He had a lot of the Hitler rant in him. For a long time we didn't take Hitler seriously here. He was easily satirized as the "little dictator." In the whole Ahmadinejad controversy over his invitation to Columbia, no remark was more fatuous than Dean John Coatsworth's observation that in defense of free speech, he would have invited Hitler to speak if he were here. His clarification wasn't much better. "[H]ad he come to the United States in 1939, he would have found a country with lots of admirers of his regime. An appearance by Hitler at Columbia," the dean said, "could have led him to appreciate what a great power the U.S. had already become." Some dean's list.
This dean should, in fact, go back to the history classroom. Hitler was anything but a quick learner. He could never see beyond his own prejudices. He thought Britain would capitulate quickly, that the Americans wouldn't fight and that he could defeat the Russians easily.
When William Randolph Hearst interviewed Hitler in Germany in 1934, he went with the hunch that he might do "some good" by meeting him. When the powerful newspaper publisher asked Hitler about the persecution of the Jews, der Fuehrer replied, "There is no persecution of any sort." Hearst was convinced. When someone later asked him about Hitler's anti-Semitism, he replied: "The whole policy . . . of anti-Semitism is such an obvious mistake I am sure that it must soon be abandoned. In fact I think it is already well on the way to abandonment."
When I hear Hitler evoked in contemporary arguments, I return to my dog-eared copy of "Mein Kampf" to reacquaint myself with what that "petty and cruel dictator" had to say in the years before he assumed the power to wreak ruin on so much of the world. He, like Ahmadinejad, was pleased to be vilified. "Any man who is not attacked in the Jewish newspapers, not slandered and vilified, is no decent German and no true National Socialist," he wrote. "The best yardstick for the value of his attitude, for the sincerity of his conviction, and the force of his will is the hostility he receives from the moral enemy of our people."
Ahmadinejad understands how to update such an attitude for the 21st century. We may think he was humiliated by the hostility he confronted at Columbia, but maybe he, like Hitler, understands how to play it out to his advantage against the gullible, the feckless and the frightened.