“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Most of us heard that little nugget of wisdom when we were children, and I don’t imagine many of us believed a word. We grow up in a world where all of our authority figures punctuate their arguments with a name. Atheist, idolater, harlot, bum, bigot, fool, weakling, coward…it sometimes seems that fully half of our native tongue is devoted to the verbal assault on our fellow man. In politics, the art and science of name calling has become a multi-billion dollar enterprise; those who are possessed of the talent and will for true nastiness are the gatekeepers of power.
The last two years have seen America rise to the pinnacle of this less than noble pursuit; no longer does the application of a name or label have to employ even the slightest grounding in reality. In fact, we the people have become so good at calling each other names, that if a term brings the appropriate level of cruelty or spite to a conversation, we need only redefine it to suit our needs. This isn’t a new talent, teenagers of every generation have fundamentally changed the definitions of words like “hot” and “cool”, but now we have the ability to apply the same process to the names and places of history. We have heard “Marxism”, “Communism”, and “Fascism” thrown around the media like so many grains of wheat. But when it comes to historical names, none has such power to stir up fear, anger, and violent rage quite like Adolf Hitler.