From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Wed Feb 19 2003 - 16:07:52 MST
So much vitriol these days. I'm not sure the cortisol levels on either side
permit much self-congratulatory feelgood neurochemistry, a recent post allegedly
about civility to the contrary...
=~=
³ When you read Hitler's private assessments of the man who stood between
him and world domination, they're just silly: Churchill was "that puppet of
Jewry." OK, that's fine as a bit of red meat tossed to the crowd when you're
foaming at Nuremberg, but as a serious evaluation of your opponent made in
the quiet of your study it's simply ... inadequate.²
=~=
THE CURTAIN WILL COME DOWN ON THE PEACENIKS
By Mark Steyn
The National Post | February 19, 2003
The "peace" marches? Oh, I've nothing to say. Can't improve on Tony Blair,
looking out of his window and observing:
"If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of
people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for.
"If there are one million, that is still less than the number of people who
died in the wars he started."
In other words, if it's a numbers game, those are the ones that matter. I'm
tempted to leave it there and go skiing, but let me come back to it in a
roundabout sort of way. The other day I got a copy of Andrew Roberts' new
book, Hitler And Churchill: Secrets Of Leadership, which sounds like some
lame-o management techniques cash-in, but is, in fact, a very useful take on
very familiar material. Most of us have read a gazillion books about the
Second World War (when I say "most of us," I exclude the fellow in Hyde Park
on Saturday holding a placard with the words "PEACE IN OUR TIME," and even
then I kind of hope he was some waggish saboteur, since the notion that the
peaceniks, though deluded, are that ignorant is a little mind-boggling).
But, comparing Britain's and Germany's wartime leaders directly, you can't
help feeling that victory and defeat were predetermined: As Philip Hensher
neatly put it in his review of Roberts' essay, "Churchill knew very well
what Hitler was like, but Hitler had no idea what sort of man Churchill
was."
Just so. When you read Hitler's private assessments of the man who stood
between him and world domination, they're just silly: Churchill was "that
puppet of Jewry." OK, that's fine as a bit of red meat tossed to the crowd
when you're foaming at Nuremberg, but as a serious evaluation of your
opponent made in the quiet of your study it's simply ... inadequate. This
failure to engage with reality is particularly telling when you look at how
each leader dealt with setbacks: During the Blitz, Churchill would stand on
the roof and watch the Luftwaffe bombing London; in the morning, he would
walk through the ruins. Hitler, by contrast, never visited bombed-out areas
and, just in case the driver should take a wrong turn, he drove the streets
with his car windows curtained. His final days were spent in a bunker -- the
perfect ending for a man whose worldview depended on keeping reality at bay
no matter how relentlessly it closed in on him.
Hitler's problem was that he was over-invested in ideology. He'd invented a
universal theory -- the wickedness of the international Jewish conspiracy --
and he persisted in fitting every square peg of cold hard reality into that
theory's round hole. Thus, Churchill must be a "puppet of Jewry." As a
general rule, when it's reality versus delusion, bet on reality. That held
true in the Cold War. Moral equivalists like Harold Pinter insisted that
America and the Soviet Union were both equally bad. But the traffic across
the Berlin Wall was all one way. East German guards were not unduly
overworked trying to keep people from getting in. The Eastern bloc collapsed
because it was a lie, and the alternative wasn't.
Well, the Soviet Union's gone now so Pinter no longer has to observe the
pox-on-both-their-houses niceties. Addressing the demonstrators on Saturday,
he declared that the U.S. is "a country run by a bunch of criminals ... with
Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug."
Got that? It's not Saddam who's the thug, it's Tony. It's not the Baathist
killers from Tikrit who are the bunch of criminals, it's the Republican
Party. It's not the million-man murderer of Baghdad who's the new Hitler,
it's George W. Bush. It's not the Iraqi one-party state with its
government-controlled media that "crushes dissent," it's the White House.
It's not the Wahhabis who are the fundamentalists, it's Bush, Blair and the
other Christians. It's not Osama bin Laden who's the terrorist, it's
American foreign policy. Supporting the continued enslavement of the Iraqi
people is "pacifist," but it's "racist" for America to disagree with the UN,
even though it's Colin Powell and Condi Rice doing the disagreeing and the
fellows they're disagreeing with are a bunch of white guys from Europe.
The new Universal Theory, to which 99% of Saturday's speakers and placards
enthusiastically subscribed, is that, whatever the problem, American
imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame. In fact, it's not so different
from the old Universal Theory, in that the international Zionist conspiracy
is assumed to be behind the scenes controlling the cowboys: Bush is a
"puppet of Jewry," just like Churchill was -- notwithstanding the fact that
America's Jews voted overwhelmingly for Gore. But, if you believe that the
first non-imperialist great power in modern history is the source of all the
world's woes, then logic is irrelevant. "It's all about oil"? Yes, for the
French, whose stake in Iraqi oil is far more of a determining factor than
America's ever has been or will be. "America created Saddam"? No, not
really, the French and Germans and Russians have sold him far more stuff,
and Paris built him that reactor which would have made him a nuclear power
by now, if the Israelis hadn't destroyed it in the Eighties.
But, as Colin Powell and Jack Straw have surely learned by now, there's no
real point doing the patient line-by-line rebuttal: Nobody's interested in
French oil contracts or German arms sales or even Saddamite corpse tallies
because it doesn't fit into the Universal Theory which insists that
everything can be explained by the Evil of America. On the other hand, the
indestructible belief that "over 4,000" civilians were killed by U.S. bombs
in Afghanistan is impervious to scientific evidence because it accords
perfectly with the Universal Theory.
How far are the "peace" crowd prepared to go? Well, they've stopped talking
about their little pet cause of the Nineties, East Timor, ever since the
guys who blew up that Bali nightclub and whoever's putting together those
"Osama" audio tapes started listing support for East Timor's independence as
one of the Islamist grievances against the West. But why be surprised? In
fall 2001, being pro-gay and pro-feminist didn't stop the left defending an
Afghan regime that disenfranchised women and executed homosexuals. Yet these
are the same fellows who insist that a secular regime like Iraq's would
never make common cause with Islamic fundamentalists, apparently requiring a
higher degree of intellectual coherence of Saddam than of themselves.
You can believe all this if you want, just as Harold Pinter believed that
the Iron Curtain was only there to prevent fleeing Westerners from swamping
Warsaw Pact social services. But it depends on keeping reality at arm's
length or beyond: You're metaphorically driving around with the curtains
drawn. Perhaps that's why so many of the "peace" crowd get ever so touchy if
you question their slogans. If you ask a guy with an "It's All About Oil"
sign what he thinks of the recent contracts signed between Iraq and France's
Total Fina Elf, he looks blank for a moment and then accuses you of wanting
to crush dissent. It's not fair, you're trying to pull back his curtain.
I bet on reality. The defining difference between Hitler and Churchill is
that, while the former presided over a court of sycophants, the latter
thrived on argument and antagonism. (Lord Alanbrooke's diaries are
especially recommended in this regard.) He had a not untypical background
for an Englishman of his time and class -- an unexceptional public school
education, a bit of colonial adventuring. It's what the multiculturalists
would have us believe was a narrow and blinkered upbringing. Yet an English
public-school debating-society approach to life served him in good stead: He
was utterly at ease with disagreement, quite happy to have any assertion
tested. In Saturday's demonstrations, the heirs to Churchill's Harrow
schoolmasters were well represented -- lots of teachers and professors. Yet
the difference between now and then is their reluctance to expose their
assertions to debate -- these days few institutions are as aggressively
protective of their fragile little pieties as the academy.
Well, so be it. If everybody thought like Saturday's marchers, it would be
curtains for all of us. But we're not quite there yet, and reality will be
breaking in very soon. Saying that Bush is the real "weapon of mass
destruction" is awful cute the first nine or ten thousand times, but only if
you live in Toronto or Paris or Madrid. Viewed by an Iraqi from the reality
of Basra, it's pathetic.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Feb 19 2003 - 16:12:04 MST