Bush-Hitler Comparison Unjust

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Oct 19 03:25:37 PDT 2002


On Fri, 18 Oct 2002, Chris Doss wrote:


> Bush-Hitler Comparison Unjust

Chris, where'd this come from? IMHO it takes a good joke and fucks it up. Parts of it sound downright brown.

BTW, fwiw, as much as I enjoy a good Bush/Hitler joke, and as much as I supported the German government's position on Iraq, the original comments by Herta Daeubler-Gmelin were completely ridiculous if you took them seriously. She said Hitler used war to distract the people in 1936 from economic problems. There's three big problems with that. One, Hitler didn't have economic problems in 1936 he had to distract people from -- the employment situation had hugely improved under him. Two, even if he did, it's not like he would worry about getting voted out over it. There was this terror thing he did. And three, this makes it sound like aggressive war wasn't his raison d'etre -- that he could take it or leave it, and it was only considerations of popularity that forced him into killing 60 million people.

The idea that Hitler was dependent on popular approval, and that war was not his idea but something he only gave in on to make the German people happy, would out Goldhagen Goldhagen if you took it seriously. But there's no need to. Gmelin was not a foreign policy person. She's was a German union hack using what was in a German context an extremely (and obviously) daring buzzword for militarism (i.e., Hitler) to fire up the faithful during the last days of a campaign.

Michael



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