Actions by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in the Crimea by Norman Solomon (OpEd News)
The frontrunner to become the next president of the United States is playing an old and dangerous political game — comparing a foreign leader to Adolf Hitler.
At a private charity event on Tuesday, in comments preserved on audio, Hillary Clinton talked about actions by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in the Crimea. “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ’30s,” she said.
The next day, Clinton gave the inflammatory story more oxygen when speaking at UCLA. She “largely stood by the remarks,” the Washington Post reported. Clinton “said she was merely noting parallels between Putin’s claim that he was protecting Russian-speaking minorities in Crimea and Hitler’s moves into Poland, Czechoslovakia and other parts of Europe to protect German minorities.”
Clinton denied that she was comparing Putin with Hitler even while she persisted in comparing Putin with Hitler. “I just want people to have a little historic perspective,” she said. “I’m not making a comparison certainly, but I am recommending that we perhaps can learn from this tactic that has been used before.”
Yes indeed. Let’s learn from this tactic that has been used before – the tactic of comparing overseas adversaries to Hitler. Such comparisons by U.S. political leaders have a long history of fueling momentum for war.
“Surrender in Vietnam” would not bring peace, President Lyndon Johnson said at a news conference on July 28, 1965 as he tried to justify escalating the war, “because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression.”
After Ho Chi Minh was gone, the Hitler analogy went to other leaders of countries in U.S. crosshairs. The tag was also useful when attached to governments facing U.S.-backed armies.
Three decades ago, while Washington funded the contra forces in Nicaragua, absurd efforts to smear the elected left-wing Sandinistas knew no rhetorical bounds. Secretary of State George Shultz said on February 15, 1984, at a speech in Boston: “I’ve had good friends who experienced Germany in the 1930s go there and come back and say, ‘I’ve visited many communist countries, but Nicaragua doesn’t feel like that. It feels like Nazi Germany.’”
Washington embraced Panama’s Gen. Manuel Noriega as an ally, and for a while he was a CIA collaborator. But there was a falling out, and tension spiked in the summer of 1989. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said that drug trafficking by Noriega “is aggression as surely as Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland 50 years ago was aggression.” A U.S. invasion overthrew Noriega in December 1989.
In early August 1990, the sudden Iraqi invasion of Kuwait abruptly ended cordial relations between Washington and Baghdad. The two governments had a history of close cooperation during the 1980s. But President George H. W. Bush proclaimed that Saddam Hussein was “a little Hitler.” In January 1991, the U.S. government launched the Gulf War.
Near the end of the decade, Hillary Clinton got a close look at how useful it can be to conflate a foreign leader with Hitler, as President Bill Clinton and top aides repeatedly drew the parallel against Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic. In late March 1999, the day before the bombing of Kosovo and Serbia began, President Clinton said in a speech: “And so I want to talk to you about Kosovo today but just remember this — it’s about our values. What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?”
As the U.S.-led NATO bombing intensified, so did efforts to justify it with references to Hitler. “Clinton and his senior advisers harked repeatedly back to images of World War II and Nazism to give moral weight to the bombing,” the Washington Post reported. Vice President Al Gore chimed in for the war chorus, calling Milosevic “one of these junior-league Hitler types.”
Just a few years later, the George W. Bush administration cranked up a revival of Saddam-Hitler comparisons. They became commonplace.
Five months before the invasion of Iraq, it was nothing extraordinary when a leading congressional Democrat pulled out all the stops. “Had Hitler’s regime been taken out in a timely fashion,” said Rep. Tom Lantos, “the 51 million innocent people who lost their lives during the Second World War would have been able to finish their normal life cycles. Mr. Chairman, if we appease Saddam Hussein, we will stand humiliated before both humanity and history.”
From the Vietnam War to the Iraq War, facile and wildly inaccurate comparisons between foreign adversaries and Adolf Hitler have served the interests of politicians hell-bent on propelling the United States into war. Often, those politicians succeeded. The carnage and the endless suffering have been vast.
Now, Hillary Clinton is ratcheting up her own Hitler analogies. She knows as well as anyone the power they can generate for demonizing a targeted leader.
With the largest nuclear arsenals on the planet, the United States and Russia have the entire world on a horrific knife’s edge. Nuclear saber-rattling is implicit in what the prospective President Hillary Clinton has done in recent days, going out of her way to tar Russia’s president with a Hitler brush. Her eagerness to heighten tensions with Russia indicates that she is willing to risk war — and even nuclear holocaust — for the benefit of her political ambitions.
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” Information about the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.
When global elite serving politicians like Hillary Clinton seek to hide their imperial arrogance and lawlessness by harking back to World War II then its important to know the full context of Hitlers rise to power.
The international banks, yes those same too-big-to-jail banks bailed out by the taxpayer recently, backed the Nazis.
As Dean Henderson explains in his book The Four Horsemen:
Paul and Max Warburg sat on the board of IG Farben, the Nazi business combine which made Zyklon B poison gas, as did H. A. Metz, who was director at the Warburg Bank of Manhattan – later Chase Manhattan.
In 1936 Avery Rockefeller joined forces with Hitler’s personal bankers, the German Schroeder family to create what Time magazine called “the economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis” JP Morgan and Union Banking Corporation also funded the Nazis. On the board of Union was George Bush Jr’s grandfather, Prescot Bush.
US corporations, advised no doubt by their bankers also got in on the act; ITT, Exxon, Ford and GE all sent funds and military equipment to the SS. ITT supplied the Nazis with the ingredients for the rocket bombs that were soon to reign down over London.
In 1933 at a meeting hosted by the German Schroeder bank, it was agreed to bring Hitler to power. Present at the meeting were brothers John Foster (later US Secretary of State) and Allen Dulles (later director of CIA). The managing director of the bank, Frank Cyril Tiarks was also a director at the then private Bank of England.
The following year Bank of England chairman Montagu Norman convened a meeting of London bankers where upon it was decided, with the help of Royal Dutch Shell chairman Sir Henri Deterding to covertly fund Hitler. Deterding hoped Hitler would march on the Soviet Union and regain Shell assets seized by revolutionaries.
It wasn’t until 1941, after Hitler ordered a crackdown on Freemasons and associated secret societies did the international bankers and corporations finally turn off the money and military supply spigots.
When Bill said ‘I did not have sex with that woman’, he was referring to Hilary. Why am I the only one who knows that? Look at her. Listen to her. There you go, it all becomes so clear.
Excerpt from Henderson, Dean (2011-05-14). Big Oil & Their Bankers In the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families and Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics and Terror Network By Dean Henderson.
Clinton played ball during his first term. He passed the Welfare to Work program that enriched defense giant Lockheed Martin, which was put in charge of administering new food stamp card programs in dozens of states. He allowed insurance HMO’s to derail meaningful health care reform. He came to aid of the Four Horsemen when he repeatedly bombed Iraq. He intervened in oil-rich Somalia, oversaw the dismantling of Yugoslavia and sent boatloads of aid Central Asia to ensure Big Oil control of Caspian Sea crude.
His Democrat Leadership Council faction continued its move to the right. Globalization was at the center of their agenda. Clinton implemented NAFTA and appointed Exxon Mobil director Carla Hills as trade negotiator in talks that transformed GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade) into the WTO- current Eight Families’ vehicle of choice in their endless quest to conquer the world’s resources. As political observer Jerome Binfet noted, “Clinton is the best Republican President we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt.” As Clinton became a lame duck late in his second term, he took a left turn. He designated
millions of acres of land National Parks and Monuments. In Utah the Escalante Grand Staircase National Park was created, infringing upon Conoco plans to drill for oil.
Clinton refused to open the Arctic National Wildlife refuge to Big Oil, angering BP Amoco- which owns the Alaskan Pipeline. He talked of raising the minimum wage and announced a crack-down on off-shore Eurodollar tax havens. The anti-trust division of his Justice department, under fiery new Federal Trade Commission chief Michael Kinnear, suddenly cracked down on the merger mania which Clinton earlier oversaw. Kinnear,
harkening the days of trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt, targeted the Microsoft monopoly for break up. Clinton took a more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ending decades of overt US bias towards the Rothschild/British Empire surrogate Israel. Most significantly, Clinton balanced the US budget, erasing a long-time deficit. He even began to pay down the country’s $2 trillion debt to the Eight Families, which had been mounting ever since Old Hickory balanced the books 150 years earlier. The bankers were restless.
Enter Monica Lewinsky and her handler Linda Tripp. Tripp worked at the Pentagon, while Lewinsky’s father worked for the CIA and Mossad in Central America. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) presided over the political lynching of Clinton which nearly resulted in his impeachment.
Hyde was on the board at Clyde S&L, the Chicago-based laundry for Mena-bound contra cocaine.
He oversaw the CIA’s black budget as leader of the House Intelligence Committee and was involved in the cover-up surrounding Banca Nacionale de Lavoro. [886] The Jekyl Island bankers had their Mr. Hyde. Clinton’s Presidency was weakened and his increasingly populist agenda was stopped dead in its tracks.