Michael Nellis 19 Jan 2004
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From time to time, people have compared George Bush Jr with Adolf Hitler. In fact, blatantly partisan, hack journalists have been known to metaphorically throw up their hands in exasperation and demand to know why people insist on making these comparisons. Especially when those comparisons are made in the press by wrong-wing pundits[01]. The question, however, is not: how can you compare Bush with Hitler, but: how can you not compare Bush with Hitler?
Heck, I've done it myself; back when the propaganda du jour was Weapons of Mass Destruction, Shock and Awe, and the myth that using a half a ton of fulminating high explosives that kills everyone within forty meters constitutes a surgical strike. I've gone so far as to write in a public forum of cyberspace that Bush was an outright Nazi. Not a neo-nazi, mind. And I did this knowing that the difference is not one of attitude but a technical distinction. "Nazi" was a political designation you see; it referred to a member of the National-Socialist Party of Germany. Most people misused the term even back during the Second World War when it was synonymous with "German". The same thing happened during the cold war with "Communist" being misapplied to Russian citizens.
So, strictly speaking, George Bush can only be a neo-nazi. One whose intolerance and totalitarian views mirror those of Nazi Germany. Unless he's a closet member of the Nazi Party of America.
This is beside the point, however. The point is this: comparisons of George Bush Jr. to Adolf Hitler are unfair; they are unfair to Adolf Hilter. Hitler was actually of higher moral fiber than Bush.
Right about now either your eyes are bulging out in disbelief, if you are a rational person, or you are screaming incoherently that I am some kind of godless revisionist if you are a knee jerk reactionary. Too bad. Get over it. Unfortunately, George just seems to insist on racking up the parallels between himself and Adolf. I am going to examine some of those parallels, as well as the two differences (which is as I high as I can count those differences at the moment) between them.
Moral Fibre
Even during the First World War Adolf Hitler was a raving antisemite. He was so xenophobic and humourless in fact that his comrades in arms wouldn't even share a shell hole with him. He probably spouted off about the Jewish menace with about the same frequency a Born Again Pain in the Ass does about your lack of repentance. Hitler had comrades in arms because he served in the army as a battalion runner, and believe it or don't, he actually served with some distinction. Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross, second class and first class, and getting the Iron Cross was unusual for enlisted men; he was only a corporal by the end of the war. The officer class was formed primarily from the aristocracy, or the German equivalent thereof, and I imagine that the command structure was more than a little class conscious, and that most medals for bravery went disproportionately to officers.
So, Adolf Hitler served during war time and in a war zone. George Bush Jr. very blatantly dodged the draft by using political influence. He was up for being drafted, but was suddenly catapulted to the head of a list five hundred names long for selection in the Air National Guard.
Adolf Hitler went back to the front after he was wounded. George Bush Jr. deserted from military service (in legal parlance only), simply by not showing up for duty when he was transferred. And both those claims of malfeasance are supported by documentary evidence.
This difference is what, for me, puts Hitler on a higher moral plane than George Bush jr. You see, one of the principles of leadership is that you cannot ask others to do what you yourself will not or cannot do. By making a deliberate and conscious choice to refuse to serve his country in warfare, George Bush invalidated himself from any position from which he could order others to kill and be killed. Moreover, during the occupation of Iraq the Bush administration extended the periods of service for armed forces personnel and refused to terminate their contracts as originally stipulated.[02] This too, is rank hypocrisy coming from someone who simply walked away from his term of service.
Management Skills
The second difference between Bush and Hitler is economic effectiveness. In any fair and balanced review of a despot's accomplishments you have to acknowledge those positive accomplishments along with the negative. Adolf Hitler took over a small nation that was bankrupt, in the throes of hyperinflation[03], disarmed, and demoralized. And in a few short years he turned it into a power that overran almost all of Europe.[04]
George Bush junior took two largish, and by all accounts successful, corporations and ran them both into the ground. Even before the invasion of Iraq he was being villified for his self-destructive economic policies, for having cost three million Americans their jobs, and during the Occupation of Iraq, he was further villified for turning a huge financial surfeit into an equally huge deficit.
Of course, these examples alone doesn't make Hitler a better person in light of the insanity he perpetrated. It is necessary to show that George Bush is the moral equal to Hitler in other aspects to show how Hitler could outstrip Bush in morality through his military service.
Taking Power
It is necessary, first, to establish how Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Believe it or not, he did it legally. Mostly. At least he did it within the parliamentary guidelines and laws of the day. The question of his involvement in the Reichstag fire vis a vis (probably) Hermann Goering certainly taints any claims to legality, not to mention the bullying tactics by the brown-shirted goons of the Nazi party. Those goons, by the way, were essentially private citizens. They were not themselves elected anymore than card carrying members of the Republican or Democratic parties are necessarily elected. The brown-shirts were the rank and file.
Still and all, Hitler got his party to vote to transfer to him the authority of Hindenburg's office, to go into affect on Hindenburg's death, just three hours before Hindenburg died, and a month or so later he stood up in front of the German Parliament and asked them to democratically elect him to the position of dictator and to sweep aside the democratic establishment. Which they did. Oh, yes, there was political skullduggery afoot every step of the way. So what? You think it's any different today in free societies? Grow up before somebody spanks you with your lollypop.
Hitler's takeover was managed through The Enabling Act.[05] Bush's equivalent of The Enabling Act would have been a one-two punch where the USA PATRIOT Act was the "one", and the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 (DSEA) was the "two". The USA PATRIOT Act alone struck a severe blow to the structure of civil liberties and personal freedoms which had been so hard won in free speech cases before the Supreme Court since the 1930s, and since the Civil Rights movement and the COINTEL scandal of 1974 in particular. Then too, there was the ill-fated TIPS program which would have gone a long way to establishing a society of mutual surveillance of and by everybody.
DSEA was known informally as Patriot II. DSEA compared to USA PATRIOT Act the way a hydrogen bomb compares to an atomic bomb. DSEA, in effect, would have expanded the powers accorded to the U.S. government by the USA PATRIOT Act exponentially. Including up to stripping persons born in the U.S. of their citizenship and casting them out. Personally, I equate such a measure with Hitler's disfranchisement of the Jews.
Mind you, DSEA was equally ill-fated as the TIPS program, at first glance. Even the same U.S. Congress that had passed the USA PATRIOT Act without even knowing what was in it balked at DSEA when the Center for Public Integrity blew the whistle on this secret legislation. However, this attack on liberty and freedom is reportedly being implemented piecemeal by adding provisions of it to other laws as riders.
One could argue that there is no comparsion between the two cases since Bush does not have totalitarian control of the U.S. government. However, the USA PATRIOT Act does accord powers to the government that allow the circumvention of numerous civil liberties by the arbitrary exercise of those powers, and divests the state of accountability while making all citizens accountable to the state. Hitler's taking control of Germany was for the purpose of implementing such a system. Citizens were expected to put the state first and to subject themselves to its will completely. For their personal safety and well being, of course.
Book Burning and Anti-Intellectualism
In May of 1933 Nazi Germany began its assault on intellectualism by burning thousands of books. The book burnings were due to an effort to purge the school of "unGerman" writings. Of the books taken out of the schools and libraries, many had political or scientific viewpoints and information that offended hypersensitive Nazi sensibilities. Christa Kamenetsky, in writing about the time[06], points out the irony of the situation: that the books were burned to replace them with other books. Of course, the new books contained state approved material. Aside from the book burnings some twelve hundred academics were dismissed from their posts.
In the day of electronics, you don't have to burn physical books and replace them with the party line. A very quiet program of suppression via the altering and expurgation of material available through the internet has much the same affect. The Bush administration is actively engaged in the suppression of information pertaining to sexuality and sex based health care. Government web sites are required to reflect the party line of abstinence only "education", to withhold factual information about the effectiveness of contraception and prophylaxis and information about sexual health, and agencies are required to cut funding to both domestic and foreign NGOs under the same guidelines. The cutting of funds to foreign Non-Governmental Organizations means that health care clinics in destitute areas of developing countries can be closed down for talking about abortion[07], and even within the United States teachers are punished for admitting the truth about sex.[08] Aside from which, the U.S. federal government has also passed three laws mandating the censorship of sexuality and sexual health web sites that are not proscribably obscene through the use of filtering software. One survived Supreme Court review and was deemed to pass constitutional muster.
This suppression by the Bush administration is instituted to promote the religious ideological viewpoint and the pseudoscientific "information" of the ultra-conservatives. "Information" that is based on ignorance and a priori assumptions[09] and that has no basis in reality.[10]
Strategic Acumen
Hitler was an idiot. The biggest favour he did for the Allied powers during World War Two was to oversee parts of the war effort. And the biggest fumducker of them all was to open a second front against the Soviet Union.
George Bush is an idiot. He invaded a foreign country without any plan for getting out of it. As with Hitler, he is intent on opening a second front. This one with another nuclear power. Although North Korea can't pose much of a threat to the U.S. on its own,[11] it has an ally in China. A third nuclear power and a country with a population base that outnumbers the U.S. by more than three to one.
Hitler invaded Poland on a fabricated pretext. He or his tactitians had a concentration camp prisoner killed, put into the uniform of a Polish soldier, and the body was shot full of holes. The bullet riddled corpse was then held up as proof of an attack on German troops.
George Bush accused Saddam Hussein of having NBC Weapons[12] and posing a threat to the might of the United States. Hussein's gassing of the Kurdish villagers was cited as proof of his insanity. All indications are that Saddam Hussein never had any chemical weapons that he hadn't purchased from the United States. The NBCW propaganda was forged out of whole cloth, as was the propaganda that Hussein was in league with Osama Bin Laden.
Adolf Hitler bombed civilian population centers. The strategic reasoning was that it would demoralize the population of England and drive them to surrender.
Invading American and British forces generally bombed with a reckless disregard for the civilian population of Iraq, and while bombing, covered up the number of civilian deaths simply by not counting them, and by pretending they never happened by calling these deaths "collateral damage". The most egregious sample of this was when the U.S. bombed a restaurant in downtown Baghdad on the off chance they would be able to blow up Saddam Hussein.
The two weapons of choice for American air strikes were:
Adolf Hitler betrayed his political allies and personal friends along with his political enemies on the Night of the Long Knives.
Unfortunately, this parallel fails because the U.S. government was betrayed by its puppets, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, rather than it betraying them. Bush, however, did turn his back on a world of good will and sympathy and alienated all those countries upon whose good will he could have counted for support if he hadn't been such a butthead.
Crimes Against Humanity
The first argument any person will come up with against Hitler is The Holocaust, of course. Five to six million civilians disfranchised, enslaved, starved, or specifically sent to death camps for the Final Solution. Done because they were Jewish and because every despot needs an Enemy of the State. The corollary is that Bush has no Holocaust and can't possibliy perpetrate one. No, he cannot perpetrate a Holocaust in the same way Hitler did, but he can perpetrate a Holocaust nonetheless and is in the process of doing so.
In pandering to the ultra-conservative elements in the U.S., George Bush jr. is using the so-called Global Gag Rule to disfranchise all people who like sex. The Enemy of the State for the Bush Regime is anybody who has sex outside the guidelines the ultra-conservative lunatics seek to impose. It had been reported in 2001 that 78,000 women were dieing each year from unsafe abortions in the United States[correction]. A country where information about abortions and the right to opt for one is constitutionally protected. As has been often pointed out however, the principles of liberty and freedom that are near and dear in the U.S. are not applied anywhere beyond the borders of the U.S. by the government. By cutting funding for NGOs that promote contraception, prophylaxis, and safe abortions, George Bush is condemning to death inestimable millions. One analysis of his action suggested that the rate of incidence in one small African country, then at three million HIV infections, would double in ten years under his antisexuality policies.
The most likely counter-argument to this point is that those people do not have to fuck. That they are perfectly at liberty to stop screwing and can protect themselves that way. This is like saying German Jews could have protected themselves by no longer being Jewish.
The next most likely counter-argument is that the Holocaust has already happened, it is in the past and we know the extent of it. Any philosophical parallel accorded to Bush that has yet to happen cannot be counted the same way, and there is no way we can ever know the scope and extend of any such supposed Holocaust. There is, I will allow, something to this counter-point, but I don't hold to it myself. There is a principle of leadership that goes: You're in charge, it's your fault. Moreover, there is the principle, derived from the Nuremberg Trials, that "I was just following orders" doesn't cut it as a defense for crimes against humanity. The African HIV Holocaust is being perpetrated at the order of George Bush, or on his behalf by his lackeys, and he is responsible for it, although I have no doubt that he will duck such responsibility to his dieing day -- the same way he ducked military service. But I, for one, will hold him accountable for his Holocaust and I will not accept the excuse, "God told me to", or, "The bible says so".
It is also important to remember that Jews were not the only ones relegated to the concentration camps. Also consigned to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment were Communists and homosexuals. Of course, there probably weren't six million German people in both groups combined, and at any rate, they were only sentenced to the camps for "re-education and rehabilation". Once they were deemed to be rehabilitated they were allowed back out.
In place of Communists, George Bush cracked down on immigrants, having them rounded up, sequestered in prisons and held incommunicado and without representation, and then tried in secret and, one assumes, deported. He does have programs that target homosexuals, however, the most recent of which includes a program that specifically discriminates againt homosexual couples, and his remarks concerning that program during the State of the Union speech of 20 Jan can be considered to present a clear and present threat to the civil liberties and human rights of homosexuals.
Fear Factor
As I wrote above, Hitler targetted Jews because every despot needs an Enemy of the State. George Bush also has an enemy of the state: terrorists. Hitler used the "threat" of Judaism to frighten the German people into being sumissive. Bush uses the threat of terrorism the same way the eternal war was used in Orwell's 1984. To keep the populace off balance, confused, and malleable.
In both these cases, the "threat" came/comes from an enemy that had/has no sovereign power, that had/has no central organization, was/is vague and ill-defined, and, although terrorism actually does pose a threat; it is a very minor threat. Yes, the World Trade Center was horrific. So what? How long do you think it is going to take for a terrorist group to do any significant damage by blowing up the United States one or two buildings at a time? The country suffered a terrible tragedy, but the country survived and continues to this day.
In both cases, the idea there was/is a "threat" was/is used to justify the wholesale revocation of civil liberties, the abrogation of due process, and the implementation of a police state -- or quasi-police state in the U.S. -- with secret trials and military tribunals.
So Why the Snivelling
Given the parallels between Hitler and Bush, why are the Bushites foaming at the brain over such comparisons? Well, from my point of view there are three reasons for why Bush supporters are showering shit and derision in all directions. Any individual in the Bush camp will fall into at least one of these categories and quite possibly any two or even all three. The first and most simple reason is that they believe in George Bush and share his general convictions and attitudes. An attack on Bush is also, perforce, an attack on their own basic assumptions. The second reason has a foundation in Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.[13] This means 90% of the reporting in America is crud, as much as 90% of the reporting in other countries, individually as much as collectively, is also crud. An opinion/editorial or a column full of arguments based on the most egregious logical fallacies will push anybody's buttons. Although such writing will push different buttons in rational people from those buttons pushed in the hypersensitive.
The third reason is the big kicker, though, and it is simply this: comparing one's political enemies with Adolf Hitler is a tactic that was already being employed by the Republican (read: Bushite) camp, and which has been used since the Clintons, at least, and co-opting their own tactics to use against them will send raving fools with an axe to grind, and their sycophants, totally ballistic every time.[14] Consider this message: