4. saddam as hitler - hoover institution...hoover classics : berman hcberman ch4 mp_97 rev0 page 97...

Hoover Classics : Berman hcberman ch4 Mp_97 rev0 page 97

4. Saddam as Hitler

anti-americanism has multiple dimensions. After ex-amining the German data in chapter 1, in chapter 2 weexplored several cultural and historical variants of anti-Americanism: first, an antimodern, predemocratic tra-dition; second, the legacy of communist ideology; andthird, a contemporary, postdemocratic hostility to na-tional sovereignty as such. Each version pushes anti-Americanism in a different direction. Chapter 3 lookedat the tension between fantasy and reality in anti-Amer-icanism, its ideological standing, and the role that anti-Americanism plays in the definition of an emergingidentity for unified Europe. It is, however, obvious thatcurrent anti-Americanism has erupted in relation to thetwo Iraq wars. Although the various discourses of anti-Americanism refer to many issues, both political andcultural, it was clearly the confrontation between Wash-ington and Baghdad that fueled the anger of the Euro-pean street. Anti-Americans denounce the United Stateslargely because it deposed Saddam Hussein.

The first Iraq war was fought to end the Iraqi oc-cupation of Kuwait. The second Iraq war was fought toend the Iraqi regime. Both wars, however, were foughtin terms of a metaphor: Saddam as Hitler. As this chap-


98 Anti-Americanism in Europe

ter will show, the terms of the metaphor shifted overtime. At first the analogy had the narrow meaning ofpointing out the unprovoked annexation of foreign ter-ritory: just as Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia, Sad-dam had swallowed Kuwait, both transgressions againstinternationally recognized borders. Quickly, however,even during the first Iraq war, the metaphor came tosignify the brutality of the Iraqi regime or, rather, thebrutality of the Iraqi regime in its occupation of Kuwait.During the second Gulf war, the use of the metaphorbecame more emphatic: the brutality of the Iraqi regimeto the Iraqi population itself and, especially, to ethnicminorities (e.g., the Kurds, the treatment of whom dis-played a genocidal character). Moreover, the nature ofthe international threat posed by Iraq changed. Ratherthan being viewed as a local bully endangering its neigh-bors, Iraq came to be understood as the carrier of weap-ons of mass destruction, representing a much graverdanger to countries much further away. On the onehand, the global threat associated with Iraq echoes theclassical totalitarian aspiration to world domination; onthe other, it is the function of a changed security per-ception after September 11.

The question of Iraq is central to the understandingof current anti-Americanism for two different reasons.As noted, the Iraq wars are the primary casus belli ofthe anti-Americans against the foreign policy of theUnited States. On a deeper level, however, the meta-phor of Saddam as Hitler can lead us to a better un-derstanding of what is at stake. For large parts of theAmerican public, a war against totalitarianism remains


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just and worthwhile. For large parts of the public inEurope—the continent that incubated the two totalitar-ianisms that dominated the last century—a preferencefor appeasement prevails, and this difference turns intoanti-Americanism.

However, the willingness to accommodate repre-hensible regimes is not only a European phenomenon,and clearly significant parts of the American public wereopposed to the war. It is as if the judgment on totalitar-ianism had somehow softened since the collapse ofCommunism: not that one can find many defenders ofthe great dictators of the past but simply that the con-demnation of Nazism and Communism no longer con-vincingly provides the orientation for the moral compassof many. So it is not surprising that George W. Bush’scharacterization of the Ba’ath regime as “evil” could beviewed as simplistic by a contemporary sensibility reluc-tant to distinguish between right and wrong, especiallyin Europe. It is not that anyone mounted much of apositive defense of Saddam Hussein’s regime, but therewas clearly reluctance to challenge it: Would it not bemore comfortable just to ignore brutal regimes? Not eve-ryone supported a war against Hitler, so it is not sur-prising to find an appeasement camp with regard to themetaphoric Hitler.

The Iraq wars posed the question of totalitarianism,both in terms of the metaphor of Saddam as Hitler andin terms of the real character of the regime, as will bediscussed in this chapter. However, the wars also re-vealed the complex relationship of outsiders, so-calledworld opinion, to totalitarian regimes: though some wit-



nesses can muster the resolve to confront evil, there isalways a large appeasement camp with a strong desireto ignore, minimize, or even accommodate Hitler, Sad-dam, and their ilk. Therefore the historical question oftotalitarianism is inextricably related to the contempo-rary question of moral judgment. Examining the meta-phor of Saddam as Hitler allows us to reexamine thejudgment on totalitarianism and thereby explore impor-tant inclinations in contemporary political culture. Ger-mans born after 1945 sometimes asked their parentswhat they had done under the Nazi regime. Why hadthey failed to resist? History will eventually pose thesame question to those who would have preferred toprotect Saddam’s regime from change.

the german lesson

Weimar Germany has long stood as the prime exampleof a democracy that failed and turned into the cradle oftotalitarianism. This teleology from Weimar to Hitleranticipated the many failed democracies of the twenti-eth century, and it stands as a cautionary note for cur-rent and future democratization prospects. Today wecontinue to ponder Weimar culture to understand thevulnerability of democracy and the potential for totali-tarian outcomes. Nazi Germany casts multiple shadowson the mass-murderous landscape of the twentieth cen-tury, and Weimar remains pertinent as long as mass de-struction haunts the modern world.

Yet the paradigmatic significance of the failure ofWeimar and the establishment of Nazi Germany is fre-


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quently obscured or distorted by certain misconceptions,which deserve interrogation. First, it is an illusion tobelieve that there is an intellectually viable strategy toidentify this Nazi modernity as distinctively belongingto a “right,” and therefore different from a “left,” mo-dernity in a substantive way that is more than merelyabout the externals of party affiliation. There were leftand right strands within National Socialism itself, andin any case what made the regime so central to thetwentieth century was its totalitarian and genocidal char-acter, which exploded the left-right mold.

Second, it is equally misguided to approach theNazi regime primarily as a cultural (and especially asan aesthetic-cultural) phenomenon, associated with theestablishment of something reasonably described as cul-tural hegemony. This cultural approach explicitly avoidspolitics as well as the degradation of politics into coer-cion and violence. Moreover the solely cultural ap-proach to totalitarianism quickly runs into the tempta-tions of cultural relativism, as if the Nazi worldview werejust one possible choice among many, and therefore notsubject to condemnation.

Finally, perhaps because of the growing distancefrom 1945, an underlying historicist tone has emergedthat suggests that the Nazi era belongs to a completedpast, a period in some once-upon-a-time epoch that haslittle to do with our contemporary condition. In thiscase, it would follow that the experience of that era haslittle pertinence to our thinking and institutions and thatthe totalitarian and mass-destructive potential played out



in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s has no lessons forour contemporary predicament.

These three predispositions—accepting the concep-tual viability and relevance of the left-right distinction,particularly regarding the emergence of the Nazi re-gime; the privileging of a cultural explanation and theattendant cultural relativism; and the historicizing dis-tance indicating a diminished urgency to the questionof totalitarianism—exemplify intellectual failings in theage of a relativist sensibility. To cut through some ofthese current misconceptions and recapture the stand-ing of Hitler’s Germany for political theory, it is pro-ductive to dwell on the current political metaphor, Sad-dam as Hitler, which can help us ferret out issues in thenexus of totalitarian regimes, political violence, andmass culture. Comparing Nazi Germany and Ba’athistIraq, we can try to refocus the question of totalitarianismand its implication for political culture. In particular,this comparison can help clarify the three problemsmentioned above and address certain lacunae in con-temporary discussions of both regimes.

Regarding the left-right distinction: it makes littlesense to claim that Nazi Germany was somehow of a“right” and that Stalinist Russia was then of a “left.”Perhaps this distinction holds in the nuances of theirrespective discourses, but the overwhelming feature oftotalitarianism, the destructive power of the unlimitedstate—the diametrical opposite of any ethos of limitedgovernment—outweighs those distinctions in style, andin any case, that destructiveness was not the function ofbeing “right” or “left.” As long as we pretend that Na-


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tional Socialism was of the right, then the parallel be-tween the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin is missed,and the history lesson of the twentieth century just be-comes political bias. Saddam’s Iraq is a case in point forthe obsolescence of the political designations of left andright; to paraphrase a familiar slogan, it was neither leftnor right but just terrible. It derived directly both fromHitler and Stalin in specific intellectual, political, andsymbolic terms. Like both, it involved a regime in whichthe personality of the leader was central and stood in adialectical relationship to a manipulative ideology of themass: in the totalitarian world, the call for “mass cul-tures” implied the empowerment of great dictators.

The case of Iraq also calls into question culturalapproaches to the Nazi regime, which naturally ascribea central analytic standing to “Nazi culture.” Was thecontemporary credibility of the totalitarian regime gen-uinely a matter of a cultural consensus achieved throughthe successful dissemination of a plausible belief struc-ture? Shall we really believe that the Nazi film and prop-aganda apparatus successfully convinced the Germanpublic that all was right with their world? No totalitarianregime has really been a cultural success in this sense.The alternative explanation, suggested by the case ofIraq, is the hypothesis of a “Republic of Fear,” to useexile dissident writer Kanan Makiya’s term: a regime inwhich violence, threats of violence, and enforced com-plicity in violence are overwhelming and form the basisfor the stability of the state. This is not a cultural nor-malcy but a reign of terror. Following this line ofthought with regard to Nazi Germany, one can inquire



into the character of the totalitarian state as a regime ofterror and angst, rather than as a merely distinctive cul-tural style.

Finally, if Saddam was like Hitler (and obviouslythe point is not the assertion of absolute identity but achallenge to consider similarities), then to what extentis the outside world’s response to Saddam like the earlierresponse to Hitler? It is here that the discussion of Sad-dam as Hitler overlaps with the question of anti-Amer-icanism. The point is not only to consider the inten-tional political allegory—we fought Hitler therefore wemust fight Saddam—but to remember how great thereluctance to fight Hitler was. That historical appease-ment mentality can help us understand the contempo-rary reluctance to confront Saddam. The internationalresponse to Hitler did not, after all, start in Normandy.There were long years of denial and deferral. Observersinside Germany and abroad minimized Hitler’s impor-tance in Weimar, and even after the Nazi accession topower in 1933, there was extensive acceptance, appease-ment, and tolerance. Calls for “regime change” werenot common.

Most egregious of course was the deep resistance in“world opinion” to believing the accounts of mass mur-der. A feature of modern world opinion is precisely thispreference to avoid facing violence, as well as the fas-cination with authoritarian leaders (consider the popu-larity of dictators such as Stalin, Castro, and Mao inwhat are otherwise Western democracies). The meta-phor of Saddam and Hitler is therefore also an oppor-tunity to think through the psychology of this response


105Saddam as Hitler

to totalitarian leaders and the states they command.Why is it easier to talk about instruments of violence,the weapons of mass destruction, than to recognize vic-tims of violence? For parts of the public, the presenceof weapons of mass destruction was unquestionablymore relevant than mass graves: a strange moral order,indeed.

Part of this dynamic has to do with the perverseconsequence of a defining feature of enlightened mo-dernity, tolerance, which is strangely taken to apply tocriminal dictators too. Respect for the sovereignty ofstates—and their sovereigns—ranks well above any con-sideration of the well-being of citizens. Hence also cul-tural relativism, which quickly defends a reign of terroras just another way of life, for which we should showtolerance. The prewar political debate is a case in point,with the extensive resistance, even among otherwise hu-man rights—oriented liberals, to discussions of regimechange. This stance suggests the defense of sovereigntyas such, no matter what the character of the regime,and therefore an inability to declare any regime unac-ceptable, which implies in turn the obligatory accep-tance of any regime, no matter how bad. It follows thatdiscussions of the domestic violence within another stateare regarded with apprehension and mistrust, no matterhow great the human suffering. Here the Saddam-as-Hitler metaphor takes another turn: the historical dis-counting of the reports of Nazi death camps representedthe same mentality as the willingness to diminish thesignificance of Saddam’s campaign against the Kurds.World opinion prefers to overlook genocide. Anti-Amer-



icanism results because the United States challengedthis moral lethargy.

the metaphor

In American political discourse, the metaphor of Sad-dam as Hitler dates from the period following the Iraqiinvasion of Kuwait and referred at first solely to the phe-nomenon of international aggression. Thus George H.W. Bush said in his August 8, 1990, address announcingthe deployment of U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia: “But ifhistory teaches us anything, it is that we must resist ag-gression or it will destroy our freedoms. Appeasementdoes not work. As was the case in the 1930s, we see inSaddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening hisneighbors.”1 In the same vein, one week later, on August15, Bush spoke at the Department of Defense: “A halfa century ago our nation and the world paid dearly forappeasing an aggressor who should and could have beenstopped.”2 It was not difficult for the press to take thenext step, name the dictator of the 1930s, and developan analogy between Saddam and Hitler; but for officialdiscourse the matter involved only the fact of aggressionand its corollary, the historical lesson on the importanceof refraining from policies of appeasement.

Two months later, however, the presidential ac-

1. George H. W. Bush, “Address to the Nation Announcing theDeployment of United States Armed Forces to Saudi Arabia,” August 8,1990, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu.

2. George H. W. Bush, “Remarks to Department of Defense Em-ployees,” August 15, 1990, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu.


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count of his adversary changed significantly. In place ofthe fact of Iraqi aggression, the focus shifted to the Iraqileader, now associated with negative attributes extendingbeyond the war of aggression. Perhaps this heightenedrhetoric can be attributed to the more sensational im-agery used by the press, with which the president or hisspeech writers had to compete; alternatively, the rhetor-ical shift may reflect the fall election campaign and thepolitical need to amplify public interest through morepronounced statements. Surely part of the change, how-ever, must be explained realistically by the continuingbrutality of the Iraqi occupation and the only gradualrecognition of this violence by the outside world: it wasno longer “just” a matter of the annexation of Kuwaitby an occupying army but of a reign of terror as well,which then compounded the significance of the Hitlercomparison. Thus in remarks at a fundraising luncheonfor the gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams inDallas on October 15, 1990, Bush asserted: “Hitler re-visited. But remember, when Hitler’s war ended, therewere the Nuremberg trials.” The evil of the adversarygoes hand in hand with the expectation of a conclusiveact of justice.

To substantiate the need for a trial, however, Bushwent into detail at a Republican campaign rally in Man-chester, New Hampshire, on October 23, 1990:

I am reading this great history of World War II. AndI read the other night just about how Hitler, un-challenged—the U.S. locked in its isolation in thosedays, the late thirties—marched into Poland. Behind



him—some of you will remember this—came theDeath’s Head regiments of the SS. Their role was togo in and disassemble the country. Just as it hap-pened in the past, the other day in Kuwait, twoyoung kids were passing out leaflets in opposition.They were taken, their families made to watch, andthey were shot to death—15- and 16-year-old. . . .We’re dealing with Hitler revisited, a totalitarianismand a brutality that is naked and unprecedented inmodern times. And that must not stand.”3

Although the Hitler metaphor was used in an effortto galvanize public opinion, its development over a two-month period highlights the complex range of distinctissues at stake: aggression, appeasement, violence againstcivilians, totalitarianism, and, in particular, the person-alization of the struggle with an eye to war crimes trials.The latter point has to be seen not only as the rhetoricof the moment but as part of the tradition, perhaps dis-tinctively American, of focusing on the personal respon-sibility of the adversary leader: Wilson’s insistence onthe Kaiser’s culpability in the First World War, for ex-ample, as well as the criminalization of enemy leader-ship after the Second World War, both in Germany andin Japan.4 More complexly and critically, one can sug-

3. George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at a Republican Campaign Rallyin Manchester, New Hampshire,” October 23, 1990, http://bushli-brary.tamu.edu.

4. Cf. Daniel Moran, “Restraints on Violence and the Reconstruc-tion of International Order after 1945,” in War and Terror, ed. FrankTrommler and Michael Geyer, Vol. 14 (Washington: American Institutefor Contemporary German Studies Humanities Series, forthcoming).


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gest that the focus on the person of Saddam, this indi-vidualization of history, derives from multiple sources:an individualist ethos that looks for someone to blameas well as a mass-cultural propensity to simplify complexmatters in terms of individual celebrities—that is, Sad-dam as Hitler, both as stars. Still, the focus on the in-dividual, Saddam, was not only a rhetorical effect,driven by the dynamic of political discourse; it has tobe seen primarily as a description of the priority of thesingular personality, the political leader, in the totalitar-ian state.

Before turning to the implications of this personal-ization process, it is worth noting precisely what did notshow up in the public discourse, in the press, or in pres-idential addresses regarding the similarities betweenSaddam and Hitler: multifold real historical ties be-tween National Socialism and the Ba’athist regime inIraq, which had turned into Saddam’s personal rule. AnIraqi-inflected pan-Arabism began to develop soon afterthe end of the British mandate in 1932 and became thetarget of Nazi foreign policy, given Germany’s strategicaspirations in Central Asia: the Nazi youth leader Baldurvon Schirach visited Baghdad in 1937, and the Futu-waa, a youth league modeled on the Hitlerjugend, wassoon established. Nazi Germany (with Italy and, ofcourse, the Soviet Union of the Hitler-Stalin Pact era)supported the al-Rashid coup of 1941, including the“Farhud,” a pogrom against Baghdad’s large Jewish pop-ulation.5 The coup was quickly suppressed, but it even-

5. Majid Khadduri, Independent: A Study in Iraqi Politics (London:Oxford University Press, 1960), 172–73.



tually became a mythic point of reference for the later-established Ba’ath Party, which celebrated the coup as“the first revolution for Arab liberation.”6

We know that a key Ba’athist ideologue, Michel Af-laq, expressed admiration for Hitler, as did Saddam, andthe Ba’athist pursuit of power has elicited comparisonsto Germany; thus Nicholas Natteau wrote; “The streettactics of the Ba’ath against the ICP [Iraqi CommunistParty] or suspected ICP sympathizers resembled thoseof Hitler’s S.A. storm troopers during the street battlesof the late 1920s in Weimar Germany.”7 This all sug-gests, however, that the Saddam-Hitler metaphor thatemerged in response to the occupation of Kuwait in1990 touched, if only accidentally, on a longer andmore complex genealogical entwinement. The proxim-ity of Saddam and Hitler implied by the metaphor is,therefore, not just an abstract comparison of distinctunits but is grounded in the real history of Ba’ath ide-ology, Iraqi politics, and Saddam’s personal admirationfor Hitler as well as Stalin.8 It is not just a matter of

6. Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear (Los Angeles: University of Cal-ifornia Press, 1998), 151.

7. Nicholas Natteau, Saddam over Iraq—How Much Longer? AStudy of the Ba’thist Destruction of Iraqi Civil Society and the Prospectsfor Its Rebirth (master’s thesis, Boston University, 1997), www.joric.com/Saddam/Saddam.htm.

8. “The lessons of 1963 had taught him that destroying civil societywas not enough to ensure the IBP’s [Iraqi Ba’th Party’s] stay in power.Like Hitler, he now understood that this goal would require Ba’thizingnot just the government, but the state, the military, and ultimately everynook and cranny of society. With this goal in mind, he was particularly


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comparing Saddam to Hitler for contemporary politicalreasons; there are also direct and multifaceted ideolog-ical connections.

the leader

Where culture mobilizes the masses, they are probablyfollowing leaders. Totalitarian systems depend on thepairing of masses and leaders. Mass culture implies, inone variant or another, a cult of personality. Occasion-ally there are exceptions, when the utopias of free andleaderless masses circulate: for example, in the thoughtof Rosa Luxemburg, of the left-Communists whomLenin famously denounced, or of some anarchists withtheir cult of spontaneity. But these utopian movementsare typically contained and suppressed by more organi-zationally efficient institutions, and the masses are even-tually subordinated to a party and a leader. Both in Ger-many and Iraq, the party overtook the people, and theleader came to eclipse the party.

attracted to the organizational methods used by Hitler to Nazify Germany.He understood that to ensure the party’s complete domination over Iraq,society had to be regimented into the new Ba’thist order. According toone British journalist who visited Iraq in 1975, a government translatorconfided to him that Saddam Hussein’s half-brother-in-law and head ofintelligence, Barzan al-Tikriti, had asked him to procure books on NaziGermany: ‘He believed that Saddam himself was interested in this sub-ject, not for any reason to do with racism or anti-semitism, . . . but as anexample of the successful organization of an entire society by the statefor the achievement of national goals.’” Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi,Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (New York, Toronto: The FreePress, 1991), 89. Cited by Natteau, Saddam over Iraq.



The hypertrophic leader transforms the standing ofthe “mass,” a term that ceased to serve as a designationof the somehow really existing people and became in-stead a politically charged category used to dominateand control. Thus Aflaq’s 1979 celebration that “the roleof the masses in the world has come of age”9 was notabout authentic popular culture: it meant instead thatthe Iraqi population had been redefined as a compliantmass: the mass was represented by the party, and theparty was Saddam. In particular, Aflaq’s assertion an-nounced that the political adversary, the Iraqi Com-munist Party, had been definitively defeated and with itthe category of class: the age of class struggle gave wayto the age of the Arab mass. Yet Aflaq’s announcementalso pointed to the criminalization of any dissident orotherwise nonconformist individuality, incompatiblewith the embracing and homogenizing category of mass.To be individual would mean betraying the masses. Thisoutcome is consistent with the founding constitution ofthe Ba’ath party and its assertion that “all existing dif-ferences between the members of the nation are super-ficial and false, and will be dissipated within the anat-omy of the Arab soul.”10 Individuality and differencewere proscribed. Pan-Arabism, at least in the version Af-laq bequeathed to Iraqi Ba’athism, was not only abouta transnational solidarity, vaguely comparable to pan-Germanism (subtly shifting politics away from citizen-ship in a nation-state to race, a pseudobiological cate-

9. Makiya, Republic of Fear, 243.10. Ibid., 197.


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gory at odds with the notions of citizenship) but alsoabout the submission of the individual to the mass. Pan-Arabism is ultimately one with the enforced collectivismof Nazism as well as the left-modernist fascination withliquidating individualism. Twentieth-century politicizedmass culture, in its several inflections, on the Right andon the Left, implies, tragically, a deep hostility to indi-vidual subjectivity and privacy. The echoes of this an-tisubjectivism reverberate through contemporary cul-tural theory (especially in the shadow ofpoststructuralism), which may explain the scholarly re-luctance to address critically the illiberal regimes of to-talitarian mass modernity.

The metaphor of Saddam and Hitler reappears how-ever in a very different context, when Iraqi exile writerand dissident Kanan Makiya explores the character ofBa’athist politics by way of Hannah Arendt’s study oftotalitarianism, in particular with regard to the relation-ship of the masses to the leader in regimes of mendacity.Thus the Saddam-as-Hitler metaphor is not merely anartifact of George H. W. Bush’s war rhetoric; it alsoserves the democratic Iraqi opposition in its efforts tomake sense of the Ba’ath catastrophe. Makiya’s interpre-tation of Iraq is refracted through Arendt’s understand-ing of Nazi Germany. In both Nazi Germany and Sad-dam’s Iraq, “truth” is whatever the leader says, no matterhow absurd or implausible and, in fact, no matter howinconsistent or incompatible even with the leader’s ownearlier pronouncements. Thus Makiya, who is thinkingabout Iraq, cites Arendt, who is commenting on Hitlerand Stalin: “The totalitarian mass leaders based their



propaganda on the correct psychological assumptionthat . . . one could make people believe the most fan-tastic statements one day, and trust that if the next daythey were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, theywould take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting theleaders who had lied to them, they would protest thatthey had known all along that the statement was a lieand would admire the leaders for their superior tacticalcleverness.”11

Makiya’s point involves the character of the loyaltythat the masses bring to the regime. It is not a matterof a consensus (i.e., the shared belief of a convincedpublic). It is not that the public somehow accepts thepropagandistic disinformation as representing a substan-tive truth about which it might develop an informedopinion. Nor does the public succumb to an imaginablyeffective cultural-industrial manipulation or some re-structured hegemony. All of these cultural-theoreticalmodels fail. Instead, Makiya claims that Iraqis largelyrecognize the falsehoods as false, which instead of elic-iting outrage leads to cynicism and even admiration forthe ability of the leader to change positions. Indeed itis not even a matter of treating the statements of theregime as true—the expectation of a truthful govern-ment is simply not a given—but only as performance,and it is through performance, always more powerfulthan truth or rules, that Saddam acts out his predomi-nance: “. . . the Leader’s omnipotence is acted out dra-matically, as though performed on a stage. Favors are

11. Ibid., 115.


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bestowed on people in such a way as to break the veryrules the Leader’s state enforces . . . ; his freedom to act,even to break his own rules, is intentionally pittedagainst everyone else’s profound unfreedom. The effect,however, is not to highlight the latter, but to confoundit with the former.”12 In a context of universal falsehood,Iraqi society does not find sustenance in a successfullyconvincing propaganda apparatus, some “mass culture”that elicits support and authentic trust, but rather in theimage of the great leader. Hero worship—that is, theworship of one hero—is central to the regime, whichauthorizes no room for disagreement or dissent. In otherwords, at stake is not an ideology of heroism that mightbe taken to call on all individuals to excel and to actheroically but rather a constant entwinement of the ab-jection of each individual, facing constant admonitionsto abjure all particularity, and the focus on the oneleader who is the collectivized nation. Saddam was Iraqin the sense of the Nazi slogan Deutschland ist Hitler.

It is worth observing Makiya follow Arendt in onefurther step, as he highlights the freedom that was absentin Saddam’s Iraq. Freedom—in the Ba’athist tradition—is only the freedom of the nation as a whole, (i.e., a sortof decolonization as collectivism, and this is then trans-ferred onto the political leader). There is no claim ofindividual freedom. Yet, Makiya poignantly develops analternative position: “The notion of freedom as a polit-ical condition that only exists because of the capacity ofhuman beings to be different, to be in a minority, and

12. Ibid., 116.



not have to think the same deathly ‘free’ thoughts.” Thisversion of freedom, he continues, “is absent in Iraqi so-ciety. When it arose in the modern era, it was snuffedout, first by the growing ideological hegemony of pan-Arabism and later by the social organization of the sec-ond Ba’athist regime [i.e., post-1968]. The absence notonly of freedom but also of the very idea of this kind offreedom makes Saddam Husain’s role-playing so effec-tive.”13

Makiya’s claim regarding the political freedom inthe human condition translates Arendt’s political theoryinto Iraq. The definition of freedom in terms of a hu-man condition obviously stands at odds with current ac-ademic dogma regarding essentialism and humanism;eventually the political implications of this intellectualbaggage may become clear. In the context of this chap-ter, however, and the examination of the cross-nationalmetaphor, what resonates is the suggestion of an under-developed liberal tradition—a standard piece of thinkingabout historical German political culture—but also anostalgia for a lost opportunity. Makiya suggests that be-tween the establishment of a parliamentary monarchyin 1932 and the seizure of power by the Ba’ath Party in1968, liberalizing possibilities in Iraq did in fact exist.The Ba’ath, who suppressed that tradition of freedom,look back at the earlier era with disdain, celebrating onlythe Nazi-supported 1941 coup. This historical vision ofthe dictatorial party is analogous to the Nazi memory of

13. Ibid., 116. Makiya consistently spells the name of the Iraqi dic-tator in this manner.


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the Wilhelmine era and the Weimar “system,” both vil-ified as too liberal and too free.

the leader as artist

Makiya’s underscoring of Saddam’s performance—hisdrama and his role-playing—points to the prominenceof the leader as individual and as artist within the total-itarian system. Similarly, the German author ThomasMann once drew attention to aspects of Hitler’s perfor-mance and its proximity to aspects of the artist.14 Sad-dam and Hitler as artists? One might compare Hitler’searly interest in painting with Saddam’s strange obses-sion with architecture.15 Yet the point here is not theartistic production as such but rather the performanceof the political leader as itself the act of art. The greatleader of the masses stages himself as an artistic genius,precisely as part of his political presence. Facing thedegraded masses, the leader stands out and above themas a unique individual, the creative genius: the artist.Saddam and Hitler both projected themselves to thepublic as absolute and overriding, as two examples canamply demonstrate.

While Hitler denigrates the conformist masses,whom he regards as susceptible to propaganda, he her-oizes great individuals, to whom he attributes the artistic

14. Thomas Mann, “Bruder Hitler” (1938), in Essays, Vol. 4, Ach-tung, Europa! 1933–1938 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1995), 305–12.

15. Cf. Said K. Aburish, Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge(London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 265–66.



qualities of freedom and creativity. Everyone else con-forms and obeys, but the totalitarian leader as artist canbreak all the rules (as in Makiya’s description of Sad-dam) while he asserts his particular individuality againstthe world. Thus Hitler writes in Ralph Manheim’s trans-lation of Mein Kampf: “Personality cannot be replaced;especially when it embodies not the mechanical but thecultural and creative element. No more than a famousmaster can be replaced and another take over the com-pletion of the half-finished painting he has left behindcan the great poet and thinker, the great statesman andthe great soldier, be replaced. For their activity lies al-ways in the province of art. It is not mechanicallytrained, but inborn by God’s grace.”16 Different legaciescompete within those lines: the opposition of the me-chanical and the cultural, the cult of great masters, thepriority of the aesthetic—all of these might be taken asaspects of the shattered cultural tradition of the edu-cated middle class, the Bildungsbürgertum. Yet it is Hit-ler’s insistence on irreplaceability, a resistance toexchange, that links his discourse to aspects of the aes-thetic tradition: like the work of art and the artist, thepolitician too is absolutely original and fully unique.Where this claim becomes distinctively Hitler’s, how-ever, and where it stands absolutely at odds with Ma-kiya’s Arendtian appeal to difference in the human con-dition, is that—for Hitler—this uniqueness is theprovince of only a few, the great, the masters.

16. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (London:Hutchinson, 1969), 320.


119Saddam as Hitler

The paragraphs that follow plunge, characteristi-cally, into Hitler’s antisemitism. The virtue of irreplace-ability does not apply to everyone. Yet Hitler does notexclude Jews alone. On the contrary, he claims thatmost of humanity is barred from the realm of theunique. Being genuinely individual is not part of thegeneral human condition. Uniqueness is, on the con-trary, the exclusive privilege of the few. Meanwhile, themany, the perpetually replaceable masses, depend on afew leaders, who are alone distinct. Thus Hitler contin-ues: “The greatest revolutionary changes and achieve-ments of this earth, its greatest cultural accomplish-ments, the immortal deeds in the field of statesmanship,etc., are forever inseparably bound up with a name andare represented by it. To renounce doing homage to agreat spirit means the loss of an immense strength whichemanates from the names of all great men andwomen.”17 Hence a vision in which the few great cre-ators tower over the conformist mass and demonstratetheir greatness through a distinctiveness that is—regard-less of explicit field of activity—fundamentally artistic.

This priority of leadership in the context of masssociety explains a characteristic aspect of Mein Kampf,the strange interspersion of autobiography in the politi-cal program. Individual personality—Hitler’s memoirwriting—pervades the political polemic throughout thebook. Indeed this is the program announced in the pref-ace to Mein Kampf, where Hitler states that the volumeis intended not only to describe “the aims of our move-

17. Ibid.



ment” and its development but also “to give an accountof my own development.”18 There is, however, a strangeambivalence about the project. Hitler concludes thepreface, to be sure, with a monumentalizing gesture:“for a doctrine to be disseminated uniformly and co-herently, its basic elements must be set down for alltime. To this end I wish to contribute these two volumesas foundation stones in our common edifice.” Writing,he suggests, may guarantee eternal permanence and pre-clude interpretive variance, despite the dissemination ofthe message. Hence, the reassuring conclusion of thepreface: he is putting his message in stone to guaranteeits immutability. Yet this follows immediately on the un-intentional expression of an underlying doubt about thebook: “I know that men are won over less by the writtenthan by the spoken word, that every great movement onthis earth owes its growth to great orators and not togreat writers.” Hitler the orator seems to doubt Hitlerthe writer. Or is it the pervasive suspicion of writing,literature, and the press that leads Hitler to this paeanto orality? The heavy edifice he constructs in MeinKampf recalls the Landsberg prison in which he wrotethe book, but the closing of the preface also takes on anepitaphic character: a conclusiveness, an end, whichwould only be mitigated by live oration.

The preface to Mein Kampf sheds light on the cul-tural character of totalitarianism with its tension be-tween between writing and oration and between per-manence and vitality. This conflict is symptomatic of

18. Ibid., xlv.


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the totalitarian condition: the leader is at the center ofthe movement, but the cumbersome apparatus of themovement (the party and its bureaucracy) may come tobe at odds with the principle of leadership, which re-quires the possibility of constant redefinition. The needto write, in order to build an edifice, conflicts with theneed never to be held to one’s word since truth is onlycontingent, whereas writing is permanent. Orality pro-vides a flexibility that literacy, with its inherently criticalpotential, undermines through its durability. As creativeartist, the leader can always say something new, withlittle concern for consistency. It is this absolute elevationof the leader that is symptomatic.

Saddam Hussein imitated this elevation of the to-talitarian leader that had been prefigured by Hitler andStalin. In Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography intrudesinto the political agenda. The Iraqi corollary, with asimilar magnification of the leader, is the infamous Vic-tory Arch in Baghdad. It is a grotesque monument, com-pleted in August 1988 to celebrate the (dubious) victoryover Iran, and unveiled in the midst of the genocidalanfal campaign against the Kurds. Saddam designed themonument himself, intending it as an Iraqi competitorto the Parisian Arc de Triomphe, but Saddam is presentin the monument in a way that goes far beyond hishaving envisioned it. Just as Hitler, the individual, pro-trudes into the Nazi program of Mein Kampf, so toodoes Saddam, the person, dominate the Iraqi nationalmonument.

Makiya describes the monument as follows: Twosteel forearms “come bursting out of the ground like



bronze tree trunks and rise holding a sixty-six-foot-longsword in each fist. The two swords cross to form theapex of the arch at a point roughly 130 feet above theground. Each forearm and fist, with the steel frame onwhich it is fixed, weighs 40 tons. Each sword, made ofstainless steel, weighs 24 tons. This steel . . . was madeby melting down the actual weapons of Iraqi ‘martyrs.’War debris in the shape of 5,000 real Iranian helmets,taken from the battlefield, are gathered up in two nets(2,500 helmets per net). . . . To look at the helmets inthe knowledge that their scratches, dents, and bulletholes are real, that human heads might well have ex-ploded inside them, is . . . breathtaking.”19 Indeed, it isalmost as breathtaking as the one defining characteristicof the monument, the bizarre fact that the two forearmsare not sculpted objects but castings taken from plastercasts of Saddam’s own arms and then enlarged. In 1991,still compelled to write under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, Makiya pondered this point: why a casting,which preserves all the imperfections, the scars, theveins, and the hair follicles of the forearms, rather thana sculpture that might have idealized the body parts?His answer: “Only casting renders absolute authority(which is singular and abstract, yet experienced in allthe minutiae of daily life in Iraq) visible and corporeal,while retaining the aura of absolute uniqueness, so es-sential to the work of art even in this age of mechanicalreproduction.”20

19. Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, andthe Arab World (New York: Norton, 1994), 209.

20. Samir al-Khalil (Kanan Makiya), The Monument: Art, Vulgarity,


123Saddam as Hitler

The projection of the leader’s irreducible unique-ness into the artistic edifice, in homology to MeinKampf, displays the absolute priority of personal power.It is not some idea or the spirit of the nation that per-vades this war memorial. It is the unquestionable au-thority of the lord and master, the totalitarian leader.The masses are instrumentalized, literally—they aremade identical with their instruments of violence—inthe swords made from the weapons of the Iraqi soldiers,or they are degraded in the display of the Iranian hel-mets (degraded and desecrated: elsewhere Makiya re-ports how the corpses of the victims executed by Sad-dam’s police were denied ritual cleaning, thuspreventing their entry into paradise). The infinite nar-cissism of the leader means that nothing else counts,reality dwindles away, and the world can be annihilated.As different as these two entities are, Mein Kampf andthe Victory Arch, both demonstrate the same imperiousstanding of the leader. In terms of political self-presen-tation, the metaphor—Saddam as Hitler—surely holds.

culture and violence

Saddam and Hitler: it is not difficult to ascribe to eacha cultural penumbra, the writers, artists, and intellectu-als who, sometimes bought, sometimes in voluntary de-lusion, pursued an affiliation with the totalitarian re-gime: Riefenstahl, Speer, Heidegger, Nolde, or the

and Responsibility in Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991),6.



various Arab writers and Western architects who havebenefited from Baghdad’s largesse.21 In this context, onecan cite as well the cultural programs of the regimes,the celebration of particular traditions or the symbol-laden construction projects: Saddam chose to rebuildBabylon. He would often stage himself as the heir toancient civilizations, receiving the law from Hammu-rabi, using bricks, on each of which his name was im-printed: the intrusion of the leader into monumentality,as much an act of possession and naming as Hitler’splacing himself in the center of Mein Kampf.22

Did this sort of culture really matter? It remains anopen question whether this cultural frenzy—writers’congresses, architectural competitions, museum exhibi-tions—played any significant role in generating supportfor the regime, as measured against the primary featureof life in the totalitarian state: fear of violence, includingthe moral degradation associated with complicity in vi-olence. The contempt that the German author ErnstJünger, referring to battlefield experience in the FirstWorld War, could feel toward the aestheticizing worldof bourgeois security can shed light on the tendency totreat the totalitarian regime as an aesthetic style. In Jün-ger’s words: “Our blood is full of passions and feelings,that have no place at tea-time.”23 Or more explicitly

21. Cruelty and Silence provides extensive discussion of how the Iraqiregime bought off Arab intellectuals to silence criticism and gain a publicrelations advantage.

22. Cf. Neil MacFaquhar, “Hussein’s Babylon: A Beloved Atrocity,”New York Times, August 19, 2003, A10.

23. Ernst Jünger, “Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis,” in Sämtliche


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anticultural: “This is not the time to read Werther witha tearful eye.”24 The existential reality of the battlestands at odds with the sentimentalism that Jünger as-sociates with Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Werther.War, so Jünger implies, has no space for culture.

It is a time of violence, not of art. This implies,however, that the culture of the totalitarian regime—if“culture” is the right word at all—is not primarily itsaesthetic works but the ubiquity of violence and fear. Inthis view, the Nazi regime was defined less by its variouspropagandistic art exhibits than by its brutality and mur-der, public and private. This is surely true of Iraq. De-spite the elaboration of a Ba’athist ideology, with influ-ences from Sorel (through Aflaq) and Fichte (throughHusri),25 it is not the credibility of that confused amal-gam of intellectual history that held Saddam’s Iraq to-gether but rather fear. Khidir Hamza, a key defectorfrom the Iraqi nuclear program, writes of viewing a filmof a “party denunciation meeting” in which the mem-bers of the party elite were forced to shoot each other.26

Makiya similarly describes the double strategy of publicand private violence: the public hanging of Jews accusedof espionage in January 1969, at the outset of the re-gime, attended by thousands; and the private torture,

Werke Essays I: Betrachtungen zur Zeit 7.1 (Stuttgart: Klett Verlag, 1980),95.

24. Ibid., 39.25. Cf. Makiya, Republic of Fear, 152.26. Khidir Hamza, Saddam’s Bombmaker: The Terrifying Story of the

Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda (New York: Scribner,2000), 112–15.



that concluded with sealed coffins to keep the bodiesinvisible. “Fear is the cement that holds together thisstrange body politic in Iraq,” writes Makiya: not ideol-ogy, loyalty, or even tradition. “The public is atomizedand broken up, which is why it can be made to believeanything.” Mass society in the totalitarian world is, ineffect, not a mass at all, but the ruins of the former civilsociety and communities. Makiya continues: “A societythat used to revel in politics is not only subdued andsilent, but profoundly transformed. Fear is the agencyof that transformation; the kind of fear that comes notonly from what the neighbors might say, but that makespeople careful of what they say in front of their children.This fear has become a part of the psychological con-stitution of citizenship.”27

It is a terroristic society, and the description holdsas much for Saddam’s Iraq as it did for Hitler’s Ger-many: cultures of fear, rather than art. Terror and theshame of complicity define individual lives. For exam-ple, for those Germans who viewed the boycott of Jewishstores in April 1933, enforced by Nazi paramilitarygangs, fear of facing similar threats and the shame ofhaving stood by passively surely must have left traces thatdetermined their subsequent relationship to the regime:a relationship of degradation and humiliation ratherthan of voluntary participation or ideological consensus.More important than the mobilized culture portrayed inLeni Riefenstahl’s films, the Nazi reign of terror wasdefined by an immobilized conscience.

27. Makiya, Republic of Fear, 275.


127Saddam as Hitler

It is here that the German author Hans MagnusEnzensberger’s February 1991 reflection on Saddamand Hitler (“Hitler’s Successor: Saddam Hussein in theContext of German History”) becomes pertinent. En-zensberger argues that in contrast to the standard dic-tators of the twentieth century, who were eager to enrichthemselves and therefore calculable, Hitler and Saddamrepresent something different, a desire for destruction assuch. Plausible goals or a serious ideology are absent.Rather than personal gain or principled ideals, their ul-timate goal is annihilation, a deep death wish, fromwhich their own people, indeed the leader himself, isnot excepted. In Iraq and Germany, this annihilationistleadership could succeed because of the widespreadfeelings of national humiliation—the defeat in the FirstWorld War, the legacy of colonialism—and these in-stincts were then available for manipulation by the un-limited will to death of the totalitarian political leader.Thus Enzensberger concludes: “The enemy of human-ity can arm himself with the combined death energy ofthe masses, which gives him power bordering on genius:the infallible sense for unconscious stirrings in his fol-lowers. He does not operate with arguments but withemotions that unhinge any form of logic.”28

Enzensberger’s account is at odds with Makiya’s,particularly with regard to the description of the popu-lation: in Makiya’s “republic of fear,” the bulk of thepopulation is terrorized and terrified. In contrast, En-

28. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Hitler’s Successor: Saddam Hus-sein in the Context of German History,” Telos 86 (Winter 1990–91), 156.



zensberger sketches a fanatic and fanatically loyal pop-ulation. The distinction is significant, but in both mod-els the center of social life is destruction: the threat ofdestruction directed by the state toward the popula-tion—as well as toward external enemies—or the self-destructive vengeance attributed to the population inpursuit of a death that it desires. The experience in post-war Iraq confirms both visions. There is evidence thatthe bulk of Iraqis appreciate the end of Saddam’s reignof terror, but there is also a hard core of “dead-enders,”blindly loyal to the leader and indifferent to the prospectof continued hardship for the Iraqi people.

Was there a totalitarian “culture” that was morethan the fear that terrorized and atomized individualsfelt? Enzensberger at least suggests that there was a kindof mobilized culture in the totalitarian state, but it wasa mobilization directed not toward an imaginable vic-tory but only toward devastation. Nazi architecture, un-derstood in this sense, should not be thought of as bestexemplified by the massive megalomania of AlbertSpeer’s building plans but by the real-world leveling ofEuropean cities, the genuine goal of the Nazi imagi-nation. In fact the same implies for the Allied destruc-tion of German cities, an architecture of ruins, which,in Enzensberger’s account, was somehow not the resultof the Nazi military failings but the very goal of theNazis from the start. The Nazis pursued total war as theysang, “until everything falls to pieces.” Their goal wasto transform the Volk ohne Raum—“people withoutspace,” the title of a pro-Nazi novel advocating Germancolonialism—into pure Raum ohne Volk, space without


129Saddam as Hitler

people, where human life has come to an end. It wasAmerican and English bombs that leveled German cit-ies, but that destruction was the result of a death wishdeeply embedded in the Nazi imagination from thestart. Saddam’s murders never numbered as high as themass murder under Hitler or Stalin, but a similar pro-cess pertained: the program for mass destruction was di-rected against his own people as much as against exter-nal enemies.

blissful ignorance and anti-americanism

If the metaphor holds and Saddam is like Hitler, thenhow the world responded to Nazi Germany sheds lighton how it has responded to Iraq. Of course, the analogyis not perfect, and the historical circumstances were dif-ferent, nonetheless there is one striking similarity. Inneither case did the egregious violence of the totalitar-ian regime lead directly to unanimous protests and op-position. On the contrary, in both cases the serious mil-itary engagement—the war against Nazi Germany andthe war against Saddam’s Iraq—took place only afterextensive equivocation and denial. A desire to ignoreviolence prevailed, and that inclination grew stronger,the more terrible the violence. As far as Iraq is con-cerned, the question of compliance with U.N. disar-mament mandates was long given pride of place andwas split—in the interest of respecting state sovereignty,no matter how miserable the character of the state—from questions of the treatment of the domestic popu-lation, about which a grotesque and chilling silence pre-



vailed. Even after the war, the mass graves simply countless than a determination about the weapons of massdestruction. We would rather not hear. The secret ofdomestic violence, in Iraq or elsewhere, is not easilyaddressed; indeed it is preferably ignored.

While the initial German lesson cited by GeorgeH. W. Bush in 1990 was the admonition against ap-peasing an international aggressor, there is surely an-other lesson as well: the urgency to refuse to accept theworld’s predisposition to remain impervious to genocideand terror. What is the iron law that makes world opin-ion—the editorial pages of leading newspapers, the U.N.committees, and the experts of the public sphere—sopredisposed to ignore the news of violence, and are wecondemned to obey this law? Surely the victims of vio-lence want their story to be heard. For example, Makiyaconcludes an interview with Taimour, a young Kurdwho, as a twelve-year-old, witnessed the mass destructionof his village and the killing of his family:

“If you could choose, what would you want todo in your life now?

I don’t know for myself.Is there something you want out of life very

much?”Yes.What?To be a known person.A known person?Yes.Known for what?The Anfal.


131Saddam as Hitler

Do you want to be known more for the Anfal orfor being a peshmerga?

For Anfal.What do you mean ‘known for Anfal ’?I want the world to know what happened to

me.”29

The problem is, however, that much of the worlddoes not want to know. The desire to be untroubled byother’s suffering is often greater than the sense of humancompassion. The similarity of Nazi Germany and Sad-dam’s Iraq is confirmed by the comparable avoidancestrategies that outsiders employed in order to ignore.The severe violence of the totalitarian regime elicitsnothing more readily than silence among the well-meaning carriers of world opinion: mass murder oftenprovokes less protest than a trivial scandal in a run-of-the-mill city hall. As Enzensberger put it, “Then, asnow, the world did not want to come to terms with whatit confronted. Foreign governments regarded Hitler as astatesman representing ‘legitimate concerns,’ whom onehad to accommodate, with whom one had to negotiate.The winners of WWI welcomed him as an ‘agent ofstability,’ as a trading partner, as a counterweight to theSoviet threat; in other words, one dealt with him on anormal political level and trusted that it was a matter ofsolving conflicts of interest.”30

The flight into normalcy was not merely a matterof self-interest but also, indeed above all, a denial of the

29. Makiya, Cruelty and Silence, 199.30. Enzensberger, “Hitler’s Successor,” 157.



horror, a refusal to hear the news of the death camps,just as today Saddam’s genocide is not given serious con-sideration, especially by opponents of the war. This is astrue in the Arab world as in the democratic West: theman responsible for killing the most Muslims in historydoes not face much retrospective criticism among Arableaders. Thus Mohamad Jasem al-Sager, the head of theForeign Affairs Committee in the Kuwaiti People’sCouncil, commented bitterly on Arab parliamentarians’silence regarding the evidence of mass killings underSaddam: “Is it possible that the representatives of theArab nations refuse to abide by even the most basic du-ties of their profession—representing their people? Is itpossible that they fail to utter a single word of sympathyfor the thousands of victims of the Arab dictator? . . .Arab parliamentarians limit their condemnation to theZionists and the foreign invasion and have purposefullyforgotten the crimes committed under our noses. Wouldthese Arab parliamentarians dare to hold the gaze of anIraqi woman sitting at the grave of her murdered chil-dren? We have seen thousands of people gathering theremains of their relatives in plastic bags.”31

Perhaps Arab parliamentarians have ideologicalgrounds to avoid criticizing another Arab leader: a mis-guided ideology to be sure. Yet there was hardly a com-parable rationale in the West for politicians and dem-onstrators to come to the defense of the Iraqi regime—except the cowardly rationale of avoiding addressing the

31. MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series, no. 533, July 2, 2003, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page�archives&Area�sd&ID�SP53303.


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violence. In the end, it was left to the United States torespond to the fact of Saddam’s genocide. George W.Bush called it “evil” and scandalized those segments ofthe cultural-relativist public who would have preferredto ignore it. Anti-Americanism derives from manysources, as we have seen in the previous chapters, butamong these sources one figures quite large: the highmoral standard that the United States has set, in the Iraqwar and in fact since the Nuremberg Trials, with regardto Nazi Germany. Whether the United States has alwayslived up to these principles is another matter, but his-torical failings never disprove the validity of ideals. TheUnited States has played an indispensable role in thewars against totalitarian violence and has thereby raisedmoral standards in world affairs. The United States hasdisrupted the blissful ignorance of a world opinion pre-pared to ignore suffering. Resentment results. Anti-Americanism is the expression of a desire to avoid themoral order and to withhold compassion from the vic-tims of violence.

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