Worse than who...?

I like to cruise through political opinion sites when I surf the web because I'm a news junkie and I enjoy intelligent political debate. Sadly that's rather lacking on the web these days. The other day one such opinion spewer tossed in the line "George W. Bush is worse than Hitler."

I think that illustrates not only the inflammatory rhetoric of the American Left, but also a total and complete ignorance of the realities of world history. Adolf Hitler ordered the murders of 20,000,000+ people. Most of those people died solely on the basis of their religious or political beliefs.

Josef Stalin's reign of terror over the old Soviet Union killed over 40,000,000+ people. And they're still counting how many poor people were slaughtered during the reigns of China's Mao Zedong and his ideological successors. Let's not forget the ongoing occupation of Tibet.

So, how bad is old Dubya compared to these people? Well, let's make a list of what it takes to be worse than Hitler and see how he adds up.

1. Number of forced labour camps started by George W. Bush= 0
2. Number of Americans executed for their religious & political beliefs= 0
3. Territories forcibly annexed into USA & populations enslaved= 0
4. Number of protestors shot & killed at Republican Convention= 0
5. Number of people gassed to death on the orders of the President= 0

I think I made my point. Comparing a wartime President with a war-starting lunatic does nothing but belittle your arguments and trivialises the atrocities of one the worst criminals of the 20th Century.

I like to think of myself as a political centrist. I don't subscribe to any set ideology, but I'm frightened by the turn the American Left is taking. The Left used to be the voice of progressive thinking. Now it's become the main apologist for people who would gladly cut their throats and sell DVDs of their horrible deaths on the streets of the Middle East.

As much as the Political Right has based itself on an ideal and idyllic past that never really existed, the Political Left has based its beliefs on certain key myths, they are:

• All the problems of the world are the fault of Western Liberal Democracies (WLDs). Which is ironic, because WLDs are the only places where these people can express their views without fear of being shot, or burned alive.
• All leaders of WLDs are warmongers. Now this is fascinating. You'd be hard pressed to find any historical precedent for a WLD in the past century that started a war without some sort of provocation. And France and Vietnam doesn't count, because France at the time wasn't really a liberal democracy, it was failed empire trying to reclaim lost glory after being shamed by Hitler's fascist dictatorship.
• If it's a populist movement among poor people, than it must be better than a WLD. Not exactly. Populist movements among the world's poor has produced men like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ceaucescu, Castro, Papa Doc Duvalier, Milosevic, and Ho Chi Minh. WLDs aren't perfect, and even less so when it comes to the treatment of the poor. Yet their treatment in a WLD is still light years ahead of the glorious 'worker's paradises' started by the men I just listed. The whole point of a WLD is that it has checks and balances on who holds power and for how long via constitutional governance. Also, a WLD can evolve and change to make life better for its people. Global Jihad, the current poster-child of the left, is about creating a quasi-feudal theocracy where women are property, tolerance is non-existent and the rule of law depends on the whim of a handful of zealots. I can't bring myself to think that's somehow a better way to live, even if the alternative is a Republican.
• You can appease a dictator into changing his ways by giving him whatever he wants. Sorry, the more you try to appease a dictator, the more he wants, it's basic human mathematics. It failed with Hitler, it failed with Stalin, and it going to fail with Kim Jong Il and the Ayatollahs of Iran.
• Terrorism is justified by past abuses people have suffered. I'm sorry, but nothing justifies crashing airplanes into office towers, or machine gunning schoolchildren. Gandhi didn't do anything like that, and he liberated hundreds of millions of people. If the poor Palestinians had a Gandhi instead of an Arafat they'd be running their own country, or living in peace side by side with the Israelis. Not living in squalid poverty while their 'Glorious Leader' makes millions selling concrete that's supposed to be used to build Palestinian housing to the Israelis so they can build their 'security wall.'

I hope the Political Left gets off this crazy downward spiral and realise that they've got a good thing going in the old WLDs. Sure, they're not perfect, but it's the job of the Left to come up with new ideas to improve them, not embrace those who seek to destroy them and plunge the world into a dark age.