Sept. 9 (Bloomberg) -- How did the Nazis creep into the U.S. debate over health care? What do concentration camps, eugenics and Adolf Hitler have to do with what is arguably the wonkiest U.S. domestic issue of all time?

Health-care overhaul isn’t the only topic in American politics subjected to this kind of grotesque overkill. There are plenty of other examples. President Barack Obama’s plan for AmeriCorps, the domestic Peace Corps, has been likened to Hitler’s buildup of the SS. Obama’s plan to speak to school kids has been slammed as an attempt to “indoctrinate America’s children” to his socialist agenda.

Fascist. Socialist. What’s the difference? All that matters is hurling fake historical analogies at the president and hope they stick. Never mind the damage done to political discourse, or the shocking disregard for historical truth. That’s just collateral damage in America’s escalating culture war.

Nor is the abuse coming only from right-wingers on radio or cable-news shows -- though Fox News bears much of the blame for this historical contortionism. The hysterical protests against Obama’s talk to school children, for instance, included a statement from Jim Greer, the chairman of Florida’s Republican Party.

“As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology,” he said.

In a two-party system, someone in Greer’s position once represented mainstream political thinking. No more.

‘Kill Him’

Obama’s presidency, like his candidacy, has unleashed an astonishing amount of mindless venom that the political system seems incapable of controlling, much less quashing. Remember when someone at a Sarah Palin campaign rally shouted, “Kill him!”? You didn’t hear Palin criticize such talk. She was too intent on conveying her message that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.”

Exaggeration is part of politics, as is mockery. George W. Bush was ridiculed by comics and late-night talk-show hosts.

This is something else: a deliberate distortion of the truth.

Intellectuals share responsibility for this sorry trend. Thomas Sowell, a U.S. economist, was one of the first to compare Obama to both Hitler and Lenin in an October 2008 column.

Stop the Craziness

It’s time more people denounced this craziness, as Representative Barney Frank did recently at a town meeting, when a young woman flashed a poster showing Obama with a Hitler-like moustache, and asked about Frank’s support for Nazi policies.

“On what planet do you spend most of your time?” Frank replied.

There is no room in American politics for invoking Nazis. Hitler’s Germany and World War II have absolutely nothing to do with the political choices now facing the U.S. Nor is Obama by any stretch of the imagination a socialist.

If Americans want to find out how the past relates to the present, they should tune into the debate in Eastern Europe. Over there, Hitler is equated with Josef Stalin. The Soviet dictator’s 1939 pact with the Nazis set the stage for both the German invasion of Poland 70 years ago this month and the Soviets’ near simultaneous occupation of a large swath of Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

This isn’t some ignorant or deliberately misleading abuse shouted out at a town-hall meeting: It is history’s unfinished business in a part of Europe that bore the brunt of the mass killings by both Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s.

Deep Grievances

The latest clash over history began this summer when the parliamentary assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe passed a resolution condemning both Stalin and Hitler for starting World War II.

Not surprisingly, the Russians -- who suffered huge losses during the war -- were infuriated by the comparison, even though they have acknowledged the “immorality” of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Their reaction was both aggressive and defensive: They pointed to the French, British and Polish collusion in Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938, implying that Stalin did no worse.

This debate isn’t over, and perhaps never will be. The grievances are too raw, and the national memories are too different for Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and others to settle on a common historical truth.

Oddly enough, it fell to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putinto declare last week that “half-truth is always deceit,” an interesting choice of words since half-truths and deceit were a Soviet specialty.

Putin called on Russian and Polish historians to collaborate on uncovering the past’s still-hidden secrets.

This won’t satisfy Russia’s neighbors, who want Russia to follow Germany in a sweeping admission of guilt for past crimes. But at least it is an acknowledgement that the historical record matters.

That’s more than can be said about the level of debate, and the knowledge of history, on display in the U.S.

(Celestine Bohlen is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 8, 2009 18:00 EDT