Sticks and stones may break my bones
Saturday, March 19th, 2005 10:34 am by NealVictor Davis Hanson’s latest essay in National Review Online, “Little Eichmanns†and “Digital Brownshirts†analyzes the oft-repeated comparison of Bush to Hitler. On its face, the comparison is absurd:
At first glance, all this wild rhetoric is preposterous. Hitler hijacked an elected government and turned it into a fascist tyranny. He destroyed European democracy. His minions persecuted Christians, gassed over six million Jews, and created an entire fascistic creed predicated on anti-Semitism and the myth of a superior Aryan race.
Whatever one thinks of Bush’s Iraqi campaign, the president obtained congressional approval to invade and pledged $87 billion to rebuild the country. He freely weathered mass street demonstrations and a hostile global media, successfully defended his Afghan and Iraq reconstructions through a grueling campaign and three presidential debates, and won a national plebiscite on his tenure.
In a world that is almost uniformly opposed to the democratic Jewish state, Israel has no better friend than Bush, who in turn is a believer in, not a tormentor of, Christianity. Afghanistan and Iraq, with 50 million freed, have elected governments, not American proconsuls, and there is a movement in the Middle East toward greater democratization — with no guarantee that such elected governments will not be anti-American. No president has been more adamantly against cloning, euthanasia, abortion, or anything that smacks of the use of science to predetermine super-genes or to do away with the elderly, feeble, or unborn.
Why is it then that leftists, both of the American and European variety, love to employ this smear besides the obvious “shock value” it packs? Hanson identifies two, main reasons: 1. The ignorance and arrogance of the icons of our popular culture (i.e., “Hollywoodians”) who are so often behind these slurs, and, 2. What I call the “little Napolean complex” — psychological projection based on one’s own inadequacy. Hanson describes this particular manifestation thusly, “On occasion, those who are tainted, sometimes unfairly, with past charges of rightist extremism, find some psychic release in calling an American democratic president or his conduct Nazi-like.”
Hanson then catalogues the hypocrisy of these leftists who will scream “Nazi” at the drop of a hat, but who, for idealogical reasons, ignore the real butchers of the last century. This selective enforcement of historical evil has real implications in our time and for our leaders.
Finally, I find it entertaining to point out to those who compare “Republicans” to “Nazis” that Nazi is an acronym for “National Socialist Party” and that it is Democrats, not Republicans, who are so fond of Socialism.