Remember that famous 'First they came for the communists' piece?

Turns out the story is a lot more involved than I'd known.
So it's completely unsurprising that the Ground Zero Mosque defenders have trotted out the "First they came for the Communists" nursery rhyme. Keith Olbermann did it, while suggesting that resisting the Ground Zero Mosque puts us on a path to the Holocaust. Olbermann went on to claim that Muslims in the US were at greater risk of terrorism than non-Muslims (which would be news to the actual recent targets of terrorism, who included soldiers in Fort Hood, airline passengers and anyone walking through Times Square.) And of course Olbermann hung it all on that infamous nursery rhyme and Martin Niemoller.

There are a number of problems with that. First Niemoller is not the author of the nursery rhyme, it's loosely based on some of his statements. Secondly, Niemoller went from being a Nazi sympathizer, to being a Communist sympathizer. That incidentally is the same message implicit in the poem itself. A man who supported Hitler and then supported Communist tyrants, including Ho Chi Minh is a spectacularly bad choice as a moral guide.
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Meanwhile in the USSR, the Communists had come for the Trade Unionists and the Jews. Niemoller had nothing to say on this subject. Neither do the people who quote the nursery rhyme, because it upsets their narrative. It forces them to deal with the fact that the Communists were perpetrators, rather than victims. What upsets the applecart even more, is the fact that the USSR had actually helped the Nazis destroy German Communists, because it viewed the rise of Hitler as strategically helpful to them.

It was also the Communists who were in the forefront of the anti-war movement in Western countries, after the Hitler-Stalin had been signed. It was they who insisted on no intervention. Niemoller himself became complicit in that same sort of activity when he enlisted in Soviet backed "peace" groups that opposed "American militarism".