The cunning of history

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Mar 14 08:16:22 PST 2003


Marx once said (in the _18th brummaire of the Louis Bonaparte_), that history repeats itself, as it were, twice, first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. That observation proved to be prophetic.

About 60 or so years ago, Hitler was appointed chancellor as a result of parliamentary impasse. He quickly withdrew from the League of Nations, used the burning of the Reichstag as a pretext for militarization, and then invaded a third-rate country (Poland) under the pretext of persecution of German minority there. The bone of contention was Poland's unwillingness to yiled to a highly unreasonable German demand to create a "corridor" in her territory that would connect East Prussia with the German mainland - which would effectively cut of Poland from the access to the Baltic.. The pretext for invasion was manufactured by the Nazis, who staged an attack on a German radio station in the Silesian city of Gleiwitz, making it look as if it was carried by Polish saboteurs.

Today, this history repeats itself, this time as a farce. Bush is appointed president as a result of electoral impasse. He uses WTC bombing to militarize the country, sabotage the UN, and attack a third-rate country (Iraq) under the pretext of security threats. The US demands for Iraq are as unreasonable as those Hitler made for Poland in 1939. They effectively threaten the sovereignty of any country and thus are impssible to met.

Hitler's warmongering led to a major war, and thus it was tragedy. Bush warmongering, on the other hand, will likely produceonly a realtively confiend local conflict, and thus its is farce. I sincerely hope that in a few years this nullity from Texas will be remembered as the greatest embarassment that this country's political institutions have ever suffered.

Fascist logic does not seem to have changed much. I am nonplussed, however, how quickly people forget where it leads to. True, a sizeable share of the US population, and notably almost all mainstream religious leaders, oppose Bush's warmongering, but the majority of the US-ers and almost all mainstream media (including normally dovish New Yorker) eagrly jump on Bush's bandwagon. US-ers are no different in this respect, than, say, Germans, Serbs, Croats, Rwandans, and scores of others eager to engage in collective violence against defenceless minorities, either in person or vicariously.

Wojtek



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