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CounterPunch
January
2, 2003
The Third Reich
Syndrome:
George Will and the Collapse of Historical Knowledge
by DR. WERTHER*
To paraphrase Aldous Huxley, "the only thing
men learn from history is to endlessly invoke Adolf Hitler."
Although this pseudo-historical bugaboo had its roots in the
cold war, the gratuitous invocation of Adolf Hitler and the Third
Reich has become epidemic over the past dozen years among the
foreign policy elite and their hangers-on as an all-purpose justification
for whatever foreign policy the elite wants to execute.
Beginning in 1989, the U.S. government
justified its invasion of Panama and arrest of former CIA hirling
Manuel Noriega with the excuse that he was like Hitler. On the
eve of Desert Storm, President George H.W. Bush decried erstwhile
ally Saddam Hussein as "worse than Hitler." With a
change in administrations, the practice continued, this time
to justify the overthrow of a ludicrously picayune rogue: to
the Clinton administration, none other than Haiti's Raoul Cedras
acquired the evil attributes of the long-dead Beast of Berlin.
The decade-long breakup of Yugoslavia
also assumed the sinister characteristics--at least in the fevered
minds of the half-educated Beltway literati--of Hitler's conquest
of Europe. The elite gave no regard either to the circumstance
that Yugoslavia was getting smaller, not larger, nor to the inconvenient
fact that Yugoslavia was itself an artificial construct of Wilsonian
idealism. Still less regard was paid to fact that the deaths
in this civil war were hardly above the norm of killings practiced
by U.S. allies like Turkey in Kurdistan or Indonesia in Timor
(about the Sabra and Shatila massacres or My Lai the less said
the better). In his speech justifying an attack on Serbia, President
Clinton adverted to the alleged need for the United States to
intervene in this conflict "in the heart of Europe"--a
clear attempt to link Yugoslavia (a mere backwater at the Southeast
fringe of Europe ) with the Munich agreement and the origins
of the Second World War.
Against this contemporary background
of cardboard Fuhrers and bogus crises, George F. Will has lately
put all his mock erudition and tedious moral dudgeon at the service
of the war party. His recent column [Reference 1] asserts that
the defective and incomplete arms inspection regime of the Allied
Control Commission after World War I permitted Weimar Germany
to secretly rearm. Therefore, Mr. Will implies, the current arms
inspection of Iraq is hopelessly futile, and its naive pursuit
will inevitably beget a rampant and victorious military conqueror
in the form of Saddam Hussein.
The reader also draws the inference that
those who favor inspections over pre-emptive war are not merely
fatuous optimists, but almost criminally negligent appeasers
in the manner of Neville Chamberlain. This conclusion is reinforced
by the melodramatic manner in which Mr. Will ends his piece:
the final two words are "Adolf Hitler," ending very
much like a child's "just so" story, or, if you will,
the urban legend which the teller dares the listener to doubt.
What is wrong with this historical analogy? One hardly knows
where to begin. Mr. Will evidently means to suggest Iraq and
Weimar Germany are equivalent threats by stating that the two
countries are roughly the same size. By this measure, Chad or
Outer Mongolia must have frightening military potential. Concrete
comparison, rather than emotional suggestibility, yields the
following data
Weimar Germany, despite the Versailles
sanctions, comprised the second-largest industrial base on earth.
In certain critical fields, such as chemistry, physics, and metallurgy,
it led the world. By the early-twentieth century standards of
industrial development--the production of coal, steel, or industrial
chemicals--Germany was either first in the world or second behind
the United States. No other country had as many Nobel Prize-winning
scientists as Germany.
A summary indication of Iraq's military/industrial
potential may be gleaned from the following passage: ".
. . Iraq's real gross domestic product (GDP)-that is, its GDP
adjusted for inflation-fell by 75 percent from 1991 to 1999.
In the late 1990s the country's real GDP was estimated at about
what it was in the 1940s, [emphasis added] prior to the oil boom
and the modernization of the country. As a result, per capita
income and the people's calorie intake plunged from the levels
of relatively better-off Third World countries to those of the
desperately poor Fourth World states, such as Rwanda, Haiti,
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia." (2)
So the economic indicators of this alleged
hegemon on the Euphrates are more nearly those of such basket
cases as Rwanda than those of Weimar Germany or the Soviet menace.
Mr. Will refers in his column to the
clandestine training methods of the Reichswehr as a basis for
its subsequent expansion into the Wehrmacht. But what does the
German Army of that time, almost universally acknowledged as
the most professional officer and NCO corps in the world, have
to do with a demoralized, robotic, and inept Iraqi officer corps
leading a brutalized, unwilling conscript rabble? Does their
lamentable performance in Desert Storm somehow evoke Operation
Barbarossa or the Wehrmacht's conquest of France and the Low
Countries?
Likewise Weimar Germany's relative strength
vis-a-vis its potential adversaries compared with Iraq's current
situation. As stated, Germany was the second largest industrial
base in the world. The United States, its only industrial better
in the 1920s, might as well have been on the moon for all that
it was able to affect the contemporary balance of power in Europe.
Post-Versailles America had an army that was well below the first
rank, and behind such martial midgets as Sweden or Romania.
By contrast, today the United States
alone comprises close to 50 percent of world military spending.
Its putative rival Iraq spends about a tenth on the military
compared to what it did a decade ago. Its remaining weapons are
largely obsolete 1970s vintage Soviet bloc hardware (without
spare parts or contractor support), and its delivery means of
purported weapons of mass destruction are roughly a dozen SCUDs,
themselves a derivative of 60-year old V-2 technology.
It is also hard to conceive of the history
of the 1920s as being one where the Entente powers would have
been able to designate half of Germany a no-fly zone and bomb
German military installations at will. The Entente also lacked
orbiting satellites, multi-billion dollar signals intelligence
interception capabilities, and other technical means that the
United States now routinely employs against Iraq. If the implication
is that these technologies, developed to surveille the eight
million square miles of the Soviet Union, are inadequate to handle
Iraq, one can only conclude the U.S. taxpayer has been duped.
It is not surprising that crackpot analogies
like Mr. Will's have gained traction in the United States anno
2002. A recent National Geographic survey found that in the dumbed-down
post-literate age "only about one in seven--13 percent--of
Americans between the age of 18 and 24, the prime age for military
warriors, could find Iraq" on a world map. (3) The adage
says that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
Accordingly, a half-educated discourse on the Weimar Republic
by a kennel-fed establishment literatus like George Will sounds
like real erudition to people who can barely find Canada on a
map.
As the conservative political scientist
Michael Oakshott wrote, historical analogies must be drawn with
sensitivity and attention to historical facts, because an analogy
is not a mathematical proof or a logical syllogism:
There is no process of generalization
by means of which the events, things and persons of history can
be reduced to anything other than historical events, things and
persons without at the same time being removed from the world
of historical ideas . . . In history there are no "general
laws" by means of which historical individuals can be reduced
to instances of a principle, and least of all are there general
laws of the character we find in the world of science.
Let us heed Mr. Oakshott's caution. Otherwise,
a tendentious or partisan reading of history could derive any
number of Third Reich analogies. For example, future generations
of shallow and ill-educated people might conclude that since
both Josef Goebbels and George Will never served in the military,
and both wrote tirelessly in favor of war, and both practiced
the lower forms of journalism, there must be a functional equivalence
between the two. But who would now suggest such a far-fetched
analogy?
Werther
is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.
He can be reached at: werther@counterpunch.org.
(1) "A Retrospective on Disarmament
by George F. Will, The Washington Post, 15 December 2002.
(2) "Iraq Economy," a country
profile at Mapzones.com.
(3) "Global
Goofs: US Youth Can't Find Iraq,"
(4) Experience and Its Modes, Michael
Oakshott, 1986.
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