Interesting Take On Hitler / Religion/ Bush By M. Farrell

The article, while articulate, presents the opinion that, if you ignore all of the bad things Hitler did, he's just like the current religious right. Um, Hitler wouldn't have been a problem if it weren't for all of those bad things he did. How can you ignore the central theme of Hitler? Once the religious right in this country starts rounding up the Jews into concentration camps, you'll have a valid point. Until then, this is just a silly line of [lack of] reasoning.

No, once upon a time Hitler was perceived as a caring man by the majority of the voters of Germany. I believe they saw him as a visionary with a plan to get the country out of a depression and back to a place where it had more power, as it had prior to WW1... I'm not certain how moral he was perceived to be... But, somewhere along the path to reestablishing his once great nation, he crossed a line, and Germany didn't have the checks and balances in place that the U.S. does... and WW2 was the result. That couldn't happen here in this country. Why, you might ask? Because we are a people who speak up and speak out and have some degree of power to facilitate change... every 4 years in the case of the president... also sooner if he crosses a line and deserves to be impeached. While I think there are similarities between Hitler and Bush, they aren't quite in the same league...

Well said. Just an interesting anecdote about one way this shows up in our daily lives. Travelling in Europe, you'll notice that people tend to follow laws, not matter how trivial or silly, while we don't. Case in point - jaywalking. When there is a signal telling pedestrians not to cross, even though there is no traffic in site, Europeans tend to wait - Americans cross the street. Just my little observations based only on my experience.

Excellent article. It's scary how the beginning of the 21st century looks more like the beginning of the 20th century. Fool us once—Vietnam—shame on you. Fool us twice—Iraq—shame on us.

With the erosion of civil rights in this country, the Bush administration is demonstrating the downside of democracy as the tyranny of the majority.

Hitler was not a Christian.

And.

princesspupule
The people in Germany, which were at least as enlightened and educated as any in Europe and more than most. They too I am sure could never envision it happening there either. The most valued concept we have in the US is separation of the poison of religion and state. Bush and the religious right are doing everything in their power to blur those lines.

I think the similarities are simply that both are control freaks. Instead of concentration camps Bush uses war and terrorism and religious beliefs to divide and conquer. He is better at it than Hitler because he has Karl Rove to dress it up so people in those categories will accept it and the rest of the people are either called "out of the mainstream" or "those who hate freedom" depending on whether they are Arab/Muslim or liberal democrats or French...

dammmmm revel... no wonder you're feeling funny, thinkin' like that down there.

but ya sure did hit the nail on the head!

As I recall, Hitler was very clear about his motivations early on - but no one paid any attention. He also has the support of the vast majority of the German people, and was, by all accounts, a master of propaganda such as the world has never seen since. If you want to make parallels between Bush and a world leader from WWII, think Churchill (not terribly popular, was laughed at when speaking of the evils of Hitler's Germany, but he was right).

Hitler's idealism was about Nationalism and Germany. His theory was that Germany was being walked on, by the USA and England with repatriation payments, by France with land taken, by immigrants with preceived weath taken by them. His main thrust was " Stuff this, we are german and we are been taken advantage. Lets stop being walked over and hit back". Everyone would admit he went way too far and his atrocities cannot be justified. But the philosophy of nationalism is an interesting one and will surface again.

And it is being revived by this administration. Sometimes I bet that crowd (bush, wofwizt...) thank heavens for 9/11 that gave them an excuse to do what they wanted anyway.

What a horrible thing to say.

I'm sure, if we wanted to, we could draw parallels between you and Ghengis Khan or the Toothfairy, for that matter, but it wouldn't be relevant or paint an accurate picture of you. These comparisons should be see for what they really are - an attempt to paint a mental picture in the mind of the read of GWB giving the Nazi salute with burning Jews in the background rather than to present any accurate or relevant information. Talk about propaganda!

I don't think think it was as maliciously intended as you may be thinking.

Bush clearly had a plan laid out in his mind...or at least, his Dad did, and his supporters did. 9/11 simply legitimized the means by which he sought his desired end. Without 9/11, he would have surely drawn more analogies and likeness to a Hitler-esque identity from those on the left, the center, and probably from those just to the right of center.

9/11 was a fortunate turn of events for Bush to capitalize on. And he did.
For 4 years.
And will, for 4 more.

Idaho, before 9/11 those that are now in charge wanted to fight Iraq and parts in that area. 9/11 paved the way for them to do that because people were scared.

http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

http://www.sundayherald.com/print27735

As for the charge of me trying to make bush seem like hitler with burning jews in the background. Personally I think the anti-semite charge is overused.

Some people just go out in their wolf's clothing and some people put on sheep's clothing, but both are the same.

There are two things Bush could have done after 9-11: what I'd have done, and what he has done. Me, I'd have levelled Mecca and Medina, and banned the practice of Islam not only in America but throughout the world.

Assuming you'd at least to try to travel the high road first, then the basic plan which we've seen unfold makes perfect sense. You take out the two most perverted and dangerous regimes in the muslim world, and attempt to create one or two examples of democracy in the region, and basically undo the last 60 years worth of misguided policies towards the region.

May 12, 2003
Reverse Course
Bush Didn't Squander the World's Sympathy. He Spent It.
Jonathan Rauch

Quagmire? Sure, the war in Iraq was a quagmire. It was just a
short quagmire. On the spectrum of quagmires, it was the shortest since the
Six Day War.

In fairness, the war's critics feared a quagmire not so much
during the fight as after, and they had a point. One reason the first Bush
administration didn't drive to Baghdad in 1991 was to avoid an American
occupation of a major Arab country. And now there we are.

Still, George W. Bush can probably do a better job in Iraq than
Saddam Hussein did. The new quagmire is unlikely to be as bad as the old one.
The stronger objection to the war invokes not the "Q" word but the "S" one:
squander. As in: President Bush won in Iraq, but in the process he has
squandered the world's goodwill.

Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential candidate and former
Vermont governor, blames Bush for turning the "tidal wave of support and
goodwill that engulfed us after the tragedy of 9/11" into "distrust, skepticism,
and hostility... It could well take decades to repair the damage." George
McGovern accuses Bush of converting "a world of support into a world united
against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others." And
so forth.

Poll numbers suggest that America's war in Iraq did indeed come at
a very high cost in international support and sympathy. In countries
throughout Europe-including Britain, Italy, and Spain, all of whose
governments supported the war- public opinion turned sharply against the
United States. Favorable ratings of well above 60 percent in many
countries declined to the 30s, 20s, and even teens.

In March, on the eve of the American invasion, Ipsos (an
international public-opinion research firm) asked people in Britain, Canada, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and Spain whether their government's
foreign policy should "get closer to the U.S. or distance itself more from the
U.S." In all of those countries except Germany, respondents called for
more distance from the United States, usually by large ratios: 63-28 percent
in Japan, 60-13 in Spain, 54-38 in Canada, and 52-36 even in the U.K. The
Germans split 44-46 percent, hardly a vote of confidence.

Bush's supporters retort that post-9/11 sympathy was ephemeral. At
the end of the day, they argue, a strong America will attract more support
than a weak one. In any case, France and Russia were determined to play the
spoiler; it was the world that squandered America's goodwill, more than
the other way around.

Probably, possibly, and maybe. It's all very complicated. But
those arguments miss the larger point. The talk of squandering is
fundamentally misconceived. Bush did not squander the world's goodwill. He spent it,
which is not at all the same thing.

The Cold War was a five-decade confrontation in which the United
States often found itself aligned in awkward and even obnoxious ways but
remained, through it all, on the right side of history. In the end, the
Soviet Union fell not because of Star Wars or glasnost, but because
Communism was a dysfunctional system that lost the ability to fool even
its
friends.

Perhaps the most awkward and obnoxious of America's Cold War
alignments were in the Arab world. Washington supported tyrannies and
monarchies that wrecked their economies and stunted their politics. The
Arab regimes wallowed in corruption and incompetence. They entrenched
poverty and blocked middle-class aspirations. They jailed liberal
dissidents and political moderates. They fertilized the soil for
militant Islamists who provided the only outlet for dissent. They then attempted
to neutralize Islamism by diverting its energies to hating liberalism,
Americans, and Jews.

In both Iran and Iraq, Washington supported or tolerated corrupt
and brutal regimes, with disastrous results in both places. Saudi Arabia has
been a different kind of disaster, propagating anti-Americanism and
anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism all over the world. Syria and Libya
are disasters. Lebanon is between disasters. Egypt is a disaster waiting to
happen. Maybe Jordan is, too.

In short, the United States has been on the wrong side of Arab
history for almost five decades, and it is not doing much better than the
Soviets. The old policy had no future, only a past. It was a dead policy walking.
September 11 was merely the death certificate.

Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue- not shared
by most sophisticates-of knowing a dead policy when he sees one. So he
gathered up the world's goodwill and his own political capital, spent
the whole bundle on dynamite, and blew the old policy to bits. However
things come out in Iraq, the war's larger importance is to leave little choice,
going forward, but to put America on the side of Arab reform.

Reform will take years, decades even, and it will mean different
things in different countries. In Iraq, it meant force. In Syria, it
means hostile prodding; in Saudi Arabia, friendly prodding. It means setting a
subversive example for Iran, creating the region's second democracy in
Palestine, building on change in Qatar and Kuwait, leading Egypt gently
toward multiparty politics. Progress will be fitful, at best. But the
direction will be right, for a change.

This is a breathtakingly bold undertaking. The difficulties are
staggering. Everything might go wrong. But the crucial point to remember
is that everything had already gone wrong. No available policy could
justify optimism in the Arab world, but the new policy at least offers hope. It
offers a path ahead, a future where there had been only a past. It is
not dead. It puts America on the right side of history and on the right side
of America.

Much of Europe is alarmed by the change, but then, it would be.
American troops in Saudi Arabia guaranteed the flow of oil while turning
the United States (along with Israel) into the scapegoat of choice for
millions of angry Muslims, some of whom live in Europe. From Paris's or
Amsterdam's or Bremen's point of view, what's not to like about that
deal? Why must Washington go and stir everything up?

Not long before the Iraq war began, the Heinrich Böll Foundation
sponsored a debate in Washington between Richard Perle and Daniel
Cohn-Bendit. Perle, of course, is a hawkish American neoconservative who
supported the Iraq war. Cohn-Bendit, a Frenchman, leads the Green
faction of the European Parliament, but is perhaps better known as "Danny the
Red" for leading student uprisings in France in the 1960s. In a telling
moment, Cohn-Bendit blurted out that Perle, the conservative, was now the
revolutionary, trying to reform the whole Arab world-whereas
Cohn-Bendit, the former radical, was now the conservative.

"Suddenly you want to bring democracy to the world," Cohn-Bendit
said. "Recently, your government has been behaving like the Bolsheviks in the
Russian Revolution. You want to change the whole world. Like them, you
claim that history will show that truth is on your side." Savoring the
irony, Danny the Red accused America of "revolutionary hubris."

He was right about "revolutionary," though the administration
would prefer a gradual revolution. But "hubris"? Not exactly. The effort to
reshape the Arab world would indeed seem hopelessly overweening but for
the fact that the old policy had already collapsed beneath America's feet.
It had also collapsed beneath the Arab world's feet. The question is
whether the fall of Baghdad might be the sort of wake-up call for Arabs that
September 11 was for Americans.

On April 14, The Washington Post rounded up some examples of what
it aptly called "fear and rethinking in the Middle East"-there being plenty
of both. "With the fall of Baghdad," wrote Shafeeq Ghabra, the president of
the American University of Kuwait, in Lebanon's online Daily Star, "Arab
thought as we knew it since the 1967 defeat collapsed. The nationalism
that misled Saddam and our peoples has also collapsed, as well as a pattern
of Arabism many of us exploited in favor of autocracy, oppression,
dictatorship, and the confiscation of other people's rights."

Abdul Hamid Ahmad, the editor of a United Arab Emirates-based Web
site called Gulf News, wrote, "With the stunning and shameful collapse of the
Iraqi regime and its Baathist reign, another Arab era has vanished....
And a stark reality was revealed: that these institutions were virtual
phantoms as far as the people were concerned." Single-party monopolies "only lead
to the suffocation of people, politically and socially."

Just straws in the breeze, those opinions; but at least now there
is a breeze. Spending the world's goodwill on reform in the Arab world is the
most dangerous course the Bush administration could have set, except for
all the others.



Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National
Journal and a frequent contributor to REASON. This article was published by
National Journal on May 10, 2003.

The first two letters, had they been addressed by the president at the time, may have prevented the problem we are in now.

The last one, an article by a journalist, in a UK newspaper, that paraphrases a supposed report without quoting it at all? Not worth discussing.

Gungasnake, you won't be popular on this forum if you want to ban islam. Most of the people that write here fully support the world push of islam and always defend it. I think it is safe to say that they didn't lose relatives in september 11th otherwise their opinions may be a bit more practical.

My point was that the idea of going into Iraq was around before 9/11 as those articles pointed out. 9/11 gave them the excuse to do it. You may remember that Iraq is not AQ so invading Iraq before 9/11 would not have prevented anything at all.

There were muslims that died in the world trade centers as well. After all it was a world trade center where people from all over the world gather, so imagine it is not as safe as you think it is to say that they didn't loose relatives.