Topic: The Media
Who could make this stuff up? In today's mainstream media, even Hitler has his defenders.
Bruce Ramsey is an editorial writer for the Seattle Times—which may tell you all you need to know about where he's coming from. And okay, I get that progressives hate Bush, and that Ramsey's in a snit over the President's speech to the Knesset, but does that really justify comments such as this?
The narrative we're given about Munich is entirely in hindsight. We know what kind of man Hitler was, and that he started World War II in Europe. But in 1938 people knew a lot less. What Hitler was demanding at Munich was not unreasonable as a national claim (though he was making it in a last-minute, unreasonable way.) Germany's claim was that the areas of Europe that spoke German and thought of themselves as German be under German authority. In September 1938 the principal remaining area was the Sudetenland.
Baloney. People knew plenty in 1938, as Churchill's account of the march to war (The Gathering Storm) makes very clear. What was lacking in many quarters were the intellectual honesty and moral courage to face facts. Hitler had never concealed his true purpose: it was there for all the world to read in the pages of Mein Kampf. Ramsey is right when he says that fear of war caused the democracies to sell Czechoslovakia down the river. But that is an explanation—not an excuse.
As for the claim that Hitler's demands were "reasonable," it should be noted that neither Austria nor the Czech Sudetenland had ever been part Germany. (Both were possessions of the Habsburg Monarchy up to 1918.) Hitler's desire to add these lands to his Greater German Reich only appeared reasonable to those who felt that they could save themselves by feeding someone else to the wolf.
But the crowning idiocy of Ramsey's screed is his complaint that criticizing a policy of appeasement by appealing to an historical precedent is mere 'hindsight." Well, Bruce, it could also be called "learning for the mistakes of the past"—one reason, certainly, why we study history. Fort some reason, though, the terrible mistake that was made by Britain and France at Munich is one that progressives prefer to overlook. What's up with that?
