Am I being a paranoid, crazy, nutcase when I say that we in the U.S.of A. are following a pathway of life that Adolph Hitler would support? Please don’t expect “cites,” I can’t provide specific examples. Though I really feel that the leaders of our Nation are adapting many policies that were used by the Nazi’s prior to WW 2.
Example: Wanting to give the Armed Forces the power to enforce the law on U.S. soil.
Are there Americans out there who still beleive, I mean really beleive that the U.S. was actually in danger from Iraq? :dubious: My own personal feeling is the Iraq War is just an instrument of distraction. We have issues here at Home that we should be resolving rather than interfearing in the affairs of other Nations.
That is pretty much all that I have to say now.
According to some people, you can’t compare anyone to Hitler or anything to the Nazis because such a comparison automatically invalidates the argument.
I suppose it does show many of the traits of the early Nazi regime. I could easily make a list:
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Massive rallies of the nation’s youth, designed to indoctrinate them to the government. The Bush Youth is more and more popular every day.
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Progressively harsher laws against a specific racial group, unchallenged (even supported) by the majority of the population. Darn smokers.
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Summary executions of political dissidents (everyone remembers the Night of the Long Season Finales).
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Annexations of territories with high American population, unchallenged by the world at large. There goes Canada.
5a. Building up of military forces in direct contradiction of a harsh treaty imposed upon the USA at the end of the last war.
5b. Bush’s platform being built upon rejecting said treaty.
- The use of large, violent crowds to cow Congress into submission.
Need I go on? The similarities are endless.
7 Don’t forget the rampant hyperinflation and the record unemployment suffered under the previous administration
Are you familiar with the Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism outlined by Dr. Lawrence Britt, based on his studies of “fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes”? They are from the article “Fascism Anyone?,” Lawrence Britt, Free Inquiry, Spring 2003, page 20.
I can’t put the whole thing here due to copyright issues, but here’s the list. See the link above for elaboration on each point:
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Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
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Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
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Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
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Supremacy of the Military
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Rampant Sexism
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Controlled Mass Media
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Obsession with National Security
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Religion and Government are Intertwined
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Corporate Power is Protected
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Labor Power is Suppressed
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Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
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Obsession with Crime and Punishment
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Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
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Fraudulent Elections
Here’s an “obviously biased” site which provides examples of actions in the past few years which illustrate each point. Googling Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism will bring you others. I leave you to make your own conclusions.
Jesus, you guys need to read up on your history and get some perspective. This Administration is bad–maybe rivaling the Harding Administration in incompetence and corruption–but it’s nowhere near the sort of fascist autocracies that dominated most of Europe from the late Twenties through World War II (and beyond, for Spain and the most of the Soviet satellites).
The detainment camps in Guantanamo Bay, the unilateral waging of war, the “you’re either with us or against us” rhetoric; these are all repeated and cyclic themes. Heck, in terms of international relations, this Adminstration is virtual remake of the Johnson Administration, with terrorists standing in for Communists.
And I’ve seen Adolf Hitler…George W. Bush, you, sir, are no Adolf Hitler. Hitler had charisma and oratory skills; George has trouble pronouncing the word “strategic.” Heck, he’s not even Generalissimo Ferdinand Franco. He’s more like *Billy Madison Goes To Washington."
He’ll be gone in another two years; replace, hopefully (but not probably) by someone with a sound basis in reality and some measure of education in history, economics, world politics, and social issues. Unfortunately, this leaves out most of the proposed candidates from both major parties, but you never know. Sometimes you get an Eisenhower, sometimes you get a Reagan.
Stranger
Everyone knows that I was being sarcastic, right?
[size=1]Right?[/size=1]
Indeed.
I think that one of the points where the comparison falls apart is that, within the US, Bush has plenty of rabid supporters. However, he also has a number of extremely dedicated dissenters. There are people who strongly dislike him (myself amongst them) and dedicate a huge amount of time and energy to trying to stop him. I’m fairly certain that this was lacking in Hitler’s Germany.
I think you are mistaken about that. The German Communists were fervently opposed to Hitler. Many of the leading anti-fascist voices of the 20s and 30s were Marxists.
Then Stalin and Hitler signed the non-aggression treaty, and they started practicing their flip-flops.
Regards,
Shodan
You forgot one:
- Surreptitious substitution of politically subversive URLs with innocuous content intended to sell swimming pools.
:smack:
I will check my links before I post.
I will check my links before I post.
I will check my links before I post.
I will check my links before I post.
I will check my links before I post.
I will check my links before I post.
I will check my links before I post.
I will check my links before I post.
I will not reply to two tabbed threads at once.
I will not reply to two tabbed threads at once.
I will not reply to two tabbed threads at once.
I will not reply to two tabbed threads at once.
I will not reply to two tabbed threads at once.
I will not reply to two tabbed threads at once.
I will not reply to two tabbed threads at once.
I will not reply to two tabbed threads at once.
I’m fairly sure I meant this link , although you can find the list in hundreds of places.
The OP raises two questions:
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Would Hitler approve of modern-day America?
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Is the current administration employing tactics used by the Nazis pre-WW2?
The examples given are (i) wanting to give the military the power to enforce law on US soil; and (ii) using the Iraq war as a distraction from domestic trouble.
I’ll take the two questions in reverse and say that I do think that the current administration is using tactics used by the Nazis. But then, so have many, many other governments. The rise of the modern media makes the necessity for distractions from unpleasant things not only easier but more palatable to a public that has grown up with an MTV short attention span.
But none of this is new. The military justified interning Asians and Asian-Americans during WW2 by claims of necessity. One of the trio of cases representing the greatest failures of the US Supreme Court is the Korematsu, case. The Court’s opinion relied on evidence taken in the lower court that Asians and Asian-Americans represented such a threat to the US that they needed to be rounded up. (Not so much with the Germans and Italians, as Justice Jackson pointed out in dissent.)
But the point here is that the techniques and tactics used by an administration to misdirect the public from more important issues are those used by the Nazis, and by lots of other governments (American and non-American alike). I don’t think we can condemn a savvy political machine for doing what it was built to do, or claim “they’re just like the Nazis!” for doing so.
We can, however, work to educate a public that permits its politicians to mislead, and pays its media to be those politicians’ lackeys.
As to the first point raised by the OP, I don’t think Hitler would approve of the US today. Even as bad as we might think it is, if you step back, things are pretty good for us here in the US.
The world changes; we’re light years away, as a society, from where we were even thirty years ago. Is this a dark period? In my opinion, not really. But for those who think it is, there are rays of hope: scattered judges who refuse to play along; people who protest the war; international media reporting things the domestic media plays blind to; and peole who don’t like where our current administration is taking us.
Yup. Although for a moment I thought, “Hmmm. The Bush Youth. Kind of an evocative name.”
I just want to see how the other thread’s going. 
Well we have Jews running Hollywood, Mexicans sliding under the border, Negros dominating professional sports, and rampant liberal protestation against even the most casual infringement of civil rights. Meanwhile, we can’t even subdue a modest-sized Mid-Eastern nation with the most powerful and well-supplied army on the planet. Heck, we can’t even invade and annex the small Communist-run island nation to the south after 50 years of trying.
I think it’s safe to say that Mein Furher would be vastly disappointed with modern day America, save perhaps for our defense spending.
I bet he’d love Jerry Bruckheimer films, though. Even if they are made by Zionist mongrels.
Stranger
Thank you, You summed this up better than I could have. I have many problem with Bush and love the Billy Madison Goes To Washington line.
His Admin really reminds me of the Harding Admin for incompetance and corruptance. I haven’t seen too many signs that look like Nazism.
True. The real problem isn’t today or even tomorrow. The problem is that things like this are a ratchet. Each incremental infringement sets a precedent for the next infringement which goes just a little further.
It’s not we who need to worry about excessive governmental power. It’s those in the future for which the next step toward state control is only a little one.
But why should we care what happens to them? As has been said, what have they ever done for us?
By the time the treaty was signed, there were no effective political parties in Germany except the Nazis. The Communist Party was banned and its assets seized in 1933 (following the Reichstag Fire). Shortly thereafter, the Enabling Act was passed, and shortly after that, all non-Nazi parties ceased to exist.
True…but the erosion of civil rights and Constitutional protections has been going on long before Billy Madiso…I mean, George W. Bush, took office. In each Administration it has taken a different form, but it has and will continue regardless of which party holds control of the Presidency and Congress, with occasional reversals and corrections.
I don’t like Bush (and if Kerry would have just shown a little backbone and told the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” to take their pravda and shove it up their arses I’d have ardently supported him) but it’s disingeneous to compare him to Hitler. I fear that when a real megalomanaic steps up and tries to take the Presidency, you’ll have so worn out the term “fascist” that nobody will really notice or care. There are plenty of legitimate complaints about this President (some of which, if true, are far more impeachable than getting a blowjob in the Oval Office, or even covering it up), but the hystronics don’t do credit to the claims.
Stranger
Does that make sense, did anyone suggest we don’t care about the future. If Jeb Bush is Pres in 2008 or 2012 I am going to be frightened. Of course we care what happens for future generations. I personally am more fearful of a restrictive and more overtly religious (read fundamentalist christian) government growing in power. I just don’t see the direct comparison to Nazi’s being fair.
I sincerely hope that either a very moderate republican will run and win next election and get us back on a sensible fiscal path and maintain a strong but hopefully honest foreign policy or I will settle for a moderate democrat. Either way, I would hope the assault on our freedoms and the excessive corruption of this current admin would be reversed.
In fairness, while there may have been some “erosion” of civil rights, the past fifty or sixty years has also seen an explosion in court protection of civil rights. Things we take for granted now were novel concepts thirty years ago. So my problem isn’t with the so-called erosion in our civil rights. My biggest fear is that more people will accept the current administration’s credo: “Now is not the time to question your government.” We’ve heard it before, and, frankly, it’s never been a good policy for a free people.
I don’t fear the administration. I fear the people who vote for the administration.