The Specter of Hitler in the Collective Western Mind

Once again, the West's enemy du jour is compared to Hitler in the Western establishment media.

For example, Ireland’s deputy premier Leo Varadkar has called Putin the “Hitler of the 21st century.” Timothy Snyder opined in the Boston Globe about "Putin’s Hitler-like tricks and tactics in Ukraine." Michael Ruane, echoing U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, argued in the Washington Post that "Putin’s attack on Ukraine echoes Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia." At Thursday's press briefing held by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, so-called Ukranian journalist Iryna Somer asked: "Don't you think it's time for NATO to build anti-Hitler sorry, anti-Putin coalition?" These are just some examples out of many.

In this post I am not going to argue about the substance of this comparison, since it is plainly absurd and highly disrespectful of the millions of victims of the Holocaust because it trivializes the crimes against humanity of the real Adolf Hitler and of his regime.

What I would like to discuss, instead, are the reasons why the specter of Hitler keeps regularly coming back whenever Western governments want to convince their subjects of the evil nature of their designated enemies.

First, a non-exhaustive historical review of Western-made Hitler comparisons:

• In 1988, U.S. Ambassador Vernon Walters at the United Nations compared Fidel Castro to Hitler and Stalin at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights: 

I am old enough to remember those who apologized for Hitler and Stalin... I remember the cries of shock and betrayal when the truth of what those dictators had done filtered out to the world... I think that sooner rather than later the same cries will go up when the world finally acknowledges the horrors of life under Castro.

• In 1989, U.S. representative and deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger compared Panama's leader general Manuel Noriega to Hitler at a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS):

Gen. Noriega has turned Panama into a haven for drug traffickers and a center for money laundering and the transshipment of cocaine. Will Gen. Noriega be permitted to falsely wrap himself in the flag of Panamanian sovereignty while the drug cartels with which he is allied intervene throughout this hemisphere? That is aggression as surely as Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland 50 years ago was aggression. It is aggression against us all and some day it must be brought to an end. 

That same year, the U.S. invaded Panama and captured Noriega killing hundreds of civilians in the process.

• In 1990, U.S. President George Bush I was trying to convince the U.S. American people to support a military intervention in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Referring to the false claim that Iraqi troops were taking babies out of incubators and leave them out to die, Bush I said: "We are dealing with Hitler revisited."

• In 2006, following in his father's footsteps while at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. President George Bush II (W.) flavored his comparison of Osama bin Laden to Hitler with the specter of communism: "Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them."

• Also in 2006, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld linked Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez to Hitler: "He's a person who was elected legally, just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally and then consolidated power..." In 2002, the U.S. had unsuccessfully tried to topple Chavez.

• Again in 2006, U.S. general and presidential hopeful Wesley Clark called Serbia's deposed President Slobodan Milosevic "a petty Hitler." Clark was NATO's supreme allied commander when the alliance bombed Yugoslavia in 1999.

• In 2008, Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, talking with Stephen Haldey, U.S. national security adviser in the Bush II administration, said that Iran's President "Ahmadinejad is a modern Hitler and the mistakes that were made prior to the Second World War must not be repeated."

• In 2011, it was the turn of Moammar Gadhafi to be compared to Hitler. To garner support for NATO's bombing of Libya, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on the floor of the U.S. Senate: 

Colonel Qadhafi has threatened to carry out attacks against homes, offices, families in Europe unless NATO stops its campaign of air strikes against his regime in Libya. He actually means it. Hitler meant it. He means it.

• In 2016, British newspaper The Independent published an article by May Bulman titled: "Isis 'studied Nazi methods' to create own version of Hitler Youth and train child killers from birth." The Independent cleverly made the linkage to Hitler although Isis was not headed by one single person.

• In 2017, White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested during a daily briefing that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is worse than Hitler because Hitler "didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons." He later apologized about the false statement about Hitler not using chemical weapons but doubled down on the suggestion by saying that Hitler "was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing."

• During one the 2020 U.S. presidential debates, U.S. Senator and presidential hopeful Joe Biden "compared Trump's relationship with Kim Jong Un to America's 'good relationship with Hitler' before the war."

The first thing that this brief list shows is that every single designated enemy by the U.S. and its allies has been compared to Hitler either by a U.S. government official or by one of its proxies (government officials of allied nations and Western establishment media) at some point or another.

The primary and most obvious purpose of this type of linkage is to portray the chosen target as a monster that poses an existential threat to the world.

But here, I want to advance another, perhaps less obvious explanation that while not invalidating the primary purpose may reveal something that is more deeply seated and thus more ominous.

First, it must be pointed out that Hitler, which Eric Fromm described as "a clinical case of necrophilia" compounded by sadism, was purely a Western product. In other words, the ideology of Nazism was the offspring of Western capitalist and cultural imperialism.

For this reason, Hitler and Nazism are perceived in the West as an indelible stain on its historical claim of moral and cultural superiority.

As such, Western Hitler-calling of its non-Western designated enemies should also be seen as a form of collective psychological projection aimed at exorcising Western inner demons and sense of guilt. A way for the West to tell itself and the rest of the world the story that Hitler and Nazism were just an aberration, a momentary lapse of reason, and not the logical conclusion of Western endemic cultural racism coupled with the cold rationality of the capitalist mode of production.

Yet, today, as Western leaders insanely and unnecessarily intensify the post-WWII push towards nuclear war, we must sadly take note that the Hitlerian form of necrophilia was not simply an aberration but the symptom of a culture that is bent towards destruction and ultimately collective suicide.

Baran and Sweezy on Capitalist Bourgeois Oligarchic Democracy

As I study Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital I encountered this very cogent and clear explanation on the real functioning and limits of capitalist democracy.

Except in times of crisis, the normal political system of capitalism, whether competitive or monopolistic, is bourgeois democracy. Votes are the nominal source of political power, and money is the real source: the system, in other words, is democratic in form and plutocratic in content. This is by now so well recognized that it hardly seems necessary to argue the case. Suffice it to say that all the political activities and functions which may be said to constitute the essential characteristics of the system-indoctrinating and propagandizing the voting public, organizing and maintaining political parties, running electoral campaigns-can be carried out only by means of money, lots of money. And since in monopoly capitalism the big corporations are the source of big money, they are also the main sources of political power. 

It is true that there is a latent contradiction in this system. 

The non-property-owning voters, who constitute the overwhelming majority, may form their own mass organizations (trade unions, political parties ) , raise necessary funds through dues, and thereby become an effective political force. If they succeed in winning formal political power and then attempt to use it in a way which threatens the economic power and privileges of the moneyed oligarchy, the system is confronted by a crisis which can be resolved according to its own rules only if the oligarchy is prepared to give up without a fight. Since to the best of our knowledge there is no case in history of a privileged oligarchy's behaving this way, we can safely dismiss the possibility. What happens instead is that the oligarchy, which controls either directly or through trusted agents all the instrumentalities of coercion (armed forces, police, courts, etc.), abandons the democratic forms and resorts to some form of direct authoritarian rule. Such a breakdown of bourgeois democracy and resort to authoritarian rule may also occur for other reasons-such as, for example, a prolonged inability to form a stable parliamentary majority, or successful resistance by certain vested interests to reforms necessary for the proper functioning of the economy. The history of recent decades is particularly rich in examples of the substitution of authoritarian for democratic government in capitalist countries: Italy in the early 1920's, Germany in 1933, Spain in the later 1930's, France in 1958, and many more. 

In general, however, moneyed oligarchies prefer democratic to authoritarian government. The stability of the system is enhanced by periodic popular ratifications of oligarchic rule this is what parliamentary and presidential elections normally amount to-and certain very real dangers to the oligarchy itself of personal or military dictatorship are avoided. Hence in developed capitalist countries, especially those with a long history of democratic government, oligarchies are reluctant to resort to authoritarian methods of dealing with opposition movements or solving difficult problems, and instead devise more indirect and subtle means for accomplishing their ends. Concessions are made to pull the teeth of trade-union and labor political movements professing radical aims. Their leaders are bought off-with money, flattery, and honors. As a result, when they acquire power they stay within the confines of the system, merely trying to win a few more concessions here and there to keep the rank and file satisfied, yet never challenging the real bastions of oligarchic power in the economy and in the coercive branches of the state apparatus. Similarly, the oligarchy alters the machinery of government to the extent necessary to prevent any stalemates and deadlocks which might involve the breakdown of democratic procedures (for example, the number of political parties is deliberately limited to prevent the emergence of government by unstable parliamentary coalitions). By these methods, and many others, democracy is made to serve the interests of the oligarchy far more effectively and durably than authoritarian rule. The possibility of authoritarian rule is never renounced-indeed, most democratic constitutions make specific provision for it in times of emergency-but it is decidedly not the preferred form of government for normally functioning capitalist societies.

Baran, Paul A., and Paul M. Sweezy. 1966. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. United States of America: Monthly Review Press. 155-7

Mountain Creek: Unsafe at Any Age

This is a story of profit over people.

A couple of weekends ago I went with my girlfriend and her children for a day of skiing at Mountain Creek in Vernon, NJ. On our first run of the day my girlfriend was coming to a stop on the side of the slope when she was suddenly hit by an incoming snowboarder. After hitting her, the young snowboarder – who must have been in his 20s – proceeded to disentangle himself. When I told him to stop moving to avoid compounding her potential injuries he continued as if nothing was said. It was clear at that point that the guy had no regard for the safety and health of his victim and that all he was concerned with was getting away.

Before he could manage to get up, I decided to hold him to the ground in order to prevent him from fleeing the scene until a ski patrol showed up. Needless to say, a scuffle ensued as he kept trying to escape. As I held him to the ground I repeatedly told him that he had a responsibility to stay since he had most likely injured my girlfriend. Later on, in fact, we found that that was indeed the case: a couple of torn ligaments, a flipped meniscus and no more skiing for the season plus crutches, a knee brace, hours of physical therapy and possibly knee surgery.

The scuffle went on forever, or at least so it seemed to me. As none of the supposedly free and brave onlookers mustered the courage to intervene the snowboarder eventually managed to punch me in the face. Nevertheless, I kept holding him to the ground as I resisted the temptation to punch him back. It was then that, out of the blue, a friend of his showed up. He pulled me away thus allowing the perpetrator to get up and leave. Yet, rather than following them I decided to attend to my injured girlfriend and her children as we waited for ski patrol to show up. 

Eventually ski patrol managed to arrive and little by little there were five or six of them around us. They formed a semi-circle in order to prevent oncoming skiers and snowboarders from hitting us. I have to say it was a surreal scene. Young snowboarders and inexperienced skiers kept flying by with no regard for anybody but themselves. At one point one snowboarder came down the mountain flaunting a can of beer his hand. All the ski patrollers managed to do was to yell at him. None followed him. There was no accountability.

And here lies the crux of the matter and the reason why I wrote earlier that this is a story of profit over people: there is zero accountability for hazardous behavior at Mountain Creek. As a matter of fact, one of the ski patrols at the scene of the accident told me that they are not even allowed to touch skiers. "If they want to leave we cannot stop them," he said as he checked my jaw for injuries. Another ski patroller told my girlfriend that the most they can do is to expel someone from the premises but that it is a very rare thing for them to do. In fact, only once during his 8+ years as a ski patrol on the mountain he managed to follow someone down the slope to make sure he left the premises.

With this type of non-existent accountability it is understandable that the conditions on the mountain would be unsafe. When people realize that they are not held accountable for their hazardous or injurious behavior it is to be expected that the frequency with which people will engage in such behaviors will increase. The amoral snowboarder who injured my girlfriend is a perfect case in point. He severely injured someone, fled the scene and suffered no consequences. What are the chances that 1. he would not return to Mountain Creek and 2. that he would be more careful in the future? Probably not many. In fact, I am willing to guess that as my girlfriend was being transported down the mountain on a stretcher he and his buddy were probably laughing at the incident over a cold one at Mountain Creek's outdoor bar.

The question that arises at this point is: why would Mountain Creek risk alienating those customers who end up injured because of the lack of safety control on the mountain? My guess is that the resort's accountants must have run their numbers and found that it is more profitable for them not to alienate their core customers – young snowboarders – by discouraging their behavior than to risk losing the few who get injured as a result. In fact, Mountain Creek makes sure to exempt itself from any liability occurring on its premises by making participants sign a liability waiver. One such waiver states:

I understand and EXPRESSLY AGREE to the fact that skiing in its various forms is an inherently hazardous sport that has many dangers and risks. I realize that injuries are a common and ordinary occurrence of this sport. I, or if skier is a minor, I individually and on behalf of said minor, EXPRESSLY AGREE, as a condition of being allowed to purchase a Season Pass or participate in the Student Ski & Ride Voucher Program and to use the ski area facility and premises, that I freely accept and voluntarily assume ALL RISKS of personal injury or death or property damage, and FULLY RELEASE Mountain Creek FROM ANY AND ALL LIABILITY for personal injury, death, or property damage arising out of or resulting from my participation in this sport... (emphasis added; source)

What Mountain Creek doesn't say in the waiver is that the resort does not have any meaningful safety and accountability systems in place for those who engage in hazardous behavior towards others. In so many words and as my girlfriend's incident clearly shows, it would not be unthinkable for someone to literally kill or cripple someone else on their property and get away with it. Ski patrol will not stop them (which is why I believe "Ski Patrol" to be a misnomer that should be changed to "Ski EMS"). If you think I am exaggerating read the liability waiver in its entirety. Mountain Creek has no incentive in discouraging hazardous behavior because it has totally insulated itself from all liabilities by making people sign such waiver. After being injured, customers cannot successfully sue Mountain Creek for damages and, if the person who injured them does not take responsibility, victims are left to fend for themselves.

Given the ever increasing amount of young snowboarders on their slopes – itself a much more dangerous sport for both practitioners and others than skiing – Mountain Creek's owners must have decided that it is more profitable for them to let these kids run wild and undisturbed in order to keep them coming in greater and greater numbers. This view is supported by the fact that starting this year Mountain Creek has dropped the previously mandatory safety training – the Park Pass – for all skiers who wished to enter the terrain park at South. Or, alternatively, they may simply have decided to maximize the resort's profitability by minimizing safety to the bare minimum – i.e. to the minimum level that allows them to maintain the perception of safety while counting on the fact that most people won't realize that they are entering the wild west of skiing until it's too late. And when they do, these people will realize like my girlfriend and I that they have no meaningful way of redress.

Either way, I believe it is crucial for people to distinguish reality from fantasy. In the case of Mountain Creek the reality is that people are dealing with an operation that is unsafe at any age.

The Pyramid of Capitalist System

                   Source: wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System

U.S. Weapons Exports to Israel

Here are two pie charts showing U.S. weapons exports to Israel in 2013 and 2014 courtesy of Ken Klippenstein and Paul Gottinger. Needless to say, these weapons are in large part subsidized by U.S. taxpayers through the yearly $3 billion in aid that the state of Israel receives from the U.S. government. In fact, the aid is contingent to Israel's purchasing of weapons manufactured in the U.S.. In so many words, the Palestinians are being slaughtered in order to pump up the stock prices of U.S. weapon manufacturers; perhaps one of the most perverse examples of how the capitalist system conceals exploitation and thrives on the literal destruction of humanity.

Krugman and the Truth About the 1% That Can't Be Spoken

I have been participating in OWS with increased intensity over the course of the last two months. The defining moment for me was the illegal and brutal eviction on November, 15. One of the things that I liked about the Freedom Plaza encampment was the Think Tank discussion: people from all walks of life gathering together in a public space discussing openly about the inadequacies of capitalism.

Today's New York Times op-ed by Paul Krugman The Post-Truth Campaign reminded me of these discussions particularly in terms of certain ideological tenets that seem so engrained into our collective unconscious even in the face of the starkest of realities. In this regard, Krugman opens his essay by positing the following:

Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”

Krugman goes on to say that such a statement would be universally condemned by almost everyone, including himself, and much of the essay is dedicated to creating a moral equivalence between the statement above and the continuous charges coming from Republicans about Obama being a redistributive socialist. He continues by wondering why the latter statements do not meet a condemnation similar to that which the former would receive if Obama, or anyone else for that matter, would dare uttering it.

As the title of his piece summarizes, Krugman describes this type of environment the Post-Truth Campaign.

While Krugman should be thanked for putting his finger on a praxis that has become pretty much the modus operandi of political discourse, his underlying ideological tenets don't seem to alert the Princeton economist to the fact that he has lured himself into an logical fallacy. If the idea of a post-truth political environment is assumed to be true – as I believe it has been for at least a decade – then Obama should be able to say that Mitt Romney, the embodiment of the 1%, wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs without causing any particular uproar in the establishment community. For this reason, the fact that he can't say it is proof that the statement is true: the 1% wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.

One of the primary goals of capitalism is to reduce labor costs. According to Marx's concept of surplus value, the lower the wages the higher the profits for capital. This is why the 1% has historically being opposed to unions or anyone and anything (i.e. minimum wage legislation) that would champion workers' wages. In the post-truth age, the increase of surplus value is called an increase in productivity. This is an euphemism for laying off workers while putting the extra work on the shoulders of remaining workers who must work longer ours without having their salaries raised.

If we take this tendency of capitalism to maximize profit by minimizing labor costs to its logical conclusion, it follows that the ideal wage from a capitalist's standpoint is zero. And what do we call someone who works for free or perhaps for simply food and shelter? That is a serf or, in other words, a slave. For this reason, it can be said that serfdom and slavery are an intrinsic tendency of capitalism because they represent the ultimate zero-level labor cost.

Yet, many in this country – including Krugman and those who I sometimes happened to converse with in the Think Tank discussions at Freedom Plaza – seem to not be able to grasp this simple reality. It's as if it is not possible for many people to accept that in America there are people, the 1%, who would have no qualms to return this country to the middle-ages or even earlier, more brutal forms of slavery. This resistance is perhaps rooted in the positivist idea of inevitable human progress, the idea that we could never go back to certain forms of barbarism. Yet, history is full of examples of regress – the middle-ages being only one the most glaring. Even Krugman admitted so much in an op-ed earlier this year when he wrote that the country was well on its way of becoming a banana republic.

The fact is that many Americans still seem unable to accept that given the chance the 1% would gladly turn this country into a Honduran style republic, where a tiny oligarchy which controls most of the wealth uses the government and death squads as a tool to repress a population of mostly peasants. Yet, the signs of this coming reality are all around us if one only cares to look:

– The absolute impunity of Wall Street executives in the greatest plunder of wealth in human history.

– A defense (sic) bill that enables the executive to deploy the military in the United States to arrest and detain Americans indefinitely.

– A 1% whose wealth has reached 1929 levels of concentration and which is thrusting the country into a depression.

I could go on and on but the point is simple: rather than being an imaginary statement, the truth about the 1% that can't be spoken is that they sense an historic opportunity and they are pursuing it with a vengeance: turning working people into serfs. Krugman even alluded to that much when he said that the Troika is now trying to destroy the European dream. On this, economist Dean Baker concurs. The truth is that, if they succeed, we are next.

Capitalism Hits the Fan

An excellent assessment and, most importantly, possible solutions to the world economic crisis by economist Richard Wolff, author of Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. This aired today on Democracy Now.