The Splendid Failure of Occupation
Part 9: American Modified and Accepted Hitlerism: General dynamic
By B.J. Sabri
Online Journal Contributing Writer


May 14, 2004, 19:41

"The German people are not a warlike nation. It is a soldierly one, which means it does not want a war, but does not fear it. It loves peace but also loves its honor and freedom."�Adolf Hitler, [1]

�Yet, though America can become martial, she has never been militarist. This distinction is great one, and it is hoped that a knowledge of American military history may help us to maintain it.��Robert Leckie, American military historian. [2]

�In the American folklore the myth of �the most peace-loving nation in the world� still persists. Bu the fact is that American history is not only concurrent with the annals of American arms, but is as firmly woven into it as a strand of hemp in a rope��Robert Leckie, American military historian [3]

As per my task to illustrate the failure of U.S. enterprise to colonialize Iraq, I systematically committed my resources to delineate the entire fabric of that enterprise and to link it, dialectically and historically, to the essence of what has become a sadistic-fascist empire.

Arriving to define the ideological, philosophical and ethical aspects of U.S. military interventionism around the world in Hitlerian terms, and then dwelling, extensively, on those aspects is not indulgence in valid accusations against the empire. It is rather an overdue move to shred to pieces its moral hypocrisy, debunk the mythology of American civilizational superiority versus the world, and ultimately to create an analytical method aimed at extracting realties muddied by overlapping ideologies, propaganda, concealment, and indifference.

To start with, the American-made Iraqi bloodbath and the coveted colonization of Arab lands by a coalition of biblical zealots and diehard Zionists is not an exclusive subject pertaining to Iraq only. Indeed, what U.S. hyper-imperialists have been doing to Iraq and Iraqis is not an isolated episode in U.S. history, regardless of who was in the forefront. The plight of Native Nations during their colonialist conquest and that of the Vietnamese during war on their country is but a sample testimony to the obdurate violent mentality and racism that guided U.S. imperialistic expansions. However, the recent devastation and carnage in the �Guernica� of Iraq, Falluja, the continuing daily murder of Iraqis, the raping of Iraqi women (Iraqi sources speak of over 4,000 rape cases by U.S. soldiers that the media never mention, and Iraqis hesitate to report because of the implications socially), and the pornographic abuse of Iraqis made prisoners by invaders claiming sublime American �values,� are not but minute chapters in the basic truth of U.S. imperialism. Imperialism, any imperialism, cannot impose its order without violence, be it fascist, Hitlerian, Communist, Sharonist, capitalistic, deranged, religious, or just sick to the bones.

Consequently, although I dedicated five parts of this series to discuss the American brand of international violence, and despite the fact that I addressed a multitude of other correlated issues generated by the invasion, I came to think of this series, whose trajectory spans over 32 parts, as a gestalt [4]. My declared purpose is that we have to look at the picture of U.S. imperialism as a whole, because the details of imperialistic thinking and actions if taken separately are decidedly insufficient to cast light on its manufactured nature and finality. (This does not curtail the fact that, in my opinion, each detail in the imperialistic gestalt is still essential to the understanding of the whole.) Example: many U.S. voices now concentrate on one detail, prison torture and abuse, and call for the resignation of Rumsfeld, as a sacrificial lamb for the U.S. debacle in Iraq, but no one calls for an effective end to the occupation that caused those abuses in the first place. Accordingly, a unitary and interlocked analysis of hyper-imperialism [5] and its inner thinking is the most efficient method to comprehend it.

I am well aware that discussing U.S. foreign policy and military interventions in historical frames, and then, based on the outcome of that policy and those interventions, take a decisive step to label them as an integral part of AMAH is a serious challenge. By the same method, proclaiming that in American interventionism, the passage from controlling mentality to aggressive ideology and from aggressive ideology to aggressive practice has enshrined AMAH as an ordinary or even natural national American attitude, is even more challenging, if not perilous in the U.S. of Bush, Ashcroft, and Ridge.

Consequently, to expand our arguments on Hitlerism as it applies to ideological military interventionism and wars, I have to ask a rhetorical question first: is the negation of an affirmation, a confirmation of the subject of negation? In addition, would that confirmation include context, generalities, and principle?

Semantics aside, the quotes I provided at the heading of this article lead to confirm that a negation or denial is indeed a confirmation. While Hitler confirmed the obvious by circumlocution as in �A warlike . . . ,� Leckie who is not Hitlerian, did the same thing in the first quote, by an astute use of syntax when he wrote, �Can become . . . ,� and by proposing �martial,� a synonym for �warlike� as used by Hitler, instead of the natural word to use: �militarist.� Then he, the historian of American wars, categorically denied that the U.S. is militarist, as in �Has never been . . . ,� and ended by shrouding his thought in mystery when he added, �A knowledge . . . may help us maintain it.� Did he mean that the U.S. to remain warlike (martial) but not militarist, which in the U.S. example is the same? In the second quote, he succumbed to partial intellectual honesty, abandoned his linguistic contortion, and stated the obvious, though not entirely as he substituted the word �wars� with �arms.� Thought elaboration, therefore, depends on awareness of facts. How do we present these facts in the end, is another matter.

Consequently, let me pose a question on awareness in a philosophical context: do humans realize they are conscious beings? Answer: because self-awareness and the ontological meaning of being is a product of human endeavor and conventions, it follows that the question I posed, must have a distinguished answer: In humans, the story of realization is, to say the least, explosive, and it encompasses countless different routes that eventually place figurative, practical, and philosophical meanings on existence.

The unusual detour I took to pursue my elaboration of �American Modified and Accepted Hitlerism� (AMAH) is a model upon which we can fashion the following question. Is the United States aware that the philosophy, ideology, and practical aspects that guided its existence, expansion, military interventions, and wars are similar to, and are rooted in similar ideologies of violence that we can call by many disparate names including Shermanism, Fascism, Stalinism, Hitlerism, Saddamism, Sharonism, Jacksonism, Golda Meirism, Disraeli-ism, Pol Potism, Putin-ism, Bushism, and many other violent isms? The answer is both, a categorical yes on pyramidal levels (power elites), and a distinct yes and no on basilar levels (society), and that is depending on the multiple layers of dichotomy in social functions, and intellectual categorization of purpose that form the basic structure of awareness and direct knowledge of an entire nation.

On the Side of a Categorical Yes in Awareness

The entire ruling class including political, economic, ideological, accessory forces and subaltern intelligentsia are well aware of the essential and unmitigated brand of American Hitlerism throughout history. Indeed, without Hitlerism or extreme violence, the U.S. could not have come into existence and could not have become what it is now. The inclusion of all these denominations in this pattern is unavoidable. In over 200 years of the American Empire as a political state, no individuals with different views on the American system and its imperialistic outlook have ever managed to come to the top of power: the presidency.

Moreover, and by reading U.S. political history, not one single politician had ever run for the presidency or for the Senate on a platform aiming at introducing changes to the violent nature of American imperialism and its implications for the U.S. and the world. This is primarily because all social forces in the American society are entangled passively or actively, directly or indirectly, and willingly or unwillingly with the power base and its agenda. We could speculate that, to a certain extent, the American people may even enjoy the notion of a universal empire be it fascist, Hitlerian, democratic, autocratic, or whatever, and because the system will never allow divergent views to emerge inside its imperialistic politburo. We can see how the system perpetuates itself by noting that all those who run for the presidency were/are either senators, state governors or military officers, i.e., all specialized insiders of the system and guardians of its continuity. This means the system acts with rigid safety mechanisms that impede outsiders to venture inside the den of imperialists.

There are, however, a few examples of committed high profile politicians who tried to challenge the system, but never succeeded at reforming it. For example, William Jennings Bryan challenged U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, James William Fulbright a genuine American democrat challenged the Johnson military campaign in Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and opposed U.S. military interventionism; so did Eugene McCarthy, and George McGovern who opposed the Vietnam War; but they failed.

From all the above, and in relation to the ideology of violence as a tool of achievement in interventions and conquest, one may conclude that American ruling classes are practicing and are active at preserving Hitlerism as an understated or undeclared ideology, and as a means for unlimited imperialistic expansion under the banner of uncontested military power. Conclusively, it is the awareness of this power that made Hitlerism by other names, an attractive option for establishing continuous dominance, first on a continental level and then on the world.

While the system thrives on its dominance inside the American society, contradictory and supportive voices of imperialism come from different quarters. On the amusing yet contradictory side, is the example of former Vice President Al Gore. When Al Gore was in power, he implacably seeded and nurtured the totalitarian nature of hyper-imperialism internationally by his wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and his continuous war and sanctions on Iraq during almost the entire 1990s, but once he was out of power, he turned against it denouncing the slipping of America into totalitarianism. He seemed indifferent to the fact that totalitarian attitudes in American life are not born overnight, but are the result of incessant stratifications; and most importantly, he treated the emergence of totalitarianism as if there were no relation between the promotion of violence abroad and repression of dissension inside the U.S.

On the supportive side of imperium, we can find author and university professor Fouad Adjami, a virulent anti-Arab Lebanese-American and a darling of Zionist circles in Washington. Adjami, being foreign born, clamors to appear more American than all Americans combined, and that he is the last sentinel of American destiny. In a column that he wrote for Newsweek in 1998, Adjami made it known that, he was mad because America let him down; he inveighed with brazen Zionist zeal against the hesitation of the Clinton administration to attack Iraq consequent to an arms inspection crisis. Adjami indignantly exclaimed, �We have lost our lust for empire.� [Italics added].

On the Side of a Distinct No and Yes in Awareness

The situation of the American people is more complex and requires some differentiation. The American society being: (1) multi-ethnic but with the Anglo-Saxon and European stocks in dominant roles, (2) predominantly Anglo-Americanized as a culture, (3) being multi-religious, and (4) of multiple cultural backgrounds and economic classes, is ideologically diverse and porous, but with Americanism and Americanization acting as catalysts. On strictly defined national levels, it is absurd that any one can describe the U.S. as a monolithic nation. In fact, the U.S. is actually many separate nations or groups, each of which is living in its own individual sphere, and without real connections that tie these spheres together except economic functions; and that despite mass indoctrination and Americanization. What is the reason for this situation?

Answer: a dominant American segregationist mentality repels real fusion among the groups, but promotes peaceful separation. Although I shall detail this aspect in a coming parts of this series, it suffices to say now that a society such as the American one cannot but have the most disparate and perplexing opinions on America�s foreign policy, wars, and interventions; opinions that range from the na�ve to the specialized. On their turn, specialized opinions vary according to the various levels of cultural and political grade of competency and ideological extractions. Consequently, popular awareness, acceptance, or objection to America�s brand of Hitlerism is necessarily complex and requires serious studies that go beyond the clownish opinion polls.

In abstract and as a whole, however, the U.S. is aware of its violence and its interventions, although it gives them different names and rationalizations. Moreover, because the U.S. committed all of its crimes against humanity with premeditation and pure racism, therefore those crimes were rational choices that implied awareness. I can confirm this awareness contention by addressing one single fact: a human being always knows that he or she ended the life of someone else regardless of the circumstance leading to that ending.

By the same standard, any candid observer of U.S. actions and their pertinent rationales, can display equivalent awareness of the nature and motivations that has been leading U.S. imperialism and its much more virulent and more violent successor: Zionist hyper-imperialism. Inescapably and in spite of how we name the essential nature and actions of this imperialism, the naming should be a matter of free choice that takes its thematic validity in relation to violent events experienced by world societies�I said experienced, because we have no idea what kind of future violence is waiting for humanity. Incidentally, my choice to apply Hitlerism to denominate the essence of the American �experience� in the world is neither a provocative approach, nor a forced preconception. It is a matter of reasoned selection. As I shall explain shortly, there are valid reasons that made Hitlerism the most appropriate vehicle to describe the oppressive and homicidal nature of U.S. origins and successive foreign military interventions and the trail of death it left and is leaving behind wherever it passes.

Paradoxically, Hitlerism, under certain lights, is surprisingly, more persuasive than U.S. imperialism. For example, when Hitler occupied Austria by �invitation� to implement Anschluss (unification), one would argue that his idea was natural as much as logical. Hitler, being himself an Austrian, and Austria being itself a Germanic land created by the Treaty of Versailles from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire defeated in WWI (1919), unification, even by force, could be interpreted as a national course in the guise of German unification under Bismarck. Now, compare the rationales of the German invasion of Austria to the rationales of Ronald Reagan when he invaded Grenada (to protect U.S. medical students on the island), and to the spurious rationales of George H.W. Bush when he invaded Panama.

At this point, if my contention that the United States, has been experiencing perpetual dualistic attitudes where it maintains many aspects of �democracy� inside its national borders, while it practices Hitlerism abroad, then how does AMAH manifest itself nationally? Most importantly, how did we reach such a provocative conclusion that would make some cringe for the audacity to parallel mighty America with violence and Hitlerism? Is this an exaggeration? Not really; while exaggeration is an exercise in futility, conclusions are an exercise in valid research. For example, the imperialistic racism and atrocities of the British and French Empires could easily emulate and exceed that of Hitler�s Germany, so why can we not use their examples instead of the ubiquitous and over-used Hitlerism? Hold that thought! Since, the U.S. genocidal violence against Native Nation, African slaves, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese civilians, and Iraqis exceeded that of Hitler by all standards of violence, so why do we not use the U.S. and its many violent figures as reference points and paragons. Note on slavery: the U.S. census of 1860 indicates there were 3,521,115 million slaves out of a total population of 27,489,561 million; this means, 12.5 percent of the population were slaves. [6]

Further, as I stated in part eight, Winston Churchill, by all accounts and ideological pronouncements was a perfect mirror image of Hitler. I would go even further by saying that he may have been even worse than Hitler or Heinrich Himmler. Indeed, as he was bloody, racist, fascist, imperialist, as much as Hitler, he nevertheless beats Hitler on arrogance, gelid calculation on inflicting death on colonial nations, and most importantly he beats Hitler on the treacherous side of political character. I can explain this as follows: while Hitler practically imposed himself on power, Churchill arrived to it through election, thus hiding his genocidal violence behind the trivial �civilized [sic] fa�ade of British democracy� that had colonized through barbarism over 12 million square miles of the planet. It is ironic, but when you mix Hitlerism with �democracy,� the outcome is the Anglo-American alliance for violence. Let me repeat a question I made before: �why do we not use Churchillism or any other violent �ism� as a yardstick?�

First, we have to substantiate the claim against a maniacal killer and a super-inflated icon of British supremacist statecraft. Let us compare: (1) the racism of Churchill as when he talks about Mahatma Gandhi, versus that of Hitler as when he talks about black Africans; and (2) how both political leaders theorized on violence.

Comparing Racism

Churchill: �[I]t is alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace . . . to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.� [7] [Italics added]

Hitler: �A further example may show how boundlessly today's mankind sins in this direction. From time to time, it is demonstrated to the German petty bourgeois in illustrated periodicals that for the first time here or there a Negro has become a lawyer, teacher, even clergyman, or even a leading opera tenor or something of that kind. [8]

Comparing Predilection for Genocidal Violence

Churchill proposed using poisonous gas against Arabs and Kurds in Iraq during British colonial rule in Iraq (1920):

Churchill: �I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.� Churchill continues: �[T]he use of gas, a scientific expedient, should not be prevented �by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly.� (Author�s note: in the event, gas was used against the Iraqi rebels with excellent moral effect, though gas shells were not dropped from aircraft because of practical difficulties.)� [9]

For a brief informative article on Churchill as a master killer, please connect to the provided link. [10]

Hitler: �Kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need." [11]

Conclusively, there are several others instances where the genocidal inclinations of Hitler and his lieutenants are no worse than that of many former and present world leaders and respective lieutenants, so why did I choose Hitler and Hitlerism?

• First, there is no denial that Hitler was an epitome of violence.
• Second, it is also true that the myth that surrounded Hitler�s violence has been made cosmic by his persecution of German and European Jews that Zionism exploited to perpetuate its occupation of Palestine, magnified to obtain sympathy, and gave it mythological dimension to consolidate control and to blackmail as manifested by the word Holocaust and the monopoly of its use.
• Third, had Hitler not killed so many innocent Jews with such a criminal intent aided by an ideology of racism, the war that he, Britain, and France caused to the world would have remained just that: war between rival European powers. Most importantly, Hitler would have ended just as a defeated leader.
• Fourth, because the U.S., the West and Zionists always keep referring to world leaders and dictators they do not like as Hitler, then necessarily, Hitler and Hitlerism is the unavoidable yardstick that we must use to compare ideology, actions, and ultimate results. Any other yardstick will not do.
• Fifth, since the U.S. and Zionists called Saddam Hussein, �Hitler� because he invaded Kuwait, and since we believe that Menachem Begin, George H. Bush, or George W. Bush have committed atrocities similar to that of Saddam or Hitler himself, shall we then refer to those leaders as being Stalinist, Churchillist, or Shermanist? Indeed, while Stalin, Churchill, and Sherman had committed atrocities beyond description, the problem is that choosing one of their names and adding the suffix, �ism� to indicate violence is yet to establish itself on a universal level.
• Sixth, the West enjoys attributing violence only to Stalin and Hitler, and other world leaders but gingerly overlook the crimes of their own Stalins and Hitlers (Jackson, McKinley, Truman, Rhodes, Churchill, and others), although their crimes were equivalent in nature to those of Hitler despite historical differences. Because the legacies of Churchill and Truman are the product of careful ideological and imperialistic packaging, the West considers them the personification of �courage and resilience.�
• Seventh, although Truman incinerated hundreds of thousands of people with a premeditated nuclear holocaust, using a novel word such as Trumanism to indicate violence could be confusing to some.
• Eighth, consequent to this packaging, the rest of the world is either deliberately ignorant of the whole issue of violence for safety purposes, or goes along with the dominate culture of deception and persuasion for convenience, or it is just indifferent. (When I was a young middle school student in Iraq, our history teacher asked us, �Who was the greatest figure in recent British history?� All of us students remained silent looking at his face. Annoyed with our adolescent ignorance, the teacher then thundered: �Winston Churchill!� Thus, an ignorant (because of indoctrination) teacher taking his sources from books of history written by Britain for Iraqi schools elevated the killer of his fellow citizens to a hero. In retrospect, he himself [the teacher of history] never knew his own national history!)
• Ninth, consequently, if the West considers Hitler the par excellence standard for violence, then we feel it is necessary that we adapt ourselves to that same standard by which we measure violence.

Having gone thus far in debating the essence of Hitlerian violence, we now have enough material to discuss my paradigm of �American Modified and Accepted Hitlerism� in the wider context of propagation and consolidation of imperialistic violence of the United states throughout its history and up its invasion of Iraq.

Notes:

[1] http://www.military-quotes.com/Hitler.htm

[2] Robert Leckie, �The Wars of America,� 1981, Preface, p: xii

[3] Robert Leckie, �The Wars of America,� 1981, p: 13

[4] Gestalt: the Gestalt theory in the German school of psychology maintains that a phenomenon or a subject must be studied and treated as whole rather than on componential basis.

[5] http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=46649

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

[7] http://www.freechurch.org/robbo/robbocc.htm

[8] http://www.christianseparatist.org/briefs/sb3.13.html

[9] Geoff Simons, �Iraq from Sumer to Saddam,� 1995, p: 179

[10] http://www.rense.com/genera147/thil.htm

[11] http://www.newberry.k12.sc.us/mchs/holocaustquotes.html

Next, Part 10: American Modified and Accepted Hitlerism: Discussion