WASHINGTON - The aggressive new campaign
by the administration of President George W Bush
to depict US foes in the Middle East as "fascists"
and its domestic critics as "appeasers" owes a
great deal to steadily intensifying efforts by the
right-wing press over the past several months to
draw the same comparison.
The Rupert
Murdoch-owned Fox News Network and the Weekly
Standard, as well as the Washington Times, which
is controlled by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's
Unification Church, and the
neo-conservative New York Sun,
have consistently and with increasing frequency
framed the challenges faced by Washington in the
region in the context of the rise of fascism and
Nazism in the 1930s, according to a search of the
Nexis database.
All of those outlets, as
well as two other right-wing US magazines - the
National Review and The American Spectator - far
outpaced their commercial rivals in the frequency
of their use of keywords and names such as
"appeasement", "fascism" and "Hitler",
particularly with respect to Iran and its
controversial president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
For example, Nexis cited 56 uses of
"Islamofascist" or "Islamofascism" in separate
programs or segments aired by Fox News, compared
with 24 by CNN, over the past year. Even more
striking, the same terms were used in 115
different articles or columns in the Washington
Times, compared with only eight in the Washington
Post over the same period, according to a
breakdown by Nexis.
Similarly, the
Washington Times used the words "appease" or
"appeasement" - a derogatory reference to efforts
by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to
avoid war with Nazi Germany before the latter's
invasion of Poland - in 25 different articles or
columns that dealt with alleged threats posed by
Ahmadinejad, compared with six in the Post and
only three in the New York Times.
Israel-centered neo-conservatives and
other hawks have long tried to depict foreign
challenges to US power as replays of the 1930s in
order to rally public opinion behind foreign
interventions and high defense budgets and against
domestic critics.
During the Cold War,
they attacked domestic critics of the Vietnam War
and later the Ronald Reagan administration's
"Contra war" against Nicaragua - and even Israel's
1982 invasion of Lebanon - as "isolationists" and
"appeasers" who failed to understand that their
opposition in effect served the interests of an
"evil" Soviet Union whose ambitions for world
conquest were every bit as threatening and real as
those of the Axis powers in World War II.
Known as "the Good War", the conflict
against Germany and Japan remains irresistible as
a point of comparison for hawks caught up in more
recent conflicts - from the first Gulf War when
former president George H W Bush compared Iraq's
Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler; to the Balkan wars
when neo-conservatives and liberal
interventionists alike described Serbian leader
Slobodan Milosevic in similar terms; to the
younger Bush's "global war on terrorism" (GWOT),
which he and his supporters have repeatedly tried
to depict as the latest in a series of existential
struggles against "evil" and "totalitarians" that
began with World War II.
Given the growing
public disillusionment in the US not only with the
Iraq war but with Bush's handling of the larger
GWOT as well - not to mention the imminence of the
mid-term congressional elections in November and
the growing tensions with Ahmadinejad's Iran over
its nuclear program - it is hardly surprising that
both the administration and its hawkish supporters
are trying harder than ever to identify their
current struggles, including last month's conflict
between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah,
specifically with the war against "fascism" more
than 60 years ago.
As noted by the
Associated Press (AP) this week, "fascism" or
"Islamic fascism", a phrase used by Bush himself
two weeks ago and used to encompass everything
from Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda and Hamas to
Shi'ite Hezbollah and Iran to secular Syria, has
become the "new buzzword" for Republicans.
In a controversial speech on Tuesday,
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was even more
direct, declaring that Washington faced a "new
type of fascism" and, in an explicit reference to
the failure of Western countries to confront
Hitler in the 1930s, assailing critics for
neglecting "history's lessons" by "believ(ing)
that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased".
But Rumsfeld's remarks, which drew bitter
retorts from leading Democrats, followed a
well-worn path trod with increasing intensity by
the neo-conservative and right-wing media over the
past year, according to the Nexis survey.
Significantly, it did not include the Wall Street
Journal, whose editorial pages have been dominated
by neo-conservative opinion, particularly
analogies between the rise of fascism and the
challenges faced by the US in the Middle East,
since September 11, 2001.
Thus the
Washington Times published 95 articles and columns
that featured the words "fascism" or "fascist" and
"Iraq" over the past year, twice as many as
appeared in the New York Times during the same
period. More than half of the Washington Times'
articles were published in just the past three
months - three times as many as appeared in the
New York Times.
Similarly, the National
Review led all magazines and journals with 66 such
references over the past year, followed by 48 in
The American Spectator and 14 by the Weekly
Standard. Together, those three publications
accounted for more than half of all articles with
those words published by the more than three dozen
US periodicals catalogued by Nexis since last
September.
The results were similar for
"appease" or "appeasement" and "Iraq". Led by the
Review, the same three journals accounted for more
than half the articles (175) that included those
words in some three dozen US magazines over the
past year. As for newspapers, the Washington Times
led the list with 46 articles, 50% more than the
New York Times, which also had fewer articles than
its crosstown neo-conservative rival, the much
smaller New York Sun.
A search on Nexis
for articles and columns that included "Iran" and
"fascist" or "fascism" found that the Sun and the
Times topped the newspaper list by a substantial
margin, as did the Review, the Spectator, and the
Standard among the magazines and journals. Nearly
one-third of all such references over the past
year were published in August, according to the
survey.
Nexis, which also surveys the
Canadian press, found that newspapers owned by
CanWest Global Communications, a group that owns
the country's Global Television Network as well as
the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and the
Montreal Gazette and several other regional
newspapers, were also among the most consistent
propagators of the "fascism" paradigm and ranked
far ahead of other Canadian outlets in the
frequency with which they used keywords such as
"appeasement" and "fascist" in connection with
Iraq and Iran.
The CanWest Global group is
run by members of the Asper family whose
foreign-policy views have been linked to prominent
hardline neo-conservatives in the US and the
right-wing Likud Party in Israel.
