From time to time, here and at our predecessor board, somebody raises the question of how much Bush is like Adolf Hitler. The conversation is invariably shallow, with the world-weary eggheads rolling their eyes out of their sockets while trouncing the angry lefty who raised the question in the first place. Bush offers no hint of wanting to exterminate the Jews or any other similar genocidal madness, and that pretty much kills the comparison for any practical purpose.
I bring up Hitler in the same breath with Bush for another reason altogether. I assume that Bush will never propose mass executions and he will therefore never deserve to be called "another Hitler." But he damn sure is a sui generis W -- and the depth and breadth of what he is capable of doing is still unknown.
For people living in Germany, there never was a point where either the aspiring Nazi Party or the governing Nazi Reich ever announced:
"We are nihilistic madmen who will start unprovoked wars against Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Yugoslavia, Great Britain, Greece, the USSR and the USA -- and try to conquer all those societies at once. We will attack the cities of our enemies from the air in an effort to destroy their civilization, so that we can take over and demand fealty from everybody on the planet. We will hunt down and slaughter all the Jews and Gypsies in Europe, because we think the world will be a better place after they are gone.
"We know that our wars of aggression and our systematic genocide will induce the most profound anger the world has ever seen, and millions of our people will be killed in this regime of Total War. There is a chance that we will lose this war, as we will be signicantly outnumbered by our enemies. If we lose, our country will be occupied by foreigners who will define our future for us.
"Nevertheless we have a vision for the future of our Folk -- and our destiny is to rule the world as we are the best people on earth."
History shows that thousands of people, particularly German Jews, foresaw parts or all of this fate in advance. But millions of Germans, and millions of people the world over, did not believe that Hitler would really be as bad as all that. In hindsight, it is easy for us to say that everybody should have realized that the man was a psychopathic lunatic. But for those that figured it out ahead of time, they must have had a Nazi Moment -- the last straw that confirmed that Hitler really meant to bring death and destruction to the entire world.
I have often wondered about That Nazi Moment -- what it would be like to be a student in Munich or Dresden or Berlin in 1933 or 34 or 36 or 38? You could choose to believe that the authoritarian measures of the Reich were unfortunate but beyond your control. You could regard the harassment of Jews to be unfortunate but beyond your control. You could regard the bizarre symbolism and mass hysteria of the Nazi movement as unfortunate but beyond your control. You have your own life to lead in any event. By seeing the future accurately, as some did, you pretty much condemned yourself to death or exile.
In 2004, you really can't know for sure what the Bush Administration is capable of doing. But here are the pieces of a puzzle that could match anything that Hitler did:
1. Ideology. The Project for a New American Century contends that the USA has determined the correct political structure for all societies -- secular democracy with free markets. It is now the official National Security Policy of the United States to use our military to coerce other countries to adopt this "single model" of national development.
2. War. The incumbent President has responded to the crimes of September 11 by declaring war against all "evil." This preposterous formulation carries no limiting context, no practical guide to discriminating more evil from less evil or evil from the merely awful. In practice, this purposefully vague theory of fighting evil has been used to link a war against Afghanistan (which was partially responsible for the September 11 attacks) to a war against Iraq (which had nothing to do with September 11) on the grounds that Iraq was run by the sort of people who would commit further acts of terrorism if they had the chance. Tens of millions of Americans support George W. Bush's war against Iraq for precisely this reason. Obviously, this rationale for war is infinitely elastic.
3. Power. The current government now claims the right to designate any American citizen an "enemy combattant" with no means of questioning the designation. Anybody so designated is thereby stripped of citizenship, and all constitutional rights. No courts, no lawyers, no press, no calls to friends -- just, poof -- you are now an un-person. Meanwhile, the current government contends that its troops in the field are answerable to no law other than that of the military command structure.
4. Prisons. The current government has already built a chain of detention centers around the world that are shrouded in secrecy and where physical coercion is at the sole discretion of the jailers. The information age has made it impossible to keep all of the details of these installations secret -- bizarre sexual rituals and systematic degradation are the tools of choice in trying to coerce detainees to give up information about other targets of the infinite war on terror.
5. Dishonesty. Here is where it gets frightening. The only limit on any of these four elements of infinte control is the conscience of the government. They start from the premise that they are fighting evil, and therefore they define themselves as good. All abuse and any mistakes they make are always cast in contrast to the Evil of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein -- we may put underwear on your head, but they will cut your head off. If you go further and challenge their motivations directly, they declare you a supporter of the terrorists. These cheap rhetorical games are bad enough, and ought to scare anybody with half a brain to death. But when you realize that these are all serial liars who never tell the same story twice, you realize that what deep shit we are in when they say, "Trust us."
Well.
At least they're not Hitler. At least they're not gassing Jews. At least they're not killing their political opponents.
So here's the question. Let's view everything about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft in the most favorable light as of June 1, 2004. Let's regard all these assertions of unilateral power as designed only to prevent further terrorist attacks against the US and our allies. Let's assume that only real terrorists are likely to be sent to Gitmo without due process of law.
OK, for now.
What should a vigilant American be on the lookout for in case these guys aren't as good as they claim they are? What detail would convince us that instead of earnest men trying to protect the citizenry we have nihilistic madmen driving the whole world toward death and destruction?
What would be that Bush moment?
My fear is that Bush and his colleagues believe that the demographic shifts in America that obliged them to sue to their way into the White House in 2000 have convinced them that the American experiment with mass democracy must come to an end. The War on Terror is their stalking horse for shitcanning the whole business of individual rights and popular government. They dream of conquering the Middle East, just as we once conquered the American West, and they realize that they cannot make this happen within the four corners of the Constitution.
They believe that America must be recast into a permanent warfare state, with millions of young people trained to occupy Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Democracy must be controlled or abandoned, and all who might interfere with their grand vision for Global Empire must be suppressed by whatever means necessary.
I fear that these messianic madmen are psychologically incapable of grasping the concept of defeat -- that they are all overgrown adolescents who cannot govern their own petty egos. So they have carefully set up the mechanism for a global police state under cover of the catastrophe of September 11, assuming that once their dream is accomplished and all the Middle East is tamed, then the American People will bow down at their feet to worship the men who had the boldness to capitalize on the opportunity of being the only superpower at the dawn of the New American Century.
Their minds cannot grasp the possibility that we might get our asses kicked on the ground in the Middle East.
So, assuming for a moment that the PNAC manifestos should be read like Mein Kampf, what should tip off the average American that we are not dealing with honest men trying to protect us from terrorists, but instead are faced with a gaggle of bloodthirsty fools consumed by the painfully familiar dream of Napoleon and Hitler?
The one answer that I will not accept is they wouldn't do that. That's what the people who stayed in Germany thought.
Personal note: I WAIVE ALL COPYRIGHT PROTECTION FOR THIS POST. FEEL FREE TO CUT AND PASTE THIS ENTRY TO ANY OTHER VENUE.
From Fire With Fire at www.upsizethis.org
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