Reliving the 1930's
By Victor Davis Hanson
TownHall.com
World War II was the most destructive war in
history. What caused it?
The panic from the ongoing and worldwide Depression
in the 1930s had empowered extremist movements the
world over. Like-minded, violent dictators of
otherwise quite different Nazi Germany, Fascist
Italy, Imperial Japan and Communist Soviet Union all
wanted to attack their neighbors.
Yet World War II could have been prevented had
Western Europe united to deter Germany. Instead,
France, Britain and the smaller European democracies
appeased Hitler.
The United States turned isolationist. The Soviet
Union collaborated with the Third Reich. And Italy
and Japan eventually joined it.
The 1930s saw rampant anti-Semitism. Jews were
blamed in fascist countries for the economic
downturn. They were scapegoated in democracies for
stirring up the fascists. The only safe havens for
Jews from Europe were Jewish-settled Palestine and
the United States.
Does all this sound depressingly familiar?
The aftershocks of the global financial meltdown of
2008 still paralyze the European Union while
prompting all sorts of popular extremist movements
and opportunistic terrorists.
After the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, America has
turned inward. The Depression and the lingering
unhappiness over World War I did the same to
Americans in the 1930s.
Premodern monsters are on the move. The Islamic
State is carving up Syria and Iraq to fashion a
fascist caliphate.
Vladimir Putin gobbles up his neighbors in Ossetia,
Crimea and eastern Ukraine, in crude imitation of
the way Germany once swallowed Austria,
Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Theocratic Iran is turning Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon
into a new Iranian version of Japan's old Greater
East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The Western response to all this? Likewise, similar
to the 1930s.
The NATO allies are terrified that Putin will next
attack the NATO-member Baltic states -- and that
their own paralysis will mean the embarrassing end
of the once-noble alliance.
The United States has now fled from four Middle
Eastern countries. It forfeited its post-surge
victory in Iraq. It was chased out of Libya after
the killings of Americans in Benghazi. American red
lines quickly turned pink in Syria. U.S. Marines
just laid down their weapons and flew out of the
closed American embassy in Yemen.
America has convinced its European partners to drop
tough sanctions against Iran. In the manner of the
Allies in 1938 at Munich, they prefer instead to
charm Iran, in hopes it will stop making a nuclear
bomb.
The Islamic State has used almost a year of
unchallenged aggression to remake the map of the
Middle East. President Obama had variously dismissed
it as a jayvee team or merely akin to the problems
that big-city mayors face.
Europeans pay out millions to ransom their citizens
from radical Islamic hostage-beheaders. Americans
handed over terrorist kingpins to get back a likely
Army deserter.
Then we come to the return of the Jewish question.
Seventy years after the end of the Holocaust, Jews
are once again leaving France. They have learned
that weak governments either will not or cannot
protect them from Islamic terrorists.
In France, radical Islamists recently targeted a
kosher market. In Denmark, they went after a
synagogue. In South Africa, students demanded the
expulsion of Jewish students from a university. A
Jewish prosecutor who was investigating the 1994
bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina
was found mysteriously murdered.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
is being blamed for stoking Middle Eastern tensions.
Who cares that he resides over the region's only
true democracy, one that is stable and protects
human rights? Obama administration aides have called
him a coward and worse. President Obama has
dismissed the radical Islamists' targeting of Jews
in France merely as "randomly shoot[ing] a bunch of
folks in a deli."
Putin, the Islamic State and Iran at first glance
have as little in common as did Germany, Italy and
Japan. But like the old Axis, they are all
authoritarians that share a desire to attack their
neighbors. And they all hate the West.
The grandchildren of those who appeased the
dictators of the 1930s once again prefer in the
short-term to turn a blind eye to the current
fascists. And the grandchildren of the survivors of
the Holocaust once again get blamed.
The 1930s should have taught us that aggressive
autocrats do not have to like each other to share
hatred of the West.
The 1930s should have demonstrated to us that
old-time American isolationism and the same old
European appeasement will not prevent but only
guarantee a war.
And the 1930s should have reminded us that Jews are
usually among the first -- but not the last -- to be
targeted by terrorists, thugs and autocrats.