The Bush administration has gone on the offensive this week to shore up collapsing support

for its Iraq policies. The latest effort tries to draw parallels between Iraq and World War II.

Recently, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld described Islamic terrorism as “a new kind of fascism” and compared opponents of the war in Iraq to Hitler’s appeasers. Rumsfeld described the period before US 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.”

Anti-war groups mobilising for a rally in Washington on October 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. Fascism has a specific meaning in the context of World War II, and Rumsfeld’s application robs the word of its power. These clichéd allusions only cheapen the memory of the Holocaust and hasten the degradation of political discourse. The history of European fascism ought not to be hijacked for cheap political effect. — The Boston Globe