In case you haven’t noticed, Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler. Because fascist. And threat-crisis. Also, Hitlerian:
Vladimir Putin’s Hitlerian Mind. The Russian president’s fascist revival in Eastern Europe poses a unique threat to the West. Vladimir Putin’s fascist revival is a crisis that tests the West’s capacity to decide.
When Will speaks of ‘fascism’, he means it in the mythological sense of the word, not the historic. You know; big bad Hitler plotting to conquer Planet Earth and exterminate or enslave all non-Aryans blah….blah…blah. Notice how Will cleverly embeds the allegations of a “fascist revival” and a “crisis” as a given, and then quickly redirects the subject to how the West should handle it.
Salesmen refer to this cunning rhetorical tactic as ‘assumptive selling’. Sorry George. We will not allow you get away with slipping such poisonous assumptive ‘mickeys’ into our journalistic drinks. Either prove your underlying premise of a “facist revival’ (in the sense you mean it), or cut the crap about some dangerous “crisis” caused by Putin.
At a certain point, one loses one’s innocence about the strangely repetitive coincidences concerning which first Britain, and then the USA, continually find themselves engaged in fighting wars on other people’s territory for reasons that are never, ever their fault.
I thought it was interesting that there was barely even a handwave in the less-than-halfhearted attempt to declare Assad the new Hitler.