Colbert: ‘If you don’t fight Saddam, you love Hitler’
Published: June 23, 2009
Updated 5 months ago
Due to the fact that the past is “full of mistakes,” Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert isn’t very fond of history. So Tuesday night he showed a historian how one could actually “learn from the past.”
Colbert explained to Simon Schama, author of The American Future: “Hitler. Hitler, okay. This is the one thing I like about the past is that I can look at Hitler and go, okay, there’s a lesson from the past. Can I make an equation. I can transfer from Hitler all the evil on to Saddam and I can go Hitler and Saddam are the same. Therefore if you don’t fight Saddam, you love Hitler.”
“Do you love Hitler?” asked Colbert.
Schama, not a proponent of the Iraq war, took another lesson from history. “Thomas Jefferson — Jefferson thought we should make a really serious distinction between wars of choice and wars of necessity,” said Schama.
But Schama believes the U.S. should take some credit for the recent events in Iran. “I think we can take credit in a much deeper sense. Actually, I think it’s quite true that cultures — even when it has 30 years of mullahs telling what is right and what is wrong — still actually want freedom and they want religious toleration. They want to be free,” explained Schama. “Thomas Jefferson said every man whether he has one god, three gods or no god shall be free to worship whatever he wishes without fear.”
This video is from Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, broadcast June 22, 2009.
Download video via RawReplay.com
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I think Colbert fuc ked up going to Iraq. I noticed last night people starting booing when the guest said Bush lied us into Iraq. The REICH WING really do not comprehend him. But oh well, fuck him anyways. One of his writer’s slips in some 9/11 Truth ridicule from time to time.
Was this piece just an excuse to say Iran a bunch of times? ‘If you don’t fight Saddam, you love Hitler’ - Oh yeah, good one dude, that was almost as funny as a Jay Leno joke. They should change the wording around though, “If you don’t want to wast a civilian you …”, “If you don’t think the troops are protecting our freedom you…” - There’s a zillion possibilities.
I wish DMaker would come back, now that guy was funny.
I love Colbert. He is a true master of logical fallacies. If I was teaching a class on the abuse of logic, I would play his show everyday. I’m debating whether the false equivalency of Saddam=Hitler is best described as a version of the denial of the antecedent…. or is it something else?
Of course it’s pure nonsense to say Hitler is equal to Saddam (or anyone else for that matter). Saddam didn’t invade Europe nor kill millions of Jews. The latest info from the downing street memos proves to me that Bush decided we were going to war with Saddam, no matter what the excuse was.
@natty- I noticed that too. There are definitely people that don’t ‘get’ Colbert’s schtick. His character provides right wing talking points taken to the extreme to demonstrate how ridiculous they are. Guests should prepare themselves better and actually help Steven take his character’s positions to that extreme. He is leading the way in helping guests defend a progressive viewpoint by his character’s simplistic view of life (which unfortunately represents the REAL viewpoint of the right wing).