Getting a minority of the vote in a population with a greater franchise does not make someone more legitimate than someone getting a majority of the vote with a restricted franchise-- in the latter system the majority of the restricted franchise MAY not reflect majority sentiment, but we KNOW that Hitler was voted down by heavy majorities when put to a direct vote.
And I don't friggin care what Nuremberg said, just as I don't care what toothless international law says most of the time, since it is mostly invoked for those with power, but what Hitler did in his wars which purposefully exterminated millions of those in occupied lands is not equivalent to a war in Afghanistan where at the highest count a few thousand people were killed by US bombs and where the end result was the emancipation of the half of the population living in gender slavery/apartheid. I still think the war in Afghanistan was a bad idea for a range of reasons, but comparisons to Hitler demeans his victims.
Millions will die this year because of the institutions of capitalist greed and oppression, just as millions died last year and the year before. Afghanistan changed the body count of US-led capitalism by no more than a statistical error. Bush and his crew may be trying to take advantage of 911 to make more significant inroads into that multi-million per year death count, but nothing much has changed so far.
>From day one after 911, I've thought the "world has changed" rhetoric of both
Left and Right in the US has been overblown-- the only real change has been
the self-fulfilling prophecy of US debate being obsessed with the topic to
the exclusion of everything else, which has played to the advantage of the
Right in domestic politics. For Americans who see their own media debate as
all that is important, there is a solipsitic sense of everything being
different.
But on the global stage, it is unclear to me that much has really changed-- even in Central Asia, Iran and Russia have made as large gains if not larger gains than the US geopolitically. Europe is already happily going its own way diplomatically, denouncing US policy as simplistic and wrong-headed. 40,000 delegates showed up in Porto Alegre to denounce US-led neoliberalism and proclaim "Another World is Possible" with many high-ranking delegates from around the world attending.
Global capitalism seems to coexist quite well with a diversity of voices that fascism never allowed; that is the strength of its global power for it manages its legitimation without need of eliminating all dissent, since it can manage conflict, scapegoating and the cacaphony of interests.
What we have socially is so clearly distinct from fascism to any common sense view that to invoke the word is to deny the Left any credibility wth those we are trying to convince of what is wrong with the present system.
-- Nathan Newman