Shame on the Neoconservatives, as they call themselves. They want to be called “Republicans.” But we can’t really call them Republicans, can we? They are not traditional Republicans. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were more or less traditional Republicans. Neoconservatives are more like the old Dixiecrats. In fact the manic racist Strom Thurmond was one of their honored leaders. These days “Republicans” are mostly from the South, the old Confederate states. Many of them still like to fly the flag of the old treasonous Confederacy above that of the United States.
Ever since Ronald Reagan, the Conservatives have been calling things the opposite of what they really are. Apparently they aren’t proud of what they are or what they stand for. For example, the Bush legislation that every environmental organization called an “abomination” and the “worst environmental legislation ever” the Bush Administration tried to pass as the “Clear Skies Act of 2003.” It would have increased huge tonnages of Nitrous Oxide, Sulphur Dioxide and Mercury back into the atmosphere, weakening the existing Clean Air Act, which it was supposed to sound like, apparently in order to palliate those who did not actually read it.
No, these are not your standard, garden-variety Republicans, the pro-small business, fiscally responsible, isolationist Republicans who fought for their positions against every Democrat from Roosevelt to JFK. These are a new generation of politicians, these Neoconservatives, who simply vote in a bloc against every proposal for the people, by voting for every measure under the Bush Administration that would bring down government and bankrupt it. They almost got away with it.
This is made more interesting by the fact that the Neocon tea-party people were throwing around the words like “Hitler” and the term “Nazi” a lot about the Democratic proposal to help all Americans have affordable health care. Of course, it sounds stupid when you read it like this, but those are the facts. That is what they did. So it might be an interesting exercise to use the historical Hitler…what he actually did…and compare it with things that are happening now to see…just where Hitler would stand if he were here today. (And don’t say “just to the left of Carnegie Hall” because that was the Russian Tea Room and it’s gone now.)
So, as pointed out, these are not the old traditional Republicans, which would be good for Hitler, because he would not be interested in a Party that freed Africans. He would have annihilated the blacks, as he tried to do to the Jews. On the other hand, he might like this new iteration of Republicans, the Neocons, because he undoubtedly would have liked the idea of bringing down the government. Like the Neocon Bush Administration, he had his own little tragedy at the beginning. But he created it.
He claimed the Reichstag (Parliament) building fire was set by Communists. That scared everyone, just as 9/11 was used to scare Americans into allowing the denial of civil rights. Hitler went further though, and slammed the door shut on any kind of free speech in the media, simply ransacking newspapers when they spoke out against him. Hitler would have liked Dick Cheney’s “outing” of a CIA agent. He would do anything to further his political agenda. It didn’t matter to Hitler who died. The more the merrier with him.
What about health care? Well, that is complicated. Hitler would definitely have been in favor of the tea party marches and especially bringing guns to the marches to show that the marchers had some members at least who had violent tendencies. In his day, they would beat up a few people, one or two of whom would die, just to make the point. Then they would blame the Socialists or the Communists for starting something. Sound familiar?
Living in Germany, Hitler would have perhaps had a different point of view on health care. Otto Von Bismarck had already set some standards for social services before the turn of the 20th Century, so that was an accepted part of German life. Just as in the United States, none or at least very few of these tea baggers are calling for the removal of Medicare. It is already established. People use it and like it very much. It would be foolish to try to remove it. Hitler, like Bush, Cheney and Rove wanted (and he got) a one-party, totalitarian state.
In this era of greater media proliferation, Karl Rove’s idea was not of course to simply rig all the elections and kill anyone who objected. That probably would be fine with him personally, but it would not fly in current society without a pretty big fight. Karl doesn’t want fights. He wants political power with the least amount of personal risk. Karl also knows, as Hitler did, that if you control the media and the message you can control elections. They did it very effectively, aligning themselves with reprehensible media moguls and an unwitting loosening of media regulations in 1996 that allowed huge media conglomerates.
In this time, in this country Hitler certainly would have been on the side of the big corporations at least until he had total control of the state, the military and the media. Abductions, like those carried out by Dick Cheney with what we now are discovering was a private and secret force within CIA, would be no problem for Hitler. Today, Hitler would be proud of the way the health care lobby has bought off a Quisling or two or three in the Senate. Of course he would probably have hired some people to knock off one or two more. Hitler was nothing if not pragmatic. So, in summary, if he had to play by current day rules, he would also bring in the tea parties to try to confuse the issue. This was his method also, confuse, denigrate, accuse, deny, and—in his day–kill, if necessary.
We don’t yet know what will happen to health care reform. The health care industry and those who support them, stained with the blood of those who die every day in emergency rooms for lack of preventive health care will probably continue to obstruct. That’s what Hitler did. When he could not win a victory outright, he would delay, attack the principles and the character of the opposition and delay at any cost. He was tenacious.
Hitler would have liked one thing especially about our current media society. In his day, he had complete control of the media and the message. There was no such thing as civil rights or freedom of speech. The closer he came to pure propaganda, the better he liked it. His goal was total control of the lives of Germans in order to create an Aryan race of people who would be superior to other nations and races.
Today, he would like the idea that his big corporate and industrial supporters could literally buy up media networks and arrange a story to make a point for the Nazi Party. He would jumping for joy at the possibility of having a Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham or Bill O’Reilly simply parroting information arranged by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch to make the points that would advance the goals of the Party. In this case the Neocon Party. He would be right at home in their boardrooms.
Of course we think of Hitler as hateful because we know that he was responsible for a minimum of 20 million deaths and the destruction of all of Western and Eastern Europe, great damage and death in Great Britain and total devastation of certain parts of Russia.
But he was popular with many of the people. Until it was too late they knew very little about concentration camps and when they did, just as our Senators Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman know what is right but do what is wrong, the Germans of that day often had jobs that they would lose if they spoke up…or perhaps lives they would lose.
Hitler would further be encouraged that his Party, which would seem to be the Neocons, would be the Party of violence. Two wars would be a good start. The Patriot Act where you can have secret agents go to your library or your video store and secretly find out what you are watching. He’d jump on that in a second. Then of course there are the abortion clinic bombers, the mass murderers of people that don’t agree with them and the White Aryan Brotherhood and the remnants of Strom Thurmond’s’ KKK. People like the bombers and murderers of abortion clinics, even though he was for abortion and sterilization for those he felt should not be allowed to have children.
Remember, he was of a different era. While he was using violence in Germany, we were hanging “negroes” in the Southern states for failing to sit in the back of the bus. He attacked countries without provocation to show how tough he was…like Bush Jr. did with Iraq. He didn’t kill people indiscriminately at first. He killed people who were against him politically because he was right and they were wrong and if he left them alive, he would have to deal with them later. Today, we don’t do that. But he would like the idea of tapping everyone’s phone without a warrant and he would love the idea of locking people up in a place like Guantanamo and throwing away the key.
Now this may come as a surprise, but Hitler would not be in favor of guns for the people. He would want only the police to have guns. The police and the enforcement arm of the Nazi Party, the SS, known as the Gestapo were removing people from society who did not fit the Party’s image or fit into their plans. So guns would only have complicated a situation where someone knew you were coming to take them to their death in a concentration camp.
Here’s a really good example of what is happening right now where we have a good idea of what Hitler would do. And it is complicated. A fellow named Rick Scott, who cheated the government…the taxpayers…out of at least $1.7 billion by defrauding Medicare is now leading a group against health care reform. It makes sense, right? You are a guy who personally made more than $100 million and for some reason you never went to jail. Now here comes health care reform and you are in the hospital clinic business…God knows whether you are defrauding again…but nonetheless, the government will make it tougher on you to cheat them again. So you get out in front of a tea party group in front of the Capitol and lie through your teeth about how bad health care reform is. So that’s the actual situation today. What would Hitler do?
In 1930s Germany, Hitler would have had this guy shot. Immediately. No trial. But if Hitler were here now, he might, given the fact that he did not yet have all the power…in other words until he got control of all the hospitals and health care delivery, which he eventually would do, Hitler would lie to Rick Scott and take his money and promote whatever Rick Scott was selling. He would threaten; try to intimidate a few Senators. Until the money that Rick Scott gave Hitler put him into complete power. Then he’d have Rick Scott shot. Immediately. He’d probably just put him in jail and have him shot there and say it was suicide, as he did with his good friend, Ernst Roehm.
So we have some very good information about how Hitler reacted to things. The Nazis, unlike the Bush Administration were not secretive among themselves. They kept extraordinary records for the time. If they had been Polish or Irish, we probably wouldn’t know to this day what the hell happened. The Bush-Cheney administration tried to hide all their records, did away with all Emails and so on. Several million have just been found, restored, so that should be interesting.
We know Hitler’s attitude towards labor. It is slightly more exaggerated than the Neoconservatives but strikingly similar in a maudlin way. For example, the Neoconservatives want, even now, in the recession to lower the minimum wage. That is what a lot of Neocon economists are saying. The logical extension of that is to keep lowering wages and lowering costs of goods, lowering wages again and lowering costs of goods. Eventually you will reach a point where labor works for one penny, slave wages having been passed long before that and wages less than poverty were hit by the time wages fell below the minimum wage, which is itself not a living wage.
Hitler would like this for his wealthy industrialist friends. He in fact did like it and not only allowed wages to fall but eventually provided labor from the concentration camps or actually built factories around labor camps. So he had the ultimate lowest labor costs. In 1937, he already had a much more productive labor force than we now provide, even with much of ours farmed out to China and India at fifty cents an hour. So he would be happy about the Neoconservative ideas in principle but would go much farther than they have gone thus far.
Hitler would have liked the idea that the Neoconservative Party sticks together. Hitler’s ideas were mutually exclusive. In other words, a member of the Party, like the Representative from New York in the recent election in the House of Representatives must be a Party loyalist. In Hitler’s day, you would have to be against the Jews, Catholics, and anyone who was of some suspect racial mix. Gypsies were dispatched without a second thought. In today’s Neoconservative Party, the loyalty is to having a Christian religion tied in with government, to being against homosexuals and homosexual marriage, to being against any kind of meaningful health care that would reduce profits for health insurance companies and against any kind of green or environmental action that would reduce profits for the oil industry. Of course owning guns and being anti-abortion goes without saying. You should be for privatizing Social Security and ending Medicare because it is too expensive.
So, as of Thursday, the Neocons were out supporting the tea party groups who were attacking the new health reform program. Not everyone likes everything in the health reform bill but these people were calling it everything but euthanasia. People in the know understand that the costs argument is a red herring. Over time, over ten years (and no one seems to know why the Democrats are not pushing this) health care costs will come down for everyone if the reform package is put into place. They will fall by almost half what they are now. Under the bill with a public option. So what would Hitler do on this? For sure, he would have health care for the Party members. Probably everyone else, once he had power, could go to hell. In other words, pretty much the same philosophy as the current Neoconservatives.
The guy who spoke in front of the Capitol, against health care reform was Rick Scott, the former head of Hospital Corporation of America. He is the man who headed that company and made the decisions to cheat the taxpayers. So these tea baggers were dumb enough let him stand there in front of them and not tear him limb from limb. Not only that but they stood there admiringly listening to him try to screw them out of more money! These are the dumbest people alive.
See, this is where Hitler would be standing there conflicted. Should I shoot this guy when I come to power or use him? His company had to pay the government… $1.7 billion in fines. And he is standing up there with Michelle Bachmann and John Boehner and Laura Ingraham…the three blind mice, who pander to the big health insurance companies. This would have to be too much for Hitler. He would be sweaty with anticipation of what he could do with these morons and the creepy, greedy media types.
Of course the tea party guys are no thugs. Most of these people you could knock over with a feather. A big hunk of them are simply, reality-show-watching fatties and conspiracy weirdos. Even the gun toters really don’t look menacing. Any rookie cop could disarm them in about three seconds.
But in today’s society, they may be few, but they’re out there. And they have the power of funding. They have the health insurance industry, spending about $400 million on organizing and television commercials. They have Fox News which is owned by a Right Wing despot and run by a former Right Wing head of the Republican Party putting up the money for the tea parties so that they can tape them. Hitler’s head has to be swimming with thoughts of the opportunity here.
So this character Rick Scott, who did not run off to some remote place in disgrace or in fear of his life for cheating all Americans of billions. He is welcomed by these anti-American groups who are doing their best to destroy our society. As long as we have totally ignorant Americans who will let a man like Scott rise again and now do the same thing with a chain of clinics, after being fired…though not jailed…and sent on his way by the hospital chain with a rumored $100 million dollars. Why not? He did what they must have wanted.
Hitler would have gobbled up these Tea Baggers in about 30 seconds. They would have been shouting Sig Heil at every sentence. You see, the Germans who supported Hitler were the same kind of blind ideologues as these people. The Nazi-Germans were protesting a failed government through a Nazi Party that expressed their feelings. They had their bigotries…Jews and international bankers and other countries had caused all their problems. But they could only attack their own government…until Hitler came to power.
Our Tea Party members complain about deficits and wars and lack of “freedom” and illegal aliens…all things that were started, encouraged, developed and brought to a disastrous climax in the Bush Administration. But the Neoconservatives who run the Tea Party groups have something that the rabble who attend their meetings want. They have people who are a different color that they can attack, even some from a different country. You see, the tea baggers can’t attack Bush and Cheney because….they voted for them…twice!
Let’s be honest. When you see a sign with a President…who happens to be half-black and half white…a distinguished professor of law, a Senator, a Nobel Prize winner and last but not least…your President…on a sign, dressed up as a sheik or as Hitler or as a drug dealer…called all kinds of crude names…you know you are with your people, the White Supremacist group. Man, that is Hitler’s group. In fact, there are other groups that do this sort of thing even today. They’re called American Nazis.
You could protest with other groups who want less control of our lives by big corporations and the military industrial complex and Senators on the take from big pharmaceutical and oil companies. But those groups don’t hate Mexicans or Blacks or Jews. They’re for the People, yes. But they don’t really target groups or individuals whom you can thoroughly hate.
The Neocons and the Tea Baggers are angry people. They don’t seem to know why. They can’t accept that there are 300 million Americans, of which almost half are a different color and certainly half are a different religion from whatever religion they are. These people are living in the mid-1900s and the world is living in 2009. They hate it. They want to go home to their lazy boy and watch television and only see white people of their religion in their neighborhood. They want to go home to a place that no longer exists.
