ZOT! Allah Help Us All

BERLIN -- I can understand, my German friend said, why Germans voted for Hitler in 1933 -- though he did not receive a majority of the vote. The Weimar Republic was weak and incompetent. The Great Depression had ruined the nation's war-devastated economy. People were bitter because they thought their leaders had betrayed them in the war. They wanted revenge for the humiliation of Versailles. Hitler promised strong leadership and a new beginning. But why did they continue to support that group of crazy drug addicts, thugs, killers and madmen?

The historical question remains. I leave aside the question of the guilt of the whole German people (a judgment beyond my competence because I am not God) and ask what explanations might account for what happened. Hitler turned the German economy around in short order. He was crazy, of course, a demagogic mystic sensitive to aspirations of the German spirit. He appealed skillfully to the dark side of the German heritage. Anti-Semitism was strong in Germany, as it was in most European countries, but not violent until Hitler manipulated it. He stirred up the memories of historic German military accomplishments and identified himself with Frederick the Great -- thus placating the Prussian ethos of the German army. He promised glory to a nation still smarting from the disaster of 1918. Germany was emerging from the ashes, strong and triumphant once again. He also took control of the police apparatus. The military might have been able to dump him till 1937. After that he was firmly in power. The path lay open to holocaust.

Can this model be useful to understand how contemporary America is engaged in a criminally unjust war that has turned much of the world against it, a war in which torture and murder have become routine? Has the combination of the World Trade Center attack and a president who believes his instructions come from God unleashed the dark side of the American heritage?

What is this dark side? I would suggest that it is the mix of Calvinist religious righteousness and ''my-country-right-or-wrong'' patriotism that dominated our treatment of blacks and American Indians for most of the country's history. It revealed itself in the American history of imperialism in Mexico and after the Spanish-American War in the Philippines. The ''manifest destiny'' of America was to do whatever it wanted to do, because it was strong and virtuous and chosen by God.

Today many Americans celebrate a ''strong'' leader who, like Woodrow Wilson, never wavers, never apologizes, never admits a mistake, never changes his mind, a leader with a firm ''Christian'' faith in his own righteousness. These Americans are delighted that he ignores the rest of the world and punishes the World Trade Center terrorism in Iraq. Mr. Bush is our kind of guy.

He is not another Hitler. Yet there is a certain parallelism. They have in common a demagogic appeal to the worst side of a country's heritage in a crisis. Bush is doubtless sincere in his vision of what is best for America. So too was Hitler. The crew around the president -- Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Karl Rove, the ''neo-cons'' like Paul Wolfowitz -- are not as crazy perhaps as Himmler and Goering and Goebbels. Yet like them, they are practitioners of the Big Lie -- weapons of mass destruction, Iraq democracy, only a few ''bad apples.''

Hitler's war was quantitatively different from the Iraq war, but qualitatively both were foolish, self-destructive and criminally unjust. This is a time of great peril in American history because a phony patriotism and an America-worshipping religion threaten the authentic American genius of tolerance and respect for other people.

The ''real'' America is still remembered here in Berlin for the enormous contributions of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift -- America at its best. It is time to return to that generosity and grace.

The strongest criticism that the administration levels at Sen. John Kerry is that he changes his mind. In fact, instead of a president who claims an infallibility that exceeds that of the pope, America would be much better off with a president who, like John F. Kennedy, is honest enough to admit mistakes and secure enough to change his mind.

I have wrote variations of this theme in other threads. However, this may illuminate some profound parallels to those who seem to be so manipulated and have so much hate of the west.

The handbook for manipulation of the masses was written by the Nazi facist political party that controlled Germany between 1933 and 1945 by Adolph Hitler. Michael Aflag, the founder of the Baath Party, adopted that political ideology. In the 1930s and 40s, Baathism’s founder, Syrian-born and French-educated Michel Aflaq, and a handful of his cronies, were “students” and admirers of Marx, Lenin, and Hitler. Aflaq’s alma mater, the University of Paris, produced numerous notable political leaders, such as Cambodia’s Pol Pot. On his return to Syria in 1932 Aflag worked closely with the local communists and wrote for their magazine. In the 1950s, in Iraq, young Saddam was an early Baathist, and in the 1960s became a personal associate of Aflaq. Saddam and the Baath “party” attained dictatorship in a 1968 coup, and, at Saddam’s invitation, Aflaq spent the remaining years of his life in Iraq, where, with irrepressible college spirit, he was on Saddam’s cheerleading squad.

Saddamized Baathism is a fiercely and overtly racist (Arab supremacist), violent, and imperialist political ideology that is the Arab version of National Socialism (NAZI-ism), and was actually derived in part from NAZI-ism. Baathism prescribes “perpetual revolution” toward a goal of Baathist-Arab world domination, and Saddam views America as the main impediment to that goal. If you go back and read three decades of Saddam's speeches, what you find is someone who inherited a Nazi ideology through Michel Aflaq, the founder of the Ba'ath Party who believes in genocide as a racial tool, who believes that it is his mission to have an apocalyptic confrontation with the U.S., and who believes, as he says over and over again, that he wants to be remembered 500 years from now as someone who brought the U.S. low, someone who created an Arab regime or an Arab civilization which dominated the U.S. civilization.

Why is this bias against the United States, Israel, and Britain? Because the root of this Move On garbage is Communist at its core. The communist core has as its baseline objective to dismantle capitalism. The United States, Israel, and Britain are the champions of capitalism. The communist will use the islamo-fascists as a weapon against the West and capitalism. They will employ the device of religion to fan the fanatics. There are useful idiots that hate God so bad that once manipulated and inflamed, will do anything to destroy Judeo-Christianity, which is the foundation of that societal order necessary for human interaction in a capitalistic society. Once that foundation is destabilized, the government of that society crumbles and so goes capitalism.

There are others that can easily be manipulated to hate Judeo-Christianity because they are Moslem. These people have had centuries of indoctrination against Judeo-Christianity. The hatred is already a done deal. All that's left, is to manipulate manipulate manipulate. And they perform with absolute savegery.

What we don't need are idiots who are not bright enough to see the big picture here and fail to see how they are being used as programmed automatons to turn Americans against American when we do have a fight for our existence to worry about.

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