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From time to time, here and at our predecessor board, somebody raises the question of how much Bush is like Adolf Hitler. The conversation is invariably shallow, with the world-weary eggheads rolling their eyes out of their sockets while trouncing the angry lefty who raised the question in the first place. Bush offers no hint of wanting to exterminate the Jews or any other similar genocidal madness, and that pretty much kills the comparison for any practical purpose.
I bring up Hitler in the same breath with Bush for another reason altogether. I assume that Bush will never propose mass executions and he will therefore never deserve to be called "another Hitler." But he damn sure is a sui generis W -- and the depth and breadth of what he is capable of doing is still unknown.
For people living in Germany, there never was a point where either the aspiring Nazi Party or the governing Nazi Reich ever announced:
"We are nihilistic madmen who will start unprovoked wars against Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Yugoslavia, Great Britain, Greece, the USSR and the USA -- and try to conquer all those societies at once. We will attack the cities of our enemies from the air in an effort to destroy their civilization, so that we can take over and demand fealty from everybody on the planet. We will hunt down and slaughter all the Jews and Gypsies in Europe, because we think the world will be a better place after they are gone.
"We know that our wars of aggression and our systematic genocide will induce the most profound anger the world has ever seen, and millions of our people will be killed in this regime of Total War. There is a chance that we will lose this war, as we will be signicantly outnumbered by our enemies. If we lose, our country will be occupied by foreigners who will define our future for us.
"Nevertheless we have a vision for the future of our Folk -- and our destiny is to rule the world as we are the best people on earth."
History shows that thousands of people, particularly German Jews, foresaw parts or all of this fate in advance. But millions of Germans, and millions of people the world over, did not believe that Hitler would really be as bad as all that. In hindsight, it is easy for us to say that everybody should have realized that the man was a psychopathic lunatic. But for those that figured it out ahead of time, they must have had a Nazi Moment -- the last straw that confirmed that Hitler really meant to bring death and destruction to the entire world.
I have often wondered about That Nazi Moment -- what it would be like to be a student in Munich or Dresden or Berlin in 1933 or 34 or 36 or 38? You could choose to believe that the authoritarian measures of the Reich were unfortunate but beyond your control. You could regard the harassment of Jews to be unfortunate but beyond your control. You could regard the bizarre symbolism and mass hysteria of the Nazi movement as unfortunate but beyond your control. You have your own life to lead in any event. By seeing the future accurately, as some did, you pretty much condemned yourself to death or exile. http://www.upsizethis.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12746
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