Critics Use Nazi Symbolism to Attack Bush Administration

Aug 14, 2006 — -- Criticism of the United States overseas seems to be intensifying by the day.

And it recently reached a new high, or a new low.

To relay their dissatisfaction with President Bush and his supporters, critics have begun using Nazi symbolism, eliciting condemnation that could possibly lead to legal action.

Two weeks ago in northern Germany, Hamburg police began investigating the award-winning German-Turkish director Fatih Akin after someone reportedly called the police after seeing him wearing a T-shirt inscribed with the name "Bush" in which a swastika replaced the letter "S."

According to a law established at the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, the display of Nazi symbols, except in educational contexts, is illegal.

"Using the swastika is a punishable crime in Germany," said Werner Schmidt, spokesman at the German Consulate General in New York, "just like performing the Hitler salute."

Akin said that he was not using the swastika to express anti-Semitism but rather to make a broader political commentary.

"Bush's policy is comparable with that of the Third Reich," he told the German current-affairs magazine Spiegel. "I think that under Bush, Hollywood has been making certain films at the request of the Pentagon to normalize things like torture and Guantanamo. I'm convinced the Bush administration wants a third world war. I think they're fascists."

While Akin's choice of how to make his statement may be illegal, a large portion of Germans agree with Akin's broader commentary about the Bush administration, according to polls and some foreign policy analysts.

"It used to be unthinkable that Germany and the U.S. would go their separate ways," said Charles Kupchan, senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations," under former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. "That has been irretrievably altered."

Findings from the Pew Global Attitudes Project concur with Kupchan's analysis.

According to the poll, before Bush was elected, 78 percent of Germans had a favorable opinion of America. In this year's survey, that figure had dropped to 37 percent.