William Anastasi.

Re: The Hitlers and The Saddam Husseins

Clever psychotics are common phenomena in our day-to-day world.
What turned Adolph Hitler into a unique monstrosity was the political clout with which to project and export his sickness. But even granting the pliability of the German masses at the time, the political atmosphere which made his rise to power possible, if not inevitable, was largely created by the petty, vengeful, and greedy shenanigans of the victors of the previous war. To greediness add gullibility, as in: "He will protect all of us from the Red Menace — those noisy Bolsheviks who threaten to wake up and wise up the working classes and bring to an end this cushy deal we have going."

The similarities between this and the case of Mr. Saddam Hussein are too striking to be missed. Here we have a Frankenstein created by the gross misjudgment, and gullibility again, of the powerful who had hired him and outfitted him to do the dirty work that is needed to continue stealing from that part of the world without having to deal with millions of poor people who, imitating our ways in these matters, might say, "Hey! The geological fairy placed the oil under our feet — it's ours!" To stifle this impertinent and quite distasteful suggestion before it can be uttered, we have killed them into the hundreds of thousands under the guise of stopping "Another Hitler." As I write, this "Another Hitler" is still in charge, more or less with our blessings, because given the creative bookkeeping that is needed there in order to continue "our-way-of-life," we can't come up with any way to replace him that doesn't smell like more trouble than we have under the present arrangement.

The entire disaster is a clear case of "our bastard" overstepping his mandate with the help of some purposely mixed signals from our side. As long as we thought he was helping our cause, we turned a blind eye to his atrocities — recall the gassing of the Kurds. But now the time has come to straighten him out, to show the world who's still in charge here. Needless to say, the bulk of the Iraqis "wasted" in the process had infinitely more reason to hate him than we did. Now they are dead, and we continue to use him.

And if we use oil (what else do you expect us to use, solar energy? Didn't you know that that's anti-"our-way-of-life"?) — if we use oil and think that it is already too expensive for our poor overworked credit cards, it is very inconvenient — downright uncomfortable — being reminded of all this. It bores us, really. And to relieve our boredom, we subscribe to a thousand-and-one reasons to pooh-pooh it. That's it, it's simply not true. Yes, that feels much better!

May, 1991
William Anastasi