Letters to the Editor
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What is the Lesson for America from Hitler?
Glenn Greenwald is correct to pinpoint the necessity of war advocates to pepper their arguments with allusions to Hitler. But what, in fact, is the lesson to be learned from the rise of Hitler and America's response to him? It has already been noted that "Munich" was unavoidable, given that Britain was less equipped to fight Nazi Germany in 1938 than it was a year later, when even then it wasn't ready for another great war. But I submit the more important lesson to the West is that it could have avoided war with Hitler altogether. Had Britain and France not pledged themselves, foolishly, to go to war on behalf of Poland, Hitler's take over of that country might have been as relatively peaceful as that of Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, there would have been no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, so that the inevitable confrontation between Hitler and Stalin may have come sooner and ended with less destruction to other countries. If the West had remained out of that fight, the two evil empires might have destroyed each other without the necessity of the West shedding its blood, and certainly not the United States. Not only would the world have been rid of Nazism, but it might have escaped forty to sixty years of the terror of communism upon the world, which claimed more lives, particularly in China, than did even World War II.
This is the lesson we should be taking from the experience of world with the likes of Hitler and Stalin, and the implications for how the U.S. should respond to crises in the Middle East, from Gaza to Pakistan, are obvious. We have two vast oceans to insulate us from the disputes between nations in the Eastern Hemisphere. The worst threat we endure is of an occasional 9/11, which itself was less costly to the United States than have been Bush's ensuing wars, and a threat which would be much less except for our government's military adventurism in the Muslim world. When are we going to learn that it is in our national interest only to stay out of their fights?