Godwin's Law and the Usefulness of the Nazis

Greenwald beats me to the punch in a piece that takes on neocons for getting pissy when their opponents pull out Godwin's Law.

The money quote is at the end of the piece, itself quoting from Nuremberg Diary by G.M. Gilbert, the American prison psychologist at Nuremberg who recounted an interview with Hermann Goering on April 18, 1946, in Goering's cell:

"Why, of course, the people don’t want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Greenwald: Anyone demanding that comparisons not be made between our own political culture and that is doing nothing less than attempting to conceal the truth of how things work.

I'd expand on this point to include the issue of torture. It's worth remembering that "Enhanced interrogation techniques," implemented by the Bush Administration and championed by neoconservative intellectuals, was a term also used by... you guessed it.

One of the things I find so fascinating about this is the propensity of neoconservative intellectuals to rely on the Nazi example to make the argument for going to war with everyone from the Taliban to Iraq to Iran. One of the core historical arguments they make is that we fail to understand armed fascism if we elect to not militarily confront said thugs. "Look at the Nazis. Look what happens when we don't confront them," they say. Then many (not all of them, but many of them) conveniently forget about the Nazis when they advocate practices, such as "enhanced interrogation," that are direct descendants of armed fascism. The cognitive dissonance is infuriating, especially because the liberal interventionist in me once saw some merit in the original argument.