To Hollywood, where former Home Improvement star Tim Allen is the latest oppressed conservative to speak out in the hope that the world will see the evil being done to his people before it is too late. In a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, the voice of Buzz Lightyear smilingly compared being a conservative in Hollywood currently to living in Nazi Germany. As he demi-joked: “You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody else believes.”
Now, there are those who feel the fact that Donald Trump is literally the president renders this analogy slightly flawed. I mean, you can’t say the odd conservative hasn’t caught a break.
In fact, you can’t really say much of what Allen said, in the view of the Anne Frank Center. “Tim, have you lost your mind?” wondered the centre’s director mildly in a statement. “No one in Hollywood today is subjecting you or anyone else to what the Nazis imposed on Jews in the 1930s — the world’s most evil program of dehumanisation, imprisonment and mass brutality, implemented by an entire national government, as the prelude for the genocide of nearly an entire people. Sorry, Tim, that’s just not the same as getting turned down for a movie role.”
Well, quite. No doubt Allen will now feel he has been persecuted even further underground – though somewhere that Toy Story cheques can still be cashed. But perhaps time has finally come for entertainers on both sides of the Trump argument to avoid all Nazi comparisons, unless they are absolutely and completely necessary.
