Andrew Bolt: Chinese dictator pushing the same buttons Hitler did

Reading Chinese President Xi Jinping’s latest speech side by side with Adolf Hitler’s pre-WWII speech should make us tremble for tomorrow.

The world must not ignore this: Last week’s big anniversary speech by China’s dictator sounded very much like Hitler’s.

So don’t be surprised when the shooting starts.

Xi gave his speech in Beijing on the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, at a ceremony featuring soldiers goosestepping, Nazi style.

It was frightening enough that Xi threatened “foreign forces” he’d “crack their heads and spill blood”.

Worse, was that in paragraph after key paragraph he pushed the same buttons Hitler pushed in his speech in 1937 on the fourth anniversary of his Nazi dictatorship.

All the same evils are there. The appeals to race. The paranoia. The inflammatory poking of a mortified national pride. The fake appeals for peace, and gory threats of blood. That sound of a whiner, grown big and now scary-daring himself to fight.

Reading them side-by-side, how can anyone think we’re safe?

Chinese President Xi Jinping makes a speech

Check the parallels in these speeches by Xi, who threatens to seize Taiwan, and by Hitler, who two years later invaded Poland and started World War II.

Both dictators appealed to xenophobia and a national pride once wounded by foreign invaders:

Xi:China was gradually reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society…. The country endured intense humiliation.

Hitler: This once flourishing land was pillaged, dismembered and devastated.

Both dictators boasted their parties had saved their countries from evil foreign nations:

Xi: We overcame subversion, sabotage and armed provocation by imperialist and hegemonic powers … The time in which the Chinese nation could be bullied and abused by others was gone forever.

Hitler: I took upon myself the bitter duty of restoring the honour of a nation which for 15 years had been forced to live as a pariah.

Both dictators praised their use of force to also crush internal opponents and impose dictatorship to end “disunity”:

Xi:We fought armed counter-revolution with armed revolution, toppling … bureaucrat-capitalism … The victory of the new-democratic revolution put an end … to the state of total disunity.

Hitler:(We made) the chaotic conditions brought about by parliamentary-democracy disappear in less than three months … The Bolsheviks [thought] by the use of brute force they could prevent the … National Socialist ideal – only then did we answer violence with violence.

Both dictators likened internal opponents to a virus or disease:

Xi:We must … root out any elements that would harm the Party’s advanced nature and purity and any viruses that would erode its health.

Hitler:Bolshevism is a pestilence.

Both dictators warned the world not to criticise:

Xi:We will not, however, accept sanctimonious preaching.

Hitler:It is impossible to maintain peace among the nations so long as an international irresponsible clique can continue their agitation.

Both dictators praised their fast-growing military:

Xi:We must accelerate the modernisation of national defence and the armed forces.

Hitler:The vindication of the honour of the German people … was expressed outwardly in the restoration of universal military service, the creation of a new air force, (and) the reconstruction of a German navy.

Both dictators claimed to want peace:

Xi: China has always worked to safeguard world peace.

Hitler: Peace is our dearest treasure.

But both dictators threatened blood, to great cheers:

Xi:The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress or enslave us. Whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people.

Hitler: This fight (for Nazism) will have to be undertaken even at the sacrifice of life and blood.

Both dictators appealed for their race to show a “united front” to the world:

Xi:The patriotic united front is an important means for the party to unite all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, both at home and abroad, behind the goal of national rejuvenation.

Hitler: This consolidation of the internal life of our German nation also establishes a united front towards the outside world … Each racial species must preserve the purity of the blood which God has given it.

Yes, the speeches also have important differences. Hitler’s was more emphatically racist, and vilified the Jews, while Xi’s said nothing about jailing up to one million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps.

Another difference: Hitler kept secret his plan to invade Czechoslovakia the next year to “reunify” with its German-speaking areas, but Xi openly warned China would take over democratic Taiwan: “Reunification is a historic mission”.

Compare the two speeches … and tremble for tomorrow.