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Originally Posted by LaTunaNostra
Here's the "historical" spin. 
The words precede the sticks and stones, Eric, always have. They're what make the sticks and stones work.
The Nazis ( and let's take it as a given I'm not calling Bill one  are a text book case of how a society used words to stereotype and revile the Jewish population, to dehumanize Jews to the extent that a whole citizenry could be rounded up and literally shoveled into ovens with nary a protest. Such an unfathomable act was only possible because several years of racial name calling had softened the collective German brain to a polluted mush. (of course there were individuals - exceptions who decried it) |
Spin is a good word for this.
It requires quite a bit of stretch of my imagination to blame the atrocities of Germany simply on a succesfull propoganda machine. The truth was, and still is, that anti-semitism runs very deep in Europe, as it once did in America. These feeling stem not from words that were spoken, but in a belief of wrongs that were committed for hundreds of years.
I'm not sure how America was able to shed these feelings but it seems we were successful at it and I don't believe it can be attributed to the politically correct crowd.