Hillary Clinton rally at Nashua High School North in Nashua New Hampshire in 2008. (Photo: Aaron Webb / Flickr / cc)
The
frontrunner to become the next president of the United States is
playing an old and dangerous political game -- comparing a foreign
leader to Adolf Hitler.
At a private charity event
on Tuesday, in comments preserved on
audio,
Hillary Clinton talked about actions by Russia’s President Vladimir
Putin in the Crimea. “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did
back in the ’30s,” she said.
The next day, Clinton gave the inflammatory story more oxygen when speaking at UCLA. She “largely stood by the remarks,” the
Washington Post reported.
Clinton “said she was merely noting parallels between Putin’s claim
that he was protecting Russian-speaking minorities in Crimea and
Hitler’s moves into Poland, Czechoslovakia and other parts of Europe to
protect German minorities.”
Clinton denied that she was comparing Putin with Hitler even while
she persisted in comparing Putin with Hitler. “I just want people to
have a little historic perspective,” she said. “I’m not making a
comparison certainly, but I am recommending that we perhaps can learn
from this tactic that has been used before.”
Yes indeed. Let’s learn from this tactic that has been used before --
the tactic of comparing overseas adversaries to Hitler. Such comparisons by U.S. political leaders have a long history of fueling momentum for war.
“Surrender in Vietnam” would not bring peace, President Lyndon
Johnson said at a news conference on July 28, 1965 as he tried to
justify escalating the war, “because we learned from Hitler at Munich
that success only feeds the appetite of aggression.”
After Ho Chi Minh was gone, the Hitler analogy went to other leaders
of countries in U.S. crosshairs. The tag was also useful when attached
to governments facing U.S.-backed armies.
Three decades ago, while Washington funded the contra forces in
Nicaragua, absurd efforts to smear the elected left-wing Sandinistas
knew no rhetorical bounds. Secretary of State George Shultz said on
February 15, 1984, at a speech in Boston: “I’ve had good friends who
experienced Germany in the 1930s go there and come back and say, ‘I’ve
visited many communist countries, but Nicaragua doesn’t feel like that.
It feels like Nazi Germany.’”
Washington embraced Panama’s Gen. Manuel Noriega as an ally, and for a
while he was a CIA collaborator. But there was a falling out, and
tension spiked in the summer of 1989. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence
Eagleburger said that drug trafficking by Noriega “is aggression as
surely as Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland 50 years ago was
aggression.” A U.S. invasion overthrew Noriega in December 1989.
In early August 1990, the sudden Iraqi invasion of Kuwait abruptly
ended cordial relations between Washington and Baghdad. The two
governments had a history of close cooperation during the 1980s. But
President George H. W. Bush proclaimed that Saddam Hussein was “a little
Hitler.” In January 1991, the U.S. government launched the Gulf War.
Near the end of the decade, Hillary Clinton got a close look at how
useful it can be to conflate a foreign leader with Hitler, as President
Bill Clinton and top aides repeatedly drew the parallel against Serbia’s
president, Slobodan Milosevic. In late March 1999, the day before the
bombing of Kosovo and Serbia began, President Clinton said in a speech:
“And so I want to talk to you about Kosovo today but just remember this
-- it’s about our values. What if someone had listened to Winston
Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?”
As the U.S.-led NATO bombing intensified, so did efforts to justify
it with references to Hitler. “Clinton and his senior advisers harked
repeatedly back to images of World War II and Nazism to give moral
weight to the bombing,” the
Washington Post reported. Vice President Al Gore chimed in for the war chorus, calling Milosevic “one of these junior-league Hitler types.”
Just a few years later, the George W. Bush administration cranked up a
revival of Saddam-Hitler comparisons. They became commonplace.
Five months before the invasion of Iraq, it was nothing extraordinary
when a leading congressional Democrat pulled out all the stops. “Had
Hitler’s regime been taken out in a timely fashion,” said Rep. Tom
Lantos, “the 51 million innocent people who lost their lives during the
Second World War would have been able to finish their normal life
cycles. Mr. Chairman, if we appease Saddam Hussein, we will stand
humiliated before both humanity and history.”
From the Vietnam War to the Iraq War, facile and wildly inaccurate
comparisons between foreign adversaries and Adolf Hitler have served the
interests of politicians hell-bent on propelling the United States into
war. Often, those politicians succeeded. The carnage and the endless
suffering have been vast.
Now, Hillary Clinton is ratcheting up her own Hitler analogies. She
knows as well as anyone the power they can generate for demonizing a
targeted leader.
With the largest nuclear arsenals on the planet, the United States
and Russia have the entire world on a horrific knife’s edge. Nuclear
saber-rattling is implicit in what the prospective President Hillary
Clinton has done in recent days, going out of her way to tar Russia’s
president with a Hitler brush. Her eagerness to heighten tensions with
Russia indicates that she is willing to risk war -- and even nuclear
holocaust -- for the benefit of her political ambitions.
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