Reply #65: Tell that to the millions who died as the Nazis marched across Europe-- [View All]

[Peace Patriot]

that the Nazis are an "over-used cliche."

He is quite specific: "Tony Blair and George Bush are guilty of the crime of planning and committing aggressive warfare."

Bush/Blair have done to Iraq exactly what Hitler did to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, France--invaded them without justification, because he and the Nazis wanted to make a Nazi empire in which the superior race of German Aryans would rule everybody else. They would have done the same to England, Russia and the U.S. if these countries hadn't mobilized to stop them. Read the "Project for a New American Century." The Bush Cartel is following a plan--or appears to be following a plan--very similar to the Nazis' plan for world domination. Iran is next.

They planned and executed the Iraq war without justification, slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people, and are illegally occupying that country and killing Iraqis who fight back. And they are clearly planning further invasions. Listen to their rhetoric. They are making up all kinds of excuses to invade Iran, just as they did with Iraq--based on the premise that they now have a "right" to be in Iraq (thus, if any Iranians are supplying arms to Iraqis, that is somehow an offense that deserves punishment), and also based on the premise that Iran somehow has lost the right to defend itself (for instance, by developing nuclear weapons) against the plain unadulterated aggression and threats of the Bush Cartel. The Nazis used the same kinds of justifications to crush smaller, weaker countries and any resistance that developed.

When Bush announced his new "doctrine" of preemptive, unilateral war, at West Point in 2002--a speech that the war profiteering corporate news monopolies failed to highlight as they should have--the Bush Cartel crossed the line into Hitlerian ideology, in opposition to all international law. Within months, they had invaded Iraq without the slightest justification--and, indeed, in the teeth of world opposition--and are now saber-rattling at Iran and Syria. Similarly, the creation by fiat of a legal category of "enemy combatant" (a war prisoner with no human rights) and the egregious violation of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice as to the torture and indefinite detention without trial of persons who have not even been accused of a crime, let alone convicted, parallel Hitler's view of the law: whatever is convenient for the "defense of the Fatherland" (i.e., expansion of Nazi power) is justified, no matter what law it breaks.

The parallels are compelling. This is not an "over-used cliche." This is the lesson of history, that if aggressive war is permitted to go unpunished, it will spread. The conquerers will not stop with the first conquest. This is WHY, after WW II, the United Nations was created, and all of the treaties and conventions that formed our world--to STOP this kind of aggression. And we are now in violation of all of those agreements and laws, and are acting just like the bloody Nazis who inspired them.

There are further parallels to Nazism within our society--the stolen elections, the retention of the forms of democracy without the substance, the vicious anti-intellectualism, the sham patriotism, the hatred of "the left," etc., etc. The signs are there, and anyone who doesn't see them, or who dismisses them as a "cliche," is guilty of sticking his head in sand.

Rather than trying to shut down discussion--by airily dismissing this quite relevant historical parallel as a "cliche"--we should be exploring what the lessons are, and what are the similarities and dissimilarities in our situation, in order to devise effective strategies to defeat this junta and restore democracy in the U.S.

There ARE some important dissimilarities--one of the critical ones being the Bush Cartel's motive of greed. Greed trumps ideology every time--very unlike the Nazis. These are essentially empty men, with no ideology (not even a false, evil one) and no interest in governing. PNAC and all this "Christian Crusade" business is just window-dressing. They are not creating anything that anyone--even brownshirts and wingers--could believe in. They may pave the way for a Hitler, but--odd to say--they don't have Hitler's sincerity or passion, or governing skill, for that matter--insane though it all was. Hitler wanted to transform the world. Dick Cheney & Co. just want to create opportunities to loot it. PNAC means nothing to them, except as the means to lard global corporate predators like Halliburton, and to have the power to do so. And the more this becomes apparent, the faster their support--which was only minority support to begin with--sinks.

Or so it seems to me. And the biggest strategic question, to my mind, is whether or not the great progressive American majority can recover the power of the vote, in the face of Bushite corporate control of vote tabulation (with "trade secret," proprietary programming code permitted in their contracts for electronic voting systems), and bipartisan corruption in the $4 billion electronic voting boondoggle--in order to throw these criminals out of office.

In any case, this is the kind of analysis we need. And off-hand dismissal of the Nazi model--as poor P.R. (or whatever)--is not helpful. Cliche or not, the Nazi model is instructive, and was a searing lesson to the world about what overweaning, unchecked executive power, and the possession of a vast military machine, can lead to.