Hitler and Bush; Germany and the United States

Timothy Snyder goes on at length in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune comparing the decline of democracy and the rise of Hitler in Germany in the 1930s with George Bush and what Professor Snyder claims has happened in the United States since September 11, 2001.

According to Professor Snyder, the legal basis for Hitler’s concentration camps was the same as that for the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Germany in the 1930s and the United States today both have "a runaway executive branch" (though Germany’s was worse). And so on.

While Professor Snyder does ultimately acknowledge that the United States’ "policies in the Middle East have nothing in common with Hitler’s genocidal purposes", he doesn’t get around to saying it until the thirteenth paragraph of a 17-paragraph article. And the very next paragraph claims, while admitting we have not committed any crimes "remotely comparable to the Holocaust", that Bush’s United States has "disenfranchised voters," "forged elections," "fought a war of aggression," etc., etc.

About the only thing missing from Professor Snyder’s comparison of Hitler and Bush is a claim that, just as some historians now believe the Nazis started the Reichstag fire that Hitler used to justify his policies, some people say Bush, or at least his cronies, were the ones behind the 9/11 attacks.