Anti-Climacus

LINK: Norm has a long-ish post up on why people tend to automatically link up GWB (or America currently) to Nazi Germany when searching for analogies. The obvious, easy answer is the dull thrill of satisfaction one gets from presumably thumping one's opponents.

Norm says:

"It is true that, when the limits come down, it can happen fast. We know this not only from Hitler's Europe but from many other experiences before and since. In no time at all, many - not all - can become torturers and killers. Others who don't become torturers and killers turn away or look on indifferently. There are always bystanders, supportive, unconcerned, or merely frightened, to the evils that are perpetrated."

Which also leads me to suspect there may be something resembling an uninterest in looking beyond the prima facie 'responsible' parties. One notable feature these outlooks tend to incorporate is the idea of a state being a unitary actor (or, in slightly more nuanced form, the social group as proximate cause of individual behavior). In either event, the analysis tends to bear the imprint of being political, rather than philosophical, and it's this, I suspect, that makes the particular 'Hitler, but also Bush' approach so attractive: it bears some immediate attractiveness, but to disprove it (to take Norm's approach, outlined above), requires a lot of work. Not, of course, that only the anti-war group makes these sorts of distinctions (pro-war types can assume that the complicated further down bits will go their way, too), but those just happen to be the way the winds are blowing at the moment.