George W. Bush exceeded Hitler's 50-to-1 ratio.

[no_to_war_economy]

Neither the United States nor Israel is equivalent to Nazi Germany, yet both countries have adopted a Nazi-like obsession with collective punishment. Israeli Defense Forces, which subject centers of Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank to curfews and encirclement by barbed-wire fences, taught their techniques to U.S. occupation troops in Iraq. After Islamist suicide pilots killed 3,000 Americans in the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government justified the killing of 200,000 Afghans and Iraqis as an act of "self-defense."

George W. Bush exceeded Hitler's 50-to-1 ratio.

Now Israel is "reacting" to the capture of two of its soldiers by the Palestinian resistance organization Hezbollah by invading and bombing Lebanon. Death tolls that fall disproportionately heavily upon Palestinians have long been a hallmark of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the 2000-03 intifada, for example, at least seven Palestinians were killed by Israelis for every Israeli killed by a Palestinian. Now, as of this writing, more than 500 Lebanese civilians have been killed by Israeli bombs. On the Israeli side, 15 civilians have died in Hezbollah rocket attacks and 14 soldiers have been killed in combat.

Current ratio: 30-to-1.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0721-31.htm

[Slaughtermeyer]

1. Compare Hitler's first 5 years with Bush's

Bush is responsible for the deaths of far more innocent civilians in his first 5 years of office than Hitler was in his first 5 years in power. Hitler waited over 6 years before he started his warmongering, Bush waited only a few months before starting his first war.

[MrPrax]

2. 1300:1?

In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich was the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia which had been occupied by Germany in 1939. On the morning of May 27, 1942, he was being driven from his country villa to his office in Prague. When he reached the Holešovice area of Prague, his car was attacked by two Czech resistance fighters, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš.

These men, who had been trained in Britain, had parachuted into Czechoslovakia in December, 1941, as part of Operation Anthropoid. On June 4, 1942, Heydrich died in Bulovka hospital in Prague from an infection. Hitler, enraged, ordered Kurt Daluege, Heydrich's replacement, to wade through blood to find Heydrich's killers. The Germans began a massive retaliation campaign against the civilian Czech populace.

The best known of these assaults occurred on June 10. German security police surrounded the village of Lidice, blocking all avenues of escape. The Nazis chose this village because of its residents' known hostility to the occupation and because Lidice was suspected of harbouring local resistance partisans. The entire population was rounded up, and all men over fifteen years of age were put in a barn. They were shot the next day. Another nineteen men, who were working in a mine, along with seven women, were sent to Prague, where they were also shot. The remaining women were shipped to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where about a quarter of them died in the gas chambers or from overwork. The children were taken to a concentration camp at the Gneisenaustreet in Łódź (nowadays in Poland), where they were sorted by racial criteria, and those deemed suitable for 'Aryanization' were shipped to Germany (after the war most were found and returned); the rest of the children (82) were gassed in Chełmno. The village itself was razed and bulldozed. A genuine film document, made by a German soldier, has survived.
...
The death toll resulting from the effort to avenge the death of Heydrich is estimated at 1,300. This count includes relatives of the partisans, their supporters, Czech elites suspected of disloyalty and random victims like those from Lidice.
Wiki



Article 13. The provisions of Part II cover the whole of the populations of the countries in conflict, without any adverse distinction based, in particular, on race, nationality, religion or political opinion, and are intended to alleviate the sufferings caused by war.
Fourth Geneva Convention, Part 2, 1949

[Metta]

3. Thanks for the details.

The point people don't seem to understand is that * et. al. just don't care who among us gets hurt or dies as long as they have their way. I've never seen a more asleep bunch of people in my lifetime since the South in the '50s and '60s. ... a truly tragic waste of human incarnations.

[MrPrax]

4. Agreed...

It seems the much larger issue than most are willing to admit...killing untold innocent people to get the 'bad guy' is a slippery slope and indefensible. It's Stalinist as well as Hitlerian and presumeably the whole basis of why the West thinks it's the best is wrapped up in this moral aversion to 'revenge' or the sacrificing of human beings to political objectives (no matter how noble they are).

I notice the people that speak so eloquently about Peace seem to pass over that part in their missives...the primacy of human life which should trump most things including the annoyance of idiot terrorists. But apparantly such considerations are suspended when it comes to the aid of Israel.

I mean the script obviously would be different if, say it was China bombing the shit out of Nepal, because of the tendency of Tibetans, in occupied Tibet, running back over the borders. The moral relativism of the arguments present for Israel-Lebanon would disappear immediately and virtually NO ONE would support the Chinese attacks, just like no one wanted to defend Russia when it was turning Chechnya to rubble.

The left tends towards egalitarianism; it's the right that usually fires out moral justifications to limit equality and present 'certain' people as less worthy of the protection of civil society than others.

It really goes to show just how 'values and ethics' themselves become transitory; merely replaced when a new 'product' comes along.

[Metta]

5. It's Machiavellian.

Whatever you need to do to further the objectives of the prince. For my understanding, the primacy of life is merely a convenient slogan to pacify the base and further their objectives. If they understood that they can privatize gene work/stem cell research they'd be on it like stink on shit.

The furtherings of the right are based on feudalism and fascism, never equality. Malcolm X said "Everyone needs a scapegoat."

Have a donut. :donut: :donut:

[TahitiNut]

10. Neither the Bushoilinis nor the Likuddites have any apparent interest in

... "alleviat(ing) the sufferings caused by war."

Shock and awe. Punishment. "Pressure the Lebanese people..." These are all thin facades of paternalistic (arrogantly autocratic) infliction of suffering on people. It's deliberate. It's intentional.

It's also a war crime and crime against humanity.

[FUGW]

6. It's counter productive, these types of comparisons only help to

paint us as unreasonable GWB haters. What did you think when they tried to make Saddam out to be Hitler like? I know where your coming from but we don't have the luxury of just talking about how these monsters are ruining the country. We have to act nationally in anyway we can only action will bring a change and we can change things. There was a reason GWB wanted us to go shopping after 9/11.

[datasuspect]

7. yeah, i know

these comparisons of bush to hitler: hitler was an effective public speaker.

[FUGW]

8. And he united the people.

[Vickers]

9. Hitler was also a decorated war hero, while George hid.

He's such a fucking coward.

[MrPrax]

11. Hitler was shorter... n/t