Sunday, March 20, 2005
The Little Corporal
In a poll to determine the greatest Frenchman, one figure came in surprising low:
Admirers and impartial academics alike were aghast yesterday at the news that the little Corporal who became an Emperor had only made it to No 16 in the top 100 names in a poll for the state-owned TV channel France 2.
Before writing this post I checked Napoleon's biography. I couldn't find any evidence that Napoleon was ever a corporal. After completing military school Napoleon was commissioned as a second lieutenant. It was Hitler who was a corporal. These two men have a lot in common, but they didn't share the same military ranks.
Between the two dictators, it's not just Napoleon's life that's being misrepresented. Victor Davis Hanson has a long summary of the attempts to group Hitler and President Bush:
In fact, what do Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros all have in common? The same thing that unites Fidel Castro, the European street, the Iranians, and North Koreans: an evocation of some aspects of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany to deprecate President Bush in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At first glance, all this wild rhetoric is preposterous. Hitler hijacked an elected government and turned it into a fascist tyranny. He destroyed European democracy. His minions persecuted Christians, gassed over six million Jews, and created an entire fascistic creed predicated on anti-Semitism and the myth of a superior Aryan race.
Whatever one thinks of Bush’s Iraqi campaign, the president obtained congressional approval to invade and pledged $87 billion to rebuild the country. He freely weathered mass street demonstrations and a hostile global media, successfully defended his Afghan and Iraq reconstructions through a grueling campaign and three presidential debates, and won a national plebiscite on his tenure.
In a world that is almost uniformly opposed to the democratic Jewish state, Israel has no better friend than Bush, who in turn is a believer in, not a tormentor of, Christianity. Afghanistan and Iraq, with 50 million freed, have elected governments, not American proconsuls, and there is a movement in the Middle East toward greater democratization — with no guarantee that such elected governments will not be anti-American. No president has been more adamantly against cloning, euthanasia, abortion, or anything that smacks of the use of science to predetermine super-genes or to do away with the elderly, feeble, or unborn.
The left's grouping of unlikely people to Hitler didn't start with Bush. Consider this excerpt, since revised, from Rick Steves' Europe Through The Back Door (1997):
For us to understand Islam by studying Khadafy and Hussein would be like a Turk understanding capitalism and Christianity by studying Hitler and Reagan.
People who can't see distinctions between Reagan and Hitler (or Bush and Hitler) have to be pretty far out there. They also have to be pretty ignorant. Hitler didn't believe in Christianity or capitalism. He was a pagan and a socialist.
Frequent comparisons to Hitler seem odd coming from the left. Charles Krauthammer points out that they don't have much trouble with modern day monsters:
After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.
A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero -- a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.
The international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (such as Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel -- an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.
Until now. Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading "Thank you, George W. Bush," and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.
In addition to ignorance Hanson attributes the Hitler comparisons to arrogance. That's part of it. I also think that the left keeps bringing up Hitler as a form of projection:
From the Nazi-Soviet pact through Hitler's invasion of the U.S.S.R., the international left opposed attempts to stop Hitler.
Most of the left's economics is based on socialism. Hitler was a socialist himself, though unlike the left his socialism was based on race instead of class.
Many of the most brutal dictators of the past century were supported by the left. This includes the U.S.S.R., Mao, Castro, the Sandinistas, and the Khmer Rouge.
It's really the left that seems attached to the thugs of the world.
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In a poll to determine the greatest Frenchman, one figure came in surprising low:
Admirers and impartial academics alike were aghast yesterday at the news that the little Corporal who became an Emperor had only made it to No 16 in the top 100 names in a poll for the state-owned TV channel France 2.
Before writing this post I checked Napoleon's biography. I couldn't find any evidence that Napoleon was ever a corporal. After completing military school Napoleon was commissioned as a second lieutenant. It was Hitler who was a corporal. These two men have a lot in common, but they didn't share the same military ranks.
Between the two dictators, it's not just Napoleon's life that's being misrepresented. Victor Davis Hanson has a long summary of the attempts to group Hitler and President Bush:
In fact, what do Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros all have in common? The same thing that unites Fidel Castro, the European street, the Iranians, and North Koreans: an evocation of some aspects of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany to deprecate President Bush in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At first glance, all this wild rhetoric is preposterous. Hitler hijacked an elected government and turned it into a fascist tyranny. He destroyed European democracy. His minions persecuted Christians, gassed over six million Jews, and created an entire fascistic creed predicated on anti-Semitism and the myth of a superior Aryan race.
Whatever one thinks of Bush’s Iraqi campaign, the president obtained congressional approval to invade and pledged $87 billion to rebuild the country. He freely weathered mass street demonstrations and a hostile global media, successfully defended his Afghan and Iraq reconstructions through a grueling campaign and three presidential debates, and won a national plebiscite on his tenure.
In a world that is almost uniformly opposed to the democratic Jewish state, Israel has no better friend than Bush, who in turn is a believer in, not a tormentor of, Christianity. Afghanistan and Iraq, with 50 million freed, have elected governments, not American proconsuls, and there is a movement in the Middle East toward greater democratization — with no guarantee that such elected governments will not be anti-American. No president has been more adamantly against cloning, euthanasia, abortion, or anything that smacks of the use of science to predetermine super-genes or to do away with the elderly, feeble, or unborn.
The left's grouping of unlikely people to Hitler didn't start with Bush. Consider this excerpt, since revised, from Rick Steves' Europe Through The Back Door (1997):
For us to understand Islam by studying Khadafy and Hussein would be like a Turk understanding capitalism and Christianity by studying Hitler and Reagan.
People who can't see distinctions between Reagan and Hitler (or Bush and Hitler) have to be pretty far out there. They also have to be pretty ignorant. Hitler didn't believe in Christianity or capitalism. He was a pagan and a socialist.
Frequent comparisons to Hitler seem odd coming from the left. Charles Krauthammer points out that they don't have much trouble with modern day monsters:
After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.
A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero -- a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.
The international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (such as Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel -- an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.
Until now. Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading "Thank you, George W. Bush," and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.
In addition to ignorance Hanson attributes the Hitler comparisons to arrogance. That's part of it. I also think that the left keeps bringing up Hitler as a form of projection:
From the Nazi-Soviet pact through Hitler's invasion of the U.S.S.R., the international left opposed attempts to stop Hitler.
Most of the left's economics is based on socialism. Hitler was a socialist himself, though unlike the left his socialism was based on race instead of class.
Many of the most brutal dictators of the past century were supported by the left. This includes the U.S.S.R., Mao, Castro, the Sandinistas, and the Khmer Rouge.
It's really the left that seems attached to the thugs of the world.
