…reach for Munich

"When you’ve got absolutely nothing, reach for Munich" said blogger Robert Farley, speaking about the propensity of American right-wing ideologues to use the historical analogy of Munich 1938 to punish their adversaries on the left and promote perpetual war as the only solution to geopolitical conflicts.  It’s always Munich 1938 in the bizarro-world of right-wing America; every perceived enemy is Hitler and every individual who advocates diplomacy over war is a Chamberlain.

Take the case of the pundit Charles Krauthammer, the Republican Party’s philosopher of torture.  Krauthammer routinely pulls Munich 1938 out of his bags of tricks when he writes his weekly column in the Washington Post. As Brendan Nyhan pointed out in Time Magazine, Krauthammer sees Hitler everywhere, and used the Munich 1938 analogy in his columns over the years to criticize alleged appeasement of China, Russia, North Korea, Iraq, and now – nearly every week – Iran.

  If there is a more ridiculous figure in the Republican Party than Newt Gingrich, I cannot think of him. And yet Newt is often cited as the party’s intellectual leader, one whose ideas might very well lead him into the White House in 2008 (I say, bring him on!). Sure enough, Newt invokes Munich 1938 in his latest offering in the right-wing magazine Human Events, home to racists, bigots and anti-Semites such as Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter and Patrick Buchanen. In his brilliant "letter" to fellow conservatives – The Reality of Evil and the Men and Women of Munich – the would-be intellectual historian Newt Gingrich explains that the Democrats in are the new Chamberlains for wanting to end the Iraq War, rejected now by the vast majority of Americans:

The Men and Women of Munich have just scored a victory in Congress. They passed a bill that they have been enthusiastically telling their leftwing allies is designed to end the war in Iraq by crippling the military’s ability to achieve victory.

Interestingly enough, Newt also cites the bogus story of the Koran divorce case in Frankfurt, which I debunked earlier in the week, to illustrate how Germany had succumbed to "evil" and the ghosts of Munich 1938.

And then there’s the case of Victor Davis Hanson (VDH) , the darling of the right-wing intelligentsia (oxymoron?), a classicist who has found a lucrative niche as a modern military thinker.  This academic and grape farmer has never worn a uniform, much less been in a combat situation, but advocates full-scale slaughter in every column he writes for the National Review or the Weekly Standard. Munich is VDH’s favorite analogy, and Europe is his favorite target – "Europe, an entire continent now returning to the cowardice of the 1930s (VDH)". In his latest diatribe against European cowardice and appeasement – House of Straw, on the National Review’s Web site this week – VDH vents his anger at European multilatarism, especially with respect to Europe’s approach to Iran.  Once again it’s Munich 1938, and the diplomatic approach favored by European nations would never "work against a Hitler":

"If Europeans recoil from a few Taliban hoodlums or Iranian jihadists, new mega-powers like nuclear India and China will simply ignore European protestations as the ankle-biting of tired moralists. Indeed, they do so already."

So, once again, the "solution" put foward by this Pericles of Petticoat Junction is war – preferably nuclear.

Welcome to US-style conservative thinking, where the solution to a failed unilateral invasion is to surge more troops; where every day is Munich 1938, every enemy a Hitler, and every political adversary a Chamberlain. This group of "serious" thinkers will only be content when there is total warfare that engulfs the planet.  So instead of Munich 1938 the world will resemble Berlin 1945.