YOUR OPINION
Columnist needs to get facts straight
Re: Mike Danelek

   Mike Danelek needs to take care with what appears in his most recent column on Nazism, as it would certainly not pass muster as an essay for a history course.
   In the first place, there are several strange historical assertions. While both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were unspeakably evil regimes, they were separated by more than “trivial differences.” The Nazi ideology revolved around an anti-modern mythology of the German volk, with its emphasis on racial purity and the elimination of Jews, while Stalin’s terror emerged from his own paranoia and was much more in the vein of what one might call totalitarianism. Moreover, that the Nazis included “Socialist” in their name indicates nothing more than Hitler’s willingness to play semantic games. Nazi ideology had very little to do with economic planning, save for some vague ideas about corporatism, and firms like I.G. Farben, Siemens and Krupp never fell under the control of the Nazi state, though they did certainly work with it. German Socialists are remembered for their stance in 1933 against Hitler, and especially for their refusal to grant him unfettered power under the Enabling Act when all other parties, including the Catholic Centre, acceded. Socialists, trade unionists and others from the German left soon and found themselves in the first of the Nazi camps.
   Danelek rightly describes Saddam Hussein’s regime as brutal, but to insist that it was a “theocracy” is to misunderstand it, and Hussein, completely, and to continue to reinforce the misleading idea that Hussein and Bin Laden were comrades of a sort. Iran is a true theocracy, for example, and Saudi Arabia is not far behind, though one is Shi’ite and one Wahhabist. There were no clerics serving as the ultimate authority in Iraq, for religion (as we now see only too well) was far too volatile to be used as the sole tool for political control. Hussein, along with the Assads in Syria, was one of the few remaining dictators left from the much more secular-minded and technocratic pan-Arab movement that followed on the lead of the Egyptian Nasserites in the late 1950s. The Ba’ath Party was Hussein’s vehicle in that purpose. Hussein’s Sunni followers relied more on a common sense of ethnic identity than on religious affiliation for their unity. After all, it was Sunni Arabs who persecuted Sunni Kurds in Iraq!
   To quote Mr. Gradgrind, “Stick to facts, Sir!”


Andrew Muldoon
Assistant Professor
Department of History, MSCD