Skip to main content

Hitler, narratives, meta-narratives, and the downright abuse of history

Long post warning: in order to preserve the text I'm quoting (because, as you will see, they are changing even as we speak), I'm going to go whole hog and chunk in the whole things rather than just link to them.

*********************

The furor over Dubya's comments about appeasement and Obama's response are the context in which I am writing, but they aren't the story. If you hadn't already figured out that politics would eventually end up in the gutter this season, you haven't been paying attention.

What interests me is the strange case of Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times and his editorial on the use of Hitler and the term "appeasement." Ramsey apparently (you'll see why I use the qualifier in a moment) wanted to set what he considered to be the historical record straight about the continual references to Hitler and Munich in 1938. Which, of course, the right jumped all over like . . . well, I'm spare you the gratuitous simile.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Little Green Footballs is the major source for the editorial that most right-wing sites have been linking back to for the text of the editorial, and they carry the text as the following:

Democrats are rebuking President Bush for saying in his speech to the Knesset, here, that to “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” is “appeasement.” The Democrats took it as a slap at Barack Obama. 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.


That line that I bolded--"What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable"--is the line that has headlined conservative blogs across the country; see Libertarian Republican for an example.

But even though Little Green Footballs quoted the entire editorial, I am anal enough to back-click to the Seattle Times link they provided. Imagine my surprise to discover that the Ramsey editorial that now appears there is significantly different:

Democrats are rebuking President Bush for saying in his speech to the Knesset, here, that to “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” is “appeasement.” The Democrats took it as a slap at Barack Obama. 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.

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. What Hitler was demanding at Munich was not unreasonable as a national claim (though he was making it in a last-minute, unreasonable way.) Germany's claim was that the areas of Europe that spoke German and thought of themselves as German be under German authority. In September 1938 the principal remaining area was the Sudetenland.

So the British and French let him have it. Their thought was: "Now you have your Greater Germany." They didn't want a war. They were not superpowers like the United States is now. They remembered the 1914-1918 war and how they almost lost it.

In a few months, in early 1939, Hitler ordered the invasion of what is now the Czech Republic—that is, territory that was not German. Then it was obvious that a deal with him was worthless--and the British and French did not appease Hitler any more. Thus the lesson of Munich: don't appease Hitlers.

But who else is a Hitler? If you paste that label on somebody it means they are cast out. You can't talk to them any more. And it has gotten pasted on quite a few national leaders over the years: Milosevic, Hussein, Ahmadinejad, et. al. In particular, to apply that label to the elected leaders of the Palestinians is to say that you aren't going to listen to their claims to a homeland. I think they do have a claim. So do the Israelis. In order to get anywhere, each side has to listen to the other. To continually bring up Hitler, the Nazis, the Munich Conference and “appeasement,” is to try to prolong the stalemate.


Notice the difference in emphasis. It certainly is not subtle. Ramsey undoubtedly went back and rewrote the article to make it (a) more anti-Hitler; (b) more detailed about the situation at Munich; and (c) to try to put himself back into the "don't appease" category while cautioning people not to call different world leaders "Hitler."

There are three points to make about this affair:

1. Regarding Hitler and Munich: Ramsey has evidently read a little book written about forty years ago by revisionist British historian A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, which caused a huge stir by suggesting that Adolf Hitler was, in fact, a traditional Prussian/German statesman pursuing the territorial expansion of his nation by the usual Bismarck-patented geo-political means, and that the Allies--by misreading him--were more or less responsible for starting World War Two.

(Years later, Taylor would joke that his very scholarly biography of Bismarck won rave reviews from academics but never made him a farthing, while Origins--which remains in print to this day--has kept him well abreast of three alimony checks for decades.)

Taylor's book is one of those perennially assigned to young graduate students to see if they are clever enough to realize that it's not seriously accepted academic history. And, unfortunately, it's one of those books that--if you read only one easily accessible book on the years leading up to World War Two--might convince you that Hitler was making reasonable demands in light of the evil Versailles Treaty; that the Nuremberg Laws and other forms of Jewish persecution weren't well known throughout Europe; that Germany was rearming for a major European war. . . . You get the picture.

Suffice it to say that Ramsey really has no idea what he is talking about.

2. Regarding the conservative reflex response: on the other hand, making Ramsey's whole editorial into a major "now liberals are saying Hitler was an OK guy" kind of story is not just political whoring, it's almost as filthy as--say--what was once required to get a city contract from John Street as Mayor of Philly. The Ramsey article is the work of one guy who thought his smartass insight about Adolf Hitler and Munich would allow him to lecture the world and make a name for himself. Too bad he putzed the historical data and came off looking like a fool, but that still has nothing to do with Dubya, Obama, or the whole appeasement non-controversy. Ramsey is at this point a footnote to a footnote in an appendix, except for the fact that Sean Hannity will now replay this thousands of times, saying, "And where are the Democrats repudiating Ramsey. . . ?"

3. Regarding the plastic nature of Ramsey's editorial: This is scary. I don't agree with Little Green Footballs very often, but it is not in their best interest to misquote a site to which they are currently providing an active link. I don't buy it for a second. The version that now appears on the Seattle Times website is clearly a revised, rewritten version of the editorial. It is particularly noteworthy that the "Hitler's demands were reasonable" sentence has been restructured to be less quotable and to include a shot at Hitler's tactic that did not exist in the original. The problem with the Web is the problem with Congressmen who "revise and extend" their remarks. How do you revise the past? Just write it over and hope nobody notices.

I hope (assuming you've stuck with me this far) that you'll notice. And that--like me--you will continuously demand that media organizations like the Seattle Times stop revising the past to make their present situations more palatable.

Comments

I had "half-read" this story yesterday. Thanks for laying it out.
Anonymous said…
I am getting tired of people talking about appeasement without knowing what it is and the terrible insinuation that diplomacy is somehow appeasement is I think a dangerous trend. It is like saying that talking to others is a bad idea because they might actually agree with us.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?