No. That was an error on my part thinking that I was following a style set by someone else.

I don't think so. World War One left the Germans broken and humiliated. They didn't much care for the Treaty of Versailles but the people who've lost a war rarely enthuse about the conditions imposed on them by the victors.

John Dean
Oxford

...
} Oh pleez! I'll bet you anything that UK law is exactly where US law is on } the issues implied by Coop's remarks (about the liability of a homeowner } for injuries to someone invited into his home (let's assume that Fred was } invited)).
}
} The McDonald's matter was widely criticized and ridiculed in the US too. }
} When Coop's right, he's right. *** right.
Yeah, but the test of fact of which the jury is the unreviewable judge isn't common sense, but "proximate cause", a phrase which will be drummed into them toward the end of the trial. One of the lawyers will be along in a minute to tidy up.

R. J. Valentine
The party with deep pockets isn't necessarily the party responsible for the proximate cause.

Obviously, the blame isn't for the characteristics, but for creating an atmosphere where they flourished.
It started when prisoners taken in Afghanistan were detained in Cuba, as a ruse to avoid jurisdiction of courts. The administration refused to grant them prisoner of war status, thus excluding them from the provisions of the Geneva convention. They could be detained for an unlimited time, and interrogated in whatever way the administration found convenient.Bush lied to the country and the world, saying that Iraq was connected to those who perpetrated the attack on our country, and that it was an imminent danger to us. Then he attacked Iraq, conquering it, killing many Americans and many more Iraqis, meanwhile wasting the physical and moral resources that we really do need to defend ourselves. Now that the government of Iraq is defeated, the US has gone around the country, subjugating its people, raiding their houses, seizing their property, and killing anyone who resists.

The soldiers, many of whom wouldn't think on their own of violating another person without justification, are taught by the situation that their government has placed them in that they are justified in whatever they do. When prisoners are arrested, on whatever pretext, they are put into a prison once used by Saddam's regime as a torture center. The administration's policy dictates that in 'the war on terror', anyone opposing us, or suspected of opposing us, can be treated as an enemy object instead of as a human being.
Here are a couple of quotes from an article that makes the point that the recently publicized incidents aren't a mere anomaly:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa fact " As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees.

Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority. ... ... ... Under the fourth Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed.

Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo."
To me, this means that the administration is responsible to the point of being blamed, for 1. establishing an atmosphere where individual rights of people can be dispensed with under the excuse of 'war on terror', and 2. starting an unjust war, and maintaining an unjust occupation of another people, which maintenance requires repressive measures. That war was also started and is still justified as 'war on terror'.
The other day, a man in St. Louis was charged with murder because, while he was fleeing the scene of a crime, a pursuing police car smashed into another car, killing two people. The doctrine is that he is responsible for an outcome that he didn't directly intend, because it was a consequence of his crime. It was a petty crime, the robbery of a motel, hardly comparable to Bush's crime of lying to his people and the rest of the world to start a war.

john

Not your best argument, John. Yes, he probably would have, but the conditions I've described certainly made it easier. Perhaps even possible. For a person like Hitler to rise to power takes a slew of factors that all come together for him. Who knows how many potential Hitlers around the world never "made it" because not enough factors converged?

Different time, different conditions, a weariness of the population after two major defeats, and no strong and charismatic individual that seized the opportunity. Luckily.

I don't think of Hitler as your garden-variety anti-semite or racist. He kind of set the standard for anti-semitism, but that was the result of his actions and not necessarily the reasons for them. I think Hitler used the Jews to focus the attention of the German people on a common enemy. He may have had some animosity against the Jews, but I think it was more strategy than hate. Conditions were bad in Germany, and the Jews were a convenient scape-goat. He brought the people together by uniting them to defeat the forces that put them down and kept them down. He fabricated that, of course, but he capitalized on the characteristic of human nature that says that everything bad must be someone else's fault. Hate is easier to channel than goodness.

The Jews were an easy target and provided victories for bullies. Hitler really started the ball rolling with laws and not violence. The Nuremburg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship so they were not only the enemy, but they weren't even German. Other laws were passed that deprived Jews of their economic livelihood and physically separated them within the towns. From laws separating the Jews from the "good Germans", the scene moved to violence like the Kristallnacht purge.
Once the legal suppression and the violence had started, the German citizenry pretty much had to buy into the "Jews are the enemy" mindset to justify the actions. Then it escalated.
I'm not saying that Hitler was not an anti-semite, but I think that his anti-semitic platform was more a reasoned choice in the form of a political strategy than it was an emotional reaction or even a personal feeling.