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The Present Farse

Victor Davis | 02.03.2003 10:22

Should we laugh or cry as we watch history come full circle?

ouis Bonaparte was no Napoleon. And when the pathetic nephew came to power in France aping his tyrannical uncle, Karl Marx in 1851 dismissed the silly charade with the famous line, "History always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, and the second as farce." Marx was stealing from Hegel and Engels, as he often did; but the truth of that dictum has never been more evident than in the recent sad spectacle surrounding the pygmy tyrant Saddam Hussein and the echoes of 1930s Western appeasement.

Saddam — in capability but not intent — is no Hitler. Even though he still tries to talk grandly about British and American decadence, blusters about liquidating the Jews, and counts on the indifference of France, his Republican Guard is hardly a Waffen SS and his scuds no more advanced than Nazi V-2s 60 years ago. Gassing the Jews while Europe watches is with us again: but while Germans once built nightmarish factories of death like Auschwitz, Saddam counts on a few missiles armed with Sarin gas to do the same to those huddling in plastic-lined rooms with their babies in gas masks.

Once more a weak French prime minister — Mr. Chirac sounds eerily like Edouard Daladier — scurries about, worried about everything but rising anti-Semitism in his own country, his hospitality for the thug Mr. Mugabe, and the shady deals of French companies. The German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's sordid past reads like brownshirt-Lite, or at least something out of the creepy cabarets and the street brawls of Old Berlin. His boss Gerhard Schroeder screams to mass rallies about a "German Way" — as if millions troubled over a stagnant economy can again sway from far left to right or back in the blink of an eye. The slur "cowboy" (a favorite word of Hitler's) has now returned to the German political lexicon, as we all again struggle to fathom whether the massive demonstrations of the unhappy in the New Berlin are nationalist or socialist in nature — or both.

If ex-President Hoover once worried about a looming war "over there," Jimmy Carter, who brought us economic disaster and national insecurity, gratuitously attacks a sitting president and is as ostentatious about saving the world as President Emeritus Hoover was once reticent and principled in his own relief work. Middle Eastern kingdoms and dictatorships once more have no ideology; keep their cards close to their vest; and auction off their support east or west to the highest bidder who promises weapons, debt relief, and outright largess. We are relieved only that we might buy Turkish support with the monetary equivalent of three, but not six, new aircraft carriers.

In place of the old League of Nations equivocating over the October 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, we now witness the recent pathetic speeches of the Non-Alignment Movement at the U.N. General Assembly — an amoral body once hosted in 1982 by none other than Saddam Hussein. Here was a Cuba that has never held an election lecturing about democracy. Iran, the world's leading terrorist nation, warned shrilly about extremism. Algeria acted as if talking about the need for stability would make us forget that it is a police state engaged in a dirty war with Islamic killers.

A few African countries — none of them democratic; most of them corrupt, and all responsible for millions of their own dead and diseased — pontificated about past American culpability for this and that. I almost expected to see Franco call for democracy or a young ascendant Peron to praise tolerance.

All the U.N.'s Security Council's resolutions and inspections will have about as much effect as the old League's threats in 1931 to dislodge the Japanese from Manchuria. Indeed, reasoning with a China that devoured Tibet or a Syria that stole Lebanon would in 1939 be like asking Italy that seized Abyssinia or a Soviet Union planning to annex eastern Poland for help in restraining Germany. In the 1930s a weak League blamed its woes on an isolationist America that refused to join; now an even weaker U.N. Assembly rails at a United States that it is too involved and trying to "bully" a debating society into giving teeth to its rhetoric. The way to wreck the U.N. is not to use force unilaterally, but — as in the case of the League — to haggle over a series of meaningless resolutions against dictators that cannot or will not be enforced.

Meanwhile Hans Blix, as a Geneva inspector of the 1930s par excellence, could have easily assured the world that there was no evidence that the German battleship Bismarck was oversized or the Luftwaffe out of compliance. At the same time, the Vatican welcomed in the tinhorn Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz, who won his chest medals and epaulettes in the early 1970s as a hack newspaper editor boasting from his office of the lynching of Jews in Baghdad. In between joint appearances with various Christian clergy, the chubby new Ribbentrop barked at a Rome news conference that he had not come to the Vatican to take any questions from an Israeli reporter. Fellow journalists booed — but nevertheless stayed glued to their seats to coax answers from a two-bit fascist soon to be in a cell at the Hague.

In 1933 Oxford undergraduates, traumatized by a recent war, passed a resolution refusing "in any circumstances to fight for King and Country." Today there is once again dictatorship on the rise, but our pacifists, enervated by affluence rather than scarred by battle, choose street carnival over reasoned debate, and so march in our capitals proclaiming a new Axis of Evil — the democracies of America and Israel, the shared targets of fundamentalist suicide-murderers.

Here at home in the United States we see the same 1930s antiwar coalitions of hardcore old leftists screaming about American corporatism and imperialism married with America First rightists. At peace marches swastikas appear painted over the Star of David. Meanwhile our "liberal" columnists defame Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and the bogeymen known as "the neoconservatives." So the ancient prejudice has returned, now whispering that "they" are getting "us" into war to save "them."

Western Europe has almost gone the way of Weimar. Amoral, disarmed, and socialist, it seeks ephemeral peace at all costs, never long-term security, much less justice. Furious that history has not ended in perpetual peace and leisure, it has woken up angry that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair disturbed its fanciful slumber with chatter about germs and genocide.

In recompense, cranky Western elites, terrified of trouble, indict on the cheap the democratically elected Mr. Sharon, while the masses in the millions go to the street to protest a war against a monster like Saddam Hussein and pay fealty to the terrorist Arafat. As in the past we see ideals in the militarily weak but spiritually strong leaders of Eastern Europe, as the Czechs and Poles once more reveal themselves to be far more moral men and women than any in Germany and France — the historic duet that so often either started or lost wars.

Meanwhile an American president and a British prime minister, the target of this domestic vitriol and self-loathing, once again stand nearly alone against fascism. Because they do, we know the ending of this sad spectacle. Saddam will end up like Hitler in his bunker, with a mistress or two and a half-dozen doomed toadies. Postbellum Iraq will yield up the age-old horrors that may even be too sick for the tabloids; Anglo-Americans will once again rebuild a defeated enemy country — and a passive-aggressive France will triangulate, seeking to reclaim glory without power as it looks for profits among the flotsam and jetsam of war.

The image of the French representative Dominique de Villepin — pompadour hair flying at the U.N., thin arms waving as he warns of Anglo-American bullying of dictatorial Iraq, and empty talk of France's grand historic commitment to law and justice — says it all: all this from the author of Les Cents-Jours ou l'esprit de sacrifice, a recent revisionist history that laments not the four million killed in Napoleon's mad ambitions, but the "dream" that was lost at Waterloo, a battlefield 12 miles from Brussels, the current center of the latest undemocratic European utopian fantasy.

The world, not America, has gone off the deep end — just as it did some 70 years ago when faced with similar choices between cheap rhetoric and real sacrifice. And so just as the tragedy of Pearl Harbor for Americans put an end to all the nonsense of the 1930s, let us hope that the memory of September 11 and the looming showdown with Iraq will do the same for the present farce as well.

Victor Davis

Comments

Hide the following 4 comments

piece from MOSSAD perhaps ?

02.03.2003 10:44

all well researched and sounds like it comes from a left wing academic lefty type right wing think ....

pogo


USA and Israel are today's Nazis

02.03.2003 11:03

The correct comparison with the 1930s is not to equate Saddam Hussein with Hitler. It is the aggressive expansionist United States with its commitment to "full spectrum dominance" and Israel with its genocidal policies towards the Palestinians (transfer, a nice euphimism for ethnic cleansing) and its continually expanding "settlements" which most clearly resemble Nazi Germany. It is Tony Blair who is the appeaser, the quisling prime minister, who believes so intently that whatever the United States wishes must be supported. The descendents of the fascist parties of the 1930s in Spain and Italy are of course, fully in support of the Bush imperial agenda.

Periscope


Mossad employing 12 year olds now?

02.03.2003 12:12

The giveaway here is that the article starts off saying Saddam is no Hitler then uses the rest of the piece to absurdly compare today's crisis with the 1930's. Blair has just done the same and it's clearly the product of a juvenile, incoherent mind or the words of a flat-out liar.

Actually, the Hitler/Saddam comparison has some validity, but not in the way Blair or the above post pretends -

1 - Hitler's rise to power was backed by US capital. If you have any doubts about this read Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust, which clearly reveals the shocking extent to which US businessmen supported the Nazi death machine. Of course, IBM weren't the only corporation backing Hitler. In fact much of the Bush family wealth is derived from it's dealings with Nazi Germany.

That's right - the Bush family BACKED THE NAZI's. Do some research on the Union Banking Corporation and you'll find that Prescott Bush had some of his assets confiscated under the Trading with the Enemy Act - for trading with the enemy.

2 - Saddam's rise to power was backed by the US, both the Government and private capital. Indeed, as Saddam's atrocities peaked so did US support. We've all seen the photo of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand back in '83, but that only hints at the level of co-operation - nuclear, chemical, intelligence, diplomatic, economic, you name it, Washington gave it.

The original post remarks on Jimmy Carter - who, along with the rest of the civilized world is criticising the warmongering corporate clique in Washington - as bringing economic disaster and national insecurity. Well, that's precisely what the Bush regime is doing, turning a surplus into the biggest budget deficit in history and acting in a way guaranteed to boost the queues at al Qaida recruitment offices, with consequences for all of us.

Syria stealing Lebanon is also remarked upon. But wasn't it Israel that invaded Lebanon, leaving 20,000 civilains dead, in an invasion condemned by the UN?

Typical Mossad, and straight out of the Joseph Goebell's Guide to Deception - endlessly repeat the opposite of the truth, and hope people fall for it.

The tens of millions on the streets on F15 clearly show we are not buying their bullshit.

Auntie Beeb


"Bush is no Nazi so stop saying that!"

02.03.2003 13:50

Hey auntie beeb's post reminds me of one of my favourite flash movies: "Bush is no Nazi so stop saying that!"

(You'll need shockwave installed, turn on the sound, and watch all the way through to the 1930s classic "in the fuhrer's face)

go to:
 http://www.takebackthemedia.com/bushnonazi.html

Periscope