Daily Ramblings:
As I Went Out One Morning ...03/19/2005 05:05:08 pm
Finding himself in New York's Central Park today,
your host RWB encountered
some people on their way to or from a protest against
the war in Iraq. Thinking that they must be pretty
down-in-the-mouth about now at finding themselves
stuck on the wrong side of history, reason,
timeliness, democracy and their own erstwhile liberal
ideals, RWB was sorely
tempted to buck them up a bit by shouting "Free
Saddam Hussein!" or "Death to
America!" But good conservative restraint won
the day.
I trust that after their outdoor wallowing and
rollicking, many of them will repair to their abodes,
sign in to their internet provider of choice, read
Victor Hanson's most recent column on the
absurdity (and genuine wickedness) of making
comparisons between George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler,
and realize with a start the error of their ways.
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.
So what gives with this crazy
popular analogy — one that on a typical
Internet Google search of “Bush” +
“Hitler” yields about 1,350,000
matches?
One explanation is simply the
ignorance of the icons of our popular culture. A
Linda Ronstadt, Garrison Keillor, or Harold
Pinter knows nothing much of the encompassing
evil of Hitler’s regime, its execution of
the mentally ill and disabled, the systematic
cleansing of the non-Aryans from Europe, or mass
executions and starvation of Soviet prisoners.
Like Prince Harry parading around in his
ridiculous Nazi costume, quarter-educated
celebrities who have some talent for song or
verse know only that name-dropping
“Hitler” or his associates gets them
some shock value that their pedestrian rants
otherwise would not warrant.
Worth reading in its entirety, even if you're really
tired from all the protesty stuff.
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