Is it OK to liken Bush to a Nazi now...

[holzman_tweed]

...now that he's <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6579335.stm">building a ghetto</a>[1] for Sunnis in Baghdad, or do we need to wait for actual concentration camps?

[1] In the original sense of the word.

Edit: docstrange, as usual is right -- it's premature to liken him to a Nazi yet. Tsar or Kaiser fits the bill a bit more closely.

Comments

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Tristero at Hullabaloo was just wondering (http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/for-their-own-good.html) the same thing.

Of course, the answer is no, the Bush administration isn't like the Nazis because Bush is doing this stuff in the fight against evil. The Nazis were for evil. Duh.

[salsuginous.livejournal.com]

oh. my. god.

this is horrifying.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

Amazing, or maybe just plain stunning and horrifying. But I still don't think it is OK yet to make the comparison. To do so waters down the origins, goals, deeds, and impact of the Nazis. And we should recall that the Nazis copied their ghettos from those set up by their predecessors throughout Europe, especially Italy and Russia, with the Jewish-only villages and towns of the Pale of Settlement. Although Bush is trying (however clumsily) to prevent what he knows will be the likely slaughter of minorities if he just bugs out of there, his idea of a good approach as usual is like a kid breaking everything in a china shop to save it from the bull. I agree we need not wait to see where it goes any longer before we yell out, "this is a bad road!"

If you want to compare Dumbya to nasty figures with relevancy, then compare him to the last of the Tsars, with the Pale of Settlement and wholesale encouragement of social separation (and not caring what horrors that would entail). Yeah, that seems apropos. Bush II, Tsar of Iraq. Fortunately he's not so dumb as to use that title.

I think he's setting this country up for a pair of reactionary swings. First to the left, of course. That will give us some years, probably a decade, of social rejuvenation in the wake of what will be universally seen as a failed war. Then we'll see the rise of a reactionary right hearkening back to better days before "attacks from within" undermined the glorious nation at war. A reactionary right including many moderates who would previously never have sided with the far right, but who have been systematically excluded from government. Sound familiar? Bush is also a lot like the Kaiser. Our government in the next 10 years may be a lot like the Weimar Republic.

Hearkening back to better days by populist reactionaries who usher in a more extreme rule than ever before, swinging in on that kind of vine right behind an enlightened liberal democracy is a very scary and likely reality. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Didn't you hear? Pat Buchanan's been writing in earnest again, and he's no longer considered on the farcical nutjob extreme edge by many who would have scoffed at him before. Scary times are T-minus 10 years ... that's my bet. I hope the Congress learns to seek compromise and middle ground like they promised, or they are just setting us up for an extreme version of exactly what we voted against.

[holzman.livejournal.com]

You're right -- and in being so, I think you've developed a more nuanced set of descriptors we can use to describe evil as it develops - I'm trying to decide now if it shoud go Tsar, Kaiser, Furher or Kaiser, Tsar, Furher.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

8-)

Two different development trends.

Tsar -> Father of the Glorious Revolution -> Stalin

Kaiser -> Great Progressive Modern State -> Führer

Now, if you want to rank those endpoints. Kaiser was well meaning, Tsar wasn't. The ones at the other end certainly were not.

So, um, Kaiser, then Tsar, then Führer. That said, my personal fear is we are leaving a kind of Kaiser period (more right than many want, but not Pat Buchanan territory), heading into "Great Progressive Modern State"land, with a vengeance (literally), and T-minus-10 from reactionary right unless we learn tolerance and compromise more broadly. We have 50 states - we should learn from Switzerland that the Fed should be a little less the instrument of hegemony (I mean that message to the right and the left).

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Pope. It was the Popes that thought of Ghettos. That's why they use the Italian word Ghetto, that being the neighborhood of rome assigned to the Jews.