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HEIL HISTORY!
BY PETER KURTH (published 01.14.04)
Gee, only two weeks into the new year and I’ve already got a
case of the “what ifs?”
What if we had an honest government?
What if our media told the truth?
What if Americans studied world history, or, for that matter, their
own?
Really, you’d think with all those bestselling biographies of
the Founding Fathers floating around – John Adams, Benjamin Franklin,
Alexander Hamilton, etc. -- people would be learning something. But I guess they never do. “I wander alone, and ponder,”
as Adams said.
“I muse, I mope, I ruminate. We have not men fit for the
times.”
I’m talking about “the Bush and Hitler thing,” as I
see it called, the giant flap created last week over a couple of TV ads
that never aired. These commercials
– two of them -- were entries in the “Bush in 30 Seconds”
campaign, a nationwide competition for anti-Bush TV spots sponsored by the
MoveOn.org Voter Fund. According to
news reports, one of the submissions “mixed images of Hitler and Nazi
militarism with Bush taking the oath of office. The other quoted Hitler and Bush as
saying they acted in God's name to vanquish their enemies” – a
statement of fact, inasmuch as
Hitler did, and Bush still does, say such things.
Let me repeat: Neither of
these commercials was aired. Before
being removed, they sat briefly with about 1500 others on the Bush in 30
Seconds Web site, having “slipped through” MoveOn's
screening process in violation of its written guidelines asking for no
submissions that were “inappropriate for television,” whatever
that means.
"None of these was our ad,”
explained MoveOn’s co-founder, Wes Boyd,
“nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by
the MoveOn.org Voter Fund. We do not support the
sentiment expressed in the two Hitler submissions.”
Why not, I wonder? I’ve
compared Bush to Hitler from the moment of his “election” and I
don’t apologize for it. I
don’t say they’re the same – I say they’re
alike. Both were nonentities before
they came to power. Both had no
experience for the job. Like Hitler,
Bush lies, consistently and constantly, and, like Hitler, he uses ends to
justify means. As he said himself,
so famously, during the last election, “If this was a dictatorship,
it’d be a heck of a lot easier – just so long as I’m the
dictator.”
In fact, there was no one out there to be offended by the
Bush-and-Hitler commercials until “Jewish leaders and
Republicans” – I quote the Los Angeles Times -- raised a stink
and accused MoveOn of – well, what is the
accusation? As of Monday, the only
place you could find these ads was on the Web site of the Republican
National Committee, beneath a disingenuous rant about “despicable
tactics” and a call for all Democratic presidential contenders to
disavow the message of some ads that no one saw.
“Such ads are anything but appropriate for television,”
says RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie, “and MoveOn.org should apologize for
posting [them].” MoveOn has apologized for posting them, but apparently
this is insufficient penance for the self-incensed.
"To compare the president of the United States, his fight
against al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, with the
politics of Hitler is ... shameful, it is beyond the pale, and has no place
in the legitimate discourse of American politics," says Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
in Los Angeles. “Adolf Hitler was responsible for the greatest crime in
the history of mankind – the Holocaust. To compare Hitler to an
American President is not only ludicrous, but defames the
Holocaust.”
At the same time, Rabbi Hier condemns
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei for
saying, over the weekend, that Israel is seeking “an apartheid
solution” to the Palestine problem, as evidenced by the great big
wall it’s been building around the citizens of the West Bank. And no “debasement” exists,
presumably, in the words of Grover Norquist, the
Republican Party’s “prophet of permanence,” who recently
remarked on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” program
that the American estate tax, affecting some two per cent of the
population, reflects “the morality of the Holocaust.”
“Excuse me,” said “Fresh Air’s” sturdy
hostess, Terry Gross. “Excuse
me one second. Did you just …
compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?”
"No,” said Norquist, fumbling
for words, “the morality that says it's okay to do something to a
group because they're a small percentage of the population is the morality
that says the Holocaust is okay because they didn't target everybody, just
a small percentage."
Ah. And there’s nothing
wrong, either, I suppose, with New York Post columnist Ralph Peters
attacking Howard Dean and his “Internet Gestapo,” as he did
last week, right in the middle of the MoveOn
fuss. Not a peep about it from
Republicans, rabbis or the so-called free press.
"These are the techniques employed by Hitler's Brownshirts,” Peters wrote. “Had Goebbels enjoyed access to the Internet, he would have
used the same swarm tactics as Dean's Flannelshirts
… It's Goebbels
again: Just keep repeating the lies
until the lies assume the force of truth.”
The truth, I’m afraid, is that no one owns history, no one owns
Hitler and no one owns the Holocaust, not even the Jews. I know what I’m in for when I make
that statement, but I believe it needs to be said.
“So far, I've seen nothing to eliminate the possibility that
Bush is on the same course as Hitler,” writes an unnamed reader, a
survivor of the Nazi occupation of Europe, on the Web site TruthOut.org: “And I've seen far too many
analogies to dismiss the possibility.
The propaganda. The
lies. The rhetoric. The nationalism. The flag waving. The pretext of 'preventive
war'.”
Shall we go on? Or have you
had enough already?
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