<font face="impact" size="8">Bush and Hitler</font>

The Striking Similarities.
The Incidental Differences.
A NERO FIDDLED Special Report.

These days, everyone seems to be comparing George W. Bush and Adolph Hitler. Last week, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia caused a stir when he said that Bush's attempts to destroy deliberative procedure kind of reminded him of how Hitler did the exact same thing. "Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality," Byrd pointed out. "He recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal." And at the end of February, Ted Rall published this audacious cartoon, pointing out some "Reasons Bush Isn't Like Hitler." The final panel, captioned "Hitler took personal responsibility," is one of the most compelling and disturbing images Rall has yet given us; it is undoubtedly the first contemporary comic strip drawing of Adolph Hitler having just blown his brains out. Readers of Rall's blog subsequently submitted their own comparisons; one said it was easy to tell the difference because "Hitler had a moustache."

So it's clear that there are similarities, as well as differences, between the two men. Senator Byrd has a handle on the similarities, and Ted Rall seems to have a keen eye for the differences. But many people are asking, is it fair to compare them at all? Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, thinks not. Sparing no adjective, Foxman declared that it was "hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party." Republican Chair Ken Mehlman -- the man is a chair -- said Byrd's remarks were "reprehensible and beyond the pale," and Senator Rick Santorum demanded that Byrd retract his comments. "They lessen the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate," said the Senator who compared gay sex to "man-on-dog" sex. (Those were Santorum's words. "Man-on-dog" sex. He didn't even have to think about it.)

One year ago, someone submitted a 30-second spot, comparing Bush and Hitler, to a MoveOn.org contest. The ad showed images of Hitler and the Nazis, and culminated with a picture of Bush taking the oath of office. "What were war crimes in 1945," the text ran, "is foreign policy in 2005." Responses were ferocious. Ed Gillespie, then the RNC chairman, called the ad "the worst and most vile form of political hate speech." But it is not only the right wing that cries foul when Bush and Hitler are compared. Stressing that this particular ad was not among the contest's fifteen finalists, MoveOn removed it, and then apologized for it. And on a recent broadcast, Al Franken said he thought it was bad form and bad taste to invoke Hitler in discussions of Bush.

In this special report, NERO FIDDLED looks in depth at George W. Bush and Adolph Hitler -- two powerful statesmen who are, to quote Mr. Miyagi, "different, but same."

MASS-MURDER

Right up front, it must be said that Bush is simply not in Hitler's league as a mass-murderer. Hitler exterminated 13,000,000 people. Even if he finishes his second term unimpeached, Bush is not likely to approach that death toll. 1,513 Americans have died thus far in Bush's Iraq debacle; the confirmed number of Iraqi deaths presently hovers around 16,230, although a recent investigation by Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health found credible evidence that the Iraqi death toll is over 100,000.

It's horrifying, and it's geocide, but Hitler still leads Bush by some 12,898,500 corpses. The 152 prisoners Bush executed when he was the governor of Texas are just a drop in the bucket, though it is noteworthy that no other governor in the history of the United States has executed so many.

(And it's disturbing to know that Bush took delight in his Texas killing spree. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Time reported: "Although [Bush] said he was anguished by the decision [to execute a prisoner]...writer Tucker Carlson described Bush mimicking the woman's final plea for her life. '"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."'" At the time, Gary Bauer -- competing with Bush for the Republican nomination -- said, "I think it is nothing short of unbelievable that the governor of a major state running for president thought it was acceptable to mock a woman he decided to put to death.")

In "Now and Then," their compelling article from June of 2002, W. David Jenkins and Sara DeHart acknowledge that "Bush II has not yet achieved Nazi Germany's horror at its apex," and that "it's sincerely hard to believe that Bush II's 'Final Solution' includes the elimination of an entire race." Still, the authors note that over one thousand people of Arab descent are "being held without charge or access to legal counsel." But as they conclude, "The enemy is anyone who does not agree with or follow Conservative Far Right dogma." There is clearly a whisper of the concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, but Bush would have to establish many more such venues to rank with Hitler.

Like many of the differences between the two men, this one has a lot to do with the states of their two nations at the time they came to power. When Hitler assumed command, Germany was a battered pile of rubble, barely functioning. The First World War had reduced it to embers, and the Treaty of Versailles had been its political castration. Bush, conversely, assumed command at a time when America had enjoyed peace and prosperity for nearly a decade. Therefore, Hitler had an easier time of it, and worked faster. As David R. Hoffman wrote in a January 2004 article from Pravda, Hitler "did not begin his campaign for world domination until fascism was deeply entrenched in Germany. The Bush dictatorship is still manufacturing this entrenchment."

WAR AND FOREIGN POLICY

"Lord, grant to our people peace at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign foe!"
-- Hitler, Nuremberg, 1936

"We seek peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes peace must be defended."
-- Bush, State of the Union address, 2003

"You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace."
-- Bob Dylan, "Man Of Peace," Infidels, 1983

Ted Rall's cartoon points out that unlike Bush, "Hitler won most of his military campaigns." With this exception, though, the Bush and Hitler military strategies are remarkably alike. In his well-researched August 2004 piece "31 Similarities Between Hitler and President Bush," Edward Jayne asserts that Bush "promotes a future world order that guarantees his own nation's hegemonic supremacy rather than cooperative harmony under the authority of the United Nations (or League of Nations)." This was a fair charge in 2004, but it's made even more astute by Bush's recent nomination of John Bolton to the post of U.N. Ambassador; Bolton told National Public Radio in 2000 that he believed the U.N. Security Council should have but "one permanent member," the United States, "because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world." Professor Jayne also establishes that Bush, like Hitler, is by definition a war criminal; the Iraq War itself is a war crime "as explained by Articles 41 and 42 of the U.N. Charter."

The "preemptive" war Bush launched upon Iraq, on the false pretext that Iraq posed an immediate military threat to the United States, could have been patterned on Hitler's unilateral invasion of Poland. It is as good a match as Hitler's Nazi rallies were with the Harvard football pep rallies on which he modeled them.

Take a look at Hitler's Danzig speech from September 19, 1939, and you'll hear an awful lot of familiar rhetoric. Hitler said, incorrectly, that Poland "gave the order for the first mobilization," and that "wild terror was initiated;" that his requests for diplomacy were refused by the Polish Foreign Minister; that it was his duty "to warn the German nation against them;" that "Germany, under no circumstances, will capitulate to the threats or coercion of these people;" and that "nothing occurred except for Polish general mobilization, renewed acts of terror, and finally attacks against Reich territory." Needless to say, Poland never attacked Germany, nor did it threaten to. Just as Iraq never attacked the United States, and possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

On the first night of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bush promised a devastating campaign of air strikes which would "shock and awe" the world. By coining the term, as well as by launching the attack, Bush was offering a 21st-century American version of Hitler's notorious blitzkriegs. Like Hitler, Bush followed the deadly air attack with an aggressive ground invasion which functioned without regard for civilian lives.

ELECTORAL MANIPULATION

It's a bit unclear whether Hitler was democratically elected or not, so let's focus on Bush first, because he definitely wasn't. In 2000, of course, the election came down to the state of Florida, whose recount proved that the American people had given Al Gore the majority of the country's electoral as well as popular vote. Unable to gain office by democratic election, Bush gained it by Supreme Court fiat ("with at least two judges violating several statutes of Title 28 Sec. 455 of the Judicial and Judiciary Procedure," note Jenkins and DeHart.)

Hoffman:

"The dilemma that persistently arises in America, however, is the fact that power, and those who hold it, resent being 'checked and balanced.' Yet this delicate system is the only bulwark between American democracy and American fascism. Therefore it is no surprise that the primary target of the Bush dictatorship is not Afghanistan or Iraq, but the check-and-balance system."

Hitler, meanwhile, seems to have been legitimately elected Chancellor of Germany (although some sources dispute this), whereupon he seized more power than had been granted by the people. So this one could go either way. Perhaps Bush and Hitler are similar in that neither was legitimately elected, or perhaps they are different in that Hitler was and Bush wasn't.

Citing Wikipedia's Hitler article, an anonymous correspondent of Ted Rall explains:

"In the presidential election of 1932, Hitler came in second to the incumbent Hindenburg, but later that year the Nazis came away with the largest number of seats, but not a majority, in parliamentary elections. A right-wing coalition of parties in the Reichstag convinced Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor, the German equivalent of prime minister, and bring the Nazis into the government, believing that they could control them.

"They were obviously wrong, and although Hitler was not a member of the Reichstag and was never elected himself to anything, he was legally appointed by the Reich President and had the support of a majority of the elected Reichstag, many of them democratically elected Nazis. So yes, Hitler did come to power in a constitutional, democratic manner, and only afterward used his position to force through dictatorial legislation consolidating all power in the cabinet, and, ultimately, himself."

RELIGIOUS FANATICISM

"When was the last time a Western nation had a leader so obsessed with God and claiming God was on our side? If you answered Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany, you're correct. Nothing can be more misleading than to categorize Hitler as a barbaric pagan or godless totalitarian, like Stalin."
-- Bob Fitrakis

"I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen. I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it."
-- Bush, campaign interview, 2000

"I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany."
-- Hitler, Berlin, March 1936

One of the most striking and consistent similarities between Bush and Hitler is their obsession with religious evangelism. Like Osama bin Laden or Fred Phelps, Hitler and Bush are fanatical about their perverted faith, and religious fundamentalism is their ideological bottom line. In a trenchant editorial written for Buzzflash, Maureen Farrell writes that "Hitler's own speeches and writings prove...that he presented many of the same faith-based arguments heard in America today." Farrell quotes these paragraphs from Free Inquiry's John Patrick Michael Murphy:

"Hitler's Germany amalgamated state with church. Soldiers of the vermacht wore belt buckles inscribed with the following: 'Gott mit uns' (God is with us). His troops were often sprinkled with holy water by the priests. It was a real Christian country whose citizens were indoctrinated in both state and church and blindly followed all authority figures, political and ecclesiastical.

"Hitler, like some of today's politicians and preachers, politicized 'family values.' He liked corporeal punishment in home and school. Jesus prayers became mandatory in all schools under his administration. While abortion was illegal in pre-Hitler Germany, he took it to new depths of enforcement, requiring all doctors to report to the government the circumstances of all miscarriages. He openly despised homosexuality and criminalized it."

Bush said, "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did." Hitler said, "Our prayer is: Lord God, let us never hesitate, let us never play the coward, let us never forget the duty which we have taken upon us." Bush said, "Going into this [Iraq war] period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will." Hitler said, "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator."

Does this mean that anyone who indulges in religious rhetoric is automatically a religious fascist? No. Does it mean that Hitler and Bush are religious fascists? Yes. Any monster can say he's on God's side, and most monsters do. Anyone who likes Bush because Bush says he's a Christian is simply not listening, to Bush or to Christ. Hitler's professed devotion to the Christian religion should be all the proof you need. What is certain is that Bush's America, like Hitler's Germany, seeks to manipulate the populace by claiming divine mandate, while melding the government with the clergy.

CORPORATISM

According to Jenkins and DeHart, no less an authority than Benito Mussolini once insisted that "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini must have been right, because if you look into the political campaigns of Hitler and Bush, you discover that both their ascendancies were underwritten by the most wealthy and powerful corporate entities on Earth.

When the 2000 election "could not be bought," Jenkins and DeHart write, "they used five members of the United States Supreme Court to stop the Florida vote, thereby giving election 'victory' to the eldest son of George Herbert Walker Bush." Now, when Republicans talk, you hear a lot about "states' rights" and how important they are, and yet in turning the 2000 election over to the Court, they usurped those very rights. The explanation, for Jenkins and DeHart, is "totalitarian corporate industrial policy." The policies perpetrated by the Bush administration have clearly served the interests of corporations, as opposed to people.

In the same fashion, Hitler dissolved the Reichstag, using his new influence to favor the corporations which had financed his rise to power. The corporatism angle, however, is one of the few areas in which Bush's abuse of power is arguably worse than Hitler's. Hitler, after all, was trying to repair a crippled economy, and his boons to corporate Germany can be seen as a means to that end. Bush, once again, has taken a thriving economy and crippled it.

But the point must be made that Hitler did not rely on the generosity of German corporations alone. He had a lot of American money on his side, too, and this is where it gets interesting. As The Guardian reported in September of 2004, some of Hitler's money came from none other than Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, who represented the state of Connecticut in the U.S. Senate. According to The Guardian's report, Prescott Bush "was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany...The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the U.S. National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism." Full circle.

PROPAGANDA

Professor Jayne writes, "Like Hitler, Bush began to curtail civil liberties in response to a well-publicized disaster, in Hitler's case the Reichstag fire, in Bush's case the 9/11 catastrophe." Pravda's Hoffman adds that "both men were/are suspected of either participating in, or ignoring warnings about the imminence of, these tragedies in order to enhance their political stature and power." One day after the 1933 Reichstag fire, President Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which allowed the suspension of civil liberties in a time of national emergency. So, once again, Hitler beats Bush. The Patriot Act wasn't quite there yet on 9/12/01.

But both dictators clearly have relied on a propaganda machine to guarantee what Jayne calls "sympathetic news management." Goebbels, Hitler's master propagandist, finds his contemporary American counterpart not in any one figure, but in a general climate of corporate-owned (i.e., Bush-friendly) media outlets. No example is more frequently cited -- nor bears more relation to the tactics of Goebbels -- than the Fox News Channel. A majority of Fox's audience, to this day, believes that Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 attacks; that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weaponry pointed at America; that John Kerry's foreign policy goal was to abdicate authority to France; and that the recent elections held in Iraq and the United States were fair and democratic. That audience's acceptance of these lies -- each of which has been effectively debunked -- shows how effective propaganda can be when wrought upon uncurious minds.

Once again, I turn the microphone over to Jenkins and DeHart:

"Democracy is not simply a matter of being able to vote. It is a matter of being sufficiently informed about crucial issues to participate in decision-making processes. Why are mainline news sources denying the American public such information? In regard to Nazi Germany, the entire world agrees that the German people were misled by an organized propaganda campaign. Is this currently happening in the United States? Why is there such a disparity between what is reported in the European and American press? Why, with each new revelation from the coup d'etat in Venezuela to the new information on what the Bush administration knew about a potential al Qaeda strike prior to 9/11, do American citizens trust the word of the American media? What seems to be the need to hide what's actually happening? What is so wrong with the truth other than the fact that it threatens the only court appointed president in history?"

I'd say that's about it, guys, and it's what caused Pravda's Hoffman to lament "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."

Bush's propaganda, like Hitler's, consists largely of bellicose nationalism. This is about good and evil, they both told their people; we're good, and they're evil. It's about the glory and the pride and the flag and the symbols. Knowing that nationalistic propaganda can never coexist with inquisitive intelligence, Hitler and Bush have both made intellectualism a primary target. Hitler burned books, and Bush bans them. Hitler encouraged Nazi youth groups to launch campaigns against teachers unsympathetic to the Reich; Bush encourages the College Republicans to persecute liberal professors, and Lynne Cheney has launched a remarkably fascist campaign to demonstrate that "universities are failing America" by employing "unpatriotic" educators. When Hitler came to power, Germany's leading thinkers -- Einstein and Freud leap to mind -- fled the country. Most of the leading thinkers I know considered becoming Canadians on November 3, 2004.

Along with media manipulation and the persecution of the intelligentsia, Bush's lust for control includes Hitleresque secrecy. Both leaders saw to it that only a small cadre of trusted yay-sayers would surround them, and that public appearances be attended by a carefully-screened audience of avid supporters. Just as the citizens of Hitler's Germany were taught to be quiet and not ask questions, Americans today are instantly branded as unpatriotic enemies if they question the administration's secrecy. As we are reminded by the chilling final frame of Ted Rall's cartoon, by the end of Hitler's days, he was virtually alone in a bunker, descended so far into his own evil dream that he could afford to trust absolutely nobody.

IN CONCLUSION

No matter how credible these comparisons are, it remains unlikely that Bush's reign of terror will ever rival Hitler's in scope. Jenkins and DeHart acknowledge that "one stumbling block that Bush faces that Hitler didn't have to contend with is the vast amount of information available with today's technology." The majority of the people may be in the dark, but for those willing to ask questions, the answers are now freely available on the Internet. This is an immeasurable popular advantage, totally unknown in Hitler's time. If more of us were open to the possibility that Bushism is fascism, it is the advantage that could overthrow the tyrant.

It's also important not to get too smug about the differences. As Professor Jayne reminds us, "Bush's first term in office must be compared with Hitler's performance as German Chancellor through the year 1937, preceding the chain of events immediately preceding World War II." Like the people of 1937, Hoffman writes, we "are now facing the prospect of the most powerful country on Earth metamorphosing into a neo-fascist nation, existing in a constant state of war as truth is sacrificed on the altar of bellicosity, nationalism, greed, hypocrisy and selfish ambition."

And so, what historical research finds is that there are many striking and disturbing similarities between Adolph Hitler and George W. Bush. Bush has more in common with Hitler than with any other acknowledged dictator, and much of what is true of both men is not necessarily true of world leaders in general. Yes, yes -- Hitler was worse. He was. No question. I'm the first to admit it. Bush is not as bad as Hitler. But he's much, much more like Hitler than an American president should be. And it is clearly disingenuous for Abraham Foxman to claim that it's "hideous, outrageous and offensive...to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party." Obviously, they do resemble those tactics, in many ways.

Foxman should know. We close with a quotation from Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free, for which Mayer interviewed Germans who had lived under Hitler and seen their society change. One gentleman remembered:

"The world you live in -- 'your nation, your people' -- is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

This has been a NERO FIDDLED Special Report. Have a beautiful weekend.

Noah

10:00 AM

3 comments

Comments

Thank you for your brilliant and comprehensive examination of bush/Hitler comparisons/contrasts. At least Hitler never was stupid enough or mean-spirited enough to try to destroy the German Social Security system, which incidentally, was based upon the first mandatory national universal social insurance in the world, that was originally created by Prince Otto von Bismarck in the late 19th century. There seems to be no limit to the depth of bush’s hatred for anything that helps the average guy and gal in America or heaven forbid actually lend a helping hand to the poor and down and out. The bush hostility towards anything good, kind or sweet is undoubtedly pathological in its roots. This man seems to be completely heartless at his core.
Yours truly, James K. Sayre.

# posted by James K. Sayre : 3/11/2005 9:46 PM

Hey Noah, I love you for being so angry!!! I'm furious tonight after watching Bill Maher giving minor kudos to Bush for starting the spread of democracy in the Middle East. I got sick to my stomach and had to leave the room! We can't give this jerk one ounce of credit for anything because,as you've stated, he's stupid, evil, and destructive! We've got to make him and his little friends go away as soon as possible, and the first step is to open the eyes of our Republican brethren who will be as sorely punished as the rest of us if Bush gets his way. Thanks for being on the Internet(s), Noah. We definitely need more voices like yours out there!

# posted by Madmomma : 3/12/2005 12:19 AM

Thank you! And James, I didn't know that, about Prince Otto sort of being the great-grandfather, perhaps, of Social Security. Madmomma, the Internets are lucky to have you too. As for Bush, heartless is right. Have you guys read E.L. Doctorow's essay "The Unfeeling President?" Thanks so much for reading.

# posted by Noah : 3/12/2005 4:56 PM

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Friday, March 11, 2005

Bush and Hitler