Historian Victor Davis Hanson:
Western exhaustion, guilt, and appeasement are nothing new. Much of the British aristocracy saw not much wrong with Hitler, even after the invasion of Poland. It was Churchill alone who put an end to their peace feelers to fellow travelers in Germany, still creeping out when his new British government chopped them off after the fall of France.
No need to talk about French politics in the 1930s, or the conditions in Austria before the Anschluss. Reread what Joe Kennedy or Charles Lindberg said about appeasement before December 1941, and it gives a frightening glimpse into the mind of a great segment of the population that thought it could ride out the European war, deal with a Hitlerized Europe, and live with Imperial Japan.
All that said, the West is encountering something novel, as it fights its first politically-correct war, in which all the postmodern chickens of the 1980s and 1990s have come home to roost. Thus multiculturalism makes it hard to fight non-Europeans from the former third world, inasmuch as it argued there was not just little distinctively good about the West, but rather the once recognized universal sins of mankind—racism, sexism, class oppression, inequality, patriarchy—were to be seen as exclusively Western.
Read the whole thing.
Recent Comments