Threat inflation with Syria

The problem with making the leader of every country we want to go to war with into "Hitler" is that it has produced threat inflation again and again, exaggerating the danger of country after country, none of which were "Hitler."

Robert Fisk does a memorable takedown of the "Hitler" meme in a column mocking the shallow clichés being used to drum up support for a US attack on Syria, a country that has not attacked the United States (This bombardment of Syria with clichés shows no sign of stopping Independent 09/05/2013):

And then yet once more – how tired can you get of this mulch? – Kerry also felt he could compare Assad to Hitler. This is preposterous. Over a hundred thousand Syrians may well have died in this terrible war. But Hitler started a war that may have killed 70 million. Does Kerry maybe think that Hitler is still alive? The late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin thought that when he fantasized in a letter to Ronnie Reagan when he was invading Lebanon in 1982 that he felt he was advancing on Berlin (Arafat was the man in the bunker). And not long ago the now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told us all that the crackpot president of Iran (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad at the time) was "worse than Hitler". So let’s have it just one more time: HITLER IS DEAD.

Tags: appeasement, germany, hitler, preventive war, second world war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression