Originally Written in January 2011
Edited on February 14th and 15th,
2016
Table of Contents
1.
Introduction
2.
Executive Power
3.
Military
4.
Private Military
5.
Youth Civil Service Programs
6.
Gun Control
7.
Monetary Policy
8.
Protectionism
9.
Crony Capitalism
10.
Corporate Welfare
11.
Cartels
12.
Competition, Social Darwinism, and
Bioethics
13.
Health Care
14. Smoking
and Drugs
15.
Leftism and the Unions
16.
Christianity, Islam, and Sexual Ethics
17.
Jews and the State of Israel
18.
Conclusion
19.
Afterword
Content
1.
Introduction
Current U.S. President Barack Obama
and World War II era German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, may, in fact, be more
similar than some people can imagine.
First of all, the fact that they are both charismatic
figureheads, with a knack for oratory and for delivering speeches that excite
and uplift their bases, are indisputable, so I don’t think it’s necessary to go
into that. Nor will I go into details about how both leaders campaigned under
the banner of change, and were billed and lionized as the potential saviors of
their respective countries.
Critics of Obama – such as the Tea Party protesters, and
opponents supporting political “lunatic-fringe” figures as diverse as the likes
of Ron Paul and Lyndon LaRouche – have been among the most active in comparing
Obama to Hitler. LaRouche supporters are often seen in public, holding up
posters depicting Obama with a toothbrush mustache (yes, that is what
it’s called) as well as Hitler’s characteristic floppy-bang emo hairstyle.
Although it is much more common for Tea Partiers to compare
Obama to Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, or to Communists and / or socialists in general,
rather than to Hitler, Tea Partiers can occasionally be heard calling him a
Nazi.
Former congressman Ron Paul of Texas often calls Obama’s
economic policies “corporatism”, “soft fascism”, and “watered-down economic
fascism”. Fascism is the name of the philosophy espoused by Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini, an ally of Hitler’s. Congressman Paul, in describing Obama’s
fascism, often quotes Mussolini’s description of his own philosophy: “Fascism
would more appropriately be called ‘corporatism’ because it is the merger of
state and corporate power”. I will go deeper into Hitler and Obama’s
similarities as per economic and
monetary policy later in this essay.
2.
Executive Power
Both Hitler and Obama were democratically elected, and
emphasized a strong assertion of executive power. While Hitler overtly and instantaneously suspended
his country’s constitution, and outlawed all parties except his own, Obama
appears to be suspending the U.S. Constitution slowly and subtly, building on his predecessor George W. Bush’s
attempts to gradually wither away at our civil liberties.
In his first two years as president, Obama appointed some
thirty-eight unelected “czars” to the executive branch. Also, both Obama and
Hitler ignored the advice of generals; for example, Obama's conflict with General
Stanley McChrystal, and Hitler's 1938 dismissal of sixteen senior generals.
3. Military
Each
leader expanded his country’s military. Within
three years of assuming power, Hitler sextupled the number of soldiers in the
Nazi military. As of 2011, the Obama administration was considering creating a
Europe-based force of a thousand Marines to assist Africom. In the first two
years of the Obama Administration, it stepped up U.S. military presence in – and
spending on – efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Djibouti, and Latin American
nations such as Colombia. In 201, the Obama Administration proposed significant
increases in funding for arms sales and military training programs.
4.
Private Military
To
augment the size of his army, Hitler employed the Sturmabteilung, also known as the Storm Troopers, or brown-shirts.
The brown-shirts were paramilitary forces; in other words, mercenaries, or paid
soldiers. Hitler cheaply employed three million of these soldiers, in order to
cut costs. Much of Hitler’s military technology was produced by Fritz Thyssen’s
German Steel Trust. In 1923, Thyssen and American businessman William Averell
Harriman set up the Union Banking Company in New York. From 1934 to 1943,
Prescott Bush was a director of this company, and in 1942, the U.S. federal
government cracked down on the operation after the passage of the Trading with
the Enemy Act.
President
Obama has expressed disdain for private military industries, vowing to monitor
them better and stop no-bid contracts to them, but during his 2008 campaign for
president, he stated that he would not rule out use of private military
companies. During his presidency, he has hesitated to curb their influence, and
replaced volunteer forces in Iraq with 30,000 mercenaries. This is the
“military-industrial complex”, described and denounced by President Eisenhower,
in action.
5. Youth Civil Service Programs
In
1922, Hitler announced the first Nazi Party youth group. In 1932, there were
100,000 members of the Nazi Youth, and the following year, there were 2.3
million. In 1936, membership for all youths between the ages of 10 and 18
became mandatory. By 1939 – the year in which Poland was invaded – there were 7.3
million members.
In 2006, Rahm Emanuel – who was then a
U.S. Representative from Illinois, later became Obama’s Chief of Staff, and now
serves as the Mayor of Chicago – proposed in his book The Plan: Big Ideas
for America that the U.S. enlist all Americans between the age of 18 and 25
for three months of basic training, civil defense preparation, and community
service. Emanuel said in an interview that, in his plan, citizens would “learn
what to do in the event of biochemical, nuclear, or conventional attack; how to
assist others in an evacuation; how to respond when a levee breaks or we’re hit
by a natural disaster.”
Emanuel has repeatedly claimed that this
would not constitute a draft in the vein of selective service. Well, it’s
certainly not selective service, because everybody would have to
do it! Although Emanuel quit his position as Chief of Staff to run for the Chicago
mayoral position – and, thus, is no longer part of the federal government – Emanuel
would have coupled this plan with Obama’s own plan to require
high-school students to perform fifty hours of government approved service.
6. Gun Control
Hitler
and Obama are both supporters of gun control. Hitler confiscated German
citizens’ guns, in order to prevent an armed insurrection against himself and the
Nazis. Hitler also strengthened existing regulations on Jews’ possession of
firearms.
During
his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said about people from small towns, “it’s
not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or
antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”. Obama has been given an “F” rating
by the National Rifle Association for his record on preserving gun rights.
7. Monetary Policy
The
similarities between Obama and Hitler in terms of monetary policy can be
summarized in a single word: Keynesianism. Lord John Maynard Keynes was an
influential gay British economist during World War II. In fact, some claim that
Hitler was the first practicing Keynesian leader.
A key aspect of Keynesianism is that
government takes an interventionist role in the market and in the adjustment of
interest and credit. The government controls the issuing of currency according
to its observation of the cycles of deflation and inflation, and artificially
maintains low interest rates in lending.
Keynesian
economies also tend to fund – often through deficit spending – expensive
budgets, which include large-scale military projects, corporate protectionism,
and social welfare. Keynesian economies also undertake extensive national
public works programs, for example, Obama’s “shovel-ready” infrastructure
projects, intended to create 2.5 million jobs.
8. Protectionism
A key form that protectionist policy takes
is the tariff, which is a tax on foreign imports. Hitler imposed huge
protectionist barriers in order to make Germany self-sufficient, and he used
nationalism and racialism to incite people against foreigners, and to support
the measures. President Obama and Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro
support New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s plan to impose higher tariffs against
China.
For
as long as I – and I’m sure, many young people – can remember, there has been a
bias in favor of American goods, and against foreign-made goods, in American
culture. Many people – most notably George W. Bush and Lou Dobbs – argue for a
resurgence in American self-sufficiency and competitiveness, and against
outsourcing of American jobs to places like India and Mexico. Many are apt to
characterize people who hold these views as racist, or as nationalists.
9. Crony Capitalism
In
the summer of 2010, in speaking about the B.P. oil company, Ron Paul said, “What
I don’t like is big business and big government being in bed together.” Now, of
course, Congressman Paul meant that in a figurative sense, but that turn of
phrase can also be shown to be literally true. Towards the end of the
Bush administration, M.M.S. (the U.S. Minerals Management Services; the
organization whose responsibility it is to monitor and regulate energy
companies) was discovered to be having cocaine and marijuana-fueled sex orgies,
with energy industry executives, in a Colorado regional office (not that
there’s anything wrong with that).
In an article published in the American Free Press, Ron Paul wrote that “Socialism is a system where the government
directly owns and manages businesses. Corporatism is a system where
businesses are nominally in private hands, but are, in fact,
controlled by the government. In a corporatist state, government officials
often act in collusion with their favored business interests to design policies
that give those interests a monopoly position, to the detriment of both
competitors and consumers”.
In other words, under corporatism (or
fascism), representatives of big business, lobby the government, to help
protect their industries’ abilities to monopolize – i.e., corner – the market.
This is also known as crony capitalism, or protectionism, which is a strain of
mercantilism. Mercantilism is a relic of the economic thought of post-Renaissance
feudalistic states. In a way, it is a forbearer of capitalism.
In a representative democracy,
protectionism appears as – and is,
for all intents and purposes – socialistic. I have described the kinds of
liberal democracy which support tariffs, and protecting domestic labor from
competition by foreigners, as “labor protectionism”. Anarchist theorist Stefan
Molyneux has shown that when lobbyists get their way – making unenforceable,
backroom deals – the system is, in effect, anarchistic, or chaotic.
10. Corporate Welfare
In the several months before Obama took
office – with many of the same financial officers he later appointed, already
being in power – the U.S. government nationalized banks: Bank of America,
Citigroup, and A.I.G. three different times. After Obama took office, A.I.G.’s bailout
was restructured again.
Rather
than nationalizing Germany’s banks,
Hitler employed Nazis in them, and sent S.S. officers around to make sure they
were doing as Hitler ordered. Hitler also nationalized bond insurers, as well
as airlines. Some American airlines have been nationalized since the Bush
administration ended.
Both
Obama and Hitler used government to direct asset management of automobile
companies: Obama with General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford, but also to the
United Auto Workers’ union; and Hitler with Mercedes, Daimler-Benz, B.M.W.,
M.A.N., and Auto Union. Additionally, under Hitler, Volkswagen was created as a
nationalized enterprise.
What
happened with the banking and auto industries fits in with Ron Paul’s
description of corporatism, which is that their assets are nominally held in
private hands, but directed and insured by the federal government.
11. Cartels
Both Obama and Hitler fixed wages. Obama
supports the minimum wage, and recently supported an increase in the minimum
wage for federal government employees to $10.50 per hour. Late in his administration, Hitler sought to freeze and
stabilize wages.
Additionally, both leaders fixed prices.
Hitler’s price fixing was widespread, while Obama’s price fixing has, so far,
been limited to health insurance premiums (health care is addressed in greater
detail later in the essay), and he has expressed a desire to fix energy prices
and destroy the fossil fuel industry.
12. Competition, Social Darwinism,
and Bioethics
Hitler’s views on nature were influenced
by zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whom – although he viewed human beings as a part of
nature, that must live in harmony
with it in order to survive – was a proponent of social Darwinism. Hitler
extrapolated social Darwinism to his racial theory, wherein Aryans were
believed to be inherently superior to all other human races. However, Hitler also adopted social Darwinism as an idea
that justified environmentalism,
otherwise known as environmental conservationism.
Obama
is also an environmental conservationist, promoting green initiatives, such as
a renewal of alternative energy sources, including wind and solar energy. Obama
has said that he doesn’t fully support the practice of affirmative action, but
rather a merit-based atmosphere of competitive labor. Competition in any and
all spheres is promoted and justifiable under social Darwinism.
Hitler and several of his colleagues, such
as Joseph Goebbels, have been described as vegetarians, although Hitler’s
personal vegetarianism is not exactly correct (he didn’t eat meat only
on some days). Hitler believed in
animal rights, and banned animal vivisection, although Dr. Mengele was, of
course, not beyond practicing vivisection on human beings, in addition to animals.
During
his presidential campaign, Obama claimed he was a vegan. However, in 2010, President
Obama appointed Kansas University Vice Chancellor Barbara Atkins, who bears
ultimate responsibility for the primate vivisection that occurred at the
university’s Medical Center, to a federal bioethics panel.
13. Health Care
German doctor Josef Mengele was known as
“Dr. Death” for the hideous racist experiments he conducted during the Nazi regime.
Earlier, I mentioned Obama’s appointment of some thirty-eight “czars” to the
executive branch. One of these czars is the so-called “Health Czar”, former
Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel, a doctor and medical
ethicist. Some have nicknamed Ezekiel Emanuel the “death czar.”
Emanuel has been instrumental in the
promotion of Obamacare, which Republican opponents – such as Minnesota
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, and former Alaska Governor and 2008
Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who has a son with Down’s Syndrome –
argue implements a system of rationed health care, and creates what many have
called, “death panels”, which are councils that make lists of expensive
procedures, which they would encourage doctors to urge elderly patients to
voluntarily refuse, leading to their deaths.
Both Ezekiel Emanuel and Josef Mengele are
supporters of euthanasia, or mercy-killing. Although the practice challenges
the notion enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath of “first do no harm”, this is not
such an objectionable practice (at least, in my opinion), being that proponents
such as the other famous “Doctor Death”, Jack Kevorkian, argue, it
relieves the suffering of terminally-ill patients.
However, Hitler and Mengele favored
euthanasia for people who were mentally and physically disabled, or as they called
it, “hereditarily ill.” Hitler, Mengele, and Joseph Goebbels issued propaganda
emphasizing the importance of hard work, and emphasizing that people lacking
the ability to do physical labor are a drain on society. In 1939, 100,000 of
these “hereditarily ill” people were murdered by Nazi doctors.
14. Smoking and Drugs
Hitler hated smoking. He viewed it as
decadent, and as a menace to public health. In 1940, he ordered tobacco to be
rationed among his army in a way that would dissuade soldiers from smoking.
President Obama was a life-long cigarette smoker, but has spent the last
several years trying to quit. He currently presides over a country,
three-fourths of whose states have instituted some level of smoking ban in bars
and / or restaurants. The city of Philadelphia, for example, instituted a ban
on smoking outdoors, in the early years of the Obama Administration.
Many
in Hitler’s army would drink often, and take methamphetamines, also known as “speed”.
Amphetamines gave the Nazi army the energy and attention they needed to march
across Europe quickly and effectively. The U.S. military refers to amphetamines
as “go pills”, and has been using amphetamines as early as the Vietnam War.
Today’s military culture in the U.S. is
rife with alcohol use, and – although current reports of widespread amphetamine
use in the military are not easy to find outside of the U.S. Air Force,
American medical culture over-diagnoses attention deficit and hyperactivity
disorder (A.D.H.D.) in children, and as a result, over 2.5 million American
children have been prescribed amphetamine-containing medications for the
disorder.
Another drug worth mentioning is fluoride.
Sodium fluoride (NaFl) is a chemical which is a neurotoxin at high enough doses. Hitler fluoridated the water
supply in his labor and concentration camps, in order to render his subjects
weak, confused, subservient, and sterile. Many local governments across the
U.S. fluoridate their drinking water supplies. The government has now admitted
that fluoride actually damages people’s teeth more than it contributes to
dental hygiene. Fluoride is also an active ingredient in anti-depressants such
as Prozac. Depression, like attention deficit disorder (A.D.D.), is an
over-diagnosed affliction, but unlike A.D.D. and A.D.H.D., anti-depressant
prescriptions in the U.S. number 27 million. Anti-depressant medications
are a major factor in fueling the American workaholic and consumerist
lifestyle.
15. Leftism and the Unions
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Spanish
dictator Francisco Franco – as well as President Obama – all courted, and won,
the support of the labor and trade unions, but all eventually sold out to big business and industrial interests.
In fact, Mussolini stole the thunder and popularity of Italian communist Mario
Berlinguer, and later imprisoned him (note: Berlinguer’s second cousin,
Francesco Cossiga, later became Italy’s Prime Minister, and, before his death in
August 2010, alleged that American and Israeli intelligence agencies were
complicit in 9/11).
In the lead-up to Hitler’s rise to power,
he partnered with, and made promises to, German labor unions. However, he ended
up banning trade unions, ending collective bargaining, taking away the right to
strike, the right to quit, and even the right to earn a greater wage for
increased productivity. The Nazis also rounded up, and killed, labor union
organizers and leaders.
Before
a 1934 purge, there was a left-wing propaganda arm of the Nazi Party, which was
led by Gregor and Otto Strasser. The Strassers made speeches supporting a
movement which would most appropriately be called “national syndicalism” or “social
nationalism”; i.e., the merger of the
nation-state with labor and trade unions. Additionally, of course, Hitler
temporarily partnered with Stalin, to help bring about the carving-up of Poland
between Germany and the Soviet Union, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty, and
the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1941.
During his presidential campaign, Barack
Obama said, “I believe in unions”, and spoke of “giving unions more leverage.”
He also supported the deceptively-titled Employee Free Choice Act. On the
campaign trail, Obama appeared with Bruce Springsteen, whom, with the E Street
Band, had recently recorded an album entitled We Shall Overcome: The Seeger
Sessions, which featured a folk-rock rendition of the Negro work song, “Pay
Me My Money Down.”
However,
the Obama administration’s support of pro-union legislation has largely served
to enrich union bureaucracies, and to primarily benefit the leaders of
unions, rather than their individual members. Furthermore, the Obama Administration’s
concessions to big business and banks, has effectively rendered all pro-union
measures pointless in the grand scheme of things.
16. Christianity, Islam, and Sexual
Ethics
Both Obama and Hitler have been critical
of Christianity, and tolerant of Islam. Obama has criticized people in small
towns clinging to religion, he has publicly mocked biblical laws, and he has reached
out to the Islamic world. Hitler outlawed the publication of bibles, embraced paganism,
and tolerated Islam. However, the Catholic Church harbored Nazi war criminals,
and encouraged Catholics to pray for Hitler and his regime.
On social issues, President Obama is
staunchly pro-choice (even supporting partial-birth abortion), and one of
Hitler’s first acts after taking office was to legalize abortion. Their stances
on the issue of gay marriage are different. However, President Obama supports
legalizing homosexual civil unions, and now gay marriage (although he
previously opposed it); Hitler, on the other hand, didn’t support gay anything: marriage, being alive, et cetera.
17. Jews and the State of Israel
Hitler
supported Jewish emigration to Palestine, the current location of the Zionist
State of Israel. To state the obvious, Hitler liked the idea of Jews going anywhere, as long as they were leaving
Germany. Therefore, he was willing to negotiate
with Zionists, because they shared the goal of getting Jews out of Germany.
In fact, the original so-called
“Final Solution” to the Jewish question was not
to exterminate the Jews, but to build
ostensibly autonomous Jewish communities in the African island nation of
Madagascar. According to the Nazis’ plan, those colonies would have been
supervised by the S.S. (Storm Troopers) in order to ensure the Jews’ eventual
death by disease and famine.
In
addition to supporting this intentionally failed Jewish Malagasy state, Hitler
supported a Jewish homeland in the land of Palestine, in a Transjordan under
British control. It wasn’t until after
Hitler’s death that the idea of actually turning Israel into a democratic state,
in the modern sense, was floated around as a realistic proposal, so it is
unknown whether he would have supported the Jewish state as it is today.
There
is also a theory out there, that Hitler’s father was an illegitimate child of a
member of the infamous, Jewish, Rothschild banking family of Europe. The
Rothschilds are descended from the Khazarian people of southern Russia, whom
were not genetically related to the Judean or Samarian people, but converted to
Judaism because it was strategic, in terms of military strategy, economics, and
geo-politics.
Some
claim that the Khazars are a “thirteenth tribe” of Judaism, which has used the
Jewish holy book the Talmud – as well as scriptural interpretation in general –
as a means to subvert the oral tradition of Judaism (whose adherents include
the ultra-Orthodox fringe group Neturei
Karta, whom have been ostracized by even other ultra-Orthodox Jews, for criticizing the religious
justification for the existence of the state of Israel). If Hitler was of
Rothschild lineage, then that would be a good explanation for why Orthodox
rabbis were among those first targeted in anti-Jewish Nazi pogroms.
As
many as 150,000 German Jews supported Hitler. The Nazis had the Jewish Ghetto
Police, or Jewish Police Service, which were unarmed police officers who
patrolled German ghettos. Also, there were prominent Jewish Nazis, including
Dietrich Eckhart, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg. Additionally, there was Adolf
Eichmann, who was 100% ethnically Jewish, although he did not identify himself
as such. Eichmann once said, “Had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical
Zionist.”
In
an odd bit of synchronicity, as recently as 2007, Vice President Joe Biden has
said, “If I were a Jew, I’d be a Zionist.” Obama has appointed at least 65
Zionist Jews to posts in his administration, and to federal reserve boards
around the country, and there are another 40 or so in Congress. In fact,
Obama’s appointment of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court has resulted in
the court becoming two-thirds Catholic and one-third Jewish.
As
of 2011, Jews were 350% overrepresented in the House, 500% overrepresented in
the Senate, and 1400% overrepresented on the Supreme Court. In terms of foreign
policy, all current signs point to the Obama Administration caving into Israeli
pressure on the U.S. to back off from its push for a freeze on new Israeli settlements
in peace negotiations with Palestine. Critics of Israel often compare the
Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli government to the Nazis, for the way
they have turned the West Bank into an archipelago of communities separated
from one another. The Gaza Strip is often referred to as a “concentration
camp”.
18. Conclusion
Following
the massacre in Tucson, Arizona in January 2011, many politicians and pundits
said that both sides of the political spectrum should tone down their rhetoric.
A
lot of people think it’s inappropriate for people to compare President Obama – or
anybody else, for that matter – to socialists, Communists, and to Nazis.
However, what I am about to say is something that I believe very strongly;
something I think is crucial to maintaining the freedom of speech, and to
upholding the First Amendment.
If
you take away our right to compare political figures to Hitler, then the next
Hitler is going to be able to march right into the White House without anybody
being able to say a damn thing about it.
19. Afterword (Written in February
2016)
See
Donald Trump.
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