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Ann Coulter: The Modern-Day Hitler

Written by thehim - posted July 5, 2004

"If today more than ever our Left politicians are at pains to point out the lack of arms as the necessary cause of their spineless, compliant, actually treasonous policy, we must answer only one thing: no, the reverse is true.  Through your anti-national, criminal policy of abandoning national interests, you surrendered our arms.  Now you attempt to represent the lack of arms as the underlying cause of your miserable villainy.  This, like everything you do, is lies and falsification."

- Mein Kampf

George W Bush is not the best comparison for Adolf Hitler. George W. Bush is a man of faith. He led a sinful life for many years before becoming 'born-again'. Adolf Hitler was fairly consistent in his moral behavior throughout his life, but was much more skeptical of organized Christianity and had more faith in the superiority of his race and culture, rather than its God. George W. Bush avoided military service and largely avoided politics for most of his early adult life. Adolf Hitler proudly fought for Germany in World War I, entered politics in his late 20s, and quickly became obsessed with his particular (and peculiar) ideologies. These differences say a lot in how these two men have acted as political leaders. Bush is a delegator that trusts those around him. Hitler was a dictator that felt that true leaders don't need input from others.

Anyone who reads Mein Kampf sees that even with the expected revulsion at the absurd claims concerning race, Hitler was someone that thought about a wide range of philosophical and political issues. Not everything he says in his book is wrong, but the basic message that was conveyed led an entire nation of people to decide that Germans were threatened by those not ethnically pure. It convinced that entire nation that a particular group of people, the Jews, were an active enemy that needed to be removed from German society by any means necessary.

In order to make that happen, Hitler had a recipe for using propaganda, fear, and scapegoating to convince his followers to go along with his plans. He had a gift for crafting a message for the common man that aroused passion for his ideas. While there are few people today that publicly share the kind of antiquated views on race and culture that Hitler did, there are still those that employ his tactics in their political messages. These people come from both the 'left' and the 'right' of the political spectrum, and have wide ranging messages, but I've seen none more strikingly similar to Hitler than Ann Coulter.

Coulter's books 'Treason' and 'Slander' echo all of the same themes as Mein Kampf; a mis-trust of the 'liberal' press, fierce nationalism, the accusations of treason tossed at those who disagree with her, descriptions of third world citizens as savages, and condemnations of pacifists, liberals, elitists, and democratic politicians. These books share an incredibly harsh tone and a complete unwillingness to examine both sides of an issue. Closer examination of historical facts reveals each book to be extremely unbalanced, but the talent in their propagandizing is clearly evident. Coulter's books became best sellers and, well, we all know what Hitler was able to do.

In this piece, I plan to break down the similarities between these two authors and begin to understand why people like George Soros, who were alive at the time of Hitler's rise, are seeing similarities between the political atmosphere then and now. When Soros made those claims, many said he was comparing Bush to Hitler. He wasn't. Bush is only listening to these extremists' views, and far too many times, allowing their influence to affect his governance and to promote the current extreme bipartisanship in both the government and the nation itself.

HISTORY AND PARANOIA

"To 'learn' history means to seek and find the forces which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as historical events."

- Mein Kampf

Chapter 11 of Treason is a great study in what can happen when paranoia about the forces guiding history can get in the way of historical facts. With only a year and a half of hindsight, much of what Coulter wrote in this chapter about the dangers of Saddam, the advancement of his supposed weapons program, his connections to al Qaeda, and the motivations for why many people on both the left and right opposed this war have been soundly debunked. The truly paranoid out there and perhaps even Coulter herself will still continue to believe that somehow the failure of the Iraq War to make us safer was tied to some form of liberal treachery. But the further out someone goes down that path, the harder they'll have to try to convince thinking people that reality is still just an illusion and that our gut instincts, fueled by paranoia, were correct all along.

Hitler spoke about 'forces' guiding history. By solely learning dates, events, and other historical facts, one would become 'conceited', 'insane', or even worse, a 'parliamentarian'. It was important to understand the real motivations behind these events in order to truly understand history. The mental gymnastics that Hitler went through to prove his points about the motivations of certain 'forces' in Mein Kampf are sometimes quite believable and other times, just laughable. At one point, he explains that as Jews migrated into Germany, some of them become rich while others remained poor, and that this was somehow part of their overall devious plan to have control over both the upper and lower strata of German society.

Coulter describes liberals in much the same way that Hitler describes Jews. She sees them as a force in history that can be measured in a different way than just simply by looking at historical facts and common sense. They are a devious group that is conspiring against the nation and its national values.

Hitler also wrote that when studying history, "It is essential that the content of what one reads at any time should not be transmitted to the memory in the sequence of the book or books, but like the stone of a mosaic should fit into the general world picture in its proper place, and thus help to form this picture in the mind of the reader." In other words, you don't learn something from reading with an open mind and letting it shape your vision of the world. Instead, you must go through life collecting the facts and events through history that fit into your world view while discarding the rest as if it had never happened. This is the recipe for extremism, and Coulter has followed it brilliantly herself in her books. And to be fair here, this is not solely an American thing. At the same time that Treason was a New York Times bestseller, the best selling book in France was a book claiming that 9-11 was a hoax. Extremism is not unique to the left or right, it is simply paranoia that the other side of the political spectrum is the enemy and can not be trusted.

JEWS AND LIBERALS

"The Jew is the great master in lying, and lies and deception are his weapons in struggle.  Every Jewish slander and every Jewish lie is a scar of honor on the body of our warriors."

- Mein Kampf

The most striking similarity between Coulter's and Hitler's work is the portrayal of the pre-defined enemy. In Mein Kampf, the Jews were portrayed as being anti-German and with such complete control of the press that their anti-German viewpoints were slowly corrupting the unaware intelligentsia. Jews were conspiring against the nation and national interests through slanderous accusations against 'right-thinking' Germans, allowing for a moral decay in the nation's art and theater, capitulating with Germany's foes in World War I and beyond, and conspiring with Marxists to overthrow the economic system in Germany.

In today's world, it would have been difficult for Coulter to sell books by directly scapegoating any particular ethnic group. Instead, she levels the exact same accusations at 'liberals', which is a term she never really attempts to define or explain. Everyone seems to have a vague definition of what a liberal is, and I can only speculate what Coulter's exact definition is. But what is taken for granted from her point of view is that the Democratic Party is full of them, and the Republican Party has very few of them. However it's really defined in her mind, Coulter's take on modern history is that the 'liberal' Democrats have used slander against 'right-thinking' Americans, have created the moral decay in the nation's culture, have conspired with America's enemies in the Cold War and the War on Terror, and have allied with Communists to overthrow the current free economic system in America.

Coulter's accusations are more acceptable today when compared to Hitler's because they do not directly attack any one ethnic group, but instead attack the political party that has long been known to hold the interests for many minority ethnic groups. Yet Hitler not only criticized Jews, but also those within Germany that would not stand up and fight this threat to the German nation. He criticized members of the government, who he felt had sold out the German nation at the end of World War I and allowed for 'Jewish-led' Marxism to gain a foothold. Today, Coulter avoids any direct criticism of Muslims (in her books at least, on TV seems to be a different story), but will label anyone who dares to make inroads with the Muslim world or even attempt to understand the Muslim viewpoint as a traitor.

THE SPOKEN WORD AND THE PRESS

"Another thing that got on my nerves was the loathsome cult for France which the big press, even then, carried on. A man couldn't help feeling ashamed to be a German when he saw these saccharine hymns of praise to the 'great cultural nation.' This wretched licking of France's boots more than once made me throw down one of these 'world newspapers.'"

- Mein Kampf

What is it about France that inspires such animosity? In Hitler's case, Germany had just fought a war with France, a war that Germany lost. The press in Germany, both during and after the war, criticized the German government for allowing their country to be led into a war in which it could not win. Hitler countered that the negativity of the press caused morale to dip among the troops and led to the German defeat. He believed that propaganda was required to win wars, and that it was the responsibility of the press to propagandize. What he found out in World War II, though, is that propaganda can help you start a war, but it can't help you win one.

Wretched adoration for the French is only the beginning of the similarities between how Coulter and Hitler viewed the press. These lines from the beginning of Chapter 6 of Slander pretty much sum it up.

"Liberals don't try to win arguments, they seek to destroy their opponents and silence dissident opinions. The monopoly media of television, newspapers, and magazines can inflict liberals on the public without paying a price. Noticeably, however, liberals fail in any media realm where there is competition. In the three media where success is determined on the free market - radio, books, and the Internet - conservatives rule."

I'm not even sure I understand Coulter's point here since I'm not aware of the monopoly that controls all of the magazine and newspaper publishing in the United States. The Wall Street Journal has higher circulation than the New York Times, and the National Enquirer has almost the circulation of both of them combined. I realize that the National Enquirer is not printed daily, but that circulation number alone (2.7 million) should pretty much put to rest the notion that winning the circulation war is not a testament to accuracy or good news reporting.

Hitler also touched upon this phenomenon in Mein Kampf. At the time his movement was beginning, his movement was harshly criticized in the press. Government authorities tried to banish him from holding meetings. Yet his meetings continued and the numbers of his followers continually grew. Every time he spoke, his movement gathered momentum. He was saying things never printed in the press, and he was still being criticized by every major German newspaper. He writes, "Any man who is not attacked in the Jewish newspapers, not slandered and vilified, is not a decent German and no true National Socialist." In the days before most people had radios, Hitler was displaying the power of the spoken word and its ability to gather a significant following. Today, we see this phenomenon in effect on radio waves all over the country. Many more people listen to Rush Limbaugh and read Ann Coulter's books than read the New York Times.

Both Hitler and Coulter also gleefully rejoice at the failures of the power of the spoken word when it came to promoting the opposing viewpoints. Hitler described it this way in Chapter 6 of Volume Two, which is titled 'The Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken Word".

"For the bourgeois intelligentsia protest against such a view only because they themselves obviously lack the power and ability to influence the masses by the spoken word, since they have thrown themselves more and more into purely literary activity and renounced the real agitational activity of the spoken word.  Such habits necessarily lead in time to what distinguishes our bourgeoisie today; that is, to the loss of the psychological instinct for mass effect and mass influence."

In Slander, Coulter recounts the failures of such talk radio liberals as Gary Hart, Lowell Weicker, and Mario Cuomo. As it was in Hitler's day, the conclusion that is drawn is that liberals are out-of-touch with the common man and therefore their views are wrong. Intellectualism is naive and useless. The reality is that Hitler's oratories, much like current-day talk-radio, provided an outlet for those that didn't trust mainstream news. Reality can be scary for a lot of people, and when people decide to run away from it, they tend to run towards a more nationalist position. Liberal talk radio may thrive in the years to come, but it will only happen if liberalism becomes integral to our national identity and many more people start to believe that there's a 'conservative' bias in the media.

PROPAGANDA AND THE FUTURE

"Didn't many circles express the most shameless joy at the misfortune of the fatherland? And who would do such a thing if he does not really deserve such a punishment? Why, didn't they go even further and brag of having finally caused the front to waver? And it was not the enemy that did this - no, no, it was the Germans who poured such disgrace upon their heads!"

- Mein Kampf

Despite being born in Austria, Hitler fought as a German in World War I and always considered himself a German. His personal opinion of that war was that the press and the German government undermined the war effort through negativity and due to lack of propagandizing. The reality, of course, was quite different.

Germany had the most powerful military in the world at the beginning of the war, but due to an optimistic outlook, did not expect to be fighting such a large coalition of countries. They supported Austria's attack on the Serbs, which brought a stronger Russia into the war. Then, they attempted to attack France through Belgium, but encountered much stronger resistance than they expected. The British then entered the war on the side of France and Russia, and Germany's forces would be outnumbered until 1918. At that time, they were able to bring soldiers from the eastern front (which became less of a threat after the revolution in Russia) to the western front to fight the French, British, and now the Americans as well. The allies still wore down the German units that spring and summer, and a nation that had never known military defeat was forced to retreat back to its borders and sign a treaty limiting their future military expenses.

Hitler, as a veteran of the war, was angry about the armistice as it required Germany to forestall any military growth and pay reparations for the damage caused by German forces. And as a person paranoid about foreign influence from even his earlier days meeting Jews and Slavs in Vienna, he saw this as the beginning of the end of the sovereign and racially pure German state. He feared that Communists would take over and make the German worker a 'slave' of the international Jew. His political activity began almost immediately after the war, and by the mid-1920s while in prison for treason, he had written Mein Kampf. The nationalist spirit never died in Germany and through Hitler's speeches and his book, he was able to gain popularity and rise through the German government. He came into power in 1934 and was able to acquire dictatorial power. Within a few years of taking over the German government, Hitler had plans to once again lead Germany to war with its neighbors. He dismissed those within the military that opposed his efforts, and by 1939, the rebuilt German army was allied with Japan and attacking its neighbors again. The Second World War ended with much more death and destruction to Germany than the first one, and it resulted in the deaths of countless civilians, millions of European Jews, and millions of soldiers from both sides.

What does all this mean?

Knowing this history lends a distinct perspective to a reading of Mein Kampf. It's sobering to know that this one man and his ideas led to all of this. We constantly ask ourselves how it all could have happened, how no one stood up and provided a counter-argument to all his nonsense. Only one answer makes sense, apathy. I don't think that those in Germany who were opposed to Hitler thought that his plan would ever get carried out. And by the time they did figure it out, it was too late for many of them to stop it.

After the attacks of 9/11, Ann Coulter stated publicly that "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Nearly three years later, we find ourselves in Iraq, mired in a losing battle between a fledgling new government that can't stop terrorists without us, and former Iraqi soldiers and other able-bodied Iraqi civilians that are getting on-the-job terrorist training every day. We now have to choose between either spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to keep our troops there or pulling them out while the fledgling Iraqi government is still too weak to clamp down on the new terrorists that we've inspired to undertake Jihad. And we will be in this situation for years, not months.

Originally, this was not supposed to happen. America has the greatest military on earth, a modern fighting machine with the most high-tech weaponry and the best trained soldiers. As soon as we marched into Baghdad, we would become heroes to the Iraqis, and the silly French and Germans would be begging for a piece of the pie. We will be carting away truckloads of dangerous weapons and busting up hidden nuclear facilities. Iraq will be a democracy in a few months and the nervous dictators in that region will be trembling at the demands for democracy from their people.

It's hard to escape the obvious here. The German outlook at the beginning of World War I was not much different. The Germans were counting on a very quick victory, but eventually found themselves in a long war which drained them financially as well as militarily. Hardly anyone in Germany imagined World War I lasting 4 years. And hardly anyone in America imagined our full 150,000 forces being in Iraq for 2, yet that's now a near certainty, unless we decide to cut and run.

America is a free country, and with that freedom, there comes responsibility. People like Ann Coulter have a right to write their books and express their opinions, and it would be truly un-American to censor her in any way. Yet as Americans, we can't sit idly by when false accusations of treason are made. Apathy is cool in an 'ignorance is bliss' kind of way. But it's also risky. It's important to be aware of opinions we don't agree with, and it's important to be able to take a stand against ignorance and false accusations. The truth of what is happening in Iraq is obvious to most, but don't take that for granted. There are many out there whose mistrust of what they see on the major news outlets outweighs all reason.

What does the future hold? There's no doubt in my mind that Ann Coulter and the right-wing media will still continue to blame weak-kneed 'liberals' like Richard Clarke and Anthony Zinni for destroying the morale of our troops and making Iraq what it is today. I fully expect to continue seeing the 'liberal' press excoriated for only reporting the bad news and never the good news. And should John Kerry become our next president, I expect to see every terrorist attack during his term blamed on him, and not the Iraq War, while 9/11 will still remain entirely Bill Clinton's fault.

"All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be exerted in this direction."

- Mein Kampf

As Hitler knew, propaganda is powerful when kept simple. Nuance is bad for rallying a crowd of supporters. He was in touch with people's nationalist instincts and he knowingly counted on the ignorance of the populace. He was able to convince an entire nation that if those that try diplomacy with other nations are in charge, no one will be safe. As the world found out, it became impossible for intelligent Germans to stop this movement before it went out of control. The only consolation is that now, when people like Ann Coulter claim that America will only be safe when her side of jingoistic crusaders is in charge, we can remind her and her followers at how good a job Hitler did in keeping the 'liberals' in Germany safe with the same ideas.