War and Appeasement
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Ralph R. Reiland
Friday, March 28, 2003It looks like we're chin-deep in the big muddy again, stuck in yet another one of those epic battles for survival, another clash of civilizations, another marathon struggle between liberty and totalitarianism.
When it was Hitler on the horizon, Sir Winston Churchill provided the early warning: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." This time around, George W. Bush is saying much the same thing: "A policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth."
As it turned out, Churchill's early warnings were ignored and the world saw that appeasement delivered the most devastating war in human history. Altogether, an estimated 62 million dead – 25 million military and 37 million civilians.
In the end, Churchill wrote, World War II should have been called The Unnecessary War. "There was never a war more easy to stop," he wrote in his six-volume history that spans 1918 to 1945. "German rearmament could have been prevented without the loss of a single life."
Historian Frank Smitha describes the tenor of the times a month after Hitler came to power:
"In February 1933, students at Oxford debated the question that 'This House will in no circumstance fight for king and country.' At the conclusion of the debate, 275 undergraduates voted against fighting for king and country, and 153 voted for fighting for king and country. Newspapers described the debate, and many in Britain were dismayed. The controversy over the debate inspired another, larger, noisier debate at Oxford, with Winston Churchill's son, Randolph, leading the debate against the pacifists. And the pacifists won by a larger margin: 750 to 138. Similar debates at the London School of Economics resulted in a pacifist resolution that was supported unanimously. Aberystwyth University in Wales voted 186 to 99 for pacifism. Manchester University voted for pacifism 371 to 196. And students in Canada and New Zealand voted with the Oxford pacifists. Hitler was watching and, contemptuous of pacifists, he was encouraged. Winston Churchill was outraged."
Smitha describes a parallel mood at the colleges in the United States: "In 1933, Brown University conducted a poll of 21,725 students from 65 U.S. colleges, and the poll found 8,415 who declared themselves pacifists, 7,221 who believed that the only justification for their nation bearing arms would be its having been invaded, and only 6,089 who declared that they would fight another war if the government ordered them to do so."
A year later, it became illegal for a Jew to be a member of Germany's stock exchanges. The Nuremberg Laws came a year later, denying the rights of citizenship to Jews. Other edits followed, banning jazz (music considered to be too Negro and Jewish in origin), prohibiting Jews from shopping in gentile stores and gentiles from shopping in Jewish stores, banning marriage and extramarital relations between 'Aryans' and Jews, and making it illegal for Jews to attend movies or walk in public parks.
Churchill, in the House of Commons, warned that Britain's resolve was being undermined "with peace films, anti-recruiting propaganda and resistance to defense measures."
And Now
Today, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz describes the threat to freedom posed by the connection between terrorist networks and the states that possess weapons of mass destruction:
"As terrible as the attacks of September 11 were, we now know that the terrorists are plotting still more and greater catastrophes. We know they are seeking more terrible weapons – chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons. In the hands of terrorists, what we often call weapons of mass destruction would more accurately be called weapons of mass terror."
The answer, according to the Bush doctrine, is to drain the swamps, to destroy the regimes, primarily Arab, that support terrorism. "Once freed from Saddam's tyranny," says Wolfowitz, "it is reasonable to expect that Iraq's educated, industrious population of more than 20 million could build a modern society that would be a source of prosperity, not insecurity."
A report prepared last summer by Arab scholars at the behest of the United Nations Development Program, "Arab Human Development 2002," shows how large a task it will be to build a "modern society" among the 280 million people in the 22 Arab states:
- One out of every five people in the Arab nations lives on less than $2 per day.
- Total income in the 22 Arab states is roughly equal to total income in Spain.
- Ten million children between six and 15 years of age aren't in school.
- Including adults, the average years of schooling is 5.2 years.
- Arab countries have the lowest freedom score of any region in the world, especially in regard to civil rights, media independence, economic freedom, women's rights and government accountability.
- Industrial productivity has declined massively during the past several decades.
- Scientific research is virtually nonexistent.
- Some 65 million Arab adults are illiterate, two-thirds of them women.
- Tens of millions lack access to basic health facilities, education, housing and employment.
Bottom line: We're attempting to turn around a region that tops the world only in its manufacture of poverty, sexism, repression, hatred and ignorance.
Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University and a Pittsburgh restaurateur. E-mail: rrreiland@aol.com.
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