I'm no expert on WWII - but I learned a lot about what happened in Germany - and Europe - back in those days. I always wondered how the wonderful German people - so honest, decent, hard-working, friendly, and generous - could ever allow such a thing to happen. (There were camps near my family's home - they still talk about them only in hushed conspiratorial whispers.) I asked a lot of questions - we were only a few kilometers from the German border - and no one ever denied me. My relatives had obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the war - they still haven't forgotten - I don't think anyone can forget such a horrible nightmare. Among the questions I asked:

Why didn't you do anything about the people in the camps?

Everyone was terrified. People 'disappeared' into those camps. Sometimes the Nazis came and lined everyone up, walking behind them - even school children - with a cocked pistol. You never knew when they would just shoot someone in the back of the head. Everyone was terrified. Everyone was disarmed - guns were registered, so all the Nazis had to do was go from house to house and demand the guns.

Didn't you see what was happening?

We saw. There was nothing we could do. Our military had no modern weapons. The Nazis had technology and resources - they just invaded and took over - we were overwhelmed by their air power. They had spies everywhere - people spying on each other, just to have an 'ace in the hole' in case they were accused - and anyone who had a grudge against you could accuse you of something - just an accusation meant you'd disappear. Nobody dared ask where you had gone - anyone who returned was considered suspicious - what had they said, and who did they implicate? It was a climate of fear - there's nothing anyone can do when the government uses fear and imprisonment to intimidate people. The government was above the law - even in Germany, it became 'every man for himself'. Advancement was possible by exposing 'traitors' - anyone who questioned the government. It didn't matter if the people you accused were guilty or not - just the accusation was enough.

Did anyone know what was going on?

We all knew. We imagined the worst because the Nazis made 'examples' of a few people in every town and village. Public torture and execution. The most unspeakable atrocities were committed in full view of everyone. If this is what happened in public, can you imagine what might be going on in the camps? Nobody wanted to know.

Why didn't the German people stop the Nazis?

Life was better, at first, under the Nazis. The war machine invigorated the economy - men had jobs again, and enough money to take care of their family. New building projects were everywhere. The shops were full again - and people could afford good food, culture, and luxuries. Women could stay home in comfort. Crime was reduced. Health care improved. It was a rosy scenario - Hitler brought order and prosperity. His policies won widespread approval because life was better for most Germans, after the misery of reparations and inflation. The people liked the idea of removing the worst elements of society - the gypsies, the homosexuals, the petty criminals - it was easy to elicit support for prosecuting the corrupt 'evil'people poisoning society. Every family was proud of their hometown heroes - the sharply-dressed soldiers they contributed to his program - they were, after all,defending the Fatherland. Continuing a proud tradition that had been defeated and shamed after WWI, the soldiers gave the feeling of power and success to the proud families that showered them with praise and support. Their early victories were reason to celebrate - in spite of the fact that they faced poorly armed inferior forces - further proof that what they were doing was right, and the best thing for the country. The news was full of stories about their bravery and accomplishments against a vile enemy. They were 'liberating' these countries from their corrupt governments.

These are some of the answers I gleaned over the years. As a child, I was fascinated with the Nazis. I thought the German soldiers were really something - that's how strong an impression they made, even after the war. After all, they weren't the ones committing war crimes - they were the pride of their families and communities. It was just the SS and Gestapo that were 'bad'. Now I know better -but that pride in the military was a strong factor for many years, only adding to the mystique of military power - after all, my father had been a soldier too, but in the American army. It took a while to figure out the truth.

Every time I've gone back to Europe, someone has taken me to the 'gardens of stone' - the Allied cemeteries that dot the countryside. With great sadness, my relatives would stand in abject misery, remembering the nightmare, and asking 'Why?'. Maybe that's why they wouldn't support the US invasion of Iraq. They knew war. They knew occupation. And they knew resistance. I saw the building where British flyers hid on their way back to England - smuggled out by brave families that risked the lives of everyone to help the Allies. As a child, I had played in a basement, where the cow lived under the house, as is common there. The same place those flyers hid.

So why, now, when I hear GWB's speeches, do I think of Hitler? Why have I drawn a parallel between the Nazis and the present administration? Just one small reason -the phrase 'Never forget'. Never let this happen again. It is better to question our government - because it really can happen here - than to ignore the possibility.

So far, I've seen nothing to eliminate the possibility that Bush is on the same course as Hitler. And I've seen far too many analogies to dismiss the possibility. The propaganda. The lies. The rhetoric. The nationalism. The flag waving. The pretext of 'preventive war'. The flaunting of international law and international standards of justice. The disappearances of 'undesirable' aliens. The threats against protesters. The invasion of a non-threatening sovereign nation. The occupation of a hostile country. The promises of prosperity and security. The spying on ordinary citizens. The incitement to spy on one's neighbors - and report them to the government. The arrogant triumphant pride in military conquest. The honoring of soldiers. The tributes to 'fallen warriors. The diversion of money to the military. The demonization of government appointed 'enemies'. The establishment of 'Homeland Security'. The dehumanization of 'foreigners'. The total lack of interest in the victims of government policy. The incarceration of the poor and mentally ill. The growing prosperity from military ventures. The illusion of 'goodness' and primacy. The new einsatzgrupen forces. Assassination teams. Closed extralegal internment camps. The militarization of domestic police. Media blackout of non-approved issues. Blacklisting of protesters - including the no-fly lists and photographing dissenters at rallies.

There isn't much doubt in my mind - anyone who compares the history of Hitler's rise to power and the progression of recent events in the US cannot avoid the parallels. It's incontrovertible. Is Bush another Hitler? Maybe not, but with each incriminating event, the parallel grows -it certainly cannot be dismissed. There's too much evidence already. Just as Hitler used American tactics to plan and execute his reign, it looks as if Karl Rove is reading Hitler's playbook to plan world domination - and that is the stated intent of both. From the Reichstag fire to the landing at Nuremberg to the motto of "Gott Mit Uns" to the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq to the insistence that peace was the ultimate goal, the line is unbroken and unwavering.

I'm afraid now, that what may still come to pass is a reign far more savage and barbaric than that of the Nazis. Already, appeasement has been fruitless - it only encourages the brazen to escalate their arrogance and braggadocio. Americans support Bush - by a generous majority - and mass media sings his praises while indicting his detractors - or silencing their opinions completely. The American people seem to care only about the domestic economic situation - and even in that, they are in complete denial. They don't want to hear about Iraq, and Afghanistan is already forgotten. Even the Democratic opposition supports the occupation of Iraq. Everyone seems to agree that Saddam Hussein deserves to be executed -with or without a trial. 'Visitors' are fingerprinted. Guilty until proven innocent. Snipers are on New York City rooftops. When do the Stryker teams start appearing on American streets? They're perfectly suited for 'Homeland Security' - and they've had a trial run in Iraq. The Constitution has been suspended - until further notice. Dick Cheney just mentioned it may be for decades - even a generation, as Rice asserts as well. Is this the start of the 1000 year reign of this new collection of thugs? So it would seem.

I can only hope that in the coming year there will be some sign - some hint - that we are not becoming that which we abhor. The Theory of the Grotesque fares all too well these days. It may not be Nazi Germany - it might be a lot worse.

SL | Wisconsin

Both sought friendly audiences, confident they would not be challenged. Rumsfeld, most recently, spoke before the American Legion (interesting, isn't it, how the Legion and the VFW have been treated to so many key public manipulations in the past few years) and Cheney at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska, famous as the home of the Strategic Air Command and today the center of the United States Strategic Command.

Cheney's line, which he has used before also, was that today's jihadists are "not an enemy that can be ignored, or negotiated with, or appeased." Cheney speaks of the enemy as a "totalitarian empire," Rummy refers to it as "the rising threat of a new type of fascism."

At least Rumsfeld acknowledges his resort to historical analogy, recounting his little portion of the Munich story and adding that "once again, we face similar challenges." His history is directly tied to Munich, where Britain and France negotiated with Adolf Hitler a "settlement" that skewered Czechoslovakia but succeeded only in gaining the Allies a few months before Hitler invaded Poland, igniting global conflict.

The Bushies clearly intend to evoke an atmosphere of shattering events, but their history is fractured and misleading, and their use of this analogy is a throwback to the methods that led America into Vietnam, among the nation's greatest errors of the last century. In invoking Munich, Secretary Rumsfeld claims that the Western approach was based upon "a sentiment that took root that contended that if only the growing threats . . . could be accommodated, then the carnage . . . could be avoided." He further presents this as "cynicism and moral confusion" and "a strange innocence" about the world.

None of this is true. There was no mass political movement demanding appeasement of Germany. Rather there was a specific policy choice-made primarily by Sir Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister of the time-to mollify Hitler and gain time for rearmament. In fact, the French wanted to stand on their alliance with the Czechs and fight Hitler, but were persuaded to back down. The British might even have been right within a certain narrow framework: For years they had restricted defense spending and were just starting to correct that, while Hitler's promises-both to his military and his Italian allies-envisioned no war before 1942, which could have enabled an allied military buildup to bear fruit. The widely accepted charge that the Allies were wrong to "appease" Hitler stemmed in part from Neville Chamberlain's extravagant declaration that Munich had brought "peace for our time"-when only a short time later World War II broke out.

That was the lesson of Munich, at least until Vietnam. There the Munich analogy was used repeatedly to justify intervention and escalation. Here is President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954, writing to Sir Winston Churchill: "We failed to halt . . . Hitler by not acting in unity and in time . . . the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril." Eisenhower wanted support to jump into the Vietnam War at the time of Dien Bien Phu. Ironically, Churchill, whom Rummy today makes the hero of his Munich triptych, turned Ike down.

In February 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson invoked Munich in his reasoning for responding to a terrorist incident in the Central Highlands by beginning the bombing of North Vietnam. That summer, when LBJ sent U.S. armies to fight in Vietnam, he invoked Munich again. As Johnson's secretary of state, Dean Rusk repeatedly mentioned the dangers of appeasement. It was the effort to avoid another Munich that led to years of stark tragedy and desperate peril in Vietnam.

The correct lesson to be drawn from Munich today is that when presidents and their administrations raise its specter, it is a sure sign they want to pursue extravagant policies, usually of violence, based on narrow grounds with shaky public support. Today the Munich analogy functions as a provocation, a red flag before a bull. It is dangerous because it claims that the only solution to any situation is to fight-Cheney's point exactly. Having done nothing beyond silly propaganda-despite its own claims-to undermine the jihadists by eliminating the economic and political oppression that form the basis of jihadist appeal, the Bush people counsel that the fight is everything and that talking is "appeasement." We have seen in Lebanon lately just how misguided is that approach.

Bush administration history is like their reality-faith-based. President Bush himself, along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, characterized those who saw and spoke the truth about the run-up to the Iraq war as "revisionists"-historians who try to change the conventional wisdom about the past. Cheney not long ago declared it was "inexcusable" to repeat that truth. The same speeches that contain the Munich claims portray the Iraqi and Afghan people as "awakening to a future of hope and freedom" (Cheney) and say the U.S. strategy in Iraq "has not changed" (Rumsfeld).

The faith is that if you repeat falsehoods enough times the public will believe them. There is another historical analogy there-a real one-to Adolf Hitler's henchman, Josef Goebbels. He called it the "Big Lie." No wonder the administration's flacks need friendly audiences.

John Prados is a senior analyst with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. His forthcoming book is Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Ivan Dee Publisher).

Hitler, of course, rose to power first with the acquiescence of the German people and especially the congress. He didn't need a lot of support, just resignation. Later the European powers followed their own policies of "appeasement," as he began to force his way upon the world. Had he been opposed early, both within Germany and without, his worse instincts may have been thwarted.

It seems at least that any powerful ambitious nation left unchecked will only grow bolder and more ambitious. The likely outcome has been recorded time and time again.

Germany's European neighbors watched Hitler break international treaties to build up his military. They watched quietly as he used the Spanish Civil war as a testing ground for his new military technology. They acquiesced and even assisted his demand to annex part of Czech territory. His ally Mussolini launched a brutal invasion of Italy's former colony of Ethiopia while the world halfheartedly protested.

The world's most powerful nations didn't do anything because they were mainly concerned with maintaining international trade. And a fascist Germany was seen as good for trade and thereby world peace -- so long as Hitler restricted his conquests to less powerful and more marginalized peoples. By the time Hitler launched his invasion of Poland, it was too late for anything but world war.

More recently, the dangers of appeasing hungry dictators was invoked by the first Bush administration to justify the war on Iraq. Allowing Hussein to keep Kuwait, it was argued, would only encourage him to further adventures.

The same loud alarm about appeasement could be sounded made about the USA's acquiescence to Sharon's bloody excursions in Lebanon and Palestine. But the most relevant example of the dangers of appeasement for us in the U.S. is the activities of the current Bush administration.

The German Congress gave Hitler a temporary yet sweeping security mandate. The courts overlooked various transgressions of the Constitution. Soon after, he that owned the congress. Piece by piece his supporters saw his promises of labor and economic reform betrayed. By the time the real campaign of horror began, by the time there was serious opposition, it was too late.

Britain and France were content to appease Hitler's first moves because he wasn't in principle doing anything they weren't doing. It was when he went for a monopoly that the other governments decided he should be stopped. Until the U.S. entered the war -- two years after the European War began, when Pearl Harbor occurred -- the government suppressed information about the death camps, and U.S. corporations expanded their ventures with German industry.

That's just business. Then and now. And it is history threatening to rewrite itself.

Going along with Bush on his promise to make us safe from terrorism is only useful if he is really going to make us safe from terrorism. That's always been questionable. As time goes on and the Bush administration pursues its unilateral course, it's become quite doubtful.

How much longer can we afford to appease the intolerant hawks in the Bush administration, or to allow our congressmen and senators to continue to appease them?

While the White House plays out their fantasies of neocolonial world domination, it is the people of the U.S. and the world who pay the price.

The American public began paying vastly beginning on September 11. Bush and the National Security Industry got more powers and money after proving themselves incapable of )or uninterested in) protecting us from the predictable blowback from their previous activities.

While the Bush administration is chafing to inflict slaughter and immolation on "Saddam Hussein," it is the Iraqi people who will pay the massive price. As they have already been paying the price, for our ten-year campaign against their renegade leader, who hasn't got a scratch. The Iraqi people are caught in the middle of an ongoing feud between power-mad warlords. I'm sure I have more common interest with the ordinary Iraqi people than I have with George Bush. And it seems that George Bush has more in common with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden than he does with ordinary Americans. They've all got bunkers, for one thing.

Bush, his dad, Cheney Rumsfeld, Aschroft, Wolfowitz et al. don't feel the real repercussions of their actions. They can afford to throw away lives like chessmen for their piece of the action and of history.

And the Congress, the courts, the Democrats, the privileged, while they may disagree with particular policies, none of them protest against a pain they don't feel.

Meanwhile, a relative few corporate insiders loot the world's resources and undertake massive frauds for their own enrichment. A relative few warlords, generals and presidents unleash personal rampages in the name of peace and order.

The George W. Bush White House appears to be working toward World War III without regard for possible repercussions. It isn't there yet, and it may not be where they are gong. But each time they are allowed to go a little farther, take a little more, feel more and more powerful and unstoppable, the world gets a little more dangerous.

And it can be made safer the same way: a little bit at a time. Talking, marching, letters to the editor, letters to elected officials. Maybe Hitler couldn't have been prevented altogether, but even a little more opposition at the beginning might have had a profound effect on what came later.

The fascist ethos in Europe was a populist assault against the bankers, politicians and aristocrats who sleepwalked into the horror of the Great War in 1914. The Jews of course, were the most visible symbol of the globalist movement that was the logical endgame of the Industrial Revolution and the age of imperial conquest. Ironically, the macroeconomic horrors of the postwar decade - Weimer Germany's hyperinflation and the collapse of the Reichbank, the Versailles Treaty reparations, trade protectionism, the post Black Tuesday stock market crash and contagion in the banking dominoes of Wall Street and Europe - all reinforced the fascist claim that Jewish traitors had double - crossed Wilhelmine Germany and corrupted its society, proverbial "war profiteers". Shame, defeat, the insecurities of globalisation, besieged cultures, the search for a scapegoat, xenophobia and hatred for a liberal secular elite defined Hitler's Brownshirts and Mussolini's fascisti, as it does Pakistani or Iran politics now. After all, Hitler was elected Chacellor of the Third Reich by a German middle class enamoured by the Fuhrer's revolutionary National Socialist tirades against Bolsheviks, Jewish bankers and "degenerate" cosmopolitan intellectuals, a middle class impoverished by the most pathological inflation experience in modern times, the nightmare of Weimar.

It is all too easy for American ideologues who view the tragedy and pain of the Middle East as a "war of civilisation", the latest East-West existential crusade, to speak in terms of Hitler, appeasement and Munich. As the resurrected Taleban under Mullah Dadullah threatens NATO with an Afghan Diem Bien Phu and the American commitment deepens in Iraq's sectarian nightmare, the neocon high priest of US foreign policy in the White House, the Republican think tanks and defense are even more strident in their "Islamofascist" rhetoric. It is mission critical to dehumanise the enemy, particularly if the freedom loving Darth Vaders, the princes of darkness, are winning the war. Osama's medieval caliphate, Mullah Omar's Taleban thus morphed into our generation's Evil Empire / Nazi Germany, the existential threat to the West that evokes the bitter memories of the past East-West tragedies. So, it must have been when Xerexes's Persian Empire invaded the Greek isles, when Charles Martel faced the Spanish Arab armies outside Poitiers, when the Sultan's Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa besieged Vienna, when the Mediterranean Sea was an Ottoman lake, when Sultan Salahuddin retook Jerusalem from the Frankish knights at Hittin Cross.

As political nemesis finally overtakes George Bush and Tony Blair, they depict America's foes as "fascist", and domestic antiwar opposition as appeasement. Iran's President Ahmedinijad instigates the anti-Muslim hysteria in the Anglo-American chancelleries of power and the conservative media with his callous comments on the Holocaust and Israel's right to existence as a sovereign state. The gutter press in the Middle East hurls anti-Semitic abuse at the Jewish people unfairly making the global diaspora complicit in Israel's war crimes in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon. Ahmedinijad cannot claim to be the champion of Islamic civilisation and sponsor Holocaust cartoons without being dismissed as an anti-Semite or without wounding the faith he professes to serve. Ironically, Ahmedinijads's outburst helps Bush and Rumsfeld brand challenges to Pax Americana in the killing fields of the Sunni Triangle or Afghanistan as a replay of the 1930's. They help Bush rally an American population horrified by the rising body count in Iraq to bankroll the escalation of his unwinnable wars, help justify budget deficits that threaten to bankrupt the US.

Since so many neocon Republicans are rabid Zionists allied to Israel's hawks, Bush's Nazi / Hitler allusions evoke a visceral resonance at home. Arafat, Gaddafi and Saddam were all once "Hitlers" to the neocon - Zionist Churchills in Washington but now Osama, Dr Zawahari, Sayyid Nasrullah and the new President of Iran are our generation's Uncle Adolf wannabes.

Bush's "Islamofascist" outbursts are not new. To Reagans's hawks, the Nicaragnan Contras were "commie scum", the USSR an "evil empire," critics of Latin American - CIA death squads appeasers, Bolshies and Sandalistas.

The November elections to the US Congress, public disgust and disillusionment with the "war on terror", Israel's failure against Hezbollah, incompetence and battlefield losses in Iraq, the Iranian uranium enrichment programme and the terrorist threat from Al Qaeda all motivate Bush to whitewash his failure, to rant against "Islamofascists". Even secular Syria, Shia Hezbollah, Iraqi Sunni insurgents, Afghan warlords and Hamas nationalists are now members of the "Islamofascist" axis of evil. Like every demagogue since, well, Hitler, President Bush abuses history to make history.

Matein Khalid is a Dubai based investment banker

All of those outlets, as well as two other right-wing US magazines - the National Review and The American Spectator - far outpaced their commercial rivals in the frequency of their use of keywords and names such as "appeasement", "fascism" and "Hitler", particularly with respect to Iran and its controversial president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

For example, Nexis cited 56 uses of "Islamofascist" or "Islamofascism" in separate programs or segments aired by Fox News, compared with 24 by CNN, over the past year. Even more striking, the same terms were used in 115 different articles or columns in the Washington Times, compared with only eight in the Washington Post over the same period, according to a breakdown by Nexis.

Similarly, the Washington Times used the words "appease" or "appeasement" - a derogatory reference to efforts by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to avoid war with Nazi Germany before the latter's invasion of Poland - in 25 different articles or columns that dealt with alleged threats posed by Ahmadinejad, compared with six in the Post and only three in the New York Times.

Israel-centered neo-conservatives and other hawks have long tried to depict foreign challenges to US power as replays of the 1930s in order to rally public opinion behind foreign interventions and high defense budgets and against domestic critics.

During the Cold War, they attacked domestic critics of the Vietnam War and later the Ronald Reagan administration's "Contra war" against Nicaragua - and even Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon - as "isolationists" and "appeasers" who failed to understand that their opposition in effect served the interests of an "evil" Soviet Union whose ambitions for world conquest were every bit as threatening and real as those of the Axis powers in World War II.

Known as "the Good War", the conflict against Germany and Japan remains irresistible as a point of comparison for hawks caught up in more recent conflicts - from the first Gulf War when former president George H W Bush compared Iraq's Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler; to the Balkan wars when neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists alike described Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in similar terms; to the younger Bush's "global war on terrorism" (GWOT), which he and his supporters have repeatedly tried to depict as the latest in a series of existential struggles against "evil" and "totalitarians" that began with World War II.

Given the growing public disillusionment in the US not only with the Iraq war but with Bush's handling of the larger GWOT as well - not to mention the imminence of the mid-term congressional elections in November and the growing tensions with Ahmadinejad's Iran over its nuclear program - it is hardly surprising that both the administration and its hawkish supporters are trying harder than ever to identify their current struggles, including last month's conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, specifically with the war against "fascism" more than 60 years ago.

As noted by the Associated Press (AP) this week, "fascism" or "Islamic fascism", a phrase used by Bush himself two weeks ago and used to encompass everything from Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda and Hamas to Shi'ite Hezbollah and Iran to secular Syria, has become the "new buzzword" for Republicans.

In a controversial speech on Tuesday, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was even more direct, declaring that Washington faced a "new type of fascism" and, in an explicit reference to the failure of Western countries to confront Hitler in the 1930s, assailing critics for neglecting "history's lessons" by "believ(ing) that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased".

But Rumsfeld's remarks, which drew bitter retorts from leading Democrats, followed a well-worn path trod with increasing intensity by the neo-conservative and right-wing media over the past year, according to the Nexis survey. Significantly, it did not include the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages have been dominated by neo-conservative opinion, particularly analogies between the rise of fascism and the challenges faced by the US in the Middle East, since September 11, 2001.

Thus the Washington Times published 95 articles and columns that featured the words "fascism" or "fascist" and "Iraq" over the past year, twice as many as appeared in the New York Times during the same period. More than half of the Washington Times' articles were published in just the past three months - three times as many as appeared in the New York Times.

Similarly, the National Review led all magazines and journals with 66 such references over the past year, followed by 48 in The American Spectator and 14 by the Weekly Standard. Together, those three publications accounted for more than half of all articles with those words published by the more than three dozen US periodicals catalogued by Nexis since last September.

The results were similar for "appease" or "appeasement" and "Iraq". Led by the Review, the same three journals accounted for more than half the articles (175) that included those words in some three dozen US magazines over the past year. As for newspapers, the Washington Times led the list with 46 articles, 50% more than the New York Times, which also had fewer articles than its crosstown neo-conservative rival, the much smaller New York Sun.

A search on Nexis for articles and columns that included "Iran" and "fascist" or "fascism" found that the Sun and the Times topped the newspaper list by a substantial margin, as did the Review, the Spectator, and the Standard among the magazines and journals. Nearly one-third of all such references over the past year were published in August, according to the survey.

Nexis, which also surveys the Canadian press, found that newspapers owned by CanWest Global Communications, a group that owns the country's Global Television Network as well as the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and the Montreal Gazette and several other regional newspapers, were also among the most consistent propagators of the "fascism" paradigm and ranked far ahead of other Canadian outlets in the frequency with which they used keywords such as "appeasement" and "fascist" in connection with Iraq and Iran.

The CanWest Global group is run by members of the Asper family whose foreign-policy views have been linked to prominent hardline neo-conservatives in the US and the right-wing Likud Party in Israel.

In fact, several disturbing analogies exist between George W. Bush and history's most infamous fascist, Adolph Hitler: Both men assumed power in defiance of the will of the majority; both men used "great lies" to pursue their warmongering agendas; both men preyed upon humanity's basest instincts to disseminate those "great lies"; both men were appeased by the British government, Hitler through Neville Chamberlain and Bush through Tony Blair; both men were willing to use national tragedies to justify the destruction of civil liberties, Hitler through the burning of the Reichstag and Bush through the September 11th terrorist attacks; both men were/are suspected of either participating in, or ignoring warnings about the imminence of, these tragedies in order to enhance their political stature and power; both men [exploit(ed)] a culture of death for political self-aggrandizement, Hitler through his well-publicized genocide campaigns, and Bush who, while governor of Texas, routinely denied DNA tests to death row inmates, even though such tests could prevent wrongful executions; both men were willing to appeal to racism, Hitler through his quest for a "master race," and Bush through his condemnation of affirmative action policies, which primarily benefit racial minorities. [...] both men reveled in war and exploited the military to satiate their personal ambitions and vendettas; both men used war to enrich their political cronies; both men demonstrated contempt for international law and the concerns of the world community; and both men believed they were/are on some holy crusade inspired by a "divine province" that placed them into power. [...]

September 2004 update: he's done it again.