There have been a number of simply terrible episodes in history, and they tend to sit very large in the consciousness of people....for a certain amount of time....then the awareness of it begins to fade to some extent, and keeps on fading.

We happen to live in an era where the memories of WWII are quite recent. Therefore there is still a very highly charged atmosphere in connection with the Nazis....and in East Asia, specially in China and Korea, in connection with slaughters perpetrated by the Japanese occupation forces. We hear about that less in the West, but it's still a very sore point for the Chinese and Koreans.

So people start using something like that in their recent historical memory and they use it to attack just about anyone they have a sharp disagreement with. In the political arena, they use it to get people all het up about something...a pretty irresponsible way of getting people to support the launching of new wars, such as the "War on Terror" or the War in Iraq.

To compare Saddam's Iraq, for example, to Hitler's Germany...implying that Iraq was a similar threat to the world...was utterly spurious and disingenous. Germany was a great power...capable of threatening other great powers of its time. Iraq in 2003 was a crippled country, surrounded and helpless, completely incapable of threatening any great power or even any of its regional neighbours in its own area.

The drawing of parallels between Iraq and Nazi Germany...the quoting of examples of appeasement to Hitler to persuade people to attack Iraq...was crass emotional manipulation of the public in a way that was specious and simply dishonest.

The real fact of the matter was that Bush and Blair were in fact doing something rather similar to Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland...and were finding similarly specious ways of justifying their aggression on a small country that posed NO threat to them whatsoever.

So that's where it gets really outrageous, when people drag the name of Hitler into some situation just to panic a nation's public into supporting some kind of imperial aggression.

Anyway, these things change as time goes by. The use of "Nazis" as a word to drive people into fits will fade and one day it will be replaced by some new demon-word with which to rabble-rouse a fearful population.

Now consider this: During the period called the Hundred Years War...from about 1335 to 1453...the English kings and the English nation made a false claim to the throne of France....and they embarked on an invasion of France which lasted over a hundred years. It killed an enormous number of people there and it resulted in the systematic pillaging of most of the towns and cities in present-day France. When those towns and cities were taken, it was not uncommon to slaughter most of the inhabitants, to torture and murder men, women, and children right there in the streets, to rape the women, to burn down people's homes, to burn people at the stake, to tear people limb from limb, and to steal and carry away all their valuables. The horrors that were perpetrated on the French people during that 120 (approx) year period of English invasion and occupation amounted to a national holocaust that still is felt in the psyche of France to this day.

There's a holocaust for you. It didn't last a few years, like the Nazis' effort in WWII. It lasted over a hundred years. Imagine your nation being ocuppied by a foreign invader and brutalized and massacred and humiliated for OVER a hundred years!

If it had happened in the 1900s, instead of over 500 years ago...which holocaust do you think people would be focusing on now? Which regime would they now be holding up as the ultimate example of organized evil?

Not the Germans.

People, you see, are very subjective in where they choose to see evil. They base it on their own recent memory and their own direct experiences, and what others have told them.