For Cedar Key News
The liberal publication, The Nation, clears its skirts in the 1/26/04 issue of comments by its columnist Alexander Cockburn who apparently made some Bush/Hitler comparisons. It disavows such a comparison for itself.
However, it put me to thinking of topics which I must have read decades ago, dealing with the rise of Hitler in the 1930s. (Yes, I`ve even read Mein Kampf, an unexpurgated version published by American Jews in the 1930s, the better to expose Hitler`s anti-Semitism).
It was bad times in Germany, remember. In the 1920s inflation had been so bad that it took wheelbarrows of paper money to buy a week`s groceries. Anybody who claimed to be a savior looked good. Along came this electrifying orator who, it turned out, had a hard core following and was willing to slay his opponents. But his rise would have been impossible without the endorsement/support/aid/coooperation of business and industry. The really big boys. Here, we are talking Siemens, Volkswagen, Bayer, steel, munitions. The major message: The so-called Nazi structure was largely an amalgamation of corporate and government power. An unhealthy partnership, one feeding on the other until it settled on a mandate of expansion for its continued survival.
Looking back on it, perhaps this is what Dwight Eisenhower had in mind during his swan song, when he warned of the "military-industrial complex."
Question: Does not George Bush`s hand-in-glove relationship with major corporations and their key figures, his financing by them, his key appointments of them, his tax policy, his deregulation policy, his protection of them (environment, Enron, utilities), his privatization of government functions, his generous contracting with them, all coupled with his heavy reliance on the Pentagon arm, is there not a parallel between Germany of the 1930s and the U.S.A. of the year 2000?
This concept is not just about Ashcroft-type extremism, or the shallow comparison of Bush with Hitler. It is not just about an upcoming election. Indeed, the process may be in initial stages. It suggests a complete reworking of American society and thought-processes for the indeterminable future. It suggests a corporate-run society which, coupled with the military, will demand expansion for its own well-being.
It will not require a Hitler. It requires only process.
Buddy Davis |
