Monday, July 14, 2008

The Pyhric Pinnacle


The adulating fascination with Winston Churchill among contemporary American "leaders" (it is far more apt to simply call them "power holders") is a disquieting exercise in supremely selective memory and overarching ignorance that should trouble all who value history as well as all who value the future which, barring narcissists and nihilists, includes all of us.

We tend to remember Churchill as the man who saved democracy, but let us consider that one could walk from Baghdad to South Africa 1939 without leaving British-controlled soil and simultaneously without walking upon soil whose tillers enjoyed the right to vote for their decision-makers.

It is utterly impolitic in the United States to imply that Hitler was anything short of the most evil and murderous man to ever live and that, had he not been crushed without regard to the cost, "we'd all be speaking German". The inconvenient truth, however, is that we sided with the wrong butcher. And it was Churchill, who some call "The Man of the Century", who was more responsible for this butcher's bill than anyone else.

Great Britain declared war on Germany when Germany insisted on re-taking historically German territory from Poland, an anti-Semitic dictatorship with which Hitler had vainly attempted to forge an alliance. Poland refused to negotiate with Hitler because, and only because, Great Britain promised the Poles protection.

For simple physical and logistical reasons, this protection was an utterly hollow promise, sort of like Bolivia pledging to go to war for the territorial integrity of Oklahoma, and though the bloodiest war in the history of the world was begun to "save" Poland, Poland spent the next 50 years under a tyranny....wait for it....worse than Hitler's.

Hitler was a hater. He hated many things. Among the things he did NOT hate were the British Empire and the United States. Among the things he DID hate were, of course, the Jews, but his most visceral ire was reserved for the Bolsheviks.

Hitler recognized and vowed to protect the British Empire and the Catholic Church, but he identified the Soviet Union as a cancer on civilization that must be lanced. And, since the Reich was on the geographical front line against the promised global Marxist revolution, he aimed to crush it in its crib. He did not ask for help. He asked simply to be left alone.

Again, is it heretical in our current paradigm to imply that Hitler's aims were in any way limited or rational because, among other reasons, the means which the United States and Great Britain used to defeat Germany were neither limited nor rational. American pilots killed more Germans in one night, on several different nights during the war, than the Luftwaffe killed during all of its "terror bombing" of England.

Faux-scholars, and legitimate ones as well, point to Mein Kampf as the blueprint for Hitler's intentions. They are right, of course, but only selectively so. Hitler promised to reverse the Carthaginian and unjust "peace" imposed on Germany after World War I, he promised to drive the Jews out of Germany, and he promised to crush the Soviet regime.

He accomplished these first two tasks largely without resistance from the West. When he embarked upon the third undertaking, however, the West attacked. Even though any even lukewarm proponent of protected religion and basic human dignity would have rejoiced at seeing Stalin on the wrong end of a sword, the West attacked as Hitler began his assault on the greatest mass murderer in history.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler and Stalin both invaded Poland. Great Britain declared war on Hitler. Why? And at what cost? Poland lost a greater percentage of its population in World War II than any country had lost in any war in prior human history. Then it was pimped out to a full half-century of tyranny and foreign occupation. Good thing the British guaranteed Poland "protection", huh?

Let us have no illusion about Hitler. He was a son of a bitch, he was a racist, and he planned to take over Eastern Europe. But, more importantly, let us have no illusions about Stalin. He was perhaps history's preeminent son of a bitch, and he DID take over Eastern Europe, but he did so with the blessing of the world's only democracies, including our own.

Let it be said: the cost of crushing Hitler was to resign the nations the West claimed to aim to "save" to a fate even worse than what Hitler had in store.

It has perpetually been in vogue to denounce Neville Chamberlain for his "appeasement" of Hitler at Munich, just as it has been in vogue to see Winston Churchill as a man ahead of his time, as the man who alone understood the danger of Nazism and held the line against all odds during those long and lonely years of 1940 and 1941, when a cigar-chomping, brandy-swilling imperilast and first-degree racist, Winton Churchill, single-handedly staved off the extinction of Western Civilization.

But what did Chamberlain give up? At Munich, Chamberlain allowed Hitler to claim the Sudetenland. The Sudetenland was a nearly universally German region of Czechoslovakia, a nation created out of thin air 20 years prior. More than 90% of Sudetens voiced their desire to return to Germany. Was this appeasement, to return confiscated property to its historical owner?

Fast forward six years, when Churchill allowed Stalin to claim an entire half of the European continent, none of which had been historically Russian, and none of which had voiced any desire to be governed from Moscow. How was this not "appeasement"?

Chamberlain gave a million Germans back to Germany. This is the perenially-cited definition of "appeasement". Churchill gave tens of millions of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukranians, Albanians, Bosnians, Macedonians, Serbs, Croatians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, and assorted others to the greatest mass murder who has ever lived.

All this, after declaring a war which led to 50 million deaths and the ruin of the British Empire, a war declared to protect the very countries which were so casually signed off to a half century Soviet tyranny before said war was even over.

Much as the Americans in Iraq (a country created in large part by Mr. Churchill....thanks again, Winston), Churchill seemed utterly seduced by the temptation of employing apocalyptic levels of organized violence against an unarguably distasteful man.

He butressed this all-too-human impulse, and herein lies the key, by an incomprehensible disregard for the fact that there would be a day after, and that the day after was as much as responsibility of willing belligerents as the war itself.

As Americans, we have an understandable inability to empathize with the rational interests of landlocked states surrounded by hostile powers with military parity. States like Germany. States like the Soviet Union during the Cold War. States like contemporary Iran.

As a result of this geographic blessing, the most divine accident, we are blind to the realities that such states face. This is not meant as an apology for Hitler, of course. But neither should shoddy scholarship be allowed to serve as an apology for Stalin.

It is as simple as this: the West had two odious choices in 1939. Should we side with Hitler or with Stalin when they inevitably clash? Instead of choosing to let the despots bleed each other and undermine their tyrannies, the West subsidized and bled for the worse of the two.

In the 1980's, the West had a similar choice. Iraq and Iran were facing off along similar fronts. Iraq was the Germany. The state to the West, the bulwark protecting a certain secular region from an insidious and expansionist ideology from the East. Iraq was a brutal, vaguely fascist state. Not an appealing actor, but who was the enemy?

The enemy was Iran. Iran was the Soviet Union. The state to the East, a relatively new revolutionary experiment which promised to export its ideology around the world. Clearly, this was the more threatening enemy to the West. And the West acted accordingly, if amorally, by aiding and arming Saddam Hussein for forming the military barrier against the latest expansionist ideology.

How far have we fallen? There are never perfect choices, but we seem preordained to follow Churchill into the moral morass of claiming to exalt certain immutable values as a matter of principle while simultaneously making such poor and naive decisions that we end up facing both possible enemies rather than siding with one in a way that would lead to a lasting peace.

If we study each of the two two cases above, Hitler vs. Stalin and Hussein vs. Khomeini, and we ask which dictator we have ended up funding only to end up fighting, the answer is, tragically, and in both cases
.....both.

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