Glenn Beck Talks about Death Camps?

Well, if you read his argument he is in the right on this issue. This all started with a beef between Simon Greer who is a member of the Jewish Funds for Justice which is a liberal Jewish group. He said:

"Government makes our country function," Greer wrote. "To put God first is to put humankind first, and to put humankind first is to put the common good first."

Beck disagreed.

"This leads to death camps," Beck said on May 28. "A Jew, of all people, should know that. This is exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany — put humankind and the common good first." (Listen to the clip below, via liberal watchdog Media Matters).

Beck has a point though. Right in the 25 points of Hitlers Nazi Party we have this statement.

24. We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: common utility precedes individual utility.

That last line is what Beck is talking about. So when someone talks about common good precedes individual good they are citing Nazi ideology. If some government bureaucrat (or in this case a failed wall-paper hanger) decides that all the Jews must be liquidated "for the common good" or "that is what is morally correct" then that is what leads to 6 million people being massacred.

What Beck is talking about is who decides "the common good." It is almost never principled men that are looking out for everyone. Most of the time it is a small elite (in this case Hitler and his Inner Circle) who control every facet of their society and get to call all the shots. They get to decide that Jews are inferior, crippled people need to be euthanized, and their people need more land and it must be taken from others by force.

This same thing happened in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. There the individual was sacrificed for the common good. There humankind as a whole was more important than the individual human. So when we get a maniac like Stalin or Mao in charge of deciding what the "common good" is we end up with millions of bodies. To them a few million dead in the pursuit of the glorious Stalinist/Maoist/Fascist whole was a small price to pay.

So Beck is saying that we cannot let government be controlled by a small elite that has the power to decide what the "common good" is. That means there needs to be no "Death Panels" that decide that Grandma has had enough health care and needs to be euthanized. There needs to be no environmentalists who think 6 billion people are too many and must be culled. In short the common good cannot ever be greater than the individual good if you want to avoid more death camps.