A couple days ago I had the misfortune to be working in an area where Mr. Limbaugh’s radio show was playing. I half listened
to him, more for nostalgic reasons than any hope of learning anything.
A caller was labeling Mr. Limbaugh a hypocrite for his fanatical attacks on those that compare Mr. Bush to Mr. Hitler. “Now it’s
getting interesting”, I thought. True to form, Mr. Limbaugh blasted the caller for even contemplating the idea that the
Bush/Hitler comparisons held any validity - in fact Mr. Limbaugh rabidly attacked the woman’s patriotism.
Having been listening to the show for a while, I agreed with the caller in that Mr. Limbaugh was indeed being typically hypocritical - this got me to wondering further: Are there any valid parallels between Hitler and Bush? Between the current administration and the Nazis of the 1930’s?
The following links and excerpts are a small subset of the information and opinions I found. Obviously I can make no claims as to the accuracy of the information.
Caveat Lector
Let’s start with a history lesson. This piece gives a pretty good time-line of the Nazi rise to power:
It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.
OK so there may be some similarities, both situational and personal, but I suspect this is a carefully constructed
representation and may hold as much relevance as the daily horoscope.
Continuing…
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation’s now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people’s homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
The Patriot Act took less than 6 weeks after the WTC fell.
Moving on…
To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn’t enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation’s largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.
What’s interesting about this piece is that without any names and just a small amount of bias, one would think he’s writing about Mr. Bush.
But enough of that one, I suggest you read the entire work yourself and draw your own conclusions.
According to research carried out over the last few years, Wall Street bankers (amongst others) financed Hitler’s rise to power whilst making large profits at the same time. What is yet still more deplorable is the fact that relatives of the current U.S. president were amongst this group of individuals.
U.S. authors Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Cheitkin reveal in the recently published George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography that Prescott Bush (George W. Bush’s grandfather) and other directors of the Union Banking Company (UBC) were Nazi collaborators.
This was news to me. I’d not heard that Grandpa Bush was involved with the Nazis. Does this matter? Can we hold the sons
responsible for the father’s actions? No, but we can be suspicious about the attitudes that are passed from generation to generation - if Bush Sr. was raised in an environment that espoused fascism then it may be fair to assume that some of that philosophy was embedded.
(Of course we can’t forget that the old bootlegger Joe Kennedy was rather enamored with the Nazis also, and I don’t recall any comparisons between JFK and the Nazis.)
Searching for corroborating information didn’t take long. There is lots of data regarding this relationship. For example:
“Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951″- Federal Documents
But does any of this support comparing the President Of The United States with one of the most heinous figures in recent
history? There may be some coincidental similarities (if cloaked in vague enough language) and there may even be some tenuous familial links, but direct comparisons?
Nazi leader Herman Goering once remarked that it was easy to lead people into war, regardless of whether they resided within “a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.” All that was required, Goering argued, is for their government to “tell them they are being attacked, and [then] denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.”[Full Quote]
This is absolutely chilling. Not because of who said it but that it’s so obviously true - and so obviously being applied to us
today, right now - and most vigorously by the self proclaimed “defenders of liberty”, the right wing radio guys.
But the coup by the plutocratic supporters of George W. Bush in the year 2000, coupled with the invasion of Iraq, changed all that, revealing how easily Americans can be manipulated, how willing they are to be lied to, and how vacuous the freedoms of speech and press have become when the bulk of information is filtered through corporate-controlled media that profit from jingoism, propaganda and dishonesty. But, perhaps most disturbingly, these events demonstrated that even though the words “freedom, democracy and human rights” are chanted like mantras by political leaders, many Americans have apparently welcomed, or at the very least are blissfully unconcerned about, the erosion of freedom, the abuse of human rights, and the nation"s growing transformation from a democracy into a neo-fascist dictatorship.
That this is published in Pravda and not the New York Times supports the points being made. It takes no more than some simple observation of modern America to see just how accurate this assessment is - and it’s damned scary that we don’t have to look far or even really search - just look around.
Fascism fits well into the simplistic ideologies of the Bush dictatorship. While fascists essentially agree with America"s forefathers that people are basically evil, they actively manipulate this evil by trumpeting emotion over logic, and “great lies” over truth. This is normally accomplished through the exploitation of “scapegoats,” who are marketed as the source of all social ills, coupled with appeals to humanity"s basest instincts–bigotry, greed, fanatical nationalism, fear, and lust for conquest (just to name a few).
While I may quibble of some the words the author chooses, I can’t argue with the basic idea he espouses. These techniques are not new to Bush&Co., they’ve been in common usage for at least the last 25 years although not to the obvious and blatant level that this administration has taken them.
If you read no other works referenced here, this one should be required reading.
- “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator,” said Adolf Hitler.
- “God told me to strike at Al Qa’ida and I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did. With the might of God on our side we will triumph,” said George Bush.
I spent more than a few hours reading all manner of works, ranging from the disgusting to the apologetic. But what’s more interesting is what I did not find: not one well reasoned argument as to why Bush&Co. are not comparable to the Nazis of the 1930’s. The only arguments I found against the comparison are those that attack the comparator’s patriotism - and that as demonstrated above, is simply proving the point.
So am I going to now openly accuse Bush of being another Hitler? No, for two reasons:
- Doing so will simply elicit adhominem attacks on myself, effectively invalidating any arguments I may be using to sway my audience’s point of view.
- Direct comparisons, I believe, are disingenuous and counterproductive. Although comparing the rise of, techniques used by, and philosophies of the Nazis to the current administration may be valid and in some circumstances useful in trying to convince others.
Besides, Hitler was a great orator.