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.
