- Is George W. Bush another Hitler?
-
- James Taranto, <http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=110003753>writing
in the Wall Street Journal , offered up an offhand dismissal of Counterpunch
as "an outfit whose staple is stuff comparing Bush to Hitler,"
which seems to suggest he thinks the very notion is beyond the pale of
civil discourse.
-
- But stay. As one of the first to notice some similarities
between Bush II and the early Hitler, I didn't actually say that George
and Adolf were joined at the hip. Indeed, I suggested in <http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff02012003.html>my
Counterpunch article back on Feb. 1 , during the high-pressure White House
drive to war in Iraq, that our unelected president was surely no Hitler,
since "Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was." More importantly,
I didn't equate Bush with Hitler because there are some other big differences
between the two.
-
- So far, for example, while he has rounded up some Arab
and Muslim men purely because of their ethnicity or religion, Bush has
not started gassing them--at least not yet. What I did say, however (and
I think subsequent events have proven me even more correct than did the
events that had occurred prior to Feb..1), is that some of the tactics
of the Bush administration resemble those of Hitler and his Brownshirts.
I would go further and add that Bush's attorney general, John Ashcroft,
a man who has pointedly praised the old Confederacy, would probably feel
quite comfortable in brown with a hakenkreuz tacked to his sleeve.
-
- What are some of the Nazi-like tactics of the Bush administration?
-
- Let's start with war-mongering. The American Heritage
Dictionary, no bastion of leftism, defines fascism as "A system of
government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically
through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent
nationalism."
-
- Now we may not yet have a dictatorship, but we do have
the extreme right with a solid lock on power in Washington today, and a
glance at the top echelon of the Bush administration makes it clear that
there is not just a merger, there's a thorough melding of state and business
leadership in this administration. As for belligerent nationalism, what
else is one to call a war of aggression like the one against Iraq, especially
now that it's clear what most thinking people realized before the war even
started--that Iraq had no significant offensive military capability, much
less weapons of mass destruction. It was all a massive lie deliberately
designed to scare the living crap out of an already nervous American public,
so that they would accept the ongoing assault on the Bill of Rights being
masterminded by Ashcroft. That strategy was vintage Goebbels.
-
- Then there's the suspension of habeas corpus, right to
counsel, and a host of other civil liberties. When American citizens like
Jose Padilla can be clapped into prison--a military prison at that--with
no charges filed, no access to friends or relatives, and no right to talk
to a lawyer, we have crossed a line into fascist territory. Maybe we haven't
reached the point of wholesale mass arrests and concentration camps (though
even that, reportedly, is being contemplated by the proto-fascist Ashcroft,
and we know who appointed that right-wing religious zealot and racist to
his post), but once the principle of arrest without charge or trial is
accepted by the courts, the move to camps is a quantitative, not a qualitative
step. I would note that, Guantanamo, where hundreds of Afghan combattants
have been languishing in horriffic conditions, is being turned into a concentration
camp, and Bush has ordered the establishment of a kangaroo-court military
tribunal assemblyline that ends with a gas chamber and execution, so maybe
even that parallel will prove prescient.
-
- What is particularly troubling about the Bush administration's
enthusiastic foray into preventative detention and arrest without charge
is that it is also appointing wholesale a group of federal judges at all
levels who have little or no respect for such niceties as habeas corpus
or the right to face one's accuser. Eventually, if this process continues,
victims of Ashcroft's mad vendetta against civil rights and liberties will
have no one to turn to but equally rightwing and perverse jurists like
Antonin Scalia and his adoring acolyte Clarence Thomas.
-
- It's worth pointing out too that Hitler was not the monster
of 1939 when he took power in 1933. Indeed, when he first came to power,
in the wake of the Reichstag fire, a traumatized nation saw him as a savior
of the German government, which at the time was a parliamentary democracy.
Even as he began ratcheting down the rights of the citizenry, and as his
brownshirted minions and his gestapo began oppressing certain unpopular
minorities and political enemies on the left, there were many, including
in the United States, who saw Der Fuhrer positively (Henry Ford and Charles
Lindbergh come immediately to mind). So the fact that the Bush administration
is not at this point a fascist government should not preclude or deter
us from examining its behavior for evidence of fascist-like behavior.
-
- The fundamental difference I see between the Germany
of the middle 1930s and the America of today is that, even as many Americans
sit on their sofas and absorb the propaganda that passes for news on their
TV sets, there remains a vestigial notion of democracy and civil liberties,
the legacy of over two centuries of American civil society. A significant
percentage of Americans--certainly far greater than in Hitler's Germany
in the years before World War II--are troubled by the current trampling
of democracy and the Bill of Rights, as attested by the wave of towns and
cities and even state governments which have passed statutes protecting
the Bill of Rights against the Aschroft-inspired onslaught of the Patriot
Act.
-
- So let's make ourselves clear here. George Bush is not
Hitler. Yet. America is not a fascist state. Yet. John Ashcroft isSwell,
let's not go there. The attorney general, a man whose claim to fame is
having lost an election to a dead man, is perhaps the leading edge of a
drive in that direction.
-
- Wall Street Journal commentator Taranto may mock Counterpunch
and other publications that point to fascist tendencies in the current
administration, but he had his forebears aplenty in 1930s Germany, where
the newspapers of the day were awash in apologists for Chancellor Hitler's
gradual assumption of dictatorial powers. These pundits, like Taranto and
his ilk, failed or were unwilling to see where things were heading, and
justified the obvious erosion of freedom and democracy in the name of combating
the scourge of terrorism and revolution, as well as the threat of the "other"
posed by such undesirables as the Jews and the Gypsies. Today's American
counterparts of these apologists, like Taranto, justify the setting aside
of long-standing civil liberties in the name of combating terror and dealing
with such undesirables as the Middle Eastern immigrants in our midst.
-
- Calling attention to the parallels with the demise of
Weimar Germany and the rise of Hitler is hardly out of line.
-
- It is what we should be seeing more of in the "respectable"
media.
-
- Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation
into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. A collection of Lindorff's
stories can be found here: <http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html>http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff07182003.html
|