3 posts tagged “conservative”
Maybe some folks, particularly the religious right, remain ignorant of the disastrous consequence of global warming because its gradual increase is keeping them as blissfully unaware as a frog that has been placed in cold water that is gradually brought to a boil. Before the frog realizes it, he is in hot water.
It could be just a part of God’s master plan, and we are already in hell and God is gradually turning the heat up.
“Appease” is used as a pejorative term of weakness by those that advocates violence or the threat of its use in the solution of various kinds of disagreements--particularly those that involve conflicting interest between people of different nations.
The propagandists that use this term would like to claim that the world’s troubles with Adolph Hitler were in large part due to Neville Chamberlain traveling to in Munich1938 and entering into the Munich Agreement.
Well before September 1938, Hitler had completely consolidated his dictatorial control over Germany, and had ridden into Austria and taken over as a returning and liberating hero.
The rise of Hitler is not a lesson in appeasement, but one of slipping into being a nation of men and not law.
By using fear and the threat of foreign devils (axis of evil and WMDs comes to mind), a continuous barrage of propaganda, intimidation of the press, and with the support of a small but willing pack of sycophantic followers and opportunists, Hitler subverted the existing rule of law and crushed any opposition by claiming that those that questioned were unpatriotic, not good Germans, traitors or foolish appeasers—extraordinary means were needed in extraordinary times (and what’s the matter with a little water boarding?).
How did this happen? In part, as Edmund Burke suggested, “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”
But the forces that the good people of Germany faced were subtle and more sinister than they could ever imagine. The subversion of freedom was also so gradual that they never recognized a point of no return; by then anyone that did not go along was as much of an enemy as were the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, foreigners, and other evil doers.
After Hitler’s Germany came to an end, a majority of Germans could legitimately claim that they never really had seen it coming until it was too late and then there was nothing they could do. Too late, those that tried were the silent dead or missing.
As Justice William O.Douglas poetically cautioned, “As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
And what about the small number of Germans that were loyal to Hitler to the end and those that to this day would beyond all reason defend Hitler and trumpet his cause again? They identify with their Man of Steel—the warp and weave of his nature is that of their own and no one can readily think of themselves as being rotten to the core.
For those that would rather revise than learn from history, it is apparently never too early to set about its rewriting. Right-wing hawks are already explaining away the error of making war in Iraq—as has been done with the one in Vietnam. Their revised version of the Iraqi quagmire shifts responsibility away from George W. Bush and his Republican enablers and onto those that understand the folly of it all. How so?
These right-wing ideologues are determined practitioners of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda technique of telling a lie over and over until it becomes an unchallenged version of history. Their portrayal of the Vietnam War as a cut-and-run disgrace is a good example. The revisionist’s telling and retelling starts with dissembling the reason for our entry in and withdrawal from Vietnam, and begs the question as to the lesson to be learned.
The confabulators insist that our exit from the Vietnam War was an avoidable defeat that damaged our nation’s long-term vital interests. They blame the loss on those that saw the war from its start to have been an unnecessary, life wasting, resource squandering, and reputation damaging blunder made worse by continued bullheadedness. Perchance it sounds familiar?
Though reason would suggest that victory or defeat in any war should be measured in terms of why it is launched, those that have revised the history of the Vietnam War avoid mentioning its purpose. Our entry into Vietnam was supposed to block the advance of communism as foretold by the Domino Theory. What is the latest explanation as to why President Bush took us into a preemptive war in Iraq?
The Domino Theory , that led us into Vietnam, contended that if a former Southeast Asian imperial possession were to become communist there would be a step-by-step advance of this doctrine across the South Pacific right to the shores of God only knew where. So when the French had their disaster at Dien Bien Phu and pulled out of Vietnam we went in to stop the dominoes from falling.
In portraying defeat as being at the heart of the Vietnam debacle, revisionists disregard the real and historic fact that we left and the dominoes never fell, an indication that we need not have gone into Vietnam in the first place. Thus, the mistake was not in getting out, but in ever getting in. Might we now be staying in Iraq to avoid getting out?
Just recently President Bush made a diplomatic invasion into Southeast Asia and says that while he and the First Lady were on a sightseeing ride through Hanoi, “Laura and I were talking about how amazing it is that we’re here in Vietnam.”
Even more amazing is the now-versus-then observation that Bush offered on this same historic visit to Vietnam: “the world that we live in today is one where they want things to happen immediately and it is hard work in Iraq.”
Hum, if “they” includes him and us, what should be made of someone’s willingness to launching a preemptive war that is taking longer and proving harder to stop than to start, and was to do one thing but now is to do another? And would the lesson from history suggest that it is better to end it sooner than later and maybe in the same way that Nixon did with the one in Vietnam?
In practical terms, Nixon declared victory and brought the brave troops home—neither seen as a hasty decision nor heard from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Following his 1969 election, President Nixon announced his Vietnamization program. It was to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese and start withdrawing American forces. By the early 1970s the troops were coming home at a rate of over 12,000 a month.
By early January of 1973, Nixon suspended American offensive action in North Vietnam and by the end of the month the Paris Peace Accords were signed by the governments of North Vietnam, South Veitnam, and the US. Nixon contended that our military purpose had been achieved.
Bush’s last ditch effort in Iraq looks like a mirrored image of the Vietnam misadventure: Iraqization with a surge in place of a withdrawal. Maybe it only looks confusing if one is on the outside trying to peer into this new looking-glass war. But rest assured that the Decider is getting well-targeted advice from the Mad Hatter, when he is not down in Texas hunting his friends.
But riddle the rest of us this Mad Hatter, if the dominoes that did not fall in Southeast Asia were to likewise not fall in the Middle East, will you and history’s revisionist make any noise about it?
