I was sitting in a doctor’s office reading “Newsweek” wherein one of their columnists opined that people should not go around calling each other “Nazis.” Dutifully, he suggested that liberals should not call conservatives Nazis (I wonder whether or not he weighed in against that when it originally happened, because the examples he gave are now old news), but the occasion for his opinion piece was clearly the fact that conservatives have recently Cindarella-ed that jackboot onto some liberal feet and it fits too troublingly well; so he was saying that Nazis are, as we all know, people who sent millions of people to gas chambers and, therefore, since nobody here is doing anything that bad, nobody around here should be compared to Nazis.

Of course, what the Nazis originally were way back when they got started is a good deal more banal than that. The Nazi party did not lead the German people to monster-dom over night. It began with things that were close to the hearts of the German people such as resentment over the raw deal they got in the Versailles Treaty after World War I, and their fear and desperation due to the depressions of the 1920s and ‘30s. (It started in Germany and Austria before it came to the United States.)

As to anti-Semitism, the unique viciousness of the Nazi brand was not initially obvious, and anti-Semitism was popular the world over in the early twentieth century--including in the United States. For thousands of years, the Jewish people had been everybody’s favorite scapegoat. Those Germans who did not read Hitler’s book, “Mein Kamp” (most of them, then), initially had no reason to think that Nazi anti-Semitism was going to lead to any particular departure from the usual rhetorical bigotry that had gone in and out of fashion in European politics for centuries. My point is that in 1933, there wasn't any clear notion that Nazism was going to lead to mass murder. The German people just believed that the Nazis promoted public works projects, "social justice" and equality among the German people. Many of Hitler’s initial policies had striking parallels with the New Deal programs that existed in the United States at the same time.

Against this background, in the Early 1930s, the Nazi propaganda machine urged Germans to accept the nobility of euthanasia. They made movies about beautiful young people dying of horrible diseases and not wanting to become shells of themselves. They wanted to kill themselves, and the compassionate Nazis championed their cause. These were very convincing movies. The Nazis made their case on humanitarian grounds. Yes, you wouldn’t associate the words compassionate or humanitarian with them, would you? But that is how they made it seem, and that is how the Nazis started. They always said that they had the highest, most noble motives for their policies. It wasn’t even THEIR agenda, really; it was what their audience wanted, if only they could be convinced that they already knew it. That is what the Nazis wanted the German people to think. In the end, the Nazis rolled right over the line between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia; the next thing the German people knew, they were burning their fellow human beings in ovens and it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Last night I watched the first episode of a new NBC TV series called “Mercy” wherein a subplot involved an elderly woman who was dying of cancer and her children wanted her to undergo a risky operation to keep her alive for a while longer. The nurse who is the series’ protagonist fought for the woman’s right to die even before the woman faced the fact that she wanted to die. The nurse was not cruel, on the contrary, she was compassionate—she even cried after she told the woman, “If you were my mother I would say no” to the surgery. It turned out that the old woman knew in her heart of hearts that she really did want to cancel the surgery. She not only told her children she wanted to let nature take its course, she told the nurse who had persuaded her, “You’re a good nurse, and don’t let anyone tell you differently,” or words to that effect. Wow, the nurse was really the one whose ego needed taking care of by the dying patient.

Euthanasia, broadly speaking, can include both “letting nature take its course” and the application of lethal substances or devices to bring about death. Indeed, on last night’s TV show, nobody dealt with the fact that letting nature take its course might be a very painful or—even with sufficient pain-relievers—a long and arduous way to go. There seems to be an unexamined argument there for rolling over the line between the first kind of euthanasia and the second.

How apt that on the eve of government-controlled health care we are getting this kind of entertainment. It puts me in mind of the story of Barbara Wagner—the woman in Oregon, where the state government instituted universal health care years ago—who wanted a potentially life-saving but expensive cancer treatment, but, instead, received a letter from the Oregon Health Plan telling her that they would be willing to pay for euthanasia (which happens to be legal in Oregon) but not for a treatment that might not work and would cost more than the taxpayers of Oregon can afford. Thus voluntary euthanasia morphs into a strong recommendation. How can we really be sure that it will not morph into something more coercive?

So, comparing the advocates of government-controlled health care to Nazis is not about comparing them to the extreme mass murderers of Auschwitz fame. It is about comparing them to the banal early Nazis who made coercion seem like freedom and euthanasia seem like a noble thing—long before it turned into undisguised murder. The Nazis, after all, also said they wanted to make things better for the people; that's why the German people let them go ahead.

We MUST compare the advocates of so-called Obamacare (so-called because everybody but the president seems to be the actual author of each version of these health care bills we keep hearing about) to Nazis, not because they are like the obvious monsters who murdered people openly, but because they are like the Nazis who for most of their career hid their disdain for human decency behind a pretense of compassion, decency and high ethics, which the more lamb-brained among them probably actually believed themselves.

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BTW, it is striking that as these different versions of health care legislation come forth from the bowels of Congress, the same bad provisions seem to appear in each of them. For example, if the argument in favor of any of these bills is that people desperately want to be covered, then it makes little sense for there to be a penalty for not being insured. Yet both HR 3200 and the currently touted Baucus bill (proposed by Senator Max Baucus, D-Mont.) include this very provision. It seems likely that when the various versions of these bills are tweaked before they become one final bill that will be passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the president, some of the worst and stupidest provisions will survive to become law.

That, undoubtedly, is by design.