Bush=Hitler?
Not so fast, haters—there's something to this.
I was all prepared to scorn this piece by Pulitzer Prize-winner Diane McWhorter (full disclosure, she's a friend) on why we need to seriously consider comparisons of the Bush administration to Nazi Germany. Why are Bush comparisons to Hitler drummed out of the marketplace of debate?
Well, because they're so absurd, I thought at once.
The funny thing is, this is actually an issue—don't laugh—that has affected me in a major way. A few years back, my book, American Son, was on its way to being turned into a TV movie. Would have been great for the book, and helped to put a little money in the 401k, or to subsidize less profitable ventures, such as this blog.
The co-producer of the TV movie was a guy named Ed Gernon, part of the Canadian company that produces all the
CSIs. Another of Gernon's projects was a TV movie for CBS—which was the destination for American Son as well—about young Hitler. Ed's a nice guy, smart, thoughtful, and creative. He's also political.
You know what's coming, right?
So a few weeks before the Hitler movie is to air, Ed gives an interview to TV Guide in which he says that part of Hitler's rise to power was a result of fear—of foreigners, of protest, of instability—and the same could be said of George Bush's grip on the U.S. (Ed's Canadian, by the way.)
"It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole nation into war," Gernon said. "I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now."
Sounds pretty reasonable now, don't you think? Actually kind of smart. Prescient.
So naturally, all hell breaks loose. The New York Post starts tossing Gernon around like King Kong with Naomi Watts. Gernon's production company, Alliance Atlantis, fires him. CBS president Les Moonves announces that his network will never work with Gernon again.
Which means, of course, that Gernon is blacklisted in Hollywood. And so is everything associated with him. Including my book. So much for dreams of a TV windfall.
Apologies for the digression. But I think it's relevant to McWhorter's piece, which turns out to be serious and ambitious and disturbing and, to my mind, convincing. Here's the key graf:
The [Hitler] taboo is itself a precept of the propaganda state. Usually its enforcers profess a politically correct motive: the exceptionalism of genocidal Jewish victimhood. Thus, poor Sen. Richard Durbin, the Democrat from Illinois, found himself apologizing to the Anti-Defamation League after Republicans jumped all over him for invoking Nazi Germany to describe the conditions at Guantanamo. And so by allowing the issue to be defined by the unique suffering of the Jews, we ignore the Holocaust's more universal hallmark: the banal ordinariness of the citizens who perpetrated it. The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today's America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It's that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny.
For me, the proof of McWhorter's argument lies partly in the fact that I had such a first-hand experience with this phenomenon, and I still reflexively dismissed her argument.
A very interesting piece of writing.....
