Appearing on this site with increasing frequency are diaries and comments equating George W. Bush, his administration, and neo-cons, with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and Josef Stalin's USSR. Some have lately taken to quoting a remark attributed to the dubious Paul Craig Roberts, apparently uttered on the talk show of 9/11 "Truther" and Mel Gibson apologist Alex Jones, to the effect that Bushoid neo-cons are actually "worse" and "more evil" than Hitler and Stalin.
This week I finished one book that referenced Nazi Germany, and another that referenced Stalin's Russia. I will quote here a bit from each, in an attempt to provide a reminder of the reality that lies behind the words "Hitler" and "Stalin." The reader can then decide whether George W. Bush, his administration, and/or neo-cons, bad as they are, can reasonably be said to be "worse" or "more evil" than the persons and policies of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.
George II is not a good man. Here is some of what I've written about him:
He has lost Iraq. He has also lost Afghanistan. Where he long ago lost track of Osama bin Laden, together with any "concern" about finding him.
On September 11, 2001, George II lost the lives of more than 3000 Americans. He has since lost the lives of more than 3000 Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans. As "collateral damage," he lost from the lives of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people the presence, forever, of these people, once living, now, of the will of George II, dead . . . .
With his evisceration of habeas corpus, he has lost America's connection to some 800 years of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, stretching back to the Magna Carta. And as he metastasizes throughout the federal government his bizarre and damn-dangerous "theory of the unitary executive," he has lost America's connection to its roots as a Republic . . . .
With his "black prisons," his "enemy combatants," his "extraordinary renditions," his rejection as "quaint" the Geneva Conventions, his globe-trotting torturers, he has lost America its reputation as a place where human rights are valued and protected . . . .
But this is some of what Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany were about, from "Hell Reconsidered," a piece included in William Styron's This Quiet Dust:
[A]t Auschwitz . . . there was ultimately systematized not only mass murder on a scale never known before but mass slavery on a level of bestial cruelty. This was a form of bondage in which the victim was forced to work for a carefully calculated period (usually no more than three months) and then, through methods of deprivation calculated with equal care, allowed to die. Slaving at the nearby factory of I.G. Farben or at the Farben coal mines (or at whatever camp maintenance work the SS were able to contrive), the thousands of inmates initially spared the gas chambers were doomed to a sick and starving death-in-life perhaps more terrible than quick extinction, and luck was more often than not the chief factor involved in their survival.
[S]lave labor is pointless without an end product, and what did slave labor produce at Auschwitz? Of course, on one level, slaves--Jews and non-Jews--slaved to kill Jews. On April 4, 1943, it was decreed that the Auschwitz gas chambers--previously employed to exterminate Jews and gentiles without differentiation--would be used to kill only Jews. Therefore much of the energies of those able-bodied prisoners selected to live for a while was either directly or peripherally expended in the business of getting on with the Nazis' main obsession: the murder of all the Jews in Europe.
[I]n this inconceivably vast encampment of total domination . . . there were thousands of Poles and Russians and Czechs and Slovenes dying their predetermined and wretched deaths, [] in droves Catholic priests and nuns were being subjected to excruciating and fatal medical experiments, [and] members of Polish and other European resistance groups . . . were being tortured and, in some cases, gassed like the Jews.
And this is some of what Josef Stalin and his USSR were about, from Benson Bobrick's East of the Sun:
"Every morning," writes Robert Conquest, "Stalin would initial numbered lists of named victims"--3,182 such death warrants were signed by him on December 12, 1937, alone--"while his henchmen were issuing massive quotas for the random killing of 'enemies of the people' in every region and city. Since every person arrested was forced to denounce dozens of accomplices, the tally of the condemned soon swelled to unmanageable proportions. The purpose was to destroy through fear not just the opposition, such as it was, but the very idea of dissent." In the year of the Great Terror (1937-38), more than 1 million were executed and an estimated 7 million sent to concentration camps.
[A]ny complaint could be considered "anti-state propaganda"; and the mere acquaintance with a foreign language could lead to the charge of espionage. One man was sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor just for studying Esperanto; another, a geologist, for failing to find conjectured deposits of ore. Priests, shamans, or other religious figures, or anyone with ethnic pride unwilling to be homogenized as a "Soviet person," were automatically guilty of capital crimes.
[O]n December 27, 1929, Stalin decided to liquidate the kulaks as a class . . . . The comparitively prosperous Siberian peasantry made a natural target, and whole hamlets as well as individual homesteads were seized as kulak nests. In one Western Siberian region alone, in just one year (1932), 43,000 families were "removed" (most to concentration camps or Arctic settlements in the Siberian north), while hundreds of thousands of "kulaks" were also deported to Siberia from other provinces of the empire. "I will never forget what I saw," wrote one eyewitness. "In the waiting room of the railroad station there were nearly six hundred peasants--men, women, and children--being driven from one camp to another like cattle . . . . Many were lying down, almost naked, on the cold floor. Others were obviously dying of typhoid fever."
Rhetorical overkill is a constant temptation on a political blog, and we all, myself included, occasionally give in to it. But I would not like to see it become casual habit here to refer to George W. Bush and his people as "worse" or "more evil" than Hitler and his Germany, or Stalin and his Russia. I'm equally uncomfortable with assertions that BushCo's crimes are "merely" comparable to those of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. For it simply isn't true.
Too, I think that such rhetorical overkill diminishes, in a way, the very real suffering inflicted upon millions and millions of people by those tyrants.
I think that such comparisons also detract from the sort of comparisons that perhaps we should be making: i.e., are BushCo policies worse than those pursued by John Adams? Andrew Jackson? Rutherford B. Hayes? Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan? In my opinion, it is by looking into our own history for the antecedents of the most repugnant of George II's policies that we can learn how such policies emerge, and, more importantly, how they may be beaten back.
Finally, the easiest argument against the equation of George W. Bush with Hitler and Stalin is this very blog. For if George II were actually "worse" or "more evil" than, or even equally malignant to, those men, then this blog would instantly cease to exist. And all 120,000 of us would, this very afternoon, be riding aboard trains, awaiting delivery to a slave labor camp, or extermination chamber. In the reality of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR, an entity like Daily Kos would not for a day be permitted to exist, and anyone who posted upon it would thereby sign her own death warrant.