Who is Hitler? Hitler metamorphosed for our time, that is. If we sight Elvis, we'll know our man. But how can we know if we've sighted the animus of Hitlerian tyranny, or even whether we should believe such a thing possible? After the Bush Administration started promoting the idea of regime change in Iraq and the President took to speaking of an Axis of Evil, we often heard Saddam Hussein compared to Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, the German newspaper Schwaebisches Tagblatt quoted Germany's Justice Minister as implying a similarity between Hitler and President Bush himself. The Minister had supposedly accused the President of trumping up a war with Iraq for domestic political reasons and added, "It's a method that is sometimes favoured. Hitler also did that" (translation: BBC). The Minister denied using those words, but the report outran the denial and the Minister had to resign. The White House denounced the reported remark as an outrageous insult to the President, while the Anti-Defamation League made the point that such a comparison "only serves to fuel the gross trivialization of World War II and the Holocaust." The likening of Saddam Hussein to Hitler invites the same objection, as the first President Bush found in 1990 when he had to retract a reference to Saddam as "Hitler revisited." Bad as Saddam was, Hitler was crucially worse.

It's safe to say that there was only one Adolf Hitler. No combination of character traits, personal experience, and events is ever repeated, and yet one feels that Hitler does exist around us in pieces; even in pieces large enough to worry about. Several of the more obvious pieces seem to have been present in the makeup of Saddam Hussein. Both he and Hitler, in childhood, lived under harshly oppressive fathers (a stepfather, in Saddam's case). Both had mentors who filled them with romantic notions of national grandeur. Each experienced a sense of personal humiliation on being rejected by an academic institution. Then there was the fairly typical dictator's career of violence and treachery leading to absolute power and a cult of personality, but with a peculiar element: evildoing as destiny. Where other dictators resort to cruelty as a means of holding power, it seemed that Saddam, like Hitler, consumed power to feed some flame of cruelty burning in himself. These two men are not the only hate-driven tyrants in history, but they do have that conspicuous trait in common. Both men used the power of the state to commit mass murder. It's hardly necessary to add that both were anti-Semites.

That still leaves some important pieces missing. It's not simply a matter of scale or result; not simply that Saddam Hussein's victims were fewer than Adolf Hitler's or that his territorial ambitions came to nothing. A comparison of the two tyrants only heightens the feeling that some of the most dangerous pieces of Hitler remain unaccounted for. If they're nowhere to be found in today's world, all well and good. But what makes them dangerous is their transparency to the moral optics of many normal people: a quality that contributes to that deadening and ultimately damning effect which Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.

Let's imagine a political leader, one not at all like Saddam Hussein, who has entered office through the democratic process — who has, roughly speaking, won an election — and who presides over an industrialized nation with a well-educated citizenry, a nation renowned for its technological prowess and its cultural refinement. Germany was such a nation when it put Hitler in power. The United States, apart from lacking cultural refinement or a well-educated citizenry, is such a nation today. Circumstances like these tend to defeat the faculty of moral judgment. Surely a modern, politically advanced nation wouldn't give itself over to barbaric tyranny? Never having followed a wantonly destructive leader before, can it really be doing so now? Unthinkable. A country with the industrial resources and technical expertise of Germany in those days or of the United States today could possess a nearly unstoppable war machine. Ruled by a reckless, insensitive egomaniac with no qualms about expending human lives, that country would bring great misery to the world. But never fear: the political works of an enlightened people will always embody humanity and wisdom, won't they? And we're an enlightened people, aren't we? By thus working backward through conclusions and premises, a nation can teach itself to believe that ominous developments in its political life are not really so very bad.

Confronted with the accomplished fact of a radical faction's rise to power, even conscientious journalists may take a second look and conclude that these are essentially reasonable people. Then the journalists consult conscientious scholars who've also taken a second look, and hear it confirmed: these are, at bottom, reasonable people. After all, the radical pegs have fitted themselves into the holes of a perfectly respectable political system. The system is bound to bring out the reasonableness in them.

Next, war comes — not unbidden — and duty calls. If it's the duty of youth to fight, then it's the duty of all others to back up the boys and girls overseas by supporting their commander-in-chief. If it seems that everybody's sense of duty is being manipulated, then there must be a good reason. If so many normal people are going along with the official rationale for war abroad and the infringement of civil liberties at home, then going along must be the normal thing to do. Desperate measures for desperate times, and all that.

Hitler probably never theorized the banality of evil as Arendt did, but he understood how a society's more thoughtful people can be swept along in a crowd of less thoughtful ones and gradually taught to think less themselves. The staging of his public moments, expertly conveyed through the mass medium of film, had an intoxicating effect. As Joachim C. Fest illustrates in his incisive documentary Hitler: a Career (1977), Hitler liked to give people the thrill of seeing him arrive by air, descending from the sky in a shining silver plane like some kind of god. Hypnotic torch-lit rallies overwhelmed even those too sophisticated to be dazzled by an airplane. And images of apple-cheeked youths happily donning uniforms to serve their country made Hitler's dominion seem almost irreproachable. The title of Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda masterpiece, The Triumph of Will, makes a fitting epitaph for a society in which highly competent minds with a certain degree of media literacy were conquered by a propaganda machine astutely tuned to that degree, which tempted them with aesthetic pleasure and emotional indulgence till they didn't mind being mere receptacles for expressions of one man's will. His will became their will, the national will, and after that there was no pit into which they wouldn't follow him.

The propaganda machine of George W. Bush, too, makes unusually heavy use of images to override thought with visceral persuasion. Since Mr. Bush's thrilling descent from the sky to the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, media critics have been remarking how carefully his public appearances are staged, with the President himself always heroically lighted against some inspiring backdrop. The Bush Administration is not the first to use techniques of suggestion. The techniques themselves don't necessarily do any harm, but they will do harm if used to exalt a mean and overbearing ego ("When I say something, we actually go do it," declared Mr. Bush the other day). Even without sound, the state of the President's ego is clearly visible in one of his more frequent moments, the arrival by helicopter on the White House lawn. Other Presidents, after they alighted, would generally stroll along in a relaxed manner almost like hosts at a garden party. They'd chat with aides or pet the dog as they went. They looked comfortable and calmly self-confident, glad to get home, ready for a shower and a bite to eat. Altogether reassuring. But this President struts pugnaciously, practically snubbing his people when they approach him, jabbing his forefingers this way and that as if deploying imaginary troops. He does not look calmly self-confident, but grimly threatening. And the sunlight doesn't seem to agree with him. He makes a bee-line for the building about as fast as he can go without breaking into a run. War councils await, no doubt.

Then there's the matter of lies. Hitler exploited the principle of the Big Lie, which he had picked up from the Marxist rhetoric that had infuriated him in the aftermath of World War I. A true connoisseur of lies was Hitler. He understood that the size of a lie contributed to its credibility because, as he explains in Mein Kampf, most people are only up to furtive lying on a modest scale and therefore fail to comprehend audacious lying on a grand scale.

George W. Bush, to be sure, doesn't exploit the Big Lie of Adolf Hitler. It's hard at first to find just the right name for his kind of fabrication. There's a temptation to call it the Routine Lie, considering how readily he says things for effect regardless of their truth or falsehood, but that term suggests nothing more than the kind of lie that's used by politicians generally, the common brick in the political road to perdition. It's not that. Mr. Bush and his associates seem to have grasped a phenomenon at the theoretical level and put it to work in a systematic way, as Hitler did. It goes like this: Most people today reside partially in a media community that exists in parallel with the real community of personal experience. They don't confuse the two, as some media critics have supposed; on the contrary, they let the two remain strangely separate. In reality truth is established by some kind of process, investigative or constructive, that requires factual, logical, or moral integrity. In the mass media it's established by a narrative process, and what is required is emotional or aesthetic integrity. For a town meeting to be satisfactory, the talk has to make sense; but in a President's appeal to the nation, conveyed by television, the talk may be incoherent or disingenuous and yet satisfy many people if the scene as a whole advances an agreeable story.

The story that most Americans want spun for them now is one in which the United States, besieged by terrorists, buckles on its six-shooters and fights back. There's a period of dramatic tension while the Secretary of State is seen to be a reluctant gunslinger symbolizing Americans' essentially peace-loving nature. The President, however, believes that a man's got to do what he's got to do, which is another good trait. Then a lot of foreigners start saying that America's wrong. In that case, there has to be a war: they can't talk that way about America. Sure enough, the Secretary of State walks into the United Nations and proves that America will be right if it attacks Iraq. Legions of the faint-hearted fill the streets of the world to protest, while America carries on with a few stalwart allies. Some good kids die (but not you or I), the tyrant's statue falls, and the liberated people celebrate. The end. Epilogue: Henceforth, this President is not to be doubted. Sure, he's a rich man with a big ranch of his own, but so was Gene Autry. Now everybody stop carping about his lack of a plan for securing Iraq, his perverse assault on the natural environment, his plot to cause an economic train wreck for the benefit of the rich, and all those other unhappy unending subjects. Do you want to spoil the story?

If people found themselves in a town meeting with George W. Bush, they might suddenly feel like putting some hard questions to him. But for nearly all Americans the President of the United States exists only in the mass media, where it's the narrative that matters. His propaganda specialists understand that this allows them to overshadow the truth of reality with an illusory media truth. Their kind of fabrication could go by various names, such as the Big Lie in Little Pieces or the Cheesy Screenplay Lie, but to keep this concept from being lost to history (till one of them writes a book) let's give it a more dignified name: the Parallel Lie. They calculate that by keeping many Americans tuned to an engrossing and gratifying media narrative, a President can make the nation sleep-walk through reality; follow him unthinking down his autocratically chosen road, at least until the way back is lost in darkness.

To some hermit who had just wandered out of the mountains understanding nothing but reality, it would be an astonishing spectacle: millions of people gladly following an elitist leader, the favorite of sleek industrialists, who throws sops of rhetoric and stirring images to ordinary citizens while casually wasting their lives on his geopolitical schemes. That hermit might well imagine that he had stumbled upon some missing pieces of Hitler. •