Bush haters are real, and ugly -- real ugly

Do you think George W. Bush is a Nazi? That his family and close advisers are Nazis, too? If so, then you’ll feel right at home in the growing ranks of hard-core Bush haters.

Go to the left-wing website Counterpunch.org and you’ll find this: “It’s going a bit far to compare the Bush of 2003 to the Hitler of 1933,” writes a man named Dave Lindorff (who has written for The Nation and Salon and has appeared on National Public Radio).

“Bush is simply not the orator that Hitler was. But comparisons of the Bush administration’s fear-mongering tactics to those practiced so successfully and with such terrible results by Hitler and Goebbels on the German people and their Weimar Republic are not at all out of line.”

“The media will not tell you of the Bush family Nazi association,” says a Web movie that features photos of George W. Bush alongside photos of Adolf Hitler, along with stern warnings about the coming Bush Reich.

Then go to Fearbush.com, where you can download images of Bush in front of a giant swastika.

Does that seem like fringe stuff? Well, first remember that Counterpunch.org boasts 60,000 visitors a month. Takebackthemedia.com attracted some mainstream attention in coverage of the antiwar movement.

Page 146 of the September issue of the magazine features a letter from a reader who noticed something interesting about a photograph of Bush administration military adviser Richard Perle in a previous issue.

The photograph reminded the reader of a famous Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

“Here it is: the same arrogance, the same malice toward the photographer, the same all-around creepiness,” the letter said. “Perle isn’t the first government official to use deceit and fear-mongering to force an extremist, irrational and ultimately violent view on an entire nation, or globe.”

The interesting thing is not that some people have such thoughts. The interesting thing is that the editors of Vanity Fair found the argument so compelling that they printed the letter in a special box with the Perle and Goebbels photos side by side.

If so, stop by Bushbodycount.com, where you will learn that the president and his family have been involved in dozens of “mysterious” deaths.

“This is a list of bodies, a roster of the dead, who might have been called witnesses had they not met their untimely ends,” the site says. The list includes all sorts of names — and even suggests that the elder George Bush might have had something to do with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

At Bushbodycount.com you’ll also learn about something known on the Internet as the BFEE, or Bush Family Evil Empire. The bottom line: These Bushes are very, very bad people.

And if you tire of reading about how vicious the president is, you can take a break — and read how stupid he is.

Stop by Presidentmoron.com. And Bushisamoron.com. And Toostupidtobepresident.com. You’ll get the idea.

All that might seem not worth taking seriously were it not for the fact that similar stuff was taken quite seriously during the Clinton years.

Remember “The Clinton Chronicles,” the 1994 video that attempted to implicate Bill Clinton in all sorts of “unsolved” deaths? Remember the “Clinton Body Count” lists? Remember the stories of the president’s connections to drug running?

During those years, scurrilous stories about Bill Clinton were widely condemned in the press.

For example, in her famous “vast right-wing conspiracy” appearance on the “Today” show in 1998, then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton complained about administration opponents “accusing my husband of committing murder, of drug running.”

You might also remember that in 1995 the Clinton White House produced a 311-page study titled “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” which purported to show how anti-Clinton stories made their way from the Internet (among other sources) to the mainstream press.

At the time, the Clinton White House sought to stigmatize the opposition by branding anyone who opposed the first lady’s healthcare plan or who thought Whitewater was a legitimate inquiry as Clinton haters.

They weren’t, just as now, people who simply dislike the president’s tax cut or don’t approve of the war in Iraq are not Bush haters.

But there are genuine Bush haters out there — an extensive, aggressive network of them.

Only so far, the press has seemed less interested in their work than in the previous administration.

But pay attention to what you see and read at Counterpunch.org, Bushbodycount.com, Presidentmoron.com and Vanity Fair.

An election is coming up. Things will undoubtedly get rough. And you’ll be seeing more and more of the Bush haters.

Byron York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each Wednesday. E-mail: byork@thehill.com

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A Little Secret About the Nazis (They were left-wing socialists like the modern left of today)

A Little Secret About the Nazis
They were left-wing socialists. Yes, the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, was indeed socialist, and it had a lot in common with the modern left. Hitler preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist ``exploitation'' by capitalists -- particularly Jewish capitalists, of course. Their program called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries. They instituted and vigorously enforced a strict gun control regimen. They encouraged pornography, illegitimacy, and abortion, and they denounced Christians as right-wing fanatics. Yet a popular myth persists that the Nazis themselves were right-wing extremists. This insidious lie biases the entire political landscape, and the time has come to expose it.

Richard Poe, editor of Frontpage Magazine, sets the record straight:

Nazism was inspired by Italian Fascism, an invention of hardline Communist Benito Mussolini. During World War I, Mussolini recognized that conventional socialism wasn't working. He saw that nationalism exerted a stronger pull on the working class than proletarian brotherhood. He also saw that the ferocious opposition of large corporations made socialist revolution difficult. So in 1919, Mussolini came up with an alternative strategy. He called it Fascism. Mussolini described his new movement as a ``Third Way'' between capitalism and communism. As under communism, the state would exercise dictatorial control over the economy. But as under capitalism, the corporations would be left in private hands.

Hitler followed the same game plan. He openly acknowledged that the Nazi party was ``socialist'' and that its enemies were the ``bourgeoisie'' and the ``plutocrats'' (the rich). Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler eliminated trade unions, and replaced them with his own state-run labor organizations. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler hunted down and exterminated rival leftist factions (such as the Communists). Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler waged unrelenting war against small business.

Hitler regarded capitalism as an evil scheme of the Jews and said so in speech after speech. Karl Marx believed likewise. In his essay, ``On the Jewish Question,'' Marx theorized that eliminating Judaism would strike a crippling blow to capitalist exploitation. Hitler put Marx's theory to work in the death camps.

The Nazis are widely known as nationalists, but that label is often used to obscure the fact that they were also socialists. Some question whether Hitler himself actually believed in socialism, but that is no more relevant than whether Stalin was a true believer. The fact is that neither could have come to power without at least posing as a socialist. And the constant emphasis on the fact that the Nazis were nationalists, with barely an acknowledgment that they were socialists, is as absurd as labeling the Soviets ``internationalists'' and ignoring the fact that they were socialists (they called themselves the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Yet many who regard ``national'' socialism as the scourge of humanity consider ``international'' socialism a benign or even superior form of government.

According to a popular misconception, the Nazis must have been on the political right because they persecuted communists and fought a war with the communists in Russia. This specious logic has gone largely unchallenged because it serves as useful propaganda for the left, which needs ``right-wing'' atrocities to divert attention from the horrific communist atrocities of the past century. Hence, communist atrocities have received much less publicity than Nazi war crimes, even though they were greater in magnitude by any objective measure.

R. J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii documents in his book Death by Government that the two most murderous regimes of the past century were both communist: communists in the Soviet Union murdered 62 million of their own citizens, and Chinese communists killed 35 million Chinese citizens. The Nazi socialists come in third, having murdered 21 million Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and others. Additional purges occurred in smaller communist hellholes such as Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Ethiopia, and Cuba, of course. Communism does more than imprison and impoverish nations: it kills wholesale. And so did ``national socialism'' during the Nazi reign of terror.

But the history of the past century has been grossly distorted by the predominantly left-wing media and academic elite. The Nazis have been universally condemned -- as they obviously should be -- but they have also been repositioned clear across the political spectrum and propped up as false representatives of the far right -- even though Hitler railed frantically against capitalism in his infamous demagogic speeches. At the same time, heinous crimes of larger magnitude by communist regimes have been ignored or downplayed, and the general public is largely unaware of them. Hence, communism is still widely regarded as a fundamentally good idea that has just not yet been properly ``implemented.'' Santayana said, ``Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'' God help us if we forget the horrors of communism and get the historical lessons of Nazism backwards.

The Nazis also had something else in common with the modern left: an obsessive preoccupation with race. Hitler and his Nazis considered races other than their own inferior, of course. Modern ``liberals,'' who vociferously oppose the elimination of racial quotas, seem to agree. They apparently believe that non-white minorities (excluding Asians, of course) are inferior and unable to compete in the free market without favoritism mandated by the government. Whereas Hitler was hostile to those racial minorities, however, modern white ``liberals'' condescend benevolently. Hitler's blatant and virulent form of racism was eradicated relatively quickly and very forcefully, but the more subtle and insidious racism of the modern left has yet to be universally recognized and condemned.

The media often focuses its microscope on modern neo-nazi lunatics, but the actual scope of the menace is relatively miniscule, with perhaps a few thousand neo-nazis at most in the United States (mostly ``twenty-something'' know-nothings). The number of communists and communist sympathizers in the United States dwarfs that figure, of course -- even among tenured professors! And while the threat of neo-nazi terrorism is indeed serious, the chance of neo-nazis gaining any kind of legitimate political power anywhere is virtually zero. That is why the ACLU can safely use them to advertise its supposed commitment to free speech. Neo-nazi rallies incite violence, but they do not persuade bystanders to join their cause! If they did, the ACLU would have nothing to do with them.

--1/02

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