Black Copter Control's Journal: Echoes of Hitler

I wasn't using Hitler as an example because he was incredibly nasty. I was using him because World War II is a reasonably well known example. To learn from history, and to avoid repeating (aspects of) it, we must be willing to examine it, and use it as a template against which to compare current events. To refuse to examine current events in the context of historical events because of the atrocities that followed the relevant historical events is to lose the entire benefit of that part of our history.

The events of the day (Iraq, Afghanistan, N. Korea) being similar to some of the similar events in Germany's early wars of conquest is not a smoking gun indicating that Bush is (or is going going to be) as evil as Hitler. It is simply an 'interesting event'. Analogous to something that, in a forensic investigation, would flagged by a little paper evidence-tent. It is something that is possibly worth further investigation.

When Hitler was first elected, he seemed a fine enough fellow. At the time Hitler invaded his first couple of countries, the people of Germany did not know what he was about to do. He had convinced them that those first invasions were completely necessary and appropriate. By the time the invasions had gotten more questionable, dissent had been pretty much expunged under cover of war fervor. The first to go were the Jews, followed by the Gypsies, Communists, Homosexuals, anybody complaining about the extinction of the former groups and then pretty much anybody who didn't just shut up and do what the government told them to do. Examining the situation in hindsight, it's pretty obvious that Hitler was an evil crazed despot. In 1938, however, the only real hints available to most people would have been strange anomalies of word and action.. Being dismissive of transgressions by one group, but going ballistic at similar (or milder) transgressions by another (read: target) group.

Ignore, for a moment, the infamous nastiness of Hitler's actions subsequent to the invasions of Poland, etc. Consider, instead the process by which he took over Germany by feeding on their fears.

If the invasion of Afghanistan had stood on it's own -- If The US had worked to install a full democracy in the country and had quietly walked out afterwards, I would have thought little more about it. Instead, the precognitive rumblings about invading Afghanistan, the pending invasion of Iraq and the contextually anomalous treatment of N. Korea gnaw at me and worry me.

I doubt that the world could ever grow another short, dark-haired, mustached, swastika-saluting, Jew-hating warmonger, but we could easily grow a well-disguised analogy. Hitler was an echo of Napoleon. Napoleon was the echo of Robspierre and the terror of the French revolution. The echoes go back a long way, each one variably more or less evil than the previous. Each one variously both different from and similar to the others. No incarnation of evil will be precisely like the other, but if you listen carefully, you may hear the echoes of it's predecessors.