This page will keep track of the uses to which Hitler is put by politicians, journalists and polemicists.

Feminazis (March 22, 2004)

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh regularly refers to acitivists in the women's movement as "feminazis." His critics are now firing back in kind. In an interview with the Washington Post Lizz Winstead, co-founder of the "Daily Show" on Comedy Central and now a host of a radio show on the new liberal network, Air America, admitted her conservative competitor's show is "is highly entertaining." Then added: "He has emotion, highs, lows, passion. But so did Hitler."

Labor Union Figures: Hey, Let's Throw Some Mud (Feb. 26, 2004)

Newt Briggs, in the Las Vegas Mercury (Feb. 19, 2004):

On Friday afternoon, more than a dozen union carpenters and organizers gathered at the Hofbrauhaus, the newly opened Bavarian beer hall across from the Hard Rock Hotel. The group, however, wasn't there to wet their whistles on Bavaria's finest lagers or to dine on the region's famous schnitzels and wursts. Instead, they spread out along the sidewalk in front of the building and distributed tabloid-style leaflets that claimed to offer "The secret history that Hofbrauhaus doesn't want you to know" and mock drink coasters that declared, "Welcome to the Hofbrauhaus, where the Nazi party got its start."

According to Daniel O'Shea, senior organizer for the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters, the union's sudden historical concern was inspired by Hofbrauhaus' failure to meet area wage and benefit standards during the construction of the new building. In support of the demonstration, O'Shea offered solidarity letters from IG BAU--a German industrial union--and Jewish Defense League Director Bill Manianci, who described the original Munich Hofbrauhaus as the place where "Adolph Hitler began his reign of terror."

In a written response to the allegations, Hofbrauhaus managing partner Stefan Gastager maintained that the union's claims were "simply historically inaccurate." "Although history records that in his younger years Hitler spoke at the Hofbrauhaus, as did many political leaders long before and after Hitler, Hitler's Nationalist Party movement actually had its birthplace in the Burgerbrau Keller (Beer-hall)." Gastager also observed that the owners were born decades after Hitler's rule and that "Hofbrauhaus Las Vegas is 12 days old."

People Who Lived Through Nazism Say What's Happening in the United States Seems Familiar (Jan. 28, 2004)

Harley Sorensen, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle (Jan. 26, 2004):

The customers always write. I get about 400 e-mails in response to my columns every week, which might explain why I didn't answer yours. Here, slightly edited, is one of the more interesting ones from last week. It's from Herr Moellers in Germany:
"Dear Mr. Sorensen,

"I have many American friends and used to go on business travel to the U.S. a lot (I stopped doing that after even our European governments have given in to Uncle Sam's appetite for information about individuals traveling to God's Own Country), and I am shocked by the deterioration of democracy in a country that I used to love. This administration is a shame and the destabilization they have brought to the world is scaring the s** out of me.

"My father was a Nazi soldier and he realized during the war what he and most of his generation was led into. I have learned from him that a nation can be guilty and that we must stop the arrogance of the powers at the very beginning. To me, America is becoming truly scary and the parallels to the development in Germany of the thirties (although the reason behind it are totally different) are sickening.

"Thank you for writing about this development. The world is waiting for signs of opposition in the Unilateral States of America!"

Herr Moellers' e-mail is typical of a half dozen or so I've received over the past year from people with intimate knowledge of Nazi Germany.

I respect experience, so I'm inclined to believe what these people are telling me. Perhaps their memories help explain the attitude of Germans toward the Bush administration these days.

They've been there, they've done that. They know what a corrupt government smells like.

But are they "over the top"? Are they overreacting to a normal swing of the pendulum in American politics?

To make a comparison between Germany in the 1930s and America now, I relied on a Web site called "A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust." The passages in quotations below are taken from the site.

"With Adolf Hitler's ascendancy to the chancellorship, the Nazi Party quickly consolidated its power. Hitler managed to maintain a posture of legality throughout the Nazification process."

Whether by chance or design, George W. Bush is the most powerful American president in modern history. Not only does he have both houses of Congress beholden to him, but the majority of the Supreme Court is acting like a quintet of Bush lapdogs. And it all appears legal.

"Domestically, during the next six years, Hitler completely transformed Germany into a police state."

Civil libertarians insist that this is happening here now, with the USA Patriot Act in force and Patriot II on the table.

"Hitler engaged in a 'diplomatic revolution' by negotiating with other European countries and publicly expressing his strong desire for peace."

Nobody can accuse Bush of being overly diplomatic, but, like all political leaders, he is an apostle for peace, even while starting two wars during his brief tenure.

In 1933, the Reichstag, Germany's parliament building, was burned to the ground. Nobody knows for sure who set the fire. The Nazis blamed communists. "This incident prompted Hitler[,then Germany's chancellor,] to convince [German President Paul von] Hindenburg to issue a Decree for the Protection of People and State that granted Nazis sweeping power to deal with the so-called emergency."

The Reichstag fire parallels the Sept. 11 attacks here, and Hindenburg's decree parallels our USA Patriot Act.

Soros Denies He Compared Bush to Hitler (Jan. 19, 2004)

From a CNN interview (Jan. 12, 2004):

GEORGE SOROS: [Y]ou know, I have also been accused of comparing Bush to a Nazi. And I did not do it. I would not do it, exactly because I have lived under a Nazi regime. So I know the difference. But how come that I'm accused of that?

WOLF BLITZER: Who accused you of that? SOROS: The Republican national commission, or whatever, and a number of newspaper articles. And I -- you know, I think I really -- I'm upset about being accused of that. And I'm upset that I have to defend myself against this kind of accusation.

BLITZER: The -- I think what -- the articles that I read suggested, because of your having lived through the Nazi era, you have a special responsibility to educate people who didn't live through that. And I think the suggestion -- at one point, you had made some sort of allusion to your own personal background in explaining why you were so critical of the president.

SOROS: That's exactly right.

And then that has been distorted that I'm comparing the president to a Nazi. I mean, that is absolutely out of

(CROSSTALK)

Bush Would Be Hitler If He Applied Himself (Jan. 19, 2004)

From Drudge (Jan. 13, 2004):

The stars were out in Gotham on Monday night for the latest Bush Bashing Ball.

Followers of MOVEON.ORG gathered to unveil the winner of the website's Bush in 30 Seconds Contest.

But it was the action off the computer screen and on the stage at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom that's caused excitement.

Celebrity activists unleashed a torrent of obscenity-laced insults and allegations against Republicans and the Bush Administration -- just a week after the site's founders apologized for posting two political messages on the Internet comparing President Bush to Hitler.

The DRUDGE REPORT can now present a partial transcript of the event, as provided by various DRUDGE sources:

MARGARET CHO (Comedian) --

* "Despite all of this stupid bullsh-- that the Republican National Committee, or whatever the f--- they call them, that they were saying that they're all angry about how two of these ads were comparing Bush to Hitler? I mean, out of thousands of submissions, they find two. They're like fu--ing looking for Hitler in a hawstack. You now? I mean, George Bush is not Hitler. He would be if he fu--ing applied himself." big, extended applause) "I mean he just isn't."

America's New Fingerprinting Policy (Jan. 19, 2004)

Julier Sebastiao da Silva, a Brazilian judge, commenting on the American plan to photograph and fingerprint immigrants entering the U.S. from Brazil:

"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis."

The NY Post Publishes a Column Comparing Deaniacs to Hitler Suporters (posted 1-18-04)

From a news alert put out by FAIR--Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (Jan. 16, 2004):

The controversy over comparisons between George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler
in two ads submitted to the anti-Bush ad contest run by the online
activist group MoveOn.org says less about the state of left discourse than
it does about the double standards at Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

News Corp's Fox News Channel started the controversy on January 4, airing
Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie's complaint about the
Bush/Hitler comparison. "That's the kind of tactics we're seeing on the
left today in support of these Democratic presidential candidates,"
Gillespie charged, calling such tactics "despicable."

The whole next day (1/5/04), this was a major story on Fox News Channel.
John Gibson asked, "What about the hating Bush movement, the MoveOn.org
and George Soros sponsoring these ads that compare Bush to
Hitler?"--before being corrected that the ads were not sponsored by MoveOn
(or Soros, a funder of the group), and were taken down in response to
complaints.

Sean Hannity accused a guest: "You guys on the left are going so far over
the cliff. You're making comparisons to the president and Adolf Hitler."
Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway said on Hannity's show, "This is the
hateful, vitriolic rhetoric that has become the Howard Dean Democratic
Party." Bill O'Reilly cited the ads as evidence that "right now in America
the Democratic party is being held captive by the far, far left."

It should be noted that however hyperbolic, comparisons to Hitler and
fascism are not unknown in the American political debate. Rush Limbaugh
has routinely called women's rights advocates "femi-Nazis," and references
to "Hitlery Clinton" are a staple of right-wing talk radio. Republican
power-broker Grover Norquist on NPR (10/2/03) compared inheritance taxes
to the Holocaust.

Closer to home for Fox News, on the very same day that Gibson, Hannity and
O'Reilly were talking about the Hitler/Bush comparison as evidence of the
left's extremism, a column ran in the New York Post that described
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean as a follower of Josef
Goebbels, referred to him as "Herr Howie," accused him of "looking for his
Leni Riefenstahl," called his supporters "the Internet Gestapo" and
compared them to "Hitler's brownshirts."

The New York Post, like Fox News Channel, is part of News Corporation,
Rupert Murdoch's conservative media empire. And this piece wasn't just put
up on the Post's website as part of a contest--it was written by a
right-wing commentator who frequently appears in the Post's pages, Ralph
Peters, and selected for the op-ed page by the Post's own editors. So
it's more than a little embarrassing that these blatant Nazi comparisons
were being made in the Post while the paper's corporate sibling was
denouncing such comparisons as a sign of derangement.

So what did the Murdoch organization do? Fox appears to have completely
ignored the Post's own Nazi analogies--there's no reference to the column
whatsoever in the cable channel's transcripts. And the New York Post seems
to have sent the column down the memory hole--clicking on a link that used
to go to Peters' story gives you a "page not found" message, and the text
isn't found in the Nexis media database. (Ironically, in light of this
Orwellian disappearing act, the column also compared Dean to Big Brother.)

In the interview that started the brouhaha, the RNC's Gillespie was asked
if he would oppose similar attacks on Democrats. He replied: "If they
stoop to the kind of despicable tactic like morphing a candidate into
Adolf Hitler, yes, absolutely, I will tell you right here on the air. Have
me back if any organization does that, I would repudiate it."

The same organization that interviewed him did that, through another of
its branches, the very next day. So far, Fox News hasn't had him back on
to condemn the New York Post.

Comparing Bush to Hitler is Outrageous (posted 1-5-04)

Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, writing in the WSJ (Jan. 5, 2004):

MoveOn.org, an advocacy group, has sought to energize opposition to the president by sponsoring a contest in which Americans were urged to produce an anti-Bush advertisement to air the week of the State of the Union address. Web site visitors were invited to vote for their favorite ad from a pre-selected group that MoveOn.org deems appropriate for TV. MoveOn.org informed potential ad makers that "we're not going to post anything that would be inappropriate for television." Two of the ads posted on the group's Web site compared Adolf Hitler to George W. Bush. One ad morphed an image of Hitler into President Bush and says that, "1945's war crimes" are "2003's foreign policy."

The Holocaust was the worst crime in history. The Nazis killed six million Jews, and millions of others were murdered in a systematic genocide. Generations were exterminated. Starvation, slave labor, gassing and medical experimentation were tools for the "final solution."

The last survivors of that horror will soon pass from among us. Their eyewitness testimony will be lost, and it is for us to ensure that we never forget. It is for them that we have built museums to preserve the horror of these crimes. It is for them that we guard against the danger that the memory of the Holocaust will be trivialized. That danger is abetted when people devalue this monumental evil for political gain.

Today, MoveOn.org is doing just that, using the memory of that genocide as a political prop. Their comparison diminishes the reality of what happened, and their actions cheapen the memory of a horrific crime. It also does a terrible disservice to this country at a perilous time, when we need to examine the dangers we face with clarity and purpose.

The lessons of the Holocaust era loom larger than ever, but not as portrayed by MoveOn.org. It was from the backbenches of Britain's Parliament in the 1930s that Churchill warned of the "gathering storm," arguing that the great threat had to be confronted before it was too late. His warning went unheeded. Free nations stood idle as the Nazis harnessed their war machine. Democracies naively hoped for peace. They turned from evil, but the evil did not fade, and when World War II ended 50 million were dead.

With terrorists operating under the protection of rogue regimes, Churchill's warning is still apt today. Leadership is about confronting threats to freedom everywhere. President Bush has shown that leadership in Iraq, and our troops have liberated a people who were oppressed by another murderous dictator. MoveOn.org compares this liberation to the Holocaust. It deploys a picture of Hitler to vilify President Bush. Comparing the commander-in-chief of a democratic nation to the murderous tyrant Hitler is not only historically specious, it is morally outrageous. Comparing an American president, any American president, to Hitler is an outrage.

Columbus Compared to Hitler

From BBC News (Oct. 12, 2003):

Venezuela's populist leader has urged Latin Americans to boycott celebrations for the anniversary of the "discovery" of the Americas by Christopher Columbus.

President Hugo Chavez accused the much-lauded adventurer of spearheading a "genocide".

The 1492 arrival of the Italian explorer, employed by Spain, triggered a 150-year "invasion" of native Indians by foreign conquerors, who behaved "worse than Hitler", he said.

Columbus Day falls on 12 October and is celebrated with a public holiday on Monday in the United States and several Latin American nations.

But at a meeting in Caracas - attended by representatives of the indigenous population in South America, President Chavez said: "Christopher Columbus was the spearhead of the biggest invasion and genocide ever seen in the history of humanity."

We Venezuelans, we Latin Americans, have no reason to honour Columbus

Columbus Day should be remembered as the "Day of Indian Resistance", he said.

Spanish, Portuguese and other foreign conquerors had massacred South America's Indian inhabitants at an average rate of roughly "one every 10 minutes", he said.

He described Spanish conquistadors like Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro, as "worse than Hitler".

Arnold's Admiration of Hitler

David Kirkpatrick, writing in the NYT, on the eve of the California gubernatorial election (Oct. 4, 2003):

Campaign aides to Arnold Schwarzenegger distributed an excerpt of a 25-year-old interview in which he speaks admiringly of Hitler, providing some additional context to comments that were in a book proposal written by the producer of Mr. Schwarzenegger's first film, "Pumping Iron."

But Mr. Schwarzenegger deferred releasing the outtakes of the documentary film that included the comments, citing the difficulty of locating the relevant passage in about 100 hours of film.

In an interview yesterday as he campaigned in California, Mr. Schwarzenegger said that he did not know precisely where the relevant outtakes were and that aides were trying to trying to find them.

"I don't know where they are now but I'm sure we have them," Mr. Schwarzenegger said. "I've never held them in my hand."

Mr. Schwarzenegger's admiring comments about Hitler appeared in a 1997 book proposal prepared by George Butler, a documentary filmmaker who produced "Pumping Iron" in the mid-70's, introducing the public to Mr. Schwarzenegger and to the body-building craze he helped popularize. The book proposal was obtained this week by The New York Times and ABC News.

Sean Walsh, a spokesman for Mr. Schwarzenegger, confirmed that Mr. Schwarzenegger's staff was in possession of the 100 hours of footage unused in the film. Mr. Schwarzenegger acquired all the unused footage along with the rights to the film in 1991.

The campaign appeared to refine its position on release of the footage from Mr. Schwarzenegger's initial statements on Thursday, when he said he was prepared to release the film outtakes to the public but was not sure where they were. "I don't know if I have them now," he said in an interview Thursday afternoon. "If I find them, I would."

After early editions of The Times were printed Thursday night, Mr. Butler called a reporter to say that he had driven to his home in New Hampshire to find transcripts of the interviews with Mr. Schwarzenegger that Mr. Butler said corrected certain quotations and provided fuller context. Later editions of The Times included the fuller quotations.

Mr. Butler said yesterday that he had located a relevant transcript of about 20 pages. He read portions over the phone to a reporter, but he declined to provide the transcript in full without the authorization of the campaign. By the time that a spokesman for the campaign authorized the release at the end of the day, Mr. Butler could not be reached.

In the portion of the interview read over the phone and later distributed by the campaign, Mr. Schwarzenegger said: "In many ways I admired people — It depends for what. I admired Hitler for instance because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for his way of getting to the people and so on. But I didn't admire him for what he did with it. It is very hard to say who I admired and who are my heroes. And I admired basically people who are powerful people, like Kennedy. Who people listen to and just wait until he comes out with telling them what to do. People like that I admire a lot."

Mr. Butler said the book proposal had erroneously dropped a few words from a quotation attributed to Mr. Schwarzenegger. According to Mr. Butler's reading of the transcript, Mr. Schwarzenegger followed his comments about Hitler's public speaking by adding, "But I didn't admire him for what he did with it." He did not say, "I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it," as he was quoted in the book proposal and in early editions of The Times.

Mr. Butler said he could not explain the inaccuracy. "I am amazed that something like that escaped me."

Mr. Butler also read other sentences of the transcript, spoken in Mr. Schwarzenegger's then-imperfect English, that related to the subject. "Yes, in Germany they used power and authority but it was used in the wrong way," Mr. Schwarzenegger said, according to Mr. Butler. "But it was misused on the power. First, it started having, I mean, getting Germany out of the great recession and having everybody jobs and so on and then it was just misused. And they said, let's take this country, and so on." Mr. Schwarzenegger concluded: "That's bad."

Mr. Butler's book proposal also described Mr. Schwarzenegger clicking his heels and pretending to be an SS officer or playing Nazi marching songs at home. In an interview, Mr. Butler attributed Mr. Schwarzenegger's antics to immaturity and the context of the outrageous bodybuilding culture.

Bush Is Hitler

Dave Lindorff, writing on Counterpunch.com (July 18, 2003):

Is George W. Bush another Hitler?

James Taranto, writing in the Wall Street Journal, offered up an offhand dismissal of Counterpunch as "an outfit whose staple is stuff comparing Bush to Hitler," which seems to suggest he thinks the very notion is beyond the pale of civil discourse.

But stay. As one of the first to notice some similarities between Bush II and the early Hitler, I didn't actually say that George and Adolf were joined at the hip. Indeed, I suggested in my Counterpunch article back on Feb. 1, during the high-pressure White House drive to war in Iraq, that our unelected president was surely no Hitler, since "Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was." More importantly, I didn't equate Bush with Hitler because there are some other big differences between the two.

So far, for example, while he has rounded up some Arab and Muslim men purely because of their ethnicity or religion, Bush has not started gassing them--at least not yet. What I did say, however (and I think subsequent events have proven me even more correct than did the events that had occurred prior to Feb..1), is that some of the tactics of the Bush administration resemble those of Hitler and his Brownshirts. I would go further and add that Bush's attorney general, John Ashcroft, a man who has pointedly praised the old Confederacy, would probably feel quite comfortable in brown with a hakenkreuz tacked to his sleeve.

What are some of the Nazi-like tactics of the Bush administration?

Let's start with war-mongering. The American Heritage Dictionary, no bastion of leftism, defines fascism as "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Now we may not yet have a dictatorship, but we do have the extreme right with a solid lock on power in Washington today, and a glance at the top echelon of the Bush administration makes it clear that there is not just a merger, there's a thorough melding of state and business leadership in this administration. As for belligerent nationalism, what else is one to call a war of aggression like the one against Iraq, especially now that it's clear what most thinking people realized before the war even started--that Iraq had no significant offensive military capability, much less weapons of mass destruction. It was all a massive lie deliberately designed to scare the living crap out of an already nervous American public, so that they would accept the ongoing assault on the Bill of Rights being masterminded by Ashcroft. That strategy was vintage Goebbels.

Then there's the suspension of habeas corpus, right to counsel, and a host of other civil liberties. When American citizens like Jose Padilla can be clapped into prison--a military prison at that--with no charges filed, no access to friends or relatives, and no right to talk to a lawyer, we have crossed a line into fascist territory. Maybe we haven't reached the point of wholesale mass arrests and concentration camps (though even that, reportedly, is being contemplated by the proto-fascist Ashcroft, and we know who appointed that right-wing religious zealot and racist to his post), but once the principle of arrest without charge or trial is accepted by the courts, the move to camps is a quantitative, not a qualitative step. I would note that, Guantanamo, where hundreds of Afghan combattants have been languishing in horriffic conditions, is being turned into a concentration camp, and Bush has ordered the establishment of a kangaroo-court military tribunal assemblyline that ends with a gas chamber and execution, so maybe even that parallel will prove prescient.

Saddam Is Hitler

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to reporters on April 9, 2003, during the war against Iraq:

We are seeing history unfold, events that will shape the course of a country, the fate of a people and potentially the future of the region. Saddam Hussein is now taking his rightful place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceausescu in the pantheon of failed brutal dictators, and the Iraqi people are well on their way to freedom.

Source: CNN (April 10, 2003).

Bush Is Hitler

An editorial in Syria's Teshreen titled "Genocide for Democracy" (April 7, 2003):

The U.S. and British aggression seems to be worse than the Nazis'... In World War II, the West confronted Hitler. Now, Bush is acting worse than Hitler.