Hitler’s clone: Chavez or Bush?

By Fran Shor

In his most recent rambling tirade, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, attacked Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, as a popularly elected leader who, like Hitler, was consolidating his power through dictatorial means. Having just returned from Caracas, Venezuela where I, along with 80,000 others, participated in the 2006 World Social Forum, Rumsfeld’s accusation of Chavez as a Hitler clone seems bizarrely at odds with much of the rest of the world, especially in Latin America. In fact, posters ironically adorned a number of sessions at the Caracas Hilton that pictured Bush with a Hitler-like moustache under the heading of Bush=Assassin.

So, what are we to make of these opposing claims of who is a Hitler clone? While opponents of Chavez and Bush both resort to rhetorical excesses in denouncing their respective policies, arriving at some precision about those policies should allow us to understand where the excesses lie and why they proliferate among certain groups.

As far as Chavez’s rule is concerned, he did try to first achieve power through a military coup. However, he came to electoral victory in 1999 and withstood a US-sponsored coup in 2002 with the aid of millions of Venezuelans and their organized social movements. Of course, Bush’s electoral victory in 2000 was effectuated by Republican goon squads in Florida who disrupted a recount and the intervention of a partisan Supreme Court. Opponents of Bush and Chavez continue to accuse both of electoral intimidation and irregularities, including the fixing of vote counts through electronic machines.

Chavez’s opponents on the right, while exempting themselves from the most recent parliamentary elections (again, most likely, with Bush Administration encouragement similar to what the Reagan Administration did in Nicaragua in the 1984 elections), express their outrage over Chavez and his government through much of the media which they control. (Think of all Fox news, all the time on every TV channel except the one government channel.) Some of the deep-seated antagonism may be racial in origin since Chavez is regarded as suspicious because of his skin color and social background.

As an example of this racial and class animosity, I had an encounter with a Venezuelan gentleman in one of the wealthier districts of Caracas who verbally accosted me when he saw my WSF badge. Complaining that Chavez was corrupting the judicial and parliamentary systems by appointing only cronies (sound familiar here?) and giving away oil to countries in the Caribbean, he went on to claim that he was dismissed from his teaching job at the University of Caracas because he had signed a petition for a referendum against Chavez. His concluding remark was that he and others in the opposition felt that there were like Jews under Hitler, forced to wear yellow stars of ostracism!

While not in a position to validate his claim of being dropped from his university job, I was able to get some perspective on some of his other claims, particularly about the supposed decline in health care, from a Venezuelan doctor. This doctor pointed out that the Chavez government has used its resources to build medical clinics in the barrios in order to provide the poor with preventative medicine for the first time. Moreover, according to him, the Chavez government was moving away from a restricted educational system for doctors that favored those from privileged backgrounds to enacting an affirmative action program to expand the number of doctors, especially giving those from poor backgrounds opportunities they never had before.

The Bush Administration, on the other hand, is an implacable opponent of affirmative action, arguing even against the mild form of affirmative action upheld by the Supreme Court in the University of Michigan case. Moreover, Bush and his Republican followers in Congress continue to punish the poor through cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs while rewarding the rich with massive tax cuts.

But it is not Bush’s campaign against the poor in the United States that has led many here and abroad to raise the specter of Hitlerism. While Chavez rails against Bush as “Mr. Danger” and the world’s leading terrorist, others have tried to tar Bush more precisely as a Hitler clone. One of the earliest attacks on him from this perspective was by Germany’s former Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Grelm who was forced in resign in 2001 after comparing Bush to Hitler in the way they both used warfare to distract people from domestic problems. In October 2002 the characters in the comic strip, Boondocks, picked up on this line of thinking in the following exchange: “Some people in other countries are comparing Bush to Adolf Hitler because of his warmongering,” a Boondocks character says. “That’s preposterous; even I wouldn’t compare him to Hitler,” another replies. “I mean Hitler was democratically elected.”

Of course, Hitler never did receive a majority of the vote in the last election in 1933 before the Nazis purged their opponents and consolidated power. Enabling that consolidation was the mysterious Reichstag fire of 1933 which some have likened to the events of 9/11. Comparisons of Bush’s warmongering and Nazi Germany have proliferated because of their preemptive and illegal thrust, expressed everywhere from the Nobel Prize author, Harold Pinter, to lesser literary lights. In addition, fear of creeping fascism in the US has made Bush opponents more susceptible to the Hitler analogies.

Those of us unalterably opposed to Bush’s wars and domestic policies do not need to resort to Hitler analogies to substantiate that opposition. It is enough that we do everything in our power to prevent those wars and policies from creating more victims, including Hugo Chavez. While Chavez’s populist posture does, at times, reflect the Latin American tradition of a caudillo, there is no connecting thread whatsoever between Chavez and Hitler. Calls for his assassination by the Christian crypto-fascist Pat Robertson, heard again recently, should be condemned in the strongest manner. Finally, we need to be especially aware how this Administration and its media allies will try to manipulate opinion about Chavez in order to carry out its agenda. If we want to enact the slogan of the World Social Forum - “another world is possible” - we need to understand fully the contradictions and contentions in this world and act accordingly.

Fran Shor teaches historical and cultural studies at Wayne State University. His book, Bush-League Spectacles: Empire, Politics, and Culture in Bushwhacked America, can be ordered directly through spdbooks.org.