This is such a profound email that I am delighted to start my blogging career with someone else's words. America is lurching into this century with poor and inexperienced leadership, in the vain hope of being popular with nations of the world who expose an ideology and belief system antithetical to our democratic republican values which have made this such a great country to this date. I worry for this nation, and I worry for the world. Unless something intervenes in North Korea, Pakistan and Iran, I see a Third Word War as a distinct possibility, with a socialist Neville Chamberlain, with awful political associations in the past, in charge of the White House as the only obstacle to worldwide Armageddon.
Sometimes It's More Essential to Define the Nature Of Evil Than Good
Dear Paul,
On a number of occasions over the past year we have referred to George
Santayana’s famous quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned
to repeat it.”
The reason Santayana’s quote is so enduring is because it goes to the very heart
of why people do what they do. Ideas have consequences. Understanding that
helps one understand history. Learning from history helps one to replicate
successes and triumphs – and avoid failures and tragedies.
In the excellent commentary below, Jonathan Rosenblum points out the
disturbing parallels between how the West, and specifically British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain, dealt with Hitler prior to World War II, and how the West, and
President Obama, are dealing with the evil of radical Islam today.
That President Obama, for whatever reason, has drawn the wrong conclusions
from history should be a cause for deep concern for every American concerned
about the threat radical Islam poses to our safety, security and liberties.
May 11, 2009
Sometimes it is more essential to define the nature of evil than good
By Jonathan Rosenblum
Upon his first visit to one of the liberated death camps, Allied Supreme
Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "There are those who ask what
are we fighting for. Let them come here and see what we are fighting against."
Eisenhower's remark contains an important insight: Sometimes it is more essential
that one define the nature of evil than that one define what is good. About the latter,
there will inevitably be many opinions. But they need not prevent a consensus
from coalescing around the definition of evil.
I was reminded of that point last week as I watched The Third Jihad, the third in a
trilogy of documentaries on the threat of radical Islam produced by Raphael Shore
and Wayne Kopping. Towards the end of the documentary one of the experts
interviewed, former CIA intelligence officer Clare Lopez declared, "The real war is
between the values of freedom and barbarism. If we are not willing to recognize the
battle as one for our civilization, we might as well give up right now."
The last time the West faced such a civilizational threat, many refused to recognize
the nature of the conflict. In Troublesome Young Me, Lynne Olsen offers a gripping
account of the group of youthful Conservative backbenchers, who eventually
ousted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain from power and brought in
Winston Churchill in his place, nearly a year after the outbreak of World War II.
England entered that war totally unprepared, and lagging far behind Germany in
every respect, apart from its navy. Even after Britain proclaimed war, following the
Nazi invasion of Poland, Chamberlain pursued it half-heartedly and dreamed of an
imminent peace. Britain and France bombed only German military targets most
narrowly defined. Meanwhile Luftwaffe pilots in Poland followed orders to "close
[their] hearts to pity," happily machine-gunning women and girls picking potatoes,
bombing churches and hospitals, and strafing toddlers being herded to safety.
The parallels between today and the earlier period are eerie. Chamberlain, like
President Obama today, enjoyed an overwhelming majority in Parliament. His party
whips enforced party discipline with an iron hand — think Rahm Emanuel — and backbenchers who stepped out of line put their political futures on the line.
In another interesting parallel, Chamberlain enjoyed almost across the board
fawning support from the press and the BBC. That included self-imposed
censorship on the information reaching the British public. After the Anschluss,
British papers carried no pictures of the hundreds shot in the first days after the
Nazi takeover, of the tens of thousands arrested and sent to concentration camps,
or of Nazi soldiers forcing Jewish doctors, lawyers and professors to scrub the
streets and clean toilets on their hands and knees. When reporters asked
Chamberlain about such matters, he snapped at them for believing
"Jewish-Communist propaganda," and that was the end of the matter.
The British press ignored both the massive German arms build-up prior to the War,
and the pitiful state of British preparedness. Both before and after the conflict
started, it suppressed mention or quotations from Hitler's speeches that would
have conveyed a much different impression of his goals. As a British TV character
tartly observed forty years later, "It is hard to censor the press when it wants to be
free, but easy if it gives up its freedom voluntarily."
Chamberlain never read Mein Kampf, in which Hitler laid out in startling fashion
both his future plans for the Jews and for German conquest. Far from viewing
Hitler as an evil man, Chamberlain believed him to be a "gentleman," with whom he
could do business. He was more than once shocked to find that Hitler had lied to
him, even though that too was foreshadowed in Mein Kampf, Said future Prime
Minister Harold Macmillan, "He didn't believe people existed [who would] say one
thing and do another. …It was pathetic, really."
Chamberlain, according to Olsen, "could never bring himself to believe that [Hitler
and Mussolini] wanted to go to war. Clinging to the security of his ignorance, he
created a peace-loving image of them that defied reality." For a decade, the English and French did nothing in response to fascist aggression in Abyssinia (Ethiopia),
Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and precious little even in the wake of the German
invasion of Poland.
France and England thereby encouraged Hitler to believe they were too weak to
prevail, a judgment in which he was very nearly right. That should have taught us
— but did not — that those who hope to avoid war via appeasement inevitably end
up fighting later on worse terms.
At no point, did Chamberlain recognize that Hitler constituted a mortal threat to
Western civilization. As a consequence, he displayed far more ruthlessness
fighting those within his own party who dared challenge his policies than he did in
fighting Hitler.
The inability to recognize Hitler as evil incarnate is the most frightening parallel to
today. President Ronald Reagan was reviled by Western elites for calling the Soviet
Union the Evil Empire, as was President George W. Bush for grouping Iran, North
Korea, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq together as the Axis of Evil.
The West still remains incapable of acknowledging evil or giving credence to the pronouncements of evil men. Ayatollah Khomeini long ago made clear that he was
prepared to see Iran go up "in flames," if the worldwide rule of Islam were thereby
furthered. Mutual assured destruction, says Bernard Lewis, the greatest living
authority on Islam, is for Ahmadinejad, "not a deterrent but an incentive."
Surveying the scene in Beslan, where Chechyan Muslims killed nearly 300
Russian schoolchildren, one of the speakers on The Third Jihad puts the point
succinctly: Why should those who don't hesitate to send out their own children to
be killed hesitate to kill other peoples' children?
Yet the highest wisdom in the West today is to not take seriously the threats of
Ahmadinejad or the speculations of the Iranian leadership about the mathematics
of a nuclear exchange with Israel. They are not madmen, we are constantly told.
President Obama has no taste for confrontation with radical Islam (only with Israel).
He cannot even admit that it exists. Evil, it seems, is one of the few words that does
not come trippingly off his tongue.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/jonathan/rosenblum_evil.php3?printer_friendly
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACT for America
P.O. Box 12765
Pensacola, FL 32591
www.actforamerica.org |
|
|
|
