The View From 1776

James Taranto, in the May 19 edition of his Wall Street Journal column BEST OF THE WEB TODAY, writes:

One of the more unusual responses to President Bush’s speech last week comes from Bruce Ramsey, an editorialist at the Seattle Times. In a Friday post on the newspaper’s blog, quoted by Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, Ramsey defended Obama by . . . defending Hitler. No joke, here’s what he wrote:

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.

Hmm, “avoid war.” Does anyone happen to remember how that worked out?

Ramsey responded to the predictable mockery his post drew by totally rewriting it. The new version appears here, without any acknowledgment that it has changed. It is somewhat toned down, but still shockingly ignorant:

The narrative we’re given about Munich is entirely in hindsight. We know what kind of man Hitler was, and that he started World War II in Europe. But in 1938 people knew a lot less.

It is true that much of what Hitler did, he did after 1938. But Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and 1926. And here is an excerpt from The House That Hitler Built by Stephen Roberts, published in 1937 and quoted here last year:

At present, the German Jew has no civil rights. He is not a citizen; he cannot vote or attend any political meeting; he has no liberty of speech and cannot defend himself in print; he cannot become a civil servant or a judge; he cannot be a writer or a publisher or a journalist; he cannot speak over the radio; he cannot become a screen actor or an actor before Aryan audiences; he cannot teach in any educational institution; he cannot enter the service of the railway, the Reichsbank, and many other banks; he cannot exhibit paintings or give concerts; he cannot work in any public hospital; he cannot enter the Labour Front or any of the professional organizations, although membership of many callings is restricted to members of these groups; he cannot even sell books or antiques. . . . In addition to these, there are many other restrictions applying in certain localities. The upshot of them all is that the Jew is deprived of all opportunity for advancement and is lucky if he contrives to scrape a bare living unmolested by Black Guards or Gestapo. It is a campaign of annihilation--a pogrom of the crudest form, supported by every State instrument.

If the British and French were ignorant of Hitler’s intentions in 1938, it is not because the information was unavailable. In any case, defending that ignorance is a strange way of defending Barack Obama today.

In a follow-up post, Ramsey keeps on digging:

My previous post having inflamed a few hundred people, I’ll try another tack. Forget the Munich conference. My point is really not about that anyway.

Hey wait, aren’t those who forget history doomed to repeat it? That’s exactly what Ramsey has in mind:

It is said we can’t talk to terrorists. Get beyond the “terrorist” label, which is another device for barring communication. You have to ask: do these people represent the political aspirations of a large group? if [sic] they do, you’d better talk to them, because they’re not going away. Find out what they want. You don’t have to knuckle under. But talk. Hear them out. Have them hear you out.

If Ramsey had his way, the U.S. would respond to the murder of civilians by offering to “hear out” the murderers and “find out what they want.” Even Barack Obama does not go this far. He has advocated talking only to those terrorists who control states.

What Ramsey is advocating is precisely appeasement: answering aggression with solicitude. It is a sure way of provoking, not avoiding, war.