In America, we all know what “playing the race card” means. Well, the Neoconservatives and their supporters in the Republican party have their own card to play, one that relies heavily on the memory of Nazi fascism and the Holocaust in World War II. You see it all the time in their justifications for Bush’s policies in prosecuting his “War on Terror” whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or in the future (as many of them so fervently desire) Syria and Iran.
The most recent, and blatant, example of a neocon playing the Holocaust card is Republican presidential hopeful and Fox News commentator, Newt Gingrich, in a speech he gave at a conference in Israel, in which he implicitly calls for an attack on Iran by US and/or Israeli military forces, sooner rather than later:
In 1984 I wrote that WMD and terrorism would pose a threat for US national security. If two or three cities are destroyed because of terrorism both the US and Israel’s democracy will be eroded and both will become greater dictatorial societies.
Three nuclear weapons constitute a second Holocaust. Enemies are explicit in their desire to destroy us. We are sleepwalking through this as if diplomatic engagement will create a fiesta where we will all love one another. The terrorist threats are larger and more formidable than the political system in Israel or the US can cope with. […]
The United States and its allies should work together to change the regime in Iran. […]
The exploitation of the Holocaust as a means to justify foreign military interventions by the United States in the Middle East is not a new tactic. Indeed, it has a long and ugly history among neoconservatives and many other denizens of America’s far right wing factions.
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The Holocaust card is the foundation upon which the right wing neologism “Islamofascism” rests, a term which paints many differing Islamic political parties, terrorist organizations and nation states with a single broad brush. It matters little that many of these groups are antagonistic toward one another, and have differing and often contradictory goals. Nor is the great rift between Shi’ite and Sunni sects of Islam given any weight.
The emotion of the term overrides any semblance of logical reasoning. It simplifies what is a complex situation into a simple minded and easily absorbed meme. It provides the entire spectrum of Islamic thought and practice by millions of Muslims with a single face: the face of jackbooted thugs from the 1930’s and 40’s who murdered millions of Jews, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals and many others in the ovens of Auschwitz and the killing fields of Europe. A more loaded word could not have been imagined with which to tar the Islamic world. And behind that new word is the implied threat of a new Holocaust, this time a jihad led by Muslims against Israel and the West.
It’s not surprising that such terms, and the many allusions to World War II and the Jewish experience of that horror which they evoke are employed our Republican leaders and neoconservatives. The Holocaust in many ways continues to define and distort the foreign policy mindset of those who planned and implemented President Bush’s so-called war on terror.
The fear of another mass death event like the Holocaust, one caused by extreme fundamentalist Islamic terrorists supplied with “weapons of mass destruction” by Saddam Hussein, was exploited by the Bush administration in the run-up to the War in Iraq. And it was exploited again last year in speeches given by Rumsfeld and President Bush, in which opponents of the war were characterized as appeasers in the mold of Britain’s Prime Minister during the late 30’s, Neville Chamberlain, who agreed to permit Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia prior to the outbreak of WWII. In effect, Bush, Rumsfeld and many of their supporters were impliedly (and sometimes expressly) claiming that the critics of the war in Iraq would weaken America and expose its citizens to the threat of more destructive and murderous terrorist attacks.
According to Thomas Ricks in his masterful book on the Iraq war, Fiasco, the Holocaust was the central defining reason that Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, both neoconservatives who worked under Rumsfeld at the Pentagon during 2001-2004, promoted the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Both men had lost extended family members in the Holocaust, and both viewed Saddam Hussein, and also the problem of Islamic fundamentalism in general, through the lens of that experience. It formed the basis for their assertion that military action against rogue states in the Middle East by the US was justified in order to prevent even the merest chance of an attack on Israel or in America in the future which might lead to the deaths of thousands or millions. The fact that any realistic threat of such an attack coming from Saddam’s Iraq was far from imminent was meaningless to them.
They saw every leader of an Islamic state which was not an ally or “friend” of the United States, from Hussein in Iraq, Assad in Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the ruling mullahs in Iran, as potential Hitlers merely waiting for the means and opportunity to unleash another war of mass death against Israel and America. It was almost a mantra for them, and it pointed the way to the principle justification for the Iraq misadventure employed by Bush: Saddam’s alleged stockpiles of WMD (set atop ballistic missiles which allegedly threatened the United Kingdom with an attack for which there would be no more than 45 minutes warning — a claim we now know to have been false when it was made)..
The influence of the Holocaust card can still be seen in the rhetoric of the Bush’s most recent State of the Union address in which he makes many references to the threat of mass murder of Americans at the hands of our enemies (whether terrorists like Al Qaeda or nation states like Iran). And it is a much used stock argument by the Greek chorus of dedicated neoconservative and right wing pundits, unnamed Israeli officials and wingnut bloggers which employ it to manufacture fear in order to justify a wider war in the Middle East.
The problem with using the Holocaust in this manner should be clear to anyone who doesn’t already have an ideological bias in favor of the more war the merrier. First, there is no country in the region which has the resources or means to conquer Israel or inflict upon it a nuclear attack, with the exception of Pakistan. Yet, that country, which gave birth to the Taliban and in all likelihood is sheltering Osama bin Ladin and other high ranking members of Al Qaeda, has never threatened Israel with its nuclear arsenal. It’s not because the regime or many of its people view Israel any differently than the rest of the Islamic world, but they know that any attack on Israel would be met with the destruction of their own state by either Israeli or American nuclear weapons.
Yet, Pakistan, which has far more Islamic extremists in its midst than likely reside in Iran, and which does have a nuclear arsenal, is never mentioned by any of the pundits or conservative think tank scholars as representing an existential threat to either Israel or America’s existence. It has a dictatorial, authoritarian regime which supports and promotes terrorists in India and Afghanistan, has no semblance of a democracy, and the political factions most likely to overthrow the regime are considered even much extreme than the present leadership.
Iran, however, which does have elections and some elements of a democratic process, and which has not invaded any of its neighbors for hundreds of years, on the other hand, is labeled by neocons as the potential source of a “second holocaust.” Iran has a primitive industrial base, and an economy propped up primarily by its oil revenues. What it does have is a growing influence among Shi’ite populations in the region because of the hash Bush has made of post-Saddam Iraq, new oil contracts with Japan and China, a small nuclear research program currently being monitored by the IAEA, and a loudmouth, fundamentalist Muslim as its President who is given to making vague threats he cannot carry out. Iran has no nukes according to the IAEA, nor any prospect of getting them in the near future according to our own intelligence estimates.
That should tell you all you need to know about those who play the Holocaust card to justify another military intervention against Iran. It isn’t a second holocaust most of them fear, it’s the prospect of losing our dominant position in the Middle East and keeping the oil and oil profits, flowing into the tnakers and coffers, respectively, of American and British oil companies.
I don’t doubt that many have convinced themselves that Iran is another Nazi Germany in embryo, and that President Ahmadinejad (a man who does not even hold the highest office in Iran) is the next Hitler bent on world domination and the elimination of Israel. But we do not live in the 1930’s anymore, and the countries in the Middle East are not Nazi Germany. It’s not a repeat of the Holocaust Israelis or Americans should fear. It’s a WWI scenario, where the major combatants stumbled into war through the incompetence, greed, and mutual supicion of their respective leaders, and a political climate that made war seem the only solution rather than diplomacy.
That type of scenarion seems much closer to the situation in which we find ourselves at present vis-a-vis Iran, than any other historical analogy, like the Holocaust, no matter how attention grabbing and emotionally appealing it may be to some on the right.
