This has always intrigued me. Often otherwise intelligent people compare Bush to Hitler. In this thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=284482 Dio the Cynic does just that.
Now Mr. Cynic I am just a lowly poster. I defer to your intelligence and your status on this board. But sir, could you please defend, or explain, your “Bush is Hitler” stance?
Anyone else is welcome to play along!
You can’t defend the indefensible.
I think he means Bush is like Hitler of the early thirties before Hitler’s worst was revealed. That the totalitarian of Hitler came oozing in slowly and for many years unnoticed. Chamberlain was fooled, apparently he thought Hitler was a man you could do business with. Of course one has only to take superficial look at Mein Kampf to be convinced otherwise. It’s hard to think how Dio can think Bush can entertain ideas like Hitler’s white supremacist and anti-Semitic ones – not to say his anti-Christian ones, or anti-American. Or vegetarian for that matter, whoever heard of a vegetarian Texan? Also I’ve heard he (Bush) is not so much for Germany these days.
People on the right accuse liberals of being nazis all the time. Don’t like guns? You’re a nazi. Want equal rights for women? You’re a “feminazi.” Don’t like smoking? Tobacco nazi. It goes on and on. I think we could do with a lot less of this.
Rune, you are a good guy for softening his position, but from what I have read there is no gray here according to Dio. I am not sure he isn’t planning his own putsch. I find it indefensible and embarassing and would love a detailed explanation myself.
Give it up… this thread won’t go anywhere, except maybe to the Pit. As much as I like **DtC **and respect his opinions on many matters, he is so blindingly biased against Bush that you can’t expect a rational debate. I’m conviced he doesn’t believe half of what he posts about Bush.
We need a new historical allusion. I myself recommend comparing Hitler to Ethelred the Unready. Nah, that doesn’t hold up. Bush doesn’t pay Danegeld. It doesn’t hold up.
The first sentence is true. But I think you are wrong about the second.
Godwin’s Law would say that this thread is inherently unproductive. Move it to the Pit, or better still, lock it. This can only end badly.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s what I took it to mean and the analogy has some validity in these terms. Bush pretends to be one thing (a uniter) when he has a fundamentalist religious and right-wing agenda entirely out of keeping with all that is or was good and noble about the USA.
Hitler=Bush seems to be a bit of a stretch. To establish the point, you’ve got to produce some evidence. Well, one way to get a good line on someone is to examine what he reads.
Hitler was particularly enthralled with a book entitled, “The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion,” and here’s some of what Jim Grossfeld of the Center For American Progress had to say about this opus:
**If hate literature had a magnum opus, it would probably be The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion. Concocted in 1890s Russia by the Czar’s personal police, the Okhrana, The Protocols is a fake account of Jews meeting to plan for world domination. If the plot sounds familiar, it should: among its most devoted readers was Adolph Hitler.
Commenting on the book, Hitler once said, “It simply appalled me. The stealthiness of the enemy, and his ubiquity. I saw at once that we must copy it - in our own way of course - it is in truth the critical battle for the fate of the world.” He was such an admirer of the book that he made it required reading for the Hitler Youth. **
(See entire article at Wal-Mart Open-Minded 'Protocols' Review Angers ADL)
Now fast forward to 4/2/02.
On this day George W. Bush, President of the United States of America was addressing the students at Penn State University and told them, “Sometimes, when I sleep at night, I think of ‘Hop on Pop’.” (Which, of course, is a Dr. Seuss book.)
Heil Bush! 
How about Nixon?
I think a Nixon comparison is much more rational. Arrogant, incapable of absorbing what the opposition has to say, will fight dirty to win (it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if his campaign will be exposed as the next CREEP), and yet the majority of the american public were seemingly oblivious to it when they decided to re-elect him. I also think that in this case, the full extent of his evil will come to light a couple years into his second term.
Didn’t Hitler at least manage to unite Germany ? Bush has only divided… I think Nixon is a better comparison.
Well let’s be honest. When you say “Hitler” you don’t think of a thuggish Austrian coming to power in 1930s Germany. You think of a man who sent millions of jews in ovens. THAT is the image I believe they are comparing Bush to when they say Bush is Hitler. Maybe I am wrong about that. In any case I find the argument incongruous.
To see the rhetoric softened to compare him to Nixon is almost funny. I am still interested in ANYONE, DtR included, to defend the comparison.
Thing is, even if there were some valid comparisons between a Hitler of some time and place and Bush of 2004 beyond what is between any two humans, making such comparisons it is tacitly understood that it is the inhuman totalitarian Hitler you want your man compared to. Not Hitler the doting lover. Not Hitler the brave soldier. Not Hitler the capable painter. My father is a halfway decent painter. Hitler was a halfway decent painter. You call my old man a Hitler and I’d whack you on the head with a brick. Also such accusations are self defeating. Perhaps there was a time when it would have mattered, these days though, nobody takes it serious anymore. It has been done to death. (BTW. I’ve been called a Nazi more than a few times here on SDMB) It just reveals yourself as a man with little historical knowledge and undermines your own creditability. The only harm there’s left in abusing terms like Nazi and Hitler is in that they work to water down the perception of how truly evil real Nazism is and removing the stigma connected with it. Soon it’ll be a common household name, perhaps your boss’ newest turnaround plan is called Endløsnung, perhaps you have a pet cleverly called Hitler? A little retreat in the woods called Auschwitz? For every time someone makes the Bush=Hitler thing they do their little bit to help that some day, somewhere, the holocaust is having a repeat.
Also Dio should keep in mind that Hitler was a highly intelligent man.
Well he bloody well should! Or we’ll pillage Washington!
Anyway, what about Attila the Hun? My mom sometimes told us to kids to behave or Attila the Hun would get us. That’s worked for 1500 years. Bush the Hun has a certain ring to it.
Oh how I long for the day when a reporter discovers seventeen megabytes missing from a hard drive…
Daniel
Of course Bush isn’t exactly Hitler, any more than Pol Pot was exactly Hitler, or Hitler was exactly Napoleon, or Mussolini was exactly Robespierre.
But Bush has the expansionist foreign policy of an adolescent, rooted in a sense of the divine rightness of his own culture; his success is rooted in the popular appeal of that idea, his pose as Defender of the Faith, & his doctrine that a strong leader is what we really need rather than debate, dissent, or well-thought-out policy. All of this is Fascist doctrine.
Unfortunately, Bush is probably not even conscious of his quais-fascism, or of the defects in his policy. His tax policy cannot fund his Holy War. He is the ideological grandchild of Nixon, wrapped in a mock-up of Ronald Reagan’s vestments, & lurching toward the void like Commodus, or maybe one of the post-Constantinian Caesars. He is a throwback to the European Middle Ages. He harks back to a dream of Christendom, as Hitler harked back to the myth of a noble Nordic race. He is atavist, the morphine dream of bygone times.
Where the left gets confused is that they keep looking for Bush & the Christian Right to represent a classically American sort of identity politics: Southern racism, say. But Bush is like the medieval kings in this: His base is in “Christians,” not “whites.” Race-defined counter-arguments are now out of date, & the sense of divine authority makes his base hard to sway with rhetoric. They are by church programmed.
“Gott ist mit uns.” So, no, not Hitler as such, but tapping into the atavistic dream that Hitler rode to power, another beloved shining knight to his people–if to no one else.
Actually, I don’t believe it’s “often” at all. A few people, like DtC, may have said such a thing, but I’d be willing to bet that 90% of the time, somebody made some sort of analogy in which Hitler was compared with regard to one particular point, and some knee-jerk right winger misinterpreted it and sputtered, “How DARE you say Bush is exactly equivalent to Hitler in every way!!!” Either that or it was a joke that flew over someone’s head.
In all fairness to Dio:
#1) He posted that in the Pit. Am I not correct that the Pit here is intended for flames and outrageous postings? And would not polite discourse of a topic be off topic in the Pit?
#2) Dio’s initial post in that thread was:
“The truly pathetic thing is that you actually think you won something. You just reelected Hitler. Congratulations. Enjoy the world war.”
He doesn’t say that Bush was exactly like Hitler. He merely seems to think that Bush will be responsible for a World War. While I myself see substantial differences between Hitler and Bush (although I do think both are evil), I seriously feel Bush’s irresponsible foreign policy could result in World War. If it comes down to in the next 4 years I see with my own eyes the flash of the detonation of a nuclear weapon near where I live, I dunno I will take much solace in knowing that at least Bush never killed millions of fellow Americans in genocidal death camps. That massive numbers of Americans of all races, creeds and colors will die will suck.
Similarities:
1- Hitler started a World War, Bush started a small war
2- Both invaded sovereign nations under flimsy premises
3- Both justified use of torture against their POWs
4- Both used nationalistic ferver to keep power
Differences:
1- Bush had children
2- Hitler served in combat