Comrade Bush?

by Daniel Kohanski

Comrade Bush?

From the left we occasionally hear comparisons of Bush to the Nazis. This is not only deliberately inflammatory and counter-productive, it is also inaccurate. Although there is a superficial resemblance to fascism in Bush's unholy trinity of corporation, religion, and state, the true underpinnings of Nazism - paganism, hate, planned enslavements and exterminations of whole peoples, the sense of Gotterdaemmerung - are lacking here. A better, though still incomplete, analogy is to Soviet communism. "The end justifies the means" is a Marxist slogan, not a National Socialist one. And just as Lenin and Stalin used it to justify their dictatorial powers, so Bush uses the argument--and even those very words--to claim that because we are at war, as commander-in-chief he is justified in taking any means necessary to win that war.

Lenin eschewed the cult of personality, but Stalin fostered it, in part because his legitimacy (unlike Hitler's) was always suspect. Similarly, Bush tries to limit his appearances to audiences predisposed to his views, even went to the extent, during the last campaign, of requiring attendees at his rallies to sign a loyalty pledge to him personally. Loyalty to party - to the Republican Party in this case, to the Communist Party in the first instance - is also a hallmark of the Bush administration, as administered by Karl Rove. In addition to appeals to party loyalty, Rove has also used the promise of campaign support and the threat of primary challenges to keep Congresional republicans largely in line, at least as long as it was possible to pretend that the Iraq war was going well. Even under Rove, party discipline still yields to political self-preservation, and, this being an incomplete a nalogy, Bush cannot send recacitrant congressmen to some gulag the way the Soviets did. And Guantanamo, even bereft of Americans (so far as we know), is far more analagous to the gulag than to the Nazi death camps.

Under the Soviet system, unlike the Nazi, Jews could survive, even if survival required keeping below suspicion. The Soviets may have suspected whole groups of people, but they generally went after individuals. The same can be said, if not yet to the same degree, of the Arab and Muslim communities in America. But the thing that really brought home to me the Bush's resemblance to the Soviets was the recollection of an old saying from the communist days: The Soviet Union, it went, was the only country where the future was certain and the past was unpredictable. The United States is bidding fair to become the inheritor of that epithet. On the one hand, Bush and his cabinet still continue to insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence and the testimony of expert professionals, that things are going well in Iraq, or at least they will be. We must stay the course, they proclaim, and it will lead us to a bright shining future of Middle Eastern democracy under the gentle guiding hand of America.

The past, on the other hand, is subject to constant revision. While I am not aware that the Bush administration has taken to airbrushing photographs the way the Soviets did, a number of pictures have been heard to disappear, such as the ones of Bush and Jack Abramoff being chummy with each other. (Rumsfeld must no doubt be wishing the same could have happened to those photos of him shaking hands with Saddam Hussein.) A more serious rewriting of the past is the shifting justification for invading Iraq, from the WMD story to making Iraq safe for democracy to just taking Saddam out. And Bush spokesmen compound their revision by insisting that we should not "dwell on the past" as if examining Bush's past actions too closely might taint his vision of the inevitable future. I do have to admit that Cheney does not suffer from any revisionist temptations. Once he has invented the past, it stays that way.

Thus he continues to insist, even now, that Saddam was in league with al-Qaida, when absolutely all of the evidence not only points the other way, but makes it clear that Saddam recognized al-Qaida was as much a threat to him as it was to the West. Bush and Cheney's attempts to establish a "unitary executive," as much above the law as was the Soviet leadership, run directly counter to the concept of democracy that they are claiming to export to the rest of the world, by force if not by example. But unlike Soviet Russia, or even Nazi Germany, the United States has had a long history of true democracy, and it is on the strength of that history that our hope for reversing the analogy rests. American elections, even if subject to manipulation and fraud, are not yet the total sham they were in the Soviet era. Accountability and responsibility are still ours to demand -- but only if speak up and demand them, while we still can.--