance" of criticism of other groups?

Many Republicans, like Ronald Reagan for instance, had no problem saying "I condemn Nazis. PERIOD. FULL STOP." 

 Nazis and white supremacists have become a constituency, that the Trumpers need to take care not to offend.
The veil has been lifted.


Violent neo-nazis and white Supremacists terrorize an American City, and the President says this:
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. On many sides.”

Later the White House, in an email condemned “white supremacists” AND “all extremist groups.”

Homeland Security spokesman Tm Bossert said, "I condemn white supremacists and racists and white Nazi groups and all the other groups that espouse this kind of hatred and exclusion.”

VP Mike Pence did manage to condemn nazis, 
“We have no tolerance for hate and violence, white supremacists or neo-Nazis or the KKK,”
But, then Pence immediately changed gears.
“The president also made clear that behavior by others of different militant perspectives are also unacceptable in our political debate and discourse,”


I have a question:

When did we enter a time when some  Americans can offer criticism of nazis and white supremacists only if it is immediately tempered by the "balance" of criticism of other groups?

Everyone here already condemns violence. 
Why can't you just stand up and condemn the Nazis, Period. Full stop?

By combining them with other groups you are establishing a false equivalence.You are letting nazis off the hook by suggesting that they aren't any worse than anybody else.

This is a Moral equivalence Fallacy. And it isn't new.

Moral equivalence is a form of equivocation often used in political debates. It seeks to draw comparisons between different, even unrelated things, to make a point that one is just as bad as the other or just as good as the other. Drawing a moral equivalence in this way is an informal fallacy, a special case of False equivalence.

A common manifestation of this fallacy is a claim, often made for ideological motives, that both sides are equally to blame for a war or other conflict. 

I am reminded that suggesting a moral equivalence between a number of acts carried out by the Allies during the Second World War and the deeds of the Nazis, especially the Final Solution is a common strategy employed by apologists for the Nazis.  Commonly cited as examples are the Allies' aerial destruction of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden, the systematic murder and rape of East Germans by the Red Army, etc.

 

Last edited by Goose (8/14/2017 7:28 am)