BrianGarst.com

Seattle Times Blogger Bruce Ramsey has jumped the shark in defense of the media’s savior.

Democrats are rebuking President Bush for saying in his speech to the Knesset, here, that to “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” is “appeasement.” The Democrats took it as a slap at Barack Obama. What bothers me is the continual reference to Hitler and his National Socialists, particularly the British and French accommodation at the Munich Conference of 1938.

What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable. He wanted the German-speaking areas of Europe under German authority. He had just annexed Austria, which was German-speaking, without bloodshed. There were two more small pieces of Germanic territory: the free city of Danzig and the Sudetenland, a border area of what is now the Czech Republic.

We live in an era when you do not change national borders for these sorts of reasons. But in 1938 it was different. Germany’s eastern and western borders had been redrawn 19 years before—and not to its benefit. In the democracies there was some sense of guilt with how Germany had been treated after World War I. Certainly there was a memory of the “Great War.” In 2008, we have entirely forgotten World War I, and how utterly unlike any conception of “The Good War” it was. When the British let Hitler have a slice of Czechoslovakia, they were following their historical wisdom: avoid war. War produces results far more horrible than you expected. War is a bad investment. It is not glorious. Don’t give anyone an excuse to start one.

And yet, give Hitler an excuse is exactly what they did. To the ambitious, weakness is an excuse for war. Hitler’s aggression was not some big surprise. Winston Churchill saw it coming well in time to prevent it. It’s painful how poorly Ramsey missed the point. If the objective is to avoid war, giving in to the demands of thugs, no matter how “reasonable,” is not the way to go about it.

Even if we accept his premise that the Palestinians have some territorial claim (they don’t), their true objective is much more than that. Just as Hitler’s own words made his aggressive intentions perfectly clear, so do those of the Palestinians. They want the total destruction of Israel. Appeasing their territorial demands will only encourage them to pursue this goal just as it did Hitler. That is the lesson that intelligent people were able to learn from WWII: appeasements makes war more, and not less, likely. Sadly, Bruce Ramsey and an ever increasing number of the left are not included in this group.

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