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German Daily: Bush Was Hitler
A new book compares the anti-Semitism that led to the notorious Dreyfus Affair in France to "Islamaphobia" in America that led to Guantanamo.
The American novelist and essayist Louis Begley was in Frankfurt’s Old Opera House earlier this month to promote the German edition of his new book Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters. The English edition is first scheduled for release in late August. Oddly enough, however, a German translation has already been published. The German edition bears a different title: The Dreyfus Affair: Devil’s Island, Guantánamo, a Historical Nightmare [Der Fall Dreyfus: Teufelsinsel, Guantánamo, Alptraum der Geschichte].
The German title is not only grammatically puzzling. Why the emphasis on Dreyfus’s place of imprisonment — an incidental feature of the Dreyfus Affair? And what is the “historical nightmare”? And what does Guantánamo have to do with it? An article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Begley’s Frankfurt appearance makes somewhat clearer the significance of these associations. Referring to the book, FAZ author Edo Reents writes:
Relentlessly and with a pressing intensity, Begley lists the anti-Semitic incidents that took place in France during and after the Dreyfus Affair. He then moves from this to the American Islamophobia of the Bush government, which, inasmuch as it illegally imprisoned and tortured people, essentially behaved no differently than the National Socialists.
The passage is remarkable in that it weaves together two of the favorite idées fixes that have occupied Germany’s chattering classes in recent years; the famous “Bush=Hitler” meme and the notion that “Islamophobia” is, in effect, the new form of anti-Semitism. (On the latter meme, see my earlier PJM report here.) In so doing, it is not really Guantánamo as Devil’s Island that the passage invokes, but rather Guantánamo as Auschwitz.
The outrageousness of such a comparison ought to be obvious — especially in Germany. Even if some of its former or current occupants should turn out to be innocent of their presumed connections to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, no one was ever imprisoned at Guantánamo simply by virtue of being a Muslim. So how is Guantánamo supposed in any way to be evidence of an “American Islamophobia” analogous to the German anti-Semitism that led to Auschwitz?
And then, of course, there is the yawning difference of scale — a difference of so many orders of magnitude as to be tantamount in itself to a difference of kind. Altogether, somewhere around 750 detainees are believed to have been held at Guantánamo since the first transfer of prisoners took place in 2002. Most of these have since been released and, of course, none of them was killed. What has this to do with the millions of Jews who were systematically slaughtered in the Nazi death camps or by the mobile SS Einsatzgruppen?
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John Rosenthal’s writings on European politics and transatlantic relations have appeared in English, French, and German in such leading publications as Policy Review, Les Temps Modernes, and Merkur. He holds a PhD in philosophy and he taught political philosophy and classical German philosophy before turning to journalism. More of his work can be found at Transatlantic Intelligencer.
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33 Comments
1. Realist:Most Germans and indeed Europeans hold a huge grudge against the USA for helping in their liberation and stimulating their economic growth after WWII ( N.B. while they stimulated a lot of Europe the USA actively impoverished the UK in a direct attempt to stop the UK becoming their economic rivals and the UK surprisingly still loved the USA). But the ungrateful Germans and the French the main recipients of American stimulus resented the USA greatly. That is of course until the anti American, Mohammedan extreme left wing socialist O-BOW-ma came along . Oh how they love him because they can see he will destroy the USA.
Jun 29, 2009 - 12:09 am 2. Proud_Kafir7908:Islam is clearly against human rights, gay rights, democracy, secular laws, racial equality, gender equality, the arts, skeptical thought, scientific inquiry and many other essential pillars of Western civilization. Unless one wants outright surrender to the 7th-Century barbarism epitomized by Mahound’s big-time scam known as islam in the politically-correct universe, learning about the threat posed by it to the West and how to fight back is a duty that everyone who cares for the survival of Western Civilization should take upon their shoulders.
As Jihad Watch reader Ipsofacto correctly noted a couple of days ago, the PC definition of an “islamophobe” is a non-mahoundian who has learned more than he or she was supposed to know about islam. And learning anything beyond those apparently harmless “five pillars”is already enough to earn someone that label.
Jun 29, 2009 - 12:31 am 3. Mariana:Not a small number of people (including the government)in this country (Germany) have gone completely mad – they are about to actually help the “Muslim World” destroy us all!
Jun 29, 2009 - 1:21 am 4. DavidN:All in the name of tolerance.
One of the perpetual themes of German history, the last 40-50 years, has been to somehow exonerate the nation of the shame of the Holocaust. Various explanations of what happened, that it was no worse than the Allied bombing campaigns, that the Jews were somehow surrogates for the Communists, that the atrocities were perpetrated by either East or West Germans (which opinions were spread around by their counterparts) all served, at some point, to try and absolve the nation of complicity in what happened. This sounds like another version of that, though weirdly it comes from an American, not a German. We used to hear that the A-bombs were the result of racism, and dropped merely to start the Cold War rather than end World War II, but this is even sillier.
Jun 29, 2009 - 1:26 am 5. idov:Dreyfus was an innocent man sentenced to prison. The inmates in Gitmo, most of them, are guilty of something. Irrespective of Dreyfus anti-Semitism was a common feature of European societies and it helped trigger both the founding of the Zionist movement and the mass exodus of Jews to America and other destinations.
The Holocaust is only part of the atrocities the Germans committed against all peoples. They left 2.8 million Russian POWs starve to death, just didn’t feed them. When the Poles rose up in Warsaw hoping that Stalin would come to their rescue, he never did, one night German soldiers broke into a large hospital. On the bottom floor were the worst injured people, many of them women, broken bones, internal organs smashed, many just hanging on to life. They mass raped these woman, one of the most brutal events in the history of humanity. In the last weeks of the war when it was all over but the shouting, they stopped supplying food to the Dutch and tens of thousands starved to death.
Jun 29, 2009 - 3:12 am 6. Realist:Much like the Mohammedans where so very very few are supposed to be militants the Germans cling to the lie that only very very few Germans were Nazis. Funny that when you see the old Newsreels with all the outstretched arms saluting and the enraptured people screaming Hitlers name much like the moronic Americans who are now worshiping Obambi. The Germans only stopped loving Hitler and the Nazis when they started losing the war a point our Western politicians just can’t seem to get through their thick skulls as they continue to try and appease Islam even though Islam has loudly and clearly by words and actions declared war on all of us.
Jun 29, 2009 - 5:16 am 7. jerryofva:Rather then being innocent Jew-like victims, Muslims are the new practitioners of racial supremecy. Al Qaeda, the Wahabists and the mullahs of Iran from the modern Nazi party in its full anti-Semitic glory.
I have always believed that once some idea is introduced into a culture it can never be expunged. So it is with Nazism and the Germans. Hitler has successfully woven his idealogy into the very fabric of German culture. It has been hidden all these years waiting for a set of conditions to unbind itself amoung the German people. The rise of radical Islam combined with westerm post-modern self-hatred has become the vehicle for cultural Nazism to reassert itself in Germany. One must not forget that Hitler admired Islam as a fighting religion and for its hatred of the Jews.
Jun 29, 2009 - 5:20 am 8. Mongoose:The EU Left wish to use Islam to destroy European civilization. They have learn this from their American counterparts by watching how deftly the Left employs minorities against American society and civilization. And of course the Americans learn this from Stalin.
Now the American Left is emulating the EU Socialists by creating a muslim constituency in the USA.
In both cases these villains had to create policies and practices to actually import these people. It is no accident. It is intentional and has been a project of the left for decades both here and abroad.
Rotterdam is now really a Muslim city. Christian in the EU are held on contempt while Muslims are elevated. Anyone who tries to do something about it is hounded, often into silence.
Either there is a reaction to this and it is overcome, or the West is doomed.
Multiculturalism is as big as of a fraud as Global Warming, It may prove to be even more destructive.
Jun 29, 2009 - 5:49 am 9. David W. Lincoln:Let’s see, French military secrets were sold to the Germans by a ne’erdowell named Esterhazy. Dreyfus was the only Jew in that section of the military. He was scapegoated because of the reactionary bias of the military (as well as other segments of French society).
Islamophobia is based upon the current frontrunners, or pace-setters, of man’s inhumanity to man.
In other words, the first example is of what got
cooked up. The second example is an honest appraisal.
Connection? Only that both are actions, but that
Jun 29, 2009 - 5:58 am 10. Brian Richard Allen:seems to trump the differences between the two.
“” …. What has this to do with the millions of Jews who were systematically slaughtered in the Nazi death camps or by the SS Einsatzgruppen? “”
Or, come to that, with the many millions more Christians?
Brian Richard Allen
Jun 29, 2009 - 6:14 am 11. Brian Richard Allen:Los Angeles Califobambicated 90028
And the Far Abroad
Psychopathological Hesperophobia may be most rampant among the world’s barbaric Arab-Muslim and murderous Han Chinese tribes — and with good reason. But it’s alive and well among the Russians and among the Euro-peons’ Neo-Soviet’s squalidly fasciSSocialistic satellite states’ self-and-own-culture-loathing Leftards, too.
All of whom loath and detest us.
And not (although they’ll say otherwise) for anything we have ever done and/or do. But because our Judeo-Christian/Western/Human Civilization’s overwhelming superiority sheets home the fact of their individual and of their dead, decadent and degenerate post-Christian culture’s abject inferiority.
B R A – L A
Jun 29, 2009 - 6:32 am 12. JFM:About Dreyfius:
-A captain Esterhazy was passing information to the Germans about the short hydraulic brake in the 120mm cannon (for info hydraulic brakes allowed much higher rate of fire and precision). A cleaning wooman at the German embassy working for French Intelligence Service, found a paper in German military attaché’s wastebasket and brought it to her supeiors. One of them “recognized” the writing as being of Dreyfus
Now the interesting thing is that, in theory, there was no way Esterhazy could have been in possession of this info as he was an infantry, not artillery officer, and one who wasn’t pârticularly well reagrded by the high command. In contrast, Dreyfus, was an artillery officer and a graduate from “Ecole de Guerre” meaning that he was considered colonel or general material. But despite this he had no access to the information who was being handled to the Germans.
-The other interesting point is that the project of a short hydraulic brake had been declared a failure and the hot technology was a long brake for the revolutionary 75mm cannon.
So the likely course of events was:
-The French were feeding false informatioon to the Germans through German-speaking Captain Esterhazy (this could have been a real traitotr who had been discovered and forced to cooperate) but at one point he did something silly who made the Germans wonder hwy he hadn’t been discovered by the French. So, to protect him, the French try to make them belive that thaey are after the wrong person. They needed an escapoe goaat and one who would make a likelier traitor than infantry officer Esterhazy. In other words, an artillery officer, one who was highly regarded and thus likelier to have access to confidential information. And the person who is going to pick the escape goat is Colonel Schaerrer, an Alsatian whose hate for the Germans is only paralleled by his antisemitism, and certainly not pleased that a Jew could become a gneeral in the French Army.
Now, about France in those years, it lived with the obsession of cleaning the 1870 defeat and recovering Alsace-Lorraine from Germany so the French Army was really idolized. Since the official “traitor” was a
Jun 29, 2009 - 6:56 am 13. JFM:(continued from proceeding post)
Since the “official traitor” was a Jew and that most, not all there were Jews in the anti-Dreyfus side, sided with Dreyfus it created a strong feeling against those who were perceived as throwing dirt on French Army and mining its cohesion thus weakening the instrument of the (future) recovering of Alsace-Lorraine
Jun 29, 2009 - 7:03 am 14. Marie Claude:Note that the antisemitism was a well shared sentiment across the whole continent, and particularley in the armies which frame was composed of very christian members, who still hear in church preaches that the Jews killed the Christ.
Now the Dreyfus trial made a big “noise” among the intellectual elites, you could see that half of them sided him, ie “j’accuse of Zola”, so, in spite of the ambiant spirit of revenge from the 1870 defeat, some persons had courage to oppose their convictions to the “politically corrected discourses” of the era, and this was still a democraty at work
Jun 29, 2009 - 7:52 am 15. Bilgeman:Hmmm, how very interesting.
It bears remembering though, that the greatest service to World peace and humanity done by the favored politician of the German chattering classes in the past century has been to commit suicide in an underground bunker.
IOW, consider the source.
Jun 29, 2009 - 8:12 am 16. JFM:Anyway someone should remind to those German givers of lessons that there is fundamental difference between what happened in Germany and antisemitism in France during the Dreyfus episode: while I don’t doubt some people hated Jews to death for their perceived lack of loyalty to the country, nobody in France ever dreamed of killing new-born babies for the crime of being born
Jun 29, 2009 - 8:15 am 17. Kelly:Tolerance needs to end where human rights begin.
-“islamophobe” one who cares about human rights, particularly women’s rights
Jun 29, 2009 - 9:15 am 18. "progressive"watch:Begley has the America derangement syndrome,Bush version,where a grain of hate deposited in a leftist’s brain produces over time an undying bitter hate-filled legacy. This is even a common condition in the brains of progesssive-leftist Jews like Begley who usually hate America,Israel and seemingly themselves and other handy targets.
As far multiculturalism,all cultures are great except the American Western culture of equality,individualism,JudeoChristian values,and Capitalism.
Jun 29, 2009 - 9:24 am 19. vinny vidivici:Guantanamo the media-manufactured meme and Leftist talking point bears little resemblance to the prison bearing the same name. We’re somehow supposed to believe the halal meals, dental work and korans proffered by white-gloved jailers are but a cover for a modern day Tuol Sleng.
Europeans reach for this sort of ludicrous equivalency because it’s pretty difficult to top the orgy of violence and depravity on display during its two 20th century suicide attempts (three attempts, if you count the submission of half the continent to communism).
They desperately need such equivalency because the contradiction of being history’s most prolific butchers while holding themselves up as paragons of diplomatic probity and moral judgment is unsustainable without it.
Jun 29, 2009 - 9:31 am 20. javier:if indeed bush was like hitler, then he would have killed his critics (pelosi, reid, etc), kill whoever made fun of him (michael moore etc), killed all the muslims (kinda tried that one, darn it)
A old guy traveled to France, when he arrived the french custom agent asked him for his passport, the old man replied that he had misplaced his passport, the french custom agent asked the old guy if this was his first trip to France, the old man replied “no”, the french custom agent scorned the old guy telling him that he should it know that he need it his passport upon arrival to France. The old man replied, “last time that I was here I landed in Normandy and there wasn’t any frenchmen to show them my passport”
Jun 29, 2009 - 10:11 am 21. jw:See James Glazov’s recent book, “United In Hate,” about the causes of the behavior of such people of Jewish origin, “Jews of Convenience,” like Chomsky, Finkelstein, and Begley, who attack Jews.
Jun 29, 2009 - 10:20 am 22. wlpeak:Of course they’re right.
Because falsely accusing and imprisoning a soldier then exonerating him is just like capturing combatents on the battlefield and imprisoning a few you suspect of dangerous capabilities and releasing the majority as evidence becomes available is just like rounding up millions of civilians, including your own citizens some even honored soldiers, working them to death or slaughtering them outright and making the odd lamp shade out of their skins.
Its so clear when you are an enlightened educated moral authority.
Jun 29, 2009 - 11:27 am 23. wlpeak:err combatants
Jun 29, 2009 - 11:28 am 24. Dave ll:A book being retitled for publication in Germany which placates the guilt for Nazi Germany war crimes is hardly a surprise.
And that the book is written by an American liberal Jew with an axe to grind against Bush’s policies in the “War On Terror” is hardly shocking news either…
Or that past historical events are somehow twisted, minimized or overblown, rationalized, and distorted to produce indictments on RECENT unpopular events(especially by a liberal author)
is some kind of tactic we should all be shocked about…well, you get the picture.
This will be just another sorry edition relegated to the 99 cent bargain dust-bin of history.
Jun 29, 2009 - 11:34 am 25. Delia:Meh.
Jun 29, 2009 - 11:52 am 26. David W. Lincoln:How about we do a before and after. What happened
after the Dreyfus Affair for Colonel Picquart. Contrast that with what happened before the Dreyfus Affair for Esterhazy.
Esterhazy had champagne tastes on a beer budget. He married rich. Money wasn’t good enough. Then he was a partner in a bordello. Money wasn’t good enough. Then he was selling secrets to the Germans. The money was good enough.
After all, we can either look at isolated events,
Jun 29, 2009 - 2:48 pm 27. SukieTawdry:which tends to lead to chaos, or see how they fit
into one continuum.
How to dumb down a Holocaust. Maybe that’s the point.
Jun 30, 2009 - 7:04 pm 28. Paul -Indiana:Islamophobia? Not at all. We don’t fear Islam, we just reject it.
Jul 1, 2009 - 6:06 am 29. Marie Claude:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Walsin_Esterhazy
Esterhazy, umm from hungarish origin, that was a fluent german speaker, no wonder, Hungary was ruled by Austria !
It makes me thinks to the conspiraties of a de Villepin against another French from hungarish origin, or vice-versa
some persons like to make underground wars
Jul 2, 2009 - 2:26 am 30. JFM:Esterhazy, umm from hungarish origin, that was a fluent german speaker, no wonder, Hungary was ruled by Austria !
If you read his bio, he was born in Paris and Esterhazys had been living in France for two centuries. The fact he spoke German had little or nothing to do with Hungary being ruled by Austria.
Jul 2, 2009 - 5:19 am 31. Marie Claude:right, I was too quick on that one.
Jul 2, 2009 - 8:27 am 32. Marie-Luise:Also the fact that Hungary was ruled by Austria doesn’t explain why Esterhazy spoke german, for Hungary became an austrian protectorate under Sissi the emperess reign, but rather it was a tradition by the military families of this times, until the fifties. (De Gaulle, ahah ! spoke fluently german too)
Why don’t you blame the author instead of Germany?
He, Louis Begley, is making this comparison–stupidly enough. As a Jewish person, he should know better.
“Islamophobia”–a very convenient term to put down any criticism of Islam or Muslims.
Jul 3, 2009 - 12:30 pm 33. The Editrix:“The outrageousness of such a comparison ought to be obvious — especially in Germany.”
It is. And it is put to good use. Henryk Broder said it years ago already. Any misdeed, real or perceived, committed by the Americans, the Ersatz-jew (or, for that, Israel, the Über-Jew), reduces German guilt. They just can’t resist.
Jul 19, 2009 - 2:25 am