If you follow politics you'll recall that a couple of weeks ago Donald Rumsfeld compared the current fight against "Islamofascism" to the fight against the Nazis, and implicitly compared opponents of the Bush administration's strategy to Neville Chamberlain's 1938 "peace in our time" appeasement of Hitler. A lot of virtual ink has been spilled on why, whatever your views on the current administration's actions, this is just a bad analogy.
One aspect that I have not seen discussion of is why this is a particularly ironic cudgel for Rumsfeld to use, coming from an American and a Republican.
The first irony is, of course, that when the war against Germany began in 1939 America wasn't there. In fact, the United States waited until 1941, and let Germany declare war first. It probably escapes the notice of most Americans, but at the time this was the cause of some disparagement of the United States in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (probably in continental Europe too). There is the joke that after being late to both of the World Wars, America is now in a hurry to be first up for all the next wars.
There are well known and understandable reasons why America didn't hurry herself along to participate in either of the World Wars, most of which come down to domestic politics. And here is the second layer of irony. If there was any party that represented the isolationalist strain in American politics it was the Republican party. It wasn't for nothing that Montana pacifist Jeanette Rankin was a Republican member of Congress. You can hear the echoes of this Republican isolationism in Bob Dole's 1976 complaint about "Democrat wars."
Think what you will of present policies, but historically it was the Republican party that was denser with appeasers and isolationists. Historical analogies are always a choice of people in the present, and say more about the present than the past.
Posted by eroberts at September 15, 2006 08:39 AM | TrackBack