"The year is 1938 and Iran is Germany," Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly warned -- and is likely to warn again during his visit to Washington on Monday.
The Israeli prime minister is invoking the lessons of history to make the strongest possible case against Iran, even if that means deliberately overstating the putative equivalency between that country and Nazi Germany. With President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime steadily moving closer to acquiring nuclear weapons while continuing to encourage its followers to chant "Death to Israel," Netanyahu can hardly be blamed for taking those threats seriously.
But what are the real lessons of history -- and what do they tell us about how we need to conduct ourselves today?
On that score, there's strong supporting evidence for Netanyahu's broader point about the dangers of underestimating the threat from regimes spouting radical rhetoric, but less than convincing evidence that history offers a clear guide to what constitutes a sensible course of action.
Although it seems incredible now, many people initially saw Hitler as a bizarre, effeminate politician who would never be in a position to inflict real harm -- or, later, as a pragmatic leader we could deal with.
This was true not just of the British and French leaders who signed the infamous Munich Pact of 1938, which led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. As I point out in my new book Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, it was also true of many Americans who lived and worked in Germany.
Dorothy Thompson, America's most famous woman foreign correspondent of that era, interviewed Hitler in November 1931, fourteen months before he became chancellor. She entered the room expecting to meet the future dictator of Germany, but "in something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure I was not," she wrote. Struck by the "startling insignificance of the man" who is "inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure," she predicted: "If Hitler comes into power, he will smite only the weakest of his enemies."
German politicians often made the same mistake. Franz von Papen, the vice chancellor who helped engineer Hitler's appointment to the top job, told his friends: "We have hired Hitler" -- in other words, he would be easily manipulated.
In many cases, even German Jews refused to take Hitler seriously. Paul Drey, a Bavarian from a distinguished Bavarian Jewish family who worked for the U.S. Consulate in Munich, wrote off the Nazis' early successes as "a temporary madness," insisting that Germans were "too intelligent to be taken in by such scamps." Drey would die in Dachau.
To be sure, there were those who sensed Hitler's dangerous potential right from the start. Captain Truman Smith, a junior U.S. military attaché, first met the little known Nazi leader in 1922, immediately warning that he was "a marvelous demagogue" who could go far. And along with many of her journalistic and diplomatic colleagues, Thompson radically revised her view of Hitler as soon as he seized dictatorial powers.
Still, when it came to resisting Hitler's expansionist aims, there was plenty of disagreement. Perceptive journalists like William Shirer of CBS despaired that visitors from Paris, London and New York took at face value Hitler's protestations that his intentions were peaceful. "Peace?" he wrote in his diary in 1937. "Read Mein Kampf, brothers."
But most outsiders didn't read Mein Kampf, and even among those who did there was no consensus on whether its vitriolic attacks on Jews, democracy and bolshevism, along with Hitler's stated ambitions to conquer vast territories in the east, should be taken literally or viewed as merely a cynical electoral ploy.
All of which, Netanyahu argues, stands as proof that the greatest danger is to discount the new threats of our era. But 1938 has been invoked before as justification for military action, at times with tragic results. As President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam, he claimed that he was seeking to avert another Munich. To this day, the country is split over whether the ensuing loss of American lives and treasure was justified at any point or a disaster from start to finish.
It isn't easy to determine which situations demand the kind of forceful action to stop a potential aggressor that was so woefully lacking in the 1930s. Netanyahu is right that history teaches us that we ignore the fiery rhetoric of radical regimes at our own peril. Unfortunately, though, history -- especially the history of the Nazi era -- doesn't offer many immediate lessons beyond that.
It certainly doesn't tell us what we really want to know: whether we are making the same mistake today with Iran -- or is the situation so different that a bigger mistake would be to overreact.
Joel Rubin: No Iran Bomb, No Iran War in 2012
Maybe I could have avoided discipline, had my parents argued the case that the bully had "started it" with his after-school terror program. My new fans on the bus could have coined the term “The Gottlieb Doctrine.”
Preemptive strikes are nothing new. The Japanese did it at Pearl Harbor, and the Israelis did it to Egyptians when they launched surprise air strikes in 1967 during the first hours of the Six-Day War. Right or wrong, Japan and Israel (and me, back in school) had our reasons.
So when Benjamin Netanyahu calls on lessons from war with Hitler to build his case that Ahmadinejad should be dealt a preemptive blow, he’s got a point. Had we chosen war over appeasement with Hitler, WWII may have ended before it caused 60 million deaths in 7 years (that’s 1000 souls an hour, every hour). Indeed, in the early 1930s, we took a wait-and-see approach while Hitler flouted the Versailles Treaty, massively rearmed, and began his war against the Jews. His intentions were well advertised with actions, speeches, and Mein Kampf. Netanyahu cannot be blamed for taking Iran seriously, and for thinking about parallels between 1938 and 2012.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJy7MneOH1g
What's the next demand? Iran must stop teaching the periodic Table of Mendeljev in schools?
I mean... can't be too careful, can you?
And, shouldn't we have attacked for ex. Nepal or Iceland by now?
Because, well, it is perhaps not that they are trying to build nuclear weapons right now, but nobody assures us that they might not be willing to try to develop nuclear weapons related capabilities at any unknown point in the future, right?
Yes, Nepal and Iceland are bigger threats than we can imagine, and the world must not sit idly by.
What we are actually witnessing, is that History actually repeats itself, and that is the lesson to learn.
And the same people that sold us the invasion of a country in 2003 (well, I didn't buy it back then) that did nobody harm, with the argument that the final proof would come within 45 minutes in the form of a mushroom cloud over the USA are now trying to push their agenda for more War on another country that NEVER attacked anyone.
I know there's a persistent lie going around that they are, but that's just that. A convenient and disingenuous lie.
But we should always keep in mind that Iran has been fighting a proxy war against Israel for years by funding Hamas and Hezbollah.
Israel has not retaliated against Iran for such attacks in the past. Might Iran assume that Israel would again decide not to retaliate if they cannot directly prove Iranian complicity?
That is a very difficult question to answer, but can't say I am surprised that Israel doesn't want to just sit back and hope for the best.
Try translating Zionist ideals and policies into German, and what you get is das Herrenvolk (The Chosen People) and Blut und Boden (Eretz Yisrail) and Heim ins Reich (Aliyah).
Sorry, there's no two ways about it. And I'm not even voicing an opinion pro or contra, just stating facts.
And no, I am no antisemite. I just believe that all humans and peoples are equal.
LOL!
Who brought Bolshevism to Russia again?
"Israel opens dams, floods Gaza with untreated sewage"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5BKLH_5kM0&feature=player_embedded
Who is the REAL danger to its neighbors and the world?
The East\West guy must have his eyes on some land in the west bank - someone should check that!!
Rick Steves visited Iran to film a documentary on the country. Here is what he wrote about the "Death to.." slogan:
"As we were struggling to drive away in a horribly congested street, our guide made a telling aside. He declared, “Death to traffic.” Then he said, “Because we can do nothing about this traffic, we can all say ‘Death to Traffic’.”
Did he mean kill all those drivers that were in our way? Does Iran really mean death to the US and Israel? Or is it a mix of international road rage, fear, frustration — and the seductive clarity of a catchy slogan? This quirky cultural trait might be worth looking into and trying to understand.
All I’ve got to say is, “Death to hatred and militarism based on misunderstanding, fear and national pride.”
http://www.gonomad.com/reflections/0806/rick-steves-in-iran.html
As probably fewer Americans than any people in the world speak a second language, how are they to know such 'subtleties'?
" With President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime steadily moving closer to acquiring nuclear weapons"
What evidence does the author have that USA intelligence agencies don't have?
I think going by Bibi's stance, it seems he is clearly not looking into the mirror on daily basis, he should, perhaps he will be able to solve many of the questions plaguing him...
Not that a lot of people seem to care. Somehow western lives are more valuable than non-western lives.
It's akin to deranged man walking down the street with a loaded handgun. Israel is not going anywhere.
You're going to tell anybody what's real? You wouldn't recognize truth if it bit you where your brains are, where the sun don't shine.
The only ones repeating it like a mantra is |$rae| and it's Z|0n|$t friends.... It's a well known fact Ahmadinejad was misquoted for PR purposes.