Loose lips sink history

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION has gone on the offensive this week to shore up collapsing support for its policies in Iraq. The latest effort -- transparent as it is inaccurate -- tries to draw parallels between Iraq and World War II. It's a misuse of history and the kind of propaganda that should have gone out with Liberty Bonds.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking at the American Legion's convention in Utah this week, described Islamic terrorism as ``a new kind of fascism" and compared opponents of the war in Iraq to Hitler's appeasers.

In a long, looping analogy, Rumsfeld described the period before America entered World War II as a time ``when those who warned about a coming crisis -- the rise of fascism and Nazism -- were ridiculed and ignored." He said critics of the Iraq war ``seem not to have learned history's lessons."

Meanwhile, in an almost uncanny echo of Rumsfeld's overblown rhetoric, anti war groups mobilizing for a rally in Washington on Oct. 5 have themselves seized on Nazi analogies. In newspaper ads, the Alliance for Global Justice accuses the Bush administration of trying to remake society ``in a fascist way." It presents a bill of particulars, from the response to Hurricane Katrina to denying women abortion rights. ``People look at all this and think of Hitler, and they are right to do so," the ad concludes. And, like Rumsfeld, the alliance warns that ``history is full of examples of people passively hoping to wait it out, only to be swallowed up by a horror far beyond what they ever imagined."

These days, the term fascism is loosely applied to anything antidemocratic. But it has a specific meaning in the context of World War II, and Rumsfeld's application robs the word of its power.

Similarly, there is plenty of fodder for a sharp critique of the Bush administration without opponents resorting to hyperbole about Hitler.

These cliched allusions -- whether from anti war activists or from official Washington -- only cheapen the memory of the Holocaust and hasten the degradation of political discourse. The history of European fascism ought not be hijacked for cheap political effect .