Hitler, Not So Much
Bush is not Hitler.
While there is a certain religious fervor and hatred of the infidel other among many of his supporters, Bush and his backers, and by backers I mean those with the money, are not Nazis.
They are rather a variety of fascists, in which the interest of the corporation is the interest of the state, in which anxieties over religion, race, and sexuality are fanned into a flaming animosity as a matter of political convenience. It’s always the same tactic.
The war that was supposed to take 6 months, a year tops, that was supposed to be paid for by the oil revenues, has now celebrated its third anniversary with no end in sight. Oil and gasoline are more expensive than they have ever been, and we will no doubt soon crack $100.00 per barrel. The surplus the Clenis left us is gone to pay for tax cuts (and there are MORE to come next week), and corporations are doing well, yet the economy for the man on the street is in the toilet.
Not all of this is George W. Bush’s fault: the Clenis’s insistence on NAFTA opened the floodgates to mass unemployment as corporations ditched high wage Americans for low wage Mexicans (and then went on to ditch Mexicans for slave wage Chinese). But most of it is. In fact, Mr. Bush’s insistence on a guest worker program, as envisioned in the Senate, makes the Clenis’s NAFTA scheme even worse, creating a permanent exploited-class citizen, and cracking tthe door ajar for the corporations to treat native-born Americans the same. Who woulda thought I’d be siding with James Sensennbrenner?
It is not that we are “fighting a war against Islamic terrorism/fascism”: as long as Saudi Arabia sits on all that oil, we are content to leave the Wahabbis in charge. It’s that we are fighting a war for corporate profit. It’s a fallacy: the interests of an American corporation are not always the interests of the American people, as NAFTA and associated schemes, the manufacturing implosion, outsourcing, and off-shoring have demonstarted.
Tom Friedman, in a moment of clarity in an otherwise benighted existence, is dumbfounded that GM is giving out credits for a year’s worth of cheap (by current standards) gas to customers who buy Hummers: we are funding our so-called enemies with every gallon. The interest of the coporation is not the interest of the people: what we need are different fuels, we are choking on our fumes like yeast chokes on CO2 and alcohol, drowning in its own excretions.
Bush is not Hitler. Hitler really believed the Jews (and Communists, and Slavs) were to blame for everything that had gone wrong in Germany, and if Hitler’s Willing Executioners is to be believed, anti-Semitism was endemic in the part of Western Europe: Hitler simply exploited attitudes that already existed. Bush may adopt some of the Nazis’ favorite slogans (the notion of an American “homeland” always gets my hackles up: as my father says, “The homeland, as distinguished from the lands we’ve conquered.”), but he is no true believer in extermination based on religion, race, or sexuality. He represents the corporation: it does not matter who has to die in the corporation’s interest, just as it doesn’t matter if no one has to die. As long as the corporation, and I mean this in the caricatured Global Tetrahedron sense as so aptly expressed by The Onion, gets what it wants, then all is good. If that means getting normally quite kindhearted religious people riled up about issues like homosexuals getting married in order to distract them from the fact that we’re sending other people’s sons and daughters into year three of a meat grinder that was supposed to rid our former ally against Iran, Saddam Hussein, of weapons of mass destruction that the corporation knew didn’t exist from day one, well, that’s what you have to do.
For that matter, if the corporation is losing money in the weapons sector, it’s sometimes necessary to send other people’s sons and daughters into year three of a meat grinder that was supposed to rid our former ally against Iran, Saddam Hussein, of weapons of mass destruction that the corporation knew didn’t exist from day one.
It’s the same approach to everything. You do what you have to do to achieve your objectives: if you have to lie, break the law, exploit base emotions, it does not matter. All of these are valid tactics.
Bush isn’t Hitler. Hitler believed in something.
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