I posted this earlier today elsewhere on BZ, but I think it should reach a larger audience. A surprising number of people on this web site do not seem to be well-informed about the topic and are prone to comparing others to things they apparently know nothing about. I hope to help educate people and remedy the problem with this brief summary.

I want to tell you all about the National Socialist German Workers Party, commonly known as the Nazi Party.

The Nazis were a specific political party in Germany from 1919 to 1945 headed by a man you may have hear of--he was named Adolf Hitler. Just like any political party it was, at its core, something built around ideological principles--the principles this party stood for were extreme nationalism, anti-parlimentarism, collectivism, and strong opposition to the Treaty of Versailles (which ended World War I and, they argued, left Germany in a shattered economic state).

The Nazis first tried to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed coup d'état attempt that left Hitler in jail--a time which he used to write Mein Kampf, a ponderously long dissertation of racist and fascist principles. Upon his release, Hitler reformed the Nazi party and mobilized, and in 1933 he became Chancellor of Germany. Establishing himself as "Der Führer," he speedily transformed Germany into an entirely totalitarian state. With absolute power and armies of stormtroopers at his fingertips, he instituted and upheld regime of racism, fear, and bloated nationalism.

And what did Hilter's regime do? They started the largest war of the twentieth century, what came to be called World War II. he invaded other countries and conquered a greater portion of an entire continent. Countless soldiers and civilians died because the Nazis wanted power. And what did they do back home while their armies were killing people abroad? They committed a massive genocide we now call "the Holocaust." Countless innocent people were rounded up, shuttled to death camps, tortured, and killed. By the millions. People were mutilated and murdered simply because the Nazis deemed them "inferior." The Nazi party represented the ultimate in racism.

That's what it means to be a Nazi. Murder. Genocide. Burning people alive in furnaces. Throwing human beings in chambers of poisonous gas. Showering people in corrosive acid. Performing gross medical and scientific experiments on still-living persons. Loading people into trains and shuttling them to extermination camps. Shooting someone in the head in the middle of the street just because his race or religion is different.

That's what Nazis did.

So, why am I giving you guys this history lesson? Well, simply because many people seem to have never learned it.

Please, if you're going to use a word or term, especially to describe other people, please make sure you know what it means first. Otherwise you'll probably make a comparison that makes no sense, and you'll look like a raving lunatic.