A NOD TO THE NAZI AND THE MUSLIM

jimmoyer

jimmoyer
Apr 3, 2005
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Appeasement markers
By Victor Davis Hanson
Published February 18, 2006


It is easy to damn the 1930s appeasers of Adolf Hitler -- such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in England and Edouard Daladier in France -- given what the Nazis ultimately did when unleashed.

But history demands not merely recognizing the truth post facto but trying to reconstruct the rationale of something that in hindsight seems inexplicable.

Appeasement in the 1930s was popular with the European public for various reasons. All are instructive in our hesitation about stopping a nuclear Iran, or about defending the right of Western newspapers to print what they wish -- or about fighting radical Islamism in general.

First, Europe was nearly destroyed in the Great War, a mere 20 years earlier. No responsible postwar leader wished to risk a second Continental bloodbath.

Unfortunately, Hitler understood that all too well. In a game of diplomatic chicken, he figured many responsible democratic statesmen had more to lose than he did, as the weaker and once-beaten enemy.

British intellectuals, like European Union idealists today, wrote books and treatises on the obsolescence of war. Conflicts were supposedly caused only by rapacious arms merchants and profiteers at home, not by antidemocratic dictators who saw forbearance as weakness. Winston Churchill was a voice in the wilderness -- and demonized as a warmonger and worse.

Today, the 50-year Cold War is over, and Europe is at last free of burdensome military expenditure and the threat of global annihilation. Like Osama bin Laden, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad senses a certain weariness in much of the West as it counts on perpetual peace.

He assumes most sober Westerners will do almost anything to avoid military confrontation to stop a potential threat -- even though, unlike Hitler, Mr. Ahmadinejad not only promises to liquidate the Jews but reveals his method in advance by seeking nuclear weapons.

Some naive conservatives in prewar Europe thought the German and Italian fascists would prove a valuable bulwark against communism and could be politically finessed. So, too, it has been at times with Islamic fascism. Arming the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia was once seen as an inspired way of thwarting Soviet communist imperialism.

At the time of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's homicidal fatwa against Salman Rushdie, religious conservative commentators from Patrick Buchanan to New York's John Cardinal O'Connor attacked Mr. Rushdie, rather than defend the Western right of free expression. Apparently, they felt such Islamic threats to supposed blasphemers might have positive repercussions in discouraging left-wing anti-Christian attacks.

In the 1930s, the doctrine of appeasement fobbed off responsibility of confronting fascism onto the League of Nations. Both France and England were quiet about the 1936 Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the German militarization of the Rhineland. They counted on multilateral action of the League, which issued plenty of edicts but marshaled few troops.

Likewise, the moral high ground today supposedly was to refer both the Iraqi and Iranian problems to the United Nations. But considering the oil-for-food scandals and Saddam Hussein's constant violations of U.N. resolutions, it is unlikely the Iranian theocracy has much fear the Security Council will thwart its uranium enrichment.

As fascism spread, France fortified its German border with the Maginot Line, Oxford undergraduates voted to refuse "in any circumstances to fight for King and Country," and British newspapers decried the Treaty of Versailles for unduly punishing Germany. This was all long before the "no blood for oil" slogan and Al Gore in Saudi Arabia apologizing to his Wahhabi hosts for the supposed U.S. maltreatment of Arabs.

But deja vu pertains not just to us, but our enemies as well. Like the Nazi romance of an exalted ancient Volk, the Islamists hearken to a mythical purity, free of decadence brought on by Western liberalism. Similarly, they feed off victimization -- not just recent defeats, but centuries-old bitterness at the rise of the West. Their version of the stab-in-the-back Versailles Treaty is always the creation of Israel.

Just as Hitler concocted incidents such as the burning of the Reichstag to create outrage, Islamist leaders incite frenzy in their followers over a supposed flushed Koran at Guantanamo and several inflammatory cartoons, some of them never published by Danish newspapers at all.

Anti-Semitism, of course, is the mother's milk of fascism. It is always, they say, a small group of Jews -- whether shadowy Cabinet advisers and international bankers of the 1930s or the manipulative neoconservatives and Israeli leadership of the present -- who alone stir up the trouble.

The point of the comparison is not to suggest history simply repeats itself, but to learn why intelligent people delude themselves into embracing naive policies. After the Taliban and Saddam were removed, the furious reply of the radical Islamist world was to censor Western newspapers, along with Iran's accelerated efforts to get the bomb.

In response, either the West will continue to stand up now to these recurring post-September 11, 2001, threats, or it will see the bullies' demands increase as its own resistance weakens. Like the appeasement of the 1930s, opting for the easier choice will only guarantee a more costly one later.

Victor Davis Hanson is a nationally syndicated columnist and a classicist and historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of the recent "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
 

the caracal kid

the clan of the claw
Nov 28, 2005
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good post jim

mastery lies in knowing the opponent.

to quote Sun Tzu:
Though by my estimate the military of Yueh is many,
How does this further victory?
Thus it is said, "Victory can be usurped."
Although the enemy is numerous, they can be kept from fighting.
 

Finder

House Member
Dec 18, 2005
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At one time you could make the arugument about the difference between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism. I fear that the PM of Iran and many other extremists are starting to blur the distinctions.

However many Liberal, Socialist, Seculer, moderate-Islamic and social democratic forces in the middle-east which have true Anti-Zionist tendicies may be branded as Anti-Semitic still by the recent populerity of such Anti-Semitism developments by governments.

It's sad really.
 

darkbeaver

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Jan 26, 2006
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WHO EXACTLY ARE THE PARTNERS FOR PEACE
Joshua Holland posted feb 18 2006

In his Feb. 3 column, Charles Krauthammer, a dedicated jingoist and a reliable touchstone for neoconservative thinking, wrote that all that was standing in the way of peace in the Middle East was Palestinian "rejectionism," which to him is "the source of a 60-year conflict the Israelis have long been ready to resolve." The only rational response to Hamas' victory in the recent elections, then, would be "cutting off Hamas completely: no recognition, no negotiation, no aid, nothing. And not just assistance to a Hamas government but all assistance."

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that, at the highest levels, U.S. and Israeli officials were considering exactly that approach:

The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.

The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement.

The plan would certainly be consistent with U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East. And by "consistent with U.S. foreign policy," I mean exceptionally stupid and shortsighted.

First, and this is far from controversial, much of the Arab world's resentment towards the United States -- a resentment that only serves the most extreme political elements -- is based on our hypocrisy when it comes to democracy. We talk the talk, but we support repressive oil dictatorships and always have. This is a chance to show that we're not complete liars when we talk about democracy promotion, and we should take it.

Second, if we cut off funding, we lose an important stick, namely the threat to cut off funding in the future. And if the United States and the European Union pull funding, nobody should fool themselves into believing the Palestinian Authority will wither and die. They'll go to regional powers for aid (Iran?), and that won't help.

The Neocons are squawking about how we shouldn't have anything to do with democracy if we can't rig it. Daniel Pipes recently called on the Bush administration to suspend further elections in the Middle East (as if Bush were scheduling them) until outcomes that favored the United States could be assured. Listening to the Pipes of the world would be a grave mistake.

The neocons' view is based on simplistic, black and white, good guy-bad guy binaries that don't hold water in the real world. While civilized people condemn the horrific violence on both sides -- Hamas' armed wing is certainly guilty of a catalog of crimes against humanity -- Israel's legion of conservative apologists have convinced themselves that Palestinian casualties are the stuff of accident and that Israel's policies are meant only to add to its security. They see bias in human rights organizations and consider a balanced condemnation of both sides' terror as some kind of endorsement of "Islamofascism."

Good policy can't flow from such shoddy analysis.

There's an obsessive focus on Hamas' charter, which calls for wiping Israel off the map. But that doesn't reflect mainstream Palestinian opinion (as I'll show shortly) and it ignores the reality of Israeli power. Israel's not going anywhere; it's a nuclear state with a military budget far larger than that of its bordering neighbors combined.

When Krauthammer writes that Hamas is an organization dedicated to "terrorism, rank anti-Semitism and the destruction of Israel in a romance of blood, death and revolution," he ignores that reality and reinforces one of the most despicable anti-Semitic narratives: that Jews are obsessed with their historic victimhood.

That emphasis also distracts us from the serious questions at hand, which are: (a) Is Hamas' victory good for the Palestinian people (remember them?)? and (b) Is Hamas a "partner for peace"?

The first question is unanswerable at the moment. Hamas' victory wasn't all or even mostly about its resistance to Israel's occupation. It ran as a party of reform and as a party that would significantly improve the Palestinian Authority's (PA) social and public services. I know of no serious analyst who denies that Fatah's governance was corrupt and piss-poor. If Hamas follows up on its promises, it will certainly be good for Palestinians' everyday lives.

Is Hamas a partner for peace? There are two issues here. First, many argue that the burdens of governing will be a moderating factor on Hamas. I don't reject the theory out of hand, but I'm quite skeptical. There are too many examples of violent, nonstate actors coming to power and remaining violent. I do think that if the PA and Israel can forge some kind of agreement, Hamas will be better able to enforce discipline on the Palestinian side than the PA was under Fatah.

But I think the question is somewhat disingenuous, as it suggests that Israel, under its current government, is a serious partner for peace itself. The evidence supports the contrary view. As Steven Zunes recently wrote:

Exit polls appear to indicate that had Palestinian voters believed that re-electing the more moderate Fatah movement would have allowed for the resumption of peace talks, they would not have backed the hard-line Hamas. Israel cut off negotiations with the Palestinians when right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came to office in February 2001, just one month after Israeli-Palestinian talks in Taba, Egypt, came tantalizingly close to reaching a final peace agreement. The Israeli government, with apparent U.S. backing, has refused to resume negotiations ever since.

What the media rarely report is the larger context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Specifically, there's been a broad international consensus about what peace will require, a consensus that is consistent with U.N. resolutions.

Whether you look at Oslo, the Saudi Plan, the Geneva Accords or the Road Map, all of them vary in the details but not on the essentials: Palestinians have to renounce terror and the "right of return," in whole or in part, and Israel has to give up either all or most of its settlements and grant the Palestinians sovereignty over a contiguous area more or less delineated by the Green Line (I simplify for brevity).

This consensus is backed by a majority of both populations. More Palestinians support it than Israelis, although polling data fluctuates pretty quickly as events shape opinion. A joint poll conducted by The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in June found that 62 percent of Israelis (including 30 percent of settlers) support dismantling most of the settlements in the territories as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. On the other side, according to polling cited by the U.S. Institute for Peace last month [PDF], 59 percent of Palestinians surveyed oppose attacks against Israeli civilians while 38 percent support them. A 2004 study by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center [PDF] found that even when asked about military operations against Israeli occupation forces, only 41 percent of Palestinians approved.

According to the USIP study:

When Palestinian respondents assumed the existence of a Palestinian state -- recognized by the state of Israel and emerging as an outcome of a peace agreement between Palestine and Israel -- support for reconciliation, between July 2000 and September 2005, ranged between two-thirds and three-quarters.

These data confirm earlier public opinion research (scroll down to "third party initiatives") conducted by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, which found majorities on both sides in favor of the proposals outlined in the Geneva Accords.

The obstacles to peace are the reactionary minorities -- the rejectionists -- on both sides. That includes the Krauthammers of the world.

Israel can't claim to be a serious "partner in peace" as long as it continues to expand its settlements. In December, Human Rights Watch condemned "multiple Israeli announcements of its plans to continue expanding settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories," which "directly contravenes international law and Israeli commitments under the Road Map." The European Union echoed those concerns recently.

The Israeli right is as a formidable obstacle to any serious discussion of peace along the lines long discussed as the most militant of Palestinian rejectionists. When Sharon orchestrated the pullout from Gaza -- which had far less infrastructure and economic value, and far fewer Israelis than the West Bank -- Israel came close to a civil war. In the joint Israeli-Palestinian poll I cited earlier, 71 percent of the settlers and 46 percent of the general public said that it was justified to bring down the government to prevent withdrawal. Seventeen percent among the settlers and 11 percent in the general public said that it is justified to endanger oneself and one's family, and 9 percent of the settlers and 7 percent of the general public believed it justified to endanger other citizens in such a struggle. A few weeks ago, the Chicago Tribune reported:

In the first major showdown with Jewish settlers during the tenure of acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, hundreds of club-wielding riot police fought crowds of stone-throwing protesters who barricaded themselves in illegally built homes in a West Bank settlement outpost yesterday.

That was a marginal outpost built recently. And all that doesn't get into the issue of water, which is the 800-pound gorilla in the room that few media stories discuss.

When it comes to the settlement issues, the U.S. government has shown that it, too, isn't a serious "partner for peace." We've penalized Israel for expanding settlements by decreasing our hefty aid by a few hundred million, but the Bush administration has backed away from the forceful stance on settlements that had been U.S. policy for 30 years.

With U.S. insulation from international pressure, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is entering a dangerous new phase. The Israeli right and center-right are talking about abandoning the "Roadmap" for "unilateral disengagement" -- a nice euphemism for an unprecedented land grab.

Earlier this month, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told an Israeli journalist that if his Kadima party is elected in the upcoming polls at the end of March, he'll withdrawal from "all" of the West Bank except for the three largest settlements -- Ariel, Gush Etzion and Ma'aleh Adumim --- and the Jordan Valley, a vital source of Israeli water. According to the Jerusalem Post, 185,000 of Israel's 244,000 settlers live in those blocs.

Not to be outdone, a new party, Tafnit, headed by former National security Advisor Uzi Dayan, proposed a similar plan that would remove only 21,000 of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank and "calls for the completion of the separation barrier so that the vast majority of the three main settlement blocs … would fall on the Israeli side," leaving "a Palestinian entity in the West Bank severed into two by an Israeli corridor which extends east from Jerusalem all the way to the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley." Jerusalem would fall under Israel's exclusive control.

All of these plans would guarantee an endless continuation of the cycle of violence that has plagued Israel and the Palestinians. The Bush administration, to its credit, condemned this kind of blatant land grab, but we've seen before that when the chips are down, they're more than willing to satisfy their Clash of Civilizations base and throw principle out the window.

There's little hope for peace right now. From either side.

Editor's note: after this story was submitted, the House of Representatives voted 418-1 for a resolution previously passed in the Senate calling on the Bush Administration to cut off all funding to the Palestinian Authority. In another development announced Friday, the PA agreed to an administration request to return $50 million dollars in aid that had previously been distributed.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
 

darkbeaver

the universe is electric
Jan 26, 2006
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Quote By "Werther," CounterPunch.org

quote:Let us stipulate straightaway: Victor Davis Hanson is the worst historian since Parson Weems. To picture anything remotely as bad as his pseudo-historical novels and propaganda tracts, one would have to imagine an account of the fiscal policies of the Bush administration authored by Paris Hilton.

Mr. Hanson, Cal State Fresno's contribution to human letters, is the favorite historian of the administration, the Naval War College, and other groves of disinterested research. His academic niche is to drag the Peloponnesian War into every contemporary foreign policy controversy and thereby justify whatever course of action our magistrates have taken. One suspects that if the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute were suddenly seized by the notion to invade Patagonia, Mr. Hanson would be quoting Pericles in support.

Once we strip away all the classical Greek fustian, it becomes clear that the name of his game is to take every erroneous conventional wisdom, cliche, faulty generalization, and common-man imbecility, and elevate them to a catechism. In this process, he showcases a technique beloved of pseudo-conservatives stuck at the Sean Hannity level of debate: he swallows whatever quasi-historical balderdash serves the interest of those in power, announces it with an air of surprised discovery, and then congratulates himself on his boldness in telling truth to power.

This is a surprising and rather hypocritical pose by someone who reportedly sups at the table of Vice President Cheney. For Mr. Hanson is one of a long and undistinguished line of personalities stretching back into the abysm of time: the tribal bard, the court historian, the academic recipient of the Lenin Prize. Compared to him, politically connected scribes such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., resemble Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

OK, Victor David Hanson, the most sycophantic regime apologist at the National Review(!), is not a particularly difficult target to lock onto. And yes, this column is (presumably deliberately) written in an imitation of a style which is eighty years out of date (complete with obligatory reference to the Rotary Club). Still... it's quite fun. From: Goin' Down the Road | Registered: Mar 2005 | IP: Logged
 

Said1

Hubba Hubba
Apr 18, 2005
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So Darkbeaver, what exactly is it in the article Jim posted that you take issue with. Do you even know what Greek fustian consists of?

And not to be picky, but could you put it in your own words.
 

Sassylassie

House Member
Jan 31, 2006
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Darkbeaver; plain English please. I didn't understand one word--well maybe the United States.
 

jimmoyer

jimmoyer
Apr 3, 2005
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Darkbeaver doesn't read what the source says
but what other people say about it.

I don't care who Victor David Hanson is, nor do I
care who Noam Chomsky is.

But I will read them.

See what worth their writing and insight is.

But the Left and the Right are both guilty about
listening to those who condemn these authors rather
than actually read what the authors themselves say.

Darkbeaver quotes articles by others condemning
who Victor David Hanson is. It's no better than the
rightwing quoting those who condemn Chomsky.

Take the author on.

With your own thoughts.