Is Bush Hitler?

James Taranto, writing in the Wall Street Journal, offered up an offhand dismissal of Counterpunch as "an outfit whose staple is stuff comparing Bush to Hitler," which seems to suggest he thinks the very notion is beyond the pale of civil discourse.

But stay. As one of the first to notice some similarities between Bush II and the early Hitler, I didn't actually say that George and Adolf were joined at the hip. Indeed, I suggested in my Counterpunch article back on Feb. 1, during the high-pressure White House drive to war in Iraq, that our unelected president was surely no Hitler, since "Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was." More importantly, I didn't equate Bush with Hitler because there are some other big differences between the two.

So far, for example, while he has rounded up some Arab and Muslim men purely because of their ethnicity or religion, Bush has not started gassing them--at least not yet. What I did say, however (and I think subsequent events have proven me even more correct than did the events that had occurred prior to Feb..1), is that some of the tactics of the Bush administration resemble those of Hitler and his Brownshirts. I would go further and add that Bush's attorney general, John Ashcroft, a man who has pointedly praised the old Confederacy, would probably feel quite comfortable in brown with a hakenkreuz tacked to his sleeve.

What are some of the Nazi-like tactics of the Bush administration?

Let's start with war-mongering. The American Heritage Dictionary, no bastion of leftism, defines fascism as "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Now we may not yet have a dictatorship, but we do have the extreme right with a solid lock on power in Washington today, and a glance at the top echelon of the Bush administration makes it clear that there is not just a merger, there's a thorough melding of state and business leadership in this administration. As for belligerent nationalism, what else is one to call a war of aggression like the one against Iraq, especially now that it's clear what most thinking people realized before the war even started--that Iraq had no significant offensive military capability, much less weapons of mass destruction. It was all a massive lie deliberately designed to scare the living crap out of an already nervous American public, so that they would accept the ongoing assault on the Bill of Rights being masterminded by Ashcroft. That strategy was vintage Goebbels.

Then there's the suspension of habeas corpus, right to counsel, and a host of other civil liberties. When American citizens like Jose Padilla can be clapped into prison--a military prison at that--with no charges filed, no access to friends or relatives, and no right to talk to a lawyer, we have crossed a line into fascist territory. Maybe we haven't reached the point of wholesale mass arrests and concentration camps (though even that, reportedly, is being contemplated by the proto-fascist Ashcroft, and we know who appointed that right-wing religious zealot and racist to his post), but once the principle of arrest without charge or trial is accepted by the courts, the move to camps is a quantitative, not a qualitative step. I would note that, Guantanamo, where hundreds of Afghan combattants have been languishing in horriffic conditions, is being turned into a concentration camp, and Bush has ordered the establishment of a kangaroo-court military tribunal assemblyline that ends with a gas chamber and execution, so maybe even that parallel will prove prescient.