Posted on 02/03/2006 5:40:36 AM PST by xzins
Rumsfeld Likens Chavez's Rise to Hitler
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld likened Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Adolf Hitler, reflecting continuing tension in relations between the United States and the Latin American government.
Rumsfeld, asked during a National Press Club appearance Thursday about indications of a deteriorating general relationship between Washington and parts of Latin America, said he believes such a characterization "misses the mark."
"We saw dictatorships there. And then we saw most of those countries, with the exception of Cuba, for the most part move towards democracies," he said. "We also saw corruption in that part of the world. And corruption is something that is corrosive of democracy."
The secretary acknowledged that "we've seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome."
"I mean, we've got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money," Rumsfeld added. "He's a person who was elected legally - just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally - and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others."
There have been increasing signs of hostility between Washington and Caracas, and on Monday Chavez said Venezuela's intelligence agencies have "infiltrated" a group of military officials from the U.S. Embassy who were allegedly involved in espionage.
Venezuelan authorities, including the vice president, have accused officials at the U.S. Embassy of involvement in a spying case in which Venezuelan naval officers allegedly passed sensitive information to the Pentagon.
It was not the first such charge by Chavez.
He has accused President Bush of backing efforts to overthrow his leftist government, and specifically has charged that the United States supported a short-lived coup in 2002, fomented a devastating strike in 2004 and expelled some American missionaries from Venezuela for alleged links to the CIA.
Washington has repeatedly rejected the allegations.
Actually, I don't trust Venezuela and would gladly see their government destabilized.
My husband used to work for a company that citgo bought. It is very much a venezuelian company (forgive spelling).
What's your point, that we are "picking on" Chavez like "typical North American racist gringo imperialist running-dog lackeys" or something?
Why promote his left-wing propaganda for him? The simple fact is, this guy is picking a fight with us. He doesn't like us -- we didn't know him from Bob's elderly uncle.
I disagree. See post 24 by NextRush, above, in which the argument is made logically and with appropriate references to political parallels, documented from competent eyewitness source material.
Sometimes the analogy is appropriate, and the mistake isn't hyperbole, the mistake is in trying to isolate Hitler as some sort of freak of nature, a once-in-a-millennium Phenomenon the like of which we shall not see again.
Wrongo.
Hitler and his emulators, as documented by William Shirer, are actually the default case for amoral, absolutist, "Nietzschean" leadership freed of historical moral imperatives anchored by absolute values.
I didn't read the Shirer books cited by NextRush, but I did read his Collapse of the Third Republic, in which Shirer surveys 1930's "street politics" in western Europe generally and France in particular, and makes useful comparisons among the various modernist, statist, secular-ideological parties that struggled for power in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of the traditional European moral and political order. The Communists and Socialists were crushed by the German Nazis in Germany and Austria, but they prospered in France, side-by-side with the native right-wing French Croix de Feu {"Cross of Fire": who does that sound like?). And truth be told, in power the Communists acted like the Nazis, and one is entitled to suspect that any of them, had they been successful, would have acted as the Nazis historically did -- because they all, with the exception of the royalists, operated from similar modernist, statist, "post-moral" premises that would have led them all to similar practices and policies in the end -- just with different policy objects and state victim-lists.
Another way of understanding this point is by reference to an answer that Rabbi Schneerson, long the doyen of the ultra-orthodox rabbis, once gave to the question put to him, "could Jews ever behave like Nazis?" His answer, spat out with distaste for the comparison, was "fruh morgen!": "First thing tomorrow morning!"
Wrongo. When you call people Nazis, there is no word left to describe the Nazis.
What about the people? Wouldn't de-stabilisation hurt a lot of innocent people?
You must have a pretty long adjective list that you keep handy, sounds good.
I'm just saying that it doesn't always appear to be across the board, when it is decided that we should villify certain regimes.
Not really.
Nice trope, but incorrect. And I repeat, you do your cause -- our cause -- no favors by trying to put the Nazis, fascists, phalangists, and ideological hardguys of every stripe in some "condition beyond categories" because you shut down discussion of something that needs to be discussed.
If you feel Chavez and his pack of leftist thugs have been picked on unfairly or overmuch, you might start your apologia by explaining the money Chavez gave Al Q'aeda, just to get Osama Bin Laden's attention so Chavez could express his deep appreciation properly for all those Americans (and other nationals under the protection of our laws) whom Bin Laden had just killed on 9/11.
No, my friend, when someone kills millions of people in death camps, then you can call them Nazi-like. Until then, they are evil and despicable. Hillary may be at home with socialism and want power for power's sake, but I am not going to call her a Stalinist or Maoist. They are many other words that fit, some of which cannot be posted.
No, I'm not telling you that, and anyone that has read the threads knows it...that is what you are assuming, and what you would like others to think.
What should our policy toward him be?
What don't you like about U.S. foreign policy as regards Latin America?
Not if they find an inane one. The question is whether the parallel is substantive, relevant, and historically resonant with the Nazi template cited.
In June, 1934, Hitler hadn't killed masses of people yet. Until the "night of the long knives" (the slaughter of the SA command staff around Ernst Roehm on June 30, 1934), it's arguable that the Nazis hadn't killed anybody. It would not be unfair to call someone who'd replicated Hitler's curriculum vitae and political resume to that point a Nazi, since the Hitler of 1934 was, in fact, a Nazi.
By your rule of thumb, we shouldn't call Hitler a Nazi until and unless he had accepted the Wannsee Protocol for the destruction of European Jewry. But his and many other Germans' and Austrians' embrace of antisemitic, anti-Gypsy, anti-Slavic Pan-Germanism was already generations old, dating back to the earliest articulation of Pan-Germanism in the 1880's.
Hitler didn't intervene in the Spanish Civil War until the autumn of 1936, didn't occupy Czechoslovakia and Austria until 1938. At what point did he, under your working concept of what and who deserves the epithet of "Nazi", become a "Nazi"?
The whole point of calling someone a Nazi is to point out that he and his party are replicating the Nazi career to ruin and death, before we get to the point that someone must inevitably experience the denouement.
Interesting argument. I wonder what's in Hillary's long paper about Saul Alinsky that she asked Wellesley to lock away. Saul Alinsky was arguably a Communist. Hillary and Bill were both indisputably members of the Students for a Democratic Society and therefore parties to the Port Huron Statement, the SDS's founding manifesto. How much of the program of the notorious offshoot of the SDS, the Weather Underground, did they share? Importantly to any discussion of that disgusting duo, do they still harbor the values they did back then?.
Nikita Khruschev probably loved this passage from the Port Huron Statement of 1962 -- hell, he probably had someone write it:
Democratic theory must confront the problems inherent in social revolutions. For Americans concerned with the development of democratic societies, the anti-colonial movements and revolutions in the emerging nations pose serious problems. We need to face these problems with humility: after 180 years of constitutional government we are still striving for democracy in our own society. We must acknowledge that democracy and freedom do not magically occur, but have roots in historical experience; they cannot always be demanded for any society at any time, but must be nurtured and facilitated. We must avoid the arbitrary projection of Anglo-Saxon democratic forms onto different cultures. Instead of democratic capitalism we should anticipate more or less authoritarian variants of socialism and collectivism in many emergent societies.
But we do not abandon our critical faculties. Insofar as these regimes represent a genuine realization of national independence, and are engaged in constructing social systems which allow for personal meaning and purpose where exploitation once was, economic systems which work for the people where once they oppressed them, and political systems which allow for the organization and expression of minority opinion and dissent, we recognize their revolutionary and positive character. Americans can contribute to the growth of democracy in such societies not by moralizing, nor by indiscriminate prejudgment, but by retaining a critical identification with these nations, and by helping them to avoid external threats to their independence. Together with students and radicals in these nations we need to develop a reasonable theory of democracy which is concretely applicable to the cultures and conditions of hungry people.
Source: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html
You make good arguments. My disagreement comes from not just a political viewpoint, but also from a language perspective. I'll say it again --- if Bush is Hitler, there is nothing left to describe Hitler. To me, when those comparisons are made, it lessens the impact on people of the incredible evil that was Hitler.
What I know of him, can be found in what the media has put out about him, as I do not know him personally.
I am not privy to what the State dept knows, so I cannot dictate policy.
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