And yet, teaching people new things tends to affect the world more than political discussion ever could. I'm happy that HN exists as a solace from the political storm the rest of the world is wrapped up in.
Of course politics will affect each of us. But as tptacek is fond of saying, HN can't be all things to all people. It's more important to preserve the spirit of the site than to affect change. (In fact, it seems like one comes at the cost of the other.)
Let's not pretend that we can talk about the current political spectrum with anything near the certainty and information we have about Nazi Germany, the economic policies that were involved at the time, the propaganda used, and the world events at the time.
Who is the deity that gets to determine what the "spirit of the site" is? Is that spirit not simply made up of the collective users and dynamic by nature?
Aside from news and politics itself, I can hardly think of anything more political than history. People with different nationalities and sometimes party affiliations usually have wildly different perception of historic facts. Whether the Holocaust happened or not is an obvious and well-publicized one (I believe it did, for the record), but there's an uncountable amount of subtler and/or less famous differences in how humans perceive history.