Piers Morgan recently said on his program of Russian President Vladimir Putin, “I do think he’s the nearest thing to a modern day Hitler…” Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton had something to say about that. “You know what?” Horton said. “Noriega’s Hitler and Saddam’s Hitler and Milosevic’s Hitler and Putin’s Hitler. It sounds to me like Adolf was just another Hitler.”
“And apparently, any country that America doesn’t like, we can just start an aggressive war against them because they’re all the same as that one guy that one time,” he exclaimed.
Horton is right: There is a broad consensus that the supremely evil, mid-twentieth century German National Socialist dictator, responsible for the Holocaust and other horrors, deserved death and defeat for his crimes. Which is why so many war advocates ever since have tried to cast whoever they want to go to war against as being on par with Hitler. But just like Satan, there can only be one—unless you crave war.
I could not possibly list every would-be Hitler that American leaders have wanted to take out. Scott listed off a few examples of enemies, real and imagined, going back to Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega of the Reagan-era ‘80s and Slobadan Milosevic in the Bill Clinton ‘90s, and then Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in this century.
In the post 9/11 era alone, the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned that if Muammar Gaddafi wasn’t taken out in 2011, the Libyan dictator would strike European cities.
Like Hitler, of course.
“He actually means it,” Graham said of Gaddafi fifteen years ago. “Hitler meant it. He means it.” Graham would also later compare Syria’s head Bashar al Assad to Hitler. Graham also assured us over a decade ago that the Iranian regime were Nazis, and of course that Putin was also Hitler.
