Vanity | January 24, 2009 | Nathan Bedford
Between the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 and the dawn hours of September 1,1939, there was time enough to birth a new generation in England and on the continent and to forget every lesson learned in the mud and blood of Flanders and Passchendaele.
. The new generation, and, alas, the generation that had been tutored in the blood and mud of the trenches at the cost of 10 million lives, forgot their lessons, worse, they contrived rationalizations to turn history and common sense on their heads. Both sides of the trenches got their lessons wrong. The Germans concluded that losing war was intolerable. The French and the English concluded that war itself was intolerable. Thus, the Germans made themselves vulnerable to a homicidal megalomaniac who would create a cult of personality, deprive them of their discernment, and ruin them utterly even to the point of cannibalism. He would bring them to war, he would bring them to intolerable conditions, he would bring them to ruin. From beginning to end most of them would remain under his hypnotic thrall.
Alas, the English also got their lessons wrong too, they turned to the Lotus. Abhorring evil, they chose to cope with it by simply denying its existence. Or at least they would deal with it by returning good for evil, appeasement for aggression. Up to the very cusp of Armageddon they thought they could bargain with Faust. They saved their umbrage which should have been directed at Hitler and turned it on the Jeremiah, on John the Baptist, one of their own, who was vainly summoning them to the Shield and Buckler of their sacred honor.
Lest we Americans grow too smug, our humility should be increased by recognizing that we chose to cope with evil with a geographical cure: we would leave it in Europe. Our arrogance was reinforced by an accident of geography, we were separated from Hitler by an ocean and therefore we could say that we were separated from evil by our righteousness. Our self -deception nearly let slip the whole world into a new dark age.
In Volume one, The Gathering Storm, of his historic (the actual publishing of these volumes was a matter itself of history) as well as historical account of The Second World War, Churchill identifies his theme:
How the English-speaking peoples
through their unwisdom
carelessness and good nature
allowed the wicked
to rearm
Living today in Germany, I am fascinated by the Teutonic way of seeing the world and am drawn to explore the "Hitler Zeit" or, the "Hitler Times", as they are now euphemistically described, with my neighbors. Yet, it would be boorish to barge into such a sensitive subject with people who are unfailingly polite. So I have contrived a game to draw them out, I ask them the following question: Who is the greatest man of the 20th century? Most often the answer I hear is, Adenauer. I suppose that is understandable, if not inspiring. Sometimes, I hear one from the following genre: Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Mother Theresa. I take this as evidence of the leftist educational influence in Germany. I have never heard the name, Winston Churchill, spontaneously advanced in response to my question in Germany. At first I was surprised but now I understand that this is part of a tapestry that is best left folded over. The fault for the second world war lies not with the German people but with Adolph Hitler alone or in company with a few of his henchmen. The German people themselves, you see, were duped. In many ways I believe Germans have taken the wrong lessions from the second war as they did from the first. The problem is seen as the Nazis and so they must today be suppressed. Rather than defend liberty of speech, they adopt the Nazi tactic and suppress speech. They see a grave danger in Scientology and virtually outlaw it. But then they saw a greater danger in George Bush than in Vladimir Putin.
And so were the English, French, and we Americans duped in 1933. Or were we all? Did we not seek to be duped? Churchill read Mein Kampf and so did others. Why was he nearly alone in taking a lesson from it? What is it in men that encourages us to rationalize evil? I certainly do not think it is a anything as prosaic as "unwisdom, carelessness or good nature" that ultimately accounts for it. I think there is a more sinister impulse implanted in men.
The signs were all there to see: the cult of personality; the intolerance of contrary opinion; the formation of extra-normal operatives such as political street organizations and youth organizations; playing on victimology; the creation of an us against them mentality; the demonization of opponents; the false sense of urgency; the immunity from the rule of law for the elites; the fawning of the media; the distortion of science; the tinkering with life in the laboratory; the mass psychosis.
George Bush and Winston Churchill share a one admirable characteristic in common, both men repudiate pettiness. So Bush carried this normally noble character trait to a fault in turning the other cheek to his attackers to the destruction of his own administration. Churchill would not denigrate even Chamberlain personally. Yet there is no question that Churchill could identify evil. He saw it from the very beginning in Hitler. He might have misjudged Mussolini a bit in the early going, but Churchill nailed Hitler from the get go, from even before the day Hitler came to power in 1933. He was never deceived, either, about the murderous tyrants of the Kremlin and their evil, pernicious doctrine. I tell my German friends that I think Winston Churchill was the greatest man of the 20th century, "because he single-handedly saved the world- once from fascism and once, with others, from communism."
What is the point of all this? Well, it is high time that I got to the point. More than one Freeper has asked me to comment on the early doings of the Obama administration. Believe it or not, this is a vanity about that. Am I comparing Obama to Hitler? Yes I am. I would rather make the point by identifying parallels with communism, the Soviets, their gulags, their repression, mao tse- tung's cult of personality, the treatment in the press, their domination of academia. But I am writing this to persuade people so I pick Hitler rather than Mao, Hitler rather than Che Guevera, Hitler rather than Hugo Chavez, because in today's world it is politically correct to attack Nazis and unproductive to attack extreme leftism.
How dare one compare unfavorably our first black president, freely elected by the people, with one of history's most evil men, Adolf Hitler? I'll leave that for you to ponder. If this vanity slips out somehow from FreeRepublic, probably because it is identified as an execrable example of hate on the right, the debate will be confined to how the right must be censored, they will say that it is far more dangerous than, for example, Scientology (but perhaps with less influence.) But others with a more open mind might just open those minds further to the parallels between Obama and Hitler. They might consider what it was about the English state of mind after the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month which very nearly led them into gotterdammerung. They might consider how Churchill was shunned and dismissed as a war monger. They might see some parallels in our society today in the way in which we are treating our Jeremiahs, our John the Baptists. I am bound to say in sadness that I see no Winston Churchill in our midst but I do see that it is 1933 for Obama's America.
On October 25 of last year, before the election, I published this on Free Republic:
How conservatives can contrive to come out of the wilderness or whether they can come out at all cannot now be foreseen. Much depends on whether Obama merely perverts our institutions and traditional liberties or succeeds in subverting the Constitution à la Hugo Chavez. Obama has many tools short of violence and few institutional obstacles stand in his way. He has the overwhelming justification of the financial crisis which might well become a depression. He will pack the court. He will use the treaty making power to detour around our constitutional liberties. The propaganda machine will be overwhelming. The bright side, if it can be counted as such, is that all will not be well on the left. Hillary will exercise her ambitions, inevitably at the expense of Obama. Every special-interest group will be calling in their IOUs. In the long run, an extreme leftist coalition cannot hold together unless it moves beyond our constitutional government toward some sort of repressive regime. I look for Stalin versus Trotsky wars on the left with the potential for these internicine battles to spin out of control. Who knows where that will lead? Much depends on whether the left stays within the model of a representative democracy or seeks to extend its power with subversion of our historical liberties.
It is difficult to lift one's gaze above the machinations generated by Obama's new administration to see the path leading out of the wilderness for conservatives and for the country. I think it revolves around the word, liberty. There is every reason to fear that our economic times will closely resemble 1933. Will the political times parallel 1933 as well? The portents are ominous. The absence of a conservative opposition to raise the standard even against the corruption of Obama's appointees is as dispiriting as it is revealing. We will be lucky, however, if the worst legacy of Obamaism is mere corruption. Yet, we have betrayed ourselves to be too callow to stand up even against obvious corruption. Somehow, men must raise themselves up and defend their children and their children's birthright. They must recognize evil. They must fight for liberty if only for their childrens' sake. If we succumb to the cult of personality every child in the world is lost for we are the hope of the world.
Here is how Churchill ends his the first volume at England's darkest hour when England must stand alone against the overwhelming power of evil yet, indomitably, he ends on a note of hope:
During these last crowded days of the political crisis my pulse had not quickened at any moment. I took it all as it came. But I cannot conceal from the reader of this truthful account that as I went to bed at about 3 a.m. I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. 10 years in the political wilderness had freed me from ordinary party antagonisms. My warnings over the last six years had been so numerous, so detailed, and were now so terribly vindicated, that no one could gainsay me. I could not be reproached either for making the war or would want a preparation for it. I thought I'd do a good deal about it all, and I was sure I should not fail. Therefore, although impatient for the morning, I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.
