“People look at all this and think of Hitler” and they are right to
do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very
quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act
now; the future is in the balance.”
This
passage from the Call for The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush
Regime! has galvanized many into action, and at the same time been very
controversial among many who consider this analysis of the direction of
society to be “too extreme.” In particular, the analogy to Hitler has
been hotly debated. While, as an analogy, this is not an
exact comparison, what is most striking are the parallels between the
US today and Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. Further, what’s difficult about confronting the reality of the above
passage is what it requires of us to do to stop this course.
We
will be running a thread on our website about the analogy made in our
Call, and whether this society is in fact headed in a fascist
direction. We welcome your comments and suggestions of articles to post
(send to info@worldcantwait.org ). And we urge everyone to debate this
out everywhere; and as you confront the reality of the above paragraph,
mobilize to reverse this fascist direction: drown out Bush’s State of
the Union address with the demand “Bush: step down, and take your
program with you!”
Below are some initial postings of articles
that add more substance to the above passage from our Call. Check back
for more articles coming soon.
Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate Poet:
“The Bush Administration is the most dangerous force that has ever
existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range
and depth of its activities and intentions worldwide. I give my full
support to the Call to Drive out the Bush Regime.”
| The New F-Word |
|
|
|
by Dan Meltzer, posted on http://newsun.com/
You know the old one, the one with four letters that you still can’t say
on radio or non-cable TV without getting into serious trouble.
Comedian George Carlin and Pacifica Radio lost a free-speech case in the
Supreme Court in the seventies over his hilarious and now legendary
“Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” monologue, ostensibly because
it was aired when children could have been listening. This was well
before the advent of porn channels, the Internet, and chat rooms.
Saying the F-word used to be regarded as crossing the line and hazardous
to a comic’s career. It’s now indispensable. Count them if you can in
Carlin’s recent HBO special.
There’s another F-word coming into currency these days, one that does
not refer in any way to sexual activity, body parts or bodily functions,
although it is verboten on TV, regarded as radioactive on the radio,
even in the reportage in what they call “family newspapers.”
President Bush’s “popularity ratings,” they say, have tanked. There have
been problems; the war, hurricane Katrina, “Scooter” Libby, Karl Rove,
Congressional buddy Tom Delay. They’re SO low in fact — around 40% at last
estimate — that they could rightly be called his “unpopularity” ratings.
Sixty percent against you in an election is landslide country. The
Commander in Chief is getting his lowest marks for competence and
credibility. And these, remember, are for someone whose finger is on the
“nucular” trigger. Are you worried yet?
A lot of folks have begun using that other F-word (in addition to the
four-letter favorite, sometimes even in rapid-fire F-F combos) about him
and his regime, er, administration.
It kind of spooked me the first time I heard speakers at anti-war
rallies comparing Bush to Adolph Hitler. Whoa, I thought – This ain’t no
Holocaust, we’re not talking about concentration camps and Gestapo
secret police tactics. Or is it, and are we? The US is not colonizing
Europe or looking to kill every Arab on the planet, but if not fascism,
then what SHOULD we call it when a world leader;
* Invades another country on cooked-up charges and after lying to his
own people and to the world about why, and then explains that his form
of government is better than theirs was and uses boots, bullets, and
five-hundred pound bombs to try to convince them?
* Claims immunity to international laws against war crimes such as
torture and murder, as well as the criminal infractions by his occupying
troops in foreign lands. After claiming the world’s right to prosecute
his enemies for breaking some of those same laws?
* Has taken office without a majority of the vote of the electorate?
* Whose political party states in one breath its aim to spread
“Democracy” around the world, and in the next its goal to cement
one-party rule (its own) in this country indefinitely?
* Equates opposition to its policies with treason?
* Implements and implants more and more means and devices for spying on
his own citizens, claiming the right to do so as a war power, but
without a constitutionally mandated Congressional declaration of war
against anyone?
* Subverts the media with government propaganda, and pressures
newspapers, broadcasters and cable networks to include pro-government
and pro-war opinions?
* Virtually endorses a state religion and teaching the “hand of God” in
biology classes throughout the land?
Is
it fascism yet? If It looks like a duck, talks like a duck, and it
walks like a (lame) duck, it probably is one. Beware its eggs. They
won’t be golden. They
could even be rotten. Swallow them at your own risk.
Daniel Meltzer teaches journalism at New York University. He has
written, edited, and reported for radio, television, magazines, and
newspapers. He has received the New York Press Association award for
creative nonfiction, and the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes for fiction.
He is also a published and widely produced playwright
Revolution #026, December 12, 2005, posted at revcom.us
The
struggle to defend the Hampton Seven spread widely and quickly through
the internet, generating support and debate. I want to call attention
to, and comment, a particularly important exchange on the site Inside Higher Ed.
First, the exchange:
The White Rose Society
The
Hampton University administration should read about the White Rose
Society. This small group of students distributed fliers calling for
people of Germany to oppose their fascist leaders. They did this during
the World War II. They knew the risks and were eventually caught and
executed for excercising their God-given right to free speech.The
Hampton administration seeks to expell students for similar activity.
This is the academic version of execution. Pretty draconian.Robert Anderson, at 10:28 am EST on December 1, 2005
The White Rose
While
I applaud Mr. Anderson’s knowledge of the White Rose and while I am
sympathetic to the students at Hampton, the comparison to the White
Rose is simply not accurate. Hans and Sophie Scholl, two of the
founding members of the White Rose, did not live in a free society and
did not have a right to free speech. (Whether free speech is God-given
is another debate). Violating the laws of a government (or tyrrany)
which carry a death sentence in a closed society is different from
being expelled from school in a free society. These Hampton students
have a recourse and the voices of thousands (mine included) to advocate
for them.Prof. Timothy Scholl, Program Director for General Education at Brooks Institute, at 11:50 am EST on December 2, 2005
*****
This
exchange concentrates a broader debate in society, especially among
those who oppose the Bush regime. In brief, is it correct to compare
the trends and dynamics of today to what went down in Germany between
1933 and 1945? What Professor Scholl misses in his reply is that no one
is talking about the early years of Hitler’s ascension to power. The
White Rose students were executed, as Robert Anderson points out in his
letter, during World War II, and pretty far into it at that.
There
was a whole dynamic, however, that went down in German society in the
years preceding the execution of the White Rose students. Step by step
and leap by leap, rights were stripped and new norms were put into
effect, in what proved to be an inexorable dynamic. Very few, if any,
predicted in February 1933 that things would go as far as they did; and
many kept denying the dynamic for a very long time after the danger was
apparent. And then it became too late to do anything.
Had
someone told you five years ago, Mr. Scholl, that students would be
threatened with expulsion for daring to pass out “unauthorized”
leaflets; or arrested for doing street theater in campus common area
for depicting torture carried out by the U.S. government, as they were
at Hunter University; or forced to wear an ankle bracelet connected to
the LAPD for simply participating in a protest, as Geovany Serrano has
been in Los Angeles; or any other of dozens of similar outrages
detailed on the site of the organizers of the November 2 protests (worldcantwait.org)–would
you have found it unreasonable to say that the U.S. was heading in a
fascist direction? Would you have found it wrong to invoke the
comparison to the White Rose in pointing to what was at stake, and to
where things were heading, if people did not resist? Yet today, through
steps, people have been inured to the extreme character of what
Vice-President Cheney has labelled the “new normalcy”, and some go to
great pains to correct anyone who dares invoke the analogy which
irresistibly suggests itself: Nazi Germany.
The danger is real. The need for resistance– extraordinary
resistance–urgent. As the Call for the November 2nd protest–that the
Hampton students are facing disciplinary charges for
distributing–says: “That which you will not resist and mobilize to
stop, you will learn–or be forced–to accept.”
Gott mit uns: On Bush and Hitler’s rhetoric
by Bob Fritakis, The Free Press
1, 2004
President Bush told Texas evangelist James Robinson that ‘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.’
With 49.3% of New York City residents in a recent Zogby poll
believing that some people in our government knew of the 911 attack in
advance and allowed it to happen, the President as right-wing
evangelical prophet is under siege in his Madison Square Garden bunker.
Convention watchers should take careful note of the theocratic
nationalist rhetoric at the Republican convention this week.
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.
Both Bush and Hitler believe that they were chosen by God to
lead their nations. With Hitler boldly proclaiming, before launching
his doctrine of preventive war against all of Europe, that I would
like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people
to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany.
“I follow the path assigned to me by Providence with the instinctive sureness of a sleepwalker”, Hitler said.
Hitler stated in February 1940, “But there is something else I
believe, and that is that there is a God. . . . And this God again has
blessed our efforts during the past 13 years”. After the Iraqi
invasion, Palestinian leaders reported that Bush told them, “God told
me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me
to strike at Saddam, which I did . . . . Bush spin doctors claimed
that it was merely bad translation.”
Yet, Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post Editor Bob
Woodward, of Watergate fame, reported that Bush told him virtually the
same thing prior to the attack on Iraq. When Woodward asked him if he
has consulted his father, the 41st President of the United States
before ordering the invasion of Iraq, Bush commented that “He is the
wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength; there is a higher
father that I appeal to.” The obvious implication is that Bush the
Younger believes he is on a mission from God and a Holy Crusade in the
Middle East.
Neither the similarity between Hitler and Bush’s religious
rhetoric nor the fact that the current President’s grandfather was
called Hitler’s Angel by the New York Tribune for his financing of
the Fuher’s rise to power is lost on Europeans.
Pat Robertson called Bush a prophet and Ralph Reed claimed,
after the 9/11 attack, God picked the President because he knew George
Bush had the ability to lead in this compelling way. Hitler told the
German people in March 1936, “Providence withdrew its protection and
our people fell, fell as scarcely any other people heretofore. In this
deep misery we again learn to pray. . . . The mercy of the Lord slowly
returns to us again. And in this hour we sink to our knees and beseech
our almighty God that he may bless us, that He may give us the strength
to carry on the struggle for the freedom, the future, the honor, and
the peace of our people. So help us God.”
At the beginning of Hitler’s crusade on April 12, 1922, he
spelled out his version of the warmongering Jesus:
As Bush has invoked the cross of Jesus to simultaneously
attack the Islamic and Arab world, Hitler also saw the value of
exalting the cross while waging endless war: To be sure, our Christian
Cross should be the most exalted symbol of the struggle against the Jewish-Marxist-Bolshevik spirit.”
Like Bush-ites, Hitler was fond of invoking the Ten
Commandments as the foundation of Nazi Germany: “The Ten Commandments
are a code of living to which there’s no refutation. These precepts
correspond to irrefragable needs of the human soul.”
But if you ever wondered where Bush got his idea for
so-called faith-based initiatives you need only consult Hitler’s
January 30, 1939 speech to the Reichstag. The Fuhrer begins, “Amongst
the accusations which are directed against Germany in the so-called
democracy is the charge that the National Socialist State is hostile to
religion.”
Hitler goes on to document how much public monies derived
from taxation through the organs of the State have been placed at the
disposal of both churches [Protestant and Catholic]. Hitler gave
nearly 1.8 billion Reichsmarks between 1933-1938 directly to the
Christian churches. In 1938 alone, he bragged that the Nazis gave half
a billion Reichsmarks from the national government and an additional 92
million Reichsmarks from the Nazi-controlled German states and parish
associations.
Hitler made the intent of his faith-based initiative clear
when he noted, “With a tenth of our budget for religion, we would thus
have a Church devoted to the State and of unshakable loyalty. . . . the
little sects, which receive only a few hundred thousand marks, are
devoted to us body and soul.”
Bush’s assertion that “I trust God speaks through me.
Without that, I couldn’t do my job” brings to mind God as a
dull-witted, cognitively-impaired nationalist unable to utter a simple
declarative sentence who spends his time preaching “blessed are the
warmongers and profit-makers.
—
Revised and updated October 17, 2004
—
Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press (freepress.org), a political science professor, attorney and co-author with Harvey Wasserman of George W. Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace.
Project
for the Old American Century takes Laurence Britt’s 14 common
characteristics of fascist regimes and cites numerous articles
demonstrating how the Bush regime fits the mold:
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm
From Hitler to Bush
The editor of La República del Uruguay replies to the US ambassador,
Martin Silverstein, ( Uruguay ) who had complained about the
comparisons the newspaper had drawn between Hitler and Bush.
by Dr. Federico Fasano Mertens
March 30th, 2003 “La
Repblica del Uruguay” A
few days ago I received a letter from Martin Silverstein, the US
ambassador to Uruguay, accusing La República, a publication which I am
honoured to edit, of “totally lacking any sense of journalistic
integrity” by comparing George Bush, the president of his country, to
Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of the Third Reich.
I have been unable to reply to him any sooner because the act of piracy
which his country has committed, attacking a defenceless and close to
disarmed country with the most formidable killing machine that the
history of the world has ever known, has forced me to devote more than
the usual amount of time to publishing special editions on the
slaughter. I also found myself taken up by trying to convict US-trained
uniformed torturers who had slandered me, a task which I have only
recently been able to bring to completion.
Not long ago, when the ambassador visited me in my office, I remember
saying to my colleagues that he was the most intelligent, perceptive
and witty American ambassador I had ever met. “At last,” I said, “a
representative from the empire with whom you can exchange ideas,
without being poisoned by the same tired, old cliches whenever you
attend a meeting.”
Unfortunately for the ambassador, however, his wisdom has not spared
him the misfortune of having to represent the forty-third president of
his nation, George Bush Jr.: a paranoid fanatic intoxicated by
messianic passions and dimmer than a slug. A man drunk with power, as
he was drunk with alcohol before, and legally condemned for it on 4
September 1976, for driving drunk at full speed. Admonished, too, by
none other than the evangelist Billy Graham who told him, “Who are you,
to think yourself God?”. A militant for the Christian Right, the Texan,
Southern Christian right that is. A racist in love with the death
sentence, especially when it comes to African-Americans. All in all,
the worst US president for over a century, the man who will unleash the
greatest tragedies on his own people. The opposite of Homo Sapiens, the
incarnation of Homo Demens.
And a misogynist, to boot, like any good racist. No one could forget
the public humiliations he has put Laura Bush through. You can well
imagine Laura Bush’s embarrassment on hearing her husband’s reply when
asked by the press why she wasn’t accompanying him on that day, “it’s
been raining and she’s had to sweep the driveway to our Crawford ranch,
we’re expecting Jiang Zemin, the president of China, tomorrow”.
His compatriot, the aged writer Kurt Vonnegut did not hesitate in
calling him “the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’tat
leader imaginable”.
But let’s get to the heart of the matter. Let’s leave the US ambassador
with his sad misfortune of having to defend the most delirious resident
the White House has ever known, and me with the honour of trying this
man armed only with words.
The matter at hand is the comparison between Adolf Hitler and George Bush.
There are obvious differences. The first being that the war criminal,
the murderer of the Jewish and Soviet peoples, won a resounding victory
in the German elections, while the war criminal and murderer of the
Iraqi people reached power fraudulently, in the biggest electoral
scandal in US history.
From the theoretical point of view, the comparison between Bush and
Hitler is correct. The scientists have described Nazism as a terrorist
dictatorship of corporate expansionism. Bush, by putting himself beyond
the law and invading a defenceless nation which it had not attacked in
order to take over its oil wealth, the second largest on the planet,
and then stating that other oil-producing nations will follow, comes
close to the definition of a corporate terrorist dictatorship. Even
though he may not like to admit it.
George Bush is a Nazi in his genes.
His grandfather, Prescott
Bush,
was a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman and one of the proprietors of
the Banking Corporation Union. Both companies played a key role in
financing Hitler on his way to power in Germany. On 20 October 1942,
the US government ordered the confiscation of Ranking Corporation
Union, owned by Prescott Bush, and in addition seized the Dutch-US
Trade Corporation and Seamless Steel Corporation, both administered by
the Bush-Hamman Bank. On 17 November of the same year, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt confiscated all assets of the Silesian American Corporation,
again administered by Prescott Bush, for trading with the enemy.
George’s great-grandfather, God’s warrior, Samuel Bush, father of the
Nazi Prescott Bush, was the right hand man of the steel magnate
Clarence Dillon and the banker Fritz Thyssen, who wrote a book called I
Paid Hitler, joining the German Socialist Workers Party in 1931.
Should the ambassador have any doubts on the spurious alliance between
the Bush family and Hitler, I would recommend he reads Victor Thorn’s
splendid essay. Thorn states: “An important part of the basis for the
Bush family fortune was created by the help it offered Adolf Hitler.
The current president of the United States, as his father (ex-director
of the CIA, vice-president and president), reached the summit of the
North-American political hierarchy because his grandfather,
great-grandfather and their political family aided and abetted the
Nazis”. This without going into how the Bush family swindled and
embezzled four-and-a-half million dollars from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida, or the fraud of millions of savers at the Silverado Savings Bank (Denver, Colorado).
A Nazi great-grandfather, a Nazi grandfather, a father who wasn’t able
to be a Nazi because Hitler had already killed himself in the ruins of
the Chancellery gardens, though he benefited from the ill-gotten gains
of his ancestors.
But let us not condemn our homo demens for his evil genes.
Let us judge him only by his works. And let’s compare. Just compare.
How does the ambassador believe that the delirious Austrian corporal
reached the pinnacle of public power? Hitler reached power in clean
elections, but then found that the Constitution of the Weimar Republic
placed limits which his omnipotent desires refused to accept. He then
plotted the burning of the Reichstag and in a single night was anointed
the elector of war or peace.
Doesn’t this sound familiar, Mr Ambassador?
The criminal demolition of the Twin Towers brought about the same mire
as the burning of the Reichstag. Obviously, I am not about to be so
bold as to join those who accuse the Bush warmongers of having
orchestrated the massacre or of not stopping it when they learnt of its
preparation. There is no conclusive proof for such an outrageous
statement, though there are many signs of criminal negligence and huge
suspicion which is only encouraged by strict censorship that is without
precedent in modern US democracy. Some day, when the American people
fully recover their freedom of information and investigate that black
Tuesday morning of September 11, today corralled by a Patriot Act,
approved with the single vote against of a woman, a symbol of national
US dignity, we shall be able to find out why the many tell-tale signs
of an impending large-scale assassination left throughout the country
were ignored. We shall be able to learn why the Air Force jets took 80
minutes to intercept the hijacked planes, when it was known that the
planes were hijacked and heading for Washington as soon as they took
off from Boston and the manual lays down the procedure for the
intervention of the Air Force within 5 minutes of a hijack.
We will be able to find out why the remains of the presumed plane that
hit the Pentagon were hidden. We shall be able to learn why, according
to the conservative Wall Street Journal, immediately after meeting in
Washington with CIA director George Tenet, the head of the Pakistani
secret services arranged for Islamabad to send one hundred thousand
dollars to Mohammed Atta in the US, the organiser of the New York Twin
Towers suicide attack. The suspension of civil rights by the Patriot
Act now prohibits the investigation of this frightening piece of
information. We will finally be able to find out why 15 of the 21
commandos came from Saudi Arabia, the chief US ally in the Persian
Gulf. There wasn’t a single Iraqi onboard those planes. Not even
accidentally.
Apart from all the suspicion, there is no doubt that the chaotic
forty-third president of the US, anointed by fraudulent elections, in
the middle of an impressive recession with no end in view, with the
lowest initial approval ratings for a head of state, has moved on to
dominate the stage by acquiring powers inconceivable in a democracy and
been crowned the avenging Emperor that he may cleanse the affront the
barbarians had infringed upon his people.
The American Burning of the Reichstag of September 11 gave George Bush
the chance of a lifetime. The worst electoral victory of a US president
since 1876 had turned into the best historical opportunity for a
warmonger to impose a new US order on the world.
As in Hitler’s case, the first thing he did was to surround himself
with a clique of con artists such as himself, men obsessed with the
intimidating power of force. Like Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Mengele,
or Eichmann, the Texan president searched for the protective shell of
an iron guard, often more war-like than himself to impede any
temptation to doubt, and men of a common stamp: all oilmen. The
vice-president, Dick Cheney, came from Halliburton Oil, the chief of
the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, from Occidental, another oil company,
the National Security Advisor, the spinster Condoleeza Rice, whose name
in Spanish by a twist of fate means “with sweetness”, was on Chevron’s
board of directors and has oil tankers named after her. Then there’s
the Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, who is also linked to the
oil industry, as is Bush Sr. with the Carlyle oil group, and the
current president, Bush Jr. with Harkins Oil.
This quintet of death around warrior Bush, a true mafiocracy, as with
the quintet who joined Hitler, were fed on a very special Bible. In
this case the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, which
formed and inflamed the inventor of the Holocaust of the 20th century,
were replaced by less cultivated specimens who did not posses such an
esteemed intellectual lineage, but who were more useful for the Hitler
of the 21st century.
What is the bedtime reading of this gang of warmongers?
The Bostonian Henry Cabot Lodge asserting that “in the 19th century, no
other people equalled our conquests, our colonisation or our expansion,
nobody will stop us now”. Marse Henry Watterson stated that the US “is
a great imperial republic destined to exercise a determining influence
on mankind and mould the world’s future as no other nation has ever
done before, not even the Roman Empire”. Or Charles Krauthammer who not
long ago, in 1999, declared in the Washington Post: “the US rides over
the world like a colossus. Since the time that Rome destroyed Carthage,
no other great power has reached the heights we have attained. The US
has won the Cold War, Poland and the Czech Republic are in its pocket,
and then it pulverises Serbia and Afghanistan. And, on the way, it has
proved the non-existence of Europe”. Or Robert Kaplan pointing out that
“the US victory in the Second World War, as with Rome’s victory in the
Second Punic War, made it a universal power”. Or the well-known
historian, Paul Kennedy, explaining that “neither Pax Britanica, nor
Napoleonic France, nor the Spain of Felipe II, nor Charlemagne’s
Empire, or even the Roman Empire could compare to the current US
dominion. Never before has there been such a wide disparity in power on
the world stage”.
Or the director of the Olin Strategic Studies Centre of Harvard
University, Professor Stephen Peter Rosen, stating that “our objective
is not to fight a rival, as he doesn’t exist, but to preserve our
imperial position and keep imperial order”.
Or the ineffable Zbigniew Brzezinski declaring that “the objective of
the US should be to maintain our vassal states in a state of
dependency, to guarantee the docility and protection of our subjects
and to prevent the barbarians from uniting”.
Or president Wilson declaring in the Union Congress that “I would teach
the South American republics how to elect good representatives”.
Or the famous Billy Sunday who defined a Latin American left-winger as
“someone with a porcupine’s snout and breath that would scare a skunk
away”, adding that if he could, “he would pile them all into prisons
until their feet stuck out the windows”.
Now listen to the current US vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the
Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, who with Sweetness Rice form the
belligerent triangle, more fearsome than the Bermuda Triangle.
Faced with this holy war, Cheney declared: “the US need not blush for
being a great power. It has the duty to use force in order to create a
world in the image of the US”. The chief of the Pentagon put it more
clearly, in case we failed to understand. Rumsfeld dixit, quoting Al
Capone’s favourite line: “You get more with a nice word and a gun, than
with only a nice word.”
This language which oozes from Bush’s pores and brain is a dense,
authoritarian, intimidating use of language which inevitably leads to
morally perverting the ends to justify the means. The essential nature
of the language used by the Bush gang, as with the language of the
Nazis, is its simplification, reductionism and intimidation. This
predatory group’s language is a schematic, emotional language loaded
with prejudices which inflame the people’s noblest sentiments. I have
no doubt that Bush feeds off the same source as Nazi language.
Like Hitler, Bush does not believe in the Rule of Law. This is not a
State which possesses Laws, but a State which yields, of its own
accord, to the rule of law and in no circumstances can it break the
law, even less for reasons of State. Abominable crimes have been
committed in the name of reasons of State, or the Homeland, or national
security.
What differences can there be between the intellectual edifices created
by Bush and Hitler when it comes to reasons of state? Not many I
believe. Except for differences of style, age and magnitude of might
and power.
The Bush clique’s discourse is a discourse between master and slave. It
is no different from the Hitler clique’s discourse. One is friendlier
than the other. Though history is showing us that the less friendly one
was less lethal.
Civilisation, savagery, pacifying the barbarians, the chosen people and
from there to the chosen race in a single step. In short, does this
remind us of the psychopath with the moustache?
And talking of moustaches, the account given by an influential
Washington security advisor to the Argentinean magazine Noticias is
instructive: “For better or worse, George Bush Jr. is the most
appropriate person for this war. He was born for it. He shakes with the
power coming from within. When you’re with him in his office he seems
like he’s about to eat up whoever is in front of him. He sits on the
edge of his chair, almost without resting on it and moves his arms as
if he doesn’t know what to do with them. He needs action”.
Now there’s a good imitation of the gesticulating Nazi dictator. Though
the phlegm of a Texan cowboy, with pistol in holster, is not the same
as a semi-epileptic Teuton choking with rage and spitting out his words
as he wildly gesticulates. Bush doesn’t spit when he speaks. It’s his
soul that spits, hate and violence, generating terror. He couldn’t care
less. He must have learnt Caligula’s “oderint dum metuant” (“Let them
hate us, it’s enough that they fear us”).
Bush’s emotional incontinence is already a classic and, like Adolf, he
won’t take NO for an answer. His wife, Laura Bush, once told the press
that the first time she said she didn’t like one of his speeches, he
crashed his car against the garage wall in rage.
He comes across as a Nazi deity, an emissary of God, whom he summons
whenever the opportunity presents itself. He has ordered all cabinet
meetings to begin with prayer. And claims to have consulted God before
attacking Iraq, dismissing the position of the majority of the planet’s
nations and 90% of mankind. He attempts to imitate president William
McKinley invading the Philippines to bring the Gospel to the natives
and blaming God for ordering him to invade the country against his will.
Another coincidence in these parallel lives, which would have pleased
Plutarch no end, is that Hitler and Bush would have avoided entering
the Hall of Fame for History’s Buffoons if they had only had access to
a decent psychoanalyst. A good psychoanalyst would have helped them
both channel their libidos into more normal duties, and learning to
control the only aphrodisiac they have ever known: cruel, all-embracing
power over others.
Let’s go on and look at other similarities between the warrior for the
Aryan race and “God’s warrior”, as Telma Luzzani so perceptively calls
the excitable Texan. Bush declares a pre-emptive war, urbi et orbe. In
1953, Dwight Eisenhower had no doubts on the matter: “Pre-emptive war
was invented by Adolf Hitler. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t take
anyone who came up with such a thing seriously”.
But pre-emptive war against whom? It is a well known fact that truth is
the first casualty of war. And the first thing Bush does to manufacture
his pre-emptive war, after the burning of the Reichstag, is to lie like
Goebbels in such an unsophisticated manner that nobody believes a word
of it. First he said that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda. When it was
shown that there ran an irreconcilable hatred between Saddam Hussein
and the ex-US-employee Osama Bin Laden, Bush appealed to have Iraq
included on his list of Moslem fundamentalism. Difficult to believe in
the most secular country in the Arab world. He then claimed there were
weapons of mass destruction. Asserting that Iraq wouldn’t allow
inspections and, when it did, declaring that it wouldn’t let the UN
enter Saddam’s palaces or any other protected places. When it was then
revealed that this wasn’t the case, the administration said that the
weapons were well hidden. In the end, not a single weapon of mass
destruction has been found. When all the arguments were well and truly
buried, he insisted that Saddam Hussein should stand down or go into
exile, while admitting the real truth: we want to occupy Iraqi
territory, no matter what, and decide who will govern the country.
Planetary democracy they call it. The very same disinformation campaign
that Hitler launched against Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland. The
same excuses that would change as soon as they were overrun.
Another resemblance is the disdain for the international community and
public world opinion. Hitler destroyed the League of Nations founded in
1919. Bush tore the United Nations to shreds, inciting the greatest
opposition to a country since the founding of the UN: 170 nations did
not support the war against the 30 that did, the majority lightweight
states or the result of the break up of the Soviet Union, and ready to
sell themselves to the highest bidder. Bush, like Hitler, was not
stopped by the greatest defeat to US diplomacy since the founding of
the UN. Hitler was never concerned about the hate and condemnation he
generated in people’s hearts. Bush hopes to surpass the Teuton. The
mass demonstrations without precedent on the face of the planet are
war-drums to Bush’s Wagnerian ears. He is faced with the spirit of
Seattle which, in 1999, founded the most important pacifist,
anti-globalisation movement of all time. Nothing stops him.
It was outrageous to see the rudeness meted out to the UN chief of
inspectors, Hans Blix: a man with 75 years on his back, born in frozen
yet wonderful Uppsala in social-democratic Sweden, an honourable
follower of the democratic traditions passed down by the martyr Olof
Palme.
Disdain for people and their rights is the driving force behind their
“humanism”. Listen to Marshall Goering in the Nuremberg trials: “It is
natural for the common people to not want war but, after all, it is a
country’s leaders who determine policy and it is an easy matter to
convince the people. Whether they have a voice or not, the people can
always be made to do what their rulers wish. It’s easy. All you have to
do is tell them they are under attack and condemn the pacifists for
their lack of patriotism and for exposing their country to danger”. It
was Goering the Nazi who said this in 1945, not George Bush. The
difference is that the Nazi said this in German and Bush says it in
English. The invasion of a sovereign country that has not attacked you
requires ethical though illicit legitimacy: toppling the tyrant Hussein
and imposing a popular democratic government through blood and fire. It
sounds nice, though the price to pay may go against the international
community and its regulations. But this is not necessarily so. Nobody
doubts that Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator who has murdered his own
people and that there is nothing socialist about his Baath party. But
who is going to believe that Bush is about to install an Iraqi
democracy when his predecessors, less Nazi than he, have for years and
years invaded and occupied sovereign nations and established ferocious
dictatorships which they defended in the face of popular opposition;
Somoza in Nicaragua, Duvalier in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican
Republic. Just like the despotic, puppet regimes which the Nazis
imposed on the countries they occupied, including the anti-Gaullist
France of Marshall Petain.
Just as Hitler invaded Europe in search of his Lebensraum, for the
purposes of territorial expansion, the urgent need for raw materials
required for German growth and the construction of a new German empire
that would avenge the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, Bush is
also looking for his own Lebensraum. A Lebensraum which, in today’s
globalised world, is no longer measured in terms of kilometres of
physically occupied territory but in economic and political domination
wielded from distant international financial centres.
The objectives of the new Hitler are many. In the first place, to take
over the gas tank of world capitalism, which is none other than the
Persian Gulf. Bush knows full well that the oil produced by his
country, the motor driving the production of the world economy, will
inevitably be exhausted within 10 years. In 40 years there will be no
more oil left on the planet. It’s a race against time. According to the
Statistical Review, the discovery of new energy reserves is falling off
alarmingly. These have grown by only 5% in the last decade, compared to
45% in the decade before. Sixty-five per cent of the reserves are
located in the Middle East. The US consumes 20 million barrels a day,
compared to the 77 million produced each day throughout the world, of
which only 10 million is produced by the North-Americans who therefore
depend on the rest of the world so they can go on being an imperial
power. The purpose of attacking Iraq, the world’s second largest
reserve of petroleum, is to control these deposits, control its price
and control its production. It’s nothing to do with hidden weapons or
anything else. As Galeano says, if Iraq produced radishes instead of
oil, who would even consider invading the country?
For Bush, the oil is on a plate. All he has to do is take it. It’s just
that he just doesn’t know how easily he could choke on it.
Bush’s second game plan is to discipline his ally Saudi Arabia, the
world’s number one oil producer and largest energy reserve, whose
pricing policy is of little value to US interests. The third aim, as
revealed by the undersecretary of state, John Bolton, last February, is
to invade Iran and Syria, which together with North Korea form the
“Axis of Evil”. And, if winds are favourable, why not include Libya in
the Holy of Holies? The fourth step is to destroy OPEC and control the
world’s fossil fuels. If it doesn’t expropriate these and find
alternatives in time, North-American capitalism will be forced to
change its model of national consumption, and with it perhaps lose the
fulcrum of its global hegemony. The fifth aim is the succulent
bandwagon business of reconstructing Iraq, onto which are leaping many
of the 500, mainly US, multinationals dominating the world. No less
important is the sixth objective, which lives off the teachings of Lord
Keynes; using the war industry to pull the US economy out of the deep
zero-growth recession which it is in. Let’s not forget that winning a
war is not about imposing one’s military supremacy over an adversary,
but being able to reap the financial returns thereof, the reason why it
was unleashed in the first place.
I cannot help bringing up one last aim, which is perhaps the most
important one of all in this war: imposing the supremacy of the dollar
over the euro, which has recently been giving the dollar a thrashing on
unexpected fronts, and threatened the privileged position of the US in
the crude oil market. Over the last few months, the dollar has been
falling in relation to the euro, some 17%, figures that would have been
hard to believe when the single European currency was set up. Part of
this fall is due to the Iraqi decision to transfer 10 billion dollars
of its reserves to the common European currency. This is another reason
to attack Iraq: to persuade a puppet government of its liking to return
Iraq’s 10 billion dollars to the dollar area. Russia is also operating
in petroeuros, and Iran and several other OPEC countries are
considering whether to abandon the dollar and adopt the euro. Should
this happen, the economists believe that the dollar will go through an
unwonted depreciation, US share prices will plunge, and will generally
bring the clay-footed giant to the brink of a financial collapse
similar to the one it went through in the ‘thirties.
The root cause of this invasion lies in the need to create a new
redistribution of the planet’s wealth after the failure of the triad
accords (US, Europe and Japan) at the Paris OECD meeting in 1998, and
the 1999 WTO meeting in Washington. No agreement was reached on how to
share out a world market besieged by a diminished percentage of the
Gross World Product, of which only 50% was in the hands of the triad
and its multinationals at the end of the century. The inability of
neoliberalism to maintain a maximum rate of exploitation of dependent
nations, the fatigue and decadence of unipolar hegemony and the
not-too-distant possibility of a world crisis which would transform
today’s arrogant domination into a tyranny in tatters, are the roots of
this act of international piracy.
Europe did not accept the terms of the share out and steamed ahead with
the Euro. The US is responding with the subtlety of a bull. If it gets
hold of the black lakes it will have as much cheap oil as it wants,
while its allies will be forced to pay top dollar for a few drops, to
the detriment of their economies.
That’s the war plan. The same reasons for economic dominance that threw
Hitler in the arms of Mars, with a cry of “occupy, administer,
exploit”. From there to Bush actually accomplishing his mission is a
long stretch. Especially when you bear in mind that the only one
picking up the bill for this war is the US. The last invasion of Iraq,
legitimised by the international community, was financed by all
nations. This illicit invasion, a crime against humanity that
challenges the civilised world, will be paid for solely by the US, with
only a small percentage coming from the England of renegade Blair. And
it’s a lot of money. Enough to further destabilise the proud owner of
the little machine used for printing dollars and sitting in the
Department of the Treasury of the most highly indebted nation on the
face of the planet: the United States of America.
Once the real objectives had been drawn, Bush and his band of hawks
patented the Nazi military strategy: the famous Blitzkrieg which the
Nazis used to devastate Europe, lightning war combining attacks by
whole divisions of Panzer tanks supported by waves of aircraft and
artillery pieces. Times change and the Nazi blitzkrieg has become the
US hyperblitzkrieg, but the style of fighting invented by Hitler’s
marshals is the same as that used by Bush, though with one thousand
times greater firepower.
Another similarity is the disproportion of forces. The Nazi invasion of
Czechoslovakia, or Poland where the Polish cavalry facing German tanks
was decimated beforehand by the planes. This was nothing compared to
the infernal firepower of the most powerful technological meat-grinder
in history. It’s as if the Poles had been armed only with slingshots to
defend themselves from Goering’s Luftwaffe. In the first invasion of
Iraq, the Iraqis suffered 120,000 casualties compared to 137 US dead
and 7 missing in action. With the exception of Saddam’s Republican
Guard, the rest of the Iraqi army consists of starving peasants without
training, technology or suitable weapons, all facing three hundred
thousand soldiers who have been trained to kill with not a moment’s
hesitation.
What can a country with a military budget of 1,400 million dollars do
against another which has invested $400,000 million per annum in its
armed forces? And as if that weren’t enough, Bush has just asked for a
further 75,000 million dollars in spare change for this massacre. In
exchange he promises that the spoils of war will far exceed the initial
investment involved.
Before the slaughter began, the Iraqi army was bled in the same way as
a bull is bled by the picadors when it goes into the bullring so that
the bullfighter can have an easier job of it. A decade of economic
sanctions, embargoes, a lack of spare parts, no planes, a limited
number of tanks, few anti-aircraft batteries and an army equipped only
with old AK-47 assault rifles, have driven the Iraqi bull on its knees.
The bullfighter need only drive the sword down to the hilt and wait for
the death throes.
Bled though it may be, the latest news from the front indicates that
the bull is ready to sell its life at a high price.
The Viennese tramp-cum-prophet-of-the-Aryan-race, Adolf Hitler, plunged
ahead showing no respect for mankind’s treasures, destroying wondrous
cities, assailing unrecoverable peoples and their culture and fabulous
monuments created by the hand of man over the centuries.
Acting like the chosen son, George Bush bursts into the cradle of
mankind spitting blood and fire, Mesos Potamos as Iraq was called eight
thousand years ago, the “land between the rivers”, where the first
state was created, the first agrarian civilisation flourished and
cuneiform writing was invented. In the land of the legendary library of
Niniveh, the Tower of Babel, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, between
the Euphrates and the Tigris, Bush launches mercilessly into the first
pre-emptive war of the 21st century.
He will also have to answer for the cultural treasures he destroys. His
homo demens will have to render account to homo sapiens. Just like
Hitler was forced to succumb to history and his henchmen to the
Nuremberg Trials.
The US ambassador to Uruguay, in his communique to LA REPUBLICA, claims
to be astounded by the comparison of his president to Hitler,
explaining that what Bush is doing in Iraq is precisely what the US did
when it liberated Europe from Nazism. I believe it is an insult to
intelligence to compare the brilliant creator of the New Deal, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, with this power-crazed lunatic who, in the name of
ideals, kills ideals, and with people inside them still. Roosevelt went
to war legitimised by all the nations then facing Nazi barbarity, first
among them the Soviet people who offered up the lives of thirty million
of their best men, women and children on the altar of the German
Moloch, people who gave their lives to change the course of the war,
till then victorious for the Third Reich.
Bush is like Hitler, not Roosevelt. Bush violates all international
law, challenges the United Nations and invades an almost disarmed
nation that has at no time attacked it, just like Hitler.
In any case, when you consider statements like the US liberating Europe
or the heroic surrender of the lives of American soldiers in the war
against the German Fuhrer, it would be good to remember that the US
entered the conflagration very late, almost at the end of the conflict,
when Germany had been worn down by the Soviet resistance which, alone,
faced 95% of the Nazi war machine ranged along the eastern front. The
US was the only beneficiary of the Second World War. During and after
the conflict. During, as Heinz Dieterich well describes in LA
REPUBLICA, because it was able to develop its industry and agriculture
far from the battlefields, which led to real income rising 27% between
1941 and 1945, generating seventeen million new jobs and, by 1944,
offering its population more products and services than before the war.
After the war it charged ten to one for its involvement. Yalta saw it
rise to become the strongest power on the planet, shunting England to
one side, though fearing the Soviet Union, its new historic
counter-weight.
And, though I say that it would be an insult to compare Bush to
Roosevelt, we should also not confuse the Founding Fathers of American
democracy, heroes of freedom such as Washington, Abraham Lincoln and
Thomas Jefferson, with this instructor of crime, a mobster of death,
who is incapable of camouflaging the skulking gestures typical of
cowards whenever he appears on television. Charles De Gaulle, the
valiant rebel of anti-Nazi France, once asked the great philosopher
Jean Guitton, “What is cowardice, master?”. And the source of wisdom
replied, “Cowardice, General, is seeking approval and not the truth,
decorations and not honour, promotion and not service, power and not
the health of humanity”. How well would our new Hitler, who claims to
defend the human rights of the Iraqi people while he specialises in
making them human waste, do against this measure?
How can we be surprised by this behaviour in a leader who refuses to
save the planet from devastation and sign the Kyoto protocols,
unanimously approved by the international community. A leader who has
rejected bacteriological arms control because he believes that agreeing
to prevent the proliferation of these arsenals would be prejudicial to
his country. A leader who demands that independent countries sign a
document in which they relinquish their right to judge US citizens for
crimes committed abroad. A leader who refuses to sign up to and take
part in the International Criminal Court, recently created by the world
community to judge crimes against humanity. This rejection of an
institution approved by more than 190 countries, with only 7 against,
coincides with the similar rejection by recently invaded Iraq, who also
did not want to see an International Criminal Court made up of 18
independent lawyers that could legally hinder the continued presence of
war crimes, committed by both the US and Iraq.
What do you expect from a leader who in his own country, the cradle of
democratic tradition, has suspended civil rights, has introduced
censorship, black lists, done away with habeas corpus (a right for
which so many generations have given their lives), imposed clandestine
trials, secret jails and made having an opinion a crime, taking his
country back to the black night of the most backward McCarthyism.
Against all odds, in the middle of a huge intellectual void in American
society, he has created a silent majority in favour of the horrors of
war, a state of mind driven by disinformation, his method being to
distort reality and play on the legitimate pain of the criminal attack
on the Twin Towers, which cut down the lives of four thousand human
beings, and a nationalism intentionally whipped up by this hypocrite in
the White House. Nationalism and false patriotism are other links which
unite Bush and Hitler. This form of nationalism is the scoundrel’s last
refuge and thrives on ignorance.
Albert Einstein described it well: “Nationalism is a children’s disease, the measles of mankind”.
However, a people’s movement is beginning to rise up, from the feet up,
from the roots, in the best civic traditions of the American people.
People are standing up in the large cities, driven by the moral
certainty created by common sense, an attempt to halt this serial
murderer as he unleashes the greatest warmongering injustice of the
last few decades.
Though slowly at first, the American people are beginning to understand
that “freedom can not be brought into existence by people whose brows
are stained with blood”.
Who will have the guts to stop this psychopath? It’s a question the whole planet is asking itself.
The United Nations could not. Nor could NATO. The European allies were snubbed and humiliated.
However, from the depths of history itself, the antidote is beginning
to brew. All empires and their prophets have moved from victory to
victory to their final downfall. And this empire and its emperor, who
care so little for winning the hearts and minds of the world’s nations,
who is deaf or feigns dementia in the face of the immense rebellion of
common sense, in the face of this resounding howl rising from the
exasperated throats of the multitudes that have taken to the streets
throughout the world clamouring for peace and an end to the slaughter,
will, in the end, have no other choice but to accept that the winner of
this crusade will be left picking through the ruins.
Men like Bush believe that crimes are easily swept under the carpet. Wrong. They come back to haunt us.
People are sick of violence. Sick of petty vendettas that pitch groups
against one another. They want to see an end to the days of murderers.
And if they are led up the garden path, they will react.
The sinister dialogue between master and slave nearly always ends in
the ferocity of the slave as he has nothing to lose. Spartacus dixit.
The protests in every corner of the planet do not cease. There has
never been an empire so lacking in support as the one today incarnated
by this power freak.
But this immense world movement against Bush, only comparable to the
world movement against Hitler, has one thing in its favour: the classic
cockeyed view of the new messiahs which prevents them from clearly
seeing the truth. To be cockeyed is a vicious condition of the eyes
where the two visual axes can not hold the same subject at the same
time. Reality is then distorted.
The murmur of millions can then become the weapon that stops this madness.
We need not fear these giants who ignore the laws of history. They use
cunning more than intelligence, sending them back to the age of
dinosaurs, those gigantic animals who developed an enormous body, and a
minuscule head. When disaster struck their small heads were incapable
of inventing the necessary mutation. Mosquitoes had no trouble.
There’s a German saying referring to Hitler which says, “when you see a
giant, first look at the position of the sun, make sure you’re not
looking at the shadow cast by a dwarf”. We still cannot say how much of
the giant and how much of the dwarf there is in our new Hitler.
Remember Gandhi, that moral incendiarist who alerted our consciences.
Just his voice and peaceful bearing brought the greatest empire of its
age to its knees.
Gandhi used to say that the most appalling thing about the evil deeds
perpetrated by evil people was the silence of good people. Today, this
silence does not exist.
At the beginning of the 21st century, all nations, rich or poor,
whether governed by the right or by the left, everyone, everyone, with
the exception of those living in the land of the aggressor, who are only
now beginning to awaken from their slumber, are aware that war as an
irrational crusade is capable of changing mankind. We know that unjust
war is a catastrophe which stunts the possibility of man discovering
his humanity. We join our planetary hands to tell the hired assassin in
the White House that there is a life and a breed of man less sordid
than he, and that we are ready to stand up and defend it. This is my
reply, Mr Ambassador.
Dr. Federico Fasano Mertens, editor of LA REPUBLICA.
Montevideo, Uruguay, 30 March 2003