The Nazis, Bush and Impeachment

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_maniac_060516_the_nazis_2c_bush_and_.htm

May 16, 2006

The Nazis, Bush and Impeachment
by Maniac


The Nazis who were sitting in the dock in Nuremberg, Germany, on November 21, 1945, heard the following charge when US Chief of Counsel Robert H. Jackson addressed the International Military Tribunal:

“We have also accused as criminal organizations the High Command and the General Staff of the German Armed Forces. We recognize that to plan warfare is the business of professional soldiers in all countries. But it is one thing to plan strategic moves in the event war comes, and it is another thing to plot and intrigue to bring on that war. We will prove the leaders of the German General Staff and of the High Command to have been guilty of just that. Military men are not before you because they served their country . . . They are not here because they lost the war, but because they started it.”

The lies and deceptions of Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush, his Cabinet, and his military leaders were part and parcel of the “plot and intrigue to bring on” the war against Iraq. It has been a war that “they started.” The guilty verdict rendered at Nuremberg surely informs us as to what the primary indictment in the impeachment of George W. Bush ought to be.

The Downing Street Memo confirmed what was already known: “the facts and intelligence being fixed around the policy.” Two sentences further on in the Memo are even more revealing because they tell us WHY Bush lied: “It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin.”

What was the case that Bush was trying to make? Bush knew that under the United Nations Charter there are two circumstances that permit a nation to declare war. One is that the nation must be under attack, or threat of imminent attack. Therefore, Bush claimed that Saddam had WMD and was planning to use them against the United States. But the facts could not substantiate this claim.
A country may also go to war if it is part of a collective effort sanctioned by the United Nations. Bush dispatched Colin Powell, his Secretary of State at the time, to New York in a vain attempt to persuade the organization to endorse such an effort. Since Bush failed to achieve a legal cover for his plans, the US invasion of Iraq is nothing short of naked aggression.

The truth is that under the international treaties that have been signed by US presidents and have become part of the US Constitution under Article VI, launching an aggressive war is the supreme international crime. Our president and his subordinates are already war criminals (and the projected assault on Iran simply compounds their criminality). All the other charges that can be — and should be — leveled at Bush pale in comparison to this most heinous transgression against humanity.
We have become fixated on the fact that Bush lied to get us into this war. But we leave hanging in limbo a follow-up question: If Bush had not lied, had simply said that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from power because he was a bad guy, would it have been okay for him to invade Iraq? The anti-war movement needed to ask that question and to provide the answer.


Author of Discovering America: A Political Journey and a booklet on Patriarchy; a feminist and polticval activist.

EDITED for typing

Since I am one of the people who now and then gets pilloried here for asserting that parallels between Bush and Hitler are out of line, let's revisit this issue as a way of enumerating where the parallels make some sense.

Briefly, the parallels are not valid for two reasons. First, the Nazis set a standard for evil that will not be approached for some time; however, that means that one may not be "as bad as" that and still be pretty evil. In my view, the neoconservatives are bad enough. Second, Hitler and the Nazis were about mass murder while Bush and the neoconservatives are about grand theft. Hitler murdered about 11 million civilians because they weren't Aryan enough for him and because he wanted the land on which they lived for lebensraum for Aryans; Bush, by the most liberal estimates, hasn't even killed a quarter million. It is doubtful that Bush has any desire to kill anybody. His empire is based on crackpot economics, not crackpot anthropology. He wants to seize control of the Middle East in order to control its resources and to force a neoliberal socio-economic model down the throats of developing nations. Mass murder is not conducive to this end. The neoconservatives need a world overpopulated with poor and oppressed people to supply cheap labor for the industrial capitalists who, like Hitler's Aryans, occupy the high rungs of a social hierarchy in their crackpot theories.

From examining the differences between Nazis and neoconservatives, we can also see what the similarities are.

First of all, both Nazis and neoconservatives presented/present to the world a hierarchical social system. In both cases, they believed/believe that they had/have tje right to impose this hierarchy on the world by force. Since the system being imposed is hierarchical and institutionalizes inequality, those who are condemned to occupy the lower rungs of the hierarchy naturally resist the imposition making force necessary. Consequently, the neoconservatives, like the Nazis, desire to impose a dystopia through wars.

The wars cannot be characterized as anything other than wars of aggression. Propaganda is employed to justify wars to the population with lies, since the populations would not support wars of aggression for the benefit of only a few. Consequently, the propaganda persuades the people that the war is for a more practical purpose, like national security. While threats indeed did exist to both the German government and to America, they were smaller scale threats that could erupt into dramatic events such as the Reichstag fire and the September 11 attacks rather than anything approaching war from a hostile power. The German people were persuaded that Poland was a threat to their nation, just as the American people were persuaded that Iraq was a threat. In neither case did any real threat exist from the targeted sources and in both cases those in power knew this and deliberately lied.

Consequently, both Nazis and neoconservatives were/are war criminals. The neoconservatives, while not mass murderers, nevertheless occupy today the same niche in current events occupied sixty-five years ago by the Nazis. The neoconservatives are the single greatest threat to world peace today. This threat will require extraordinary measures to contain and eliminate. In the end, the neoconservatives warrant prosecution by an international tribunal in the hopes that a hierarchical theory based on imposing an inegalitarian dystopia on the world by force will not rise again.

I think a quarter of a million people, more or less, not counting the possible effects of nuking Iran in the near future, more than qualifies as mass murder. Is there a threshold number? Do we really have to exceed 10 million before it counts?

And those are just the obvious, caught-bloody-handed murders. There are also the murders by omission, whether it be incomes for the unemployed and malnourished, health care for the uninsured, the drowned of New Orleans, the 9/11 victims, and the basic domestic violence and drug crimes of those driven to despair by the destruction of the social contract.

The only reason Latin America isn't in flames and adding to the totals is that Dubya couldn't put together one war (Afghanistan), let alone two (Iraq), never mind three (anywhere else).

That was beautifully written, by the way. I want to keep it!

Hitler was a principally a murderer and Bush is principally a thief. Hitler stole from his murder victims, but that was incidental to killing them. His "take" was the private property and personal belongings and gold teeth of his victims. Do you think he cared about it? I don't know if any one in the Third Reich personally profited from the loot, but I doubt Hitler himself did.

Likewise, Bush kills his victims, but that is incidental to stealing from them. If he could have accomplish the goal of seizing Iraq's natural resources and turning it over to his corporate cronies without killing any one, he would have.

Of course, if he actually nukes Iran, that will put him in a class of mass murderers along the lines of Hitler (and Tamerlane and Attila the Hun, for that matter). If we can prevent that, we may actually be doing Bush a favor in terms of his posthumous reputation, which will be bad enough as it is.

Is that why the average American isn't out in the street rioting, because it's "only" theft, even though they are Bush victims, too?

However, a greater reason is that most Americans don't really comprehend the gravity of what Bush has done.

There is one good thing to be said about invading Iraq: it osted Saddam from power. Most people are glad to see his back. The Bush Bubbahs are right about one thing: Saddam would most likely still be in power otherwise.

As a Hobson's choice, I'd still choose that over having our military tied up on occupation duty and Osama still on the loose. That's the practical side.

On the moral side, colonial piracy leaves a bad taste in my mouth. That, not ousting Saddam, was the real reason for invading Iraq.

It seems that some of the neocon proopaganda has worked for Bush. Although he has not been able to convince Americans that he really thought Iraq was a threat, he has been able to convince them that he wants to bring "democracy" to the Middle East and oust a brutal tyrant from power.

If more Americans were more aware that the real reasons were not so benign, there would be rioting in the streets.

...two reasons," are you referring to parallels you perceived to be actually drawn in the piece posted? I couldn't find any parallels in it that seemed to be drawn on the basis of a "standard for evil" set by the Nazis being rivaled by BushCo.

Also, while this may be beside the point, I would respectfully disagree with your statement that "Hitler and the Nazis were about mass murder while Bush and the neoconservatives are about grand theft." In my opinion both were/are about world domination. However, again, I could find nothing in the piece that seemed to compare Bush to Hitler on the basis of the respective number of deaths they've caused.

I wonder if you would agree that when evaluating the validity with which a parallel or comparison is drawn one is obliged to carefully examine the specific context in which it is made? The piece compares Hitler and the Nazi's to BushCo in the context of the lies and deceptions they used to lead their respective nations into war and that their actions constituted war crimes. Do you consider this parallel valid? I do.

If America had a progressive liberal President, let's say politically much like Dennis Kucinich, that just so happened to look and speak very much like Hitler, and further, if you were to read an essay that drew comparisons between Hitler and this liberal American president ONLY in the context of their similar appearance and speech--would you assert that the parallels were not valid because this American president wasn't a mass murderer or politically anything like Hitler, even though the essay made no attempt to draw such comparisons?

Doesn't the context of the comparisons/parallels being drawn matter in judging validity? Shouldn't they each be evauated separately and distinctly? And would you agree that to compare and contrast is not at all the same as to equate?

Thus lastly, aren't broad sweeping statements such as, "Parallels between Bush and Hitler are not valid," really somewhat meaningless?

Yes, the ultimate goal is world domination, and Bush's immediate means to the end are global piracy and misappropriation of other nations' oil fields and the elimination of democracy in America. Bush doesn't hesitate to use deadly force, either. He's just so inept at it, thank Mars.

Hitler had the same goals, but his first line of attack was massively mass murder and World War, something the Germans excelled at. I'm sure Bush would get around to that eventually, if the world let him.

Hitler may not have amassed great wealth, but his partners in crime (including German arms manufacturers, life insurance companies, Ford Motors, IBM, the Gnomes of Zurich, and the Bush patriarch) certainly did. It's taken 60 years for just hints of those details to come out, along with the looting of art treasure, which the US also participated in. come to think of it, what about that Iraqi museum of antiquities?