More daffy history from Bush

Does this man look like a Muslim terrorist to you?

Dear Leader Bush addressed his grateful subjects at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday. There was a lot of the usual: terror, evil people, the "war on terror", the value of torture, the need for indiscriminate domestic spying, etc. You can find the full text with audio and video at the White House Web site. A highlights version is available from TPM.

I was struck by the fact that Our Leader mentioned a couple of antiwar groups by name, MoveOn.org and Code Pink. He positioned them as allies of the Democrats against American national security, soldiers and veterans, starting at about 19:30 in the White House video:

I ask Congress to send me a clean veterans funding bill by Veterans Day; and to pass a clean defense spending bill. Congress needs to put the needs of those who put on the uniform ahead of their desire to spend more money. When it comes to funding our troops, some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the requests of our commanders on the ground, and less time responding to the demands of MoveOn.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters.

This is sleazy as all hell, though the Republicans generally have been slinging such charges for basically the last six years, and they're getting more and more hysterical about it.

But the Heritage Foundation crowd responded with warm enthusiasm.

I'm a little surprised by his singling those two groups out, though. It's obvious that when the President considers them significant enough to mention in a speech, that's likely to raise their profile. So why are they doing that? One reason is obviously that the Republicans have been focusing hard lately on discrediting antiwar activists and critics. But this is Dick Cheney's government, after all. So I can't help but wonder just how much they are intending to escalate against those named groups.

At about 4:50 in the White House video, Bush starts his grand history lesson. I found myself thinking about it a lot after I first heard that passage. For the first half hour or so, I was pretty much in a state of wonderment at the strangeness of it. And I don't pretend to understand it. But the jist of it is that Bin Laden is kind of like Hitler and Lenin and therefore we should pay attention to what they say, which would then make everyone go along with Bush and Cheney's plans for whatever they want to do.

Here are Dear Leader's own words on the topic starting at around 4:40 on the White House video:

We must take the words of the enemy seriously. The terrorists have stated their objectives. They intend to build a totalitarian Islamic empire - encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In pursuit of their imperial aims, these extremists say there can be no compromise or dialog with those they call infidels - a category that includes America, the world's free nation [sic], Jews, and all Muslims who reject their extreme vision of Islam. They reject the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the free world. Again, hear the words of Osama bin Laden last year: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

History teaches that underestimating the words of evil, ambitious men is a terrible mistake. In the early 1900s, the world ignored the words of Lenin, as he laid out his plans to launch a Communist revolution in Russia - and the world paid a terrible price. The Soviet Empire he established killed tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war.

In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews - and the world paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives and treasure.

Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. And the question is: Will we listen? (my emphasis)

This is more of the usual threat inflation. But I still marvel at the notion of history here.

Karl Kautsky: forerunner of the Taliban?

Let's pretend for a minute that when Woodrow Wilson entered the Oval Office in 1913, he was less worried about rising European tensions and German Imperial aggressiveness under Kaiser Bill than about the threat of communist revolution. And that he set up a crack team of assassins to go after the leader most likely to lead such a movement. He would most likely have gone after Karl Liebknecht or maybe even Lenin's ideological nemesis Karl Kautsky. They were both high-profile leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). And the SPD was generally considered the strongest of the Social Democratic parties and the most likely to come to power first. (The split into Social Democratic and Communist Parties came in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917.) It's unlikely that he would have gone after Lenin in his exile in Cracow, Poland, hanging out at the Jama Michalikowa Café. Because despite the Russian Revolution of 1905, which saw the first appearance of the workers' committees known as "soviets", Russian Social Democrats appeared even to most Marxists and Social Democrats elsewhere as unlikely leadership for a world revolution. Preventive assassination, like preventive war, is an inherently uncertain business.

John Kenneth Galbraith writes about Lenin in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

With his high forehead greatly accented by the bald dome above, his neat mustache, dark, quiet suit and something very near a Van Dyck beard, he looked like the head of a firm of chartered accountants. Leon Trosksy, with his fierce and glittering eye and much less disciplined beard, was a man of far more satisfactory aspect [to fit the popular image of a revolutionary]. ...

Previously in London he had been astonished that the library at the British Museum was run for the public and that the librarians actually regarded themselves as the servants of the readers. (Years later, according to legend, it occurred to someone to ask one of the library attendants if he remembered Lenin. He did, a most diligent little man. The librarian wondered whatever had become of him.)

Though he didn't look like The Greatest Threat to Civilization in 1912 or thereabouts, it's not as though Lenin was completely ignored, though. Anyone who had reason or inclination to know about Russian politics or the European socialist movement had probably heard of him and knew something about the Bolshevik political stance. Kaiser Bill in 1917 decided to allow Lenin to travel through Germany from Switzerland on the way back to Russia, where the Kaiser thought Lenin could cause trouble for Germany's Russian enemy in the First World War then still under way.

Karl Liebknecht: Did he want to create a worldwide caliphate?

And after Lenin came to power, Wilson hardly ignored him. In fact, Wilson had a Protestant moralistic streak not completely unlike that associated with Bush. He regarded Lenin as something like the incarnation of evil, to the point of declining to pursue a proposal from Lenin that would have given the Communist government a much smaller area of control than what they wound up with. Wilson even joined with the British in landing troops in Russia. The small clashes that ensued were actually the only time in the existence of the Soviet Union that American and Soviet troops entered directly into hostilities with each other.

So I'm not really sure what the [Cheney] Bush means when he says, "the world ignored the words of Lenin".

Then there's Hitler. The original one, I mean, not Osama Hitler or Ahmadinejad Hitler or Code Pink Hitler. Bush says, "In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews". That's actually a bit vague.

There seems to be a fascination among authoritarian types with the notion that Hitler mapped out his later strategy in Mein Kampf, which he published in 1925. Not really. Written during his brief stint in prison after making a failed coup attempt in Munich in 1923, now known as the Beer Hall Putsch, it is mostly a propagandistic rant derived largely from the extremist pamphlets he had read voraciously in Vienna prior to the First World War.

Here again, anyone paying attention in internal German politics in the 1920s would have had some knowledge of Hitler as the leader of the NSDAP (Nazi Party). Henry Ford even sent money to the NSDAP, so he knew about them. Ford was the only American singled out for praise in Mein Kampf.

But the NSDAP was one of several splinter parties in the German Parliament in the 1920s. According to my trusty multi-color chart from Fragen an die deutsche Geschichte (1991), the NSDAP in 1928 had 12 seats in Parliament, versus 73 for two other overtly anti-Semitic parties, the Christlichsoziale Partei and the Deutsche Reformpartei. Of the two "Weimar parties", as they are sometimes called, the SPD had 153 seats and the Catholic Center Party 62. The Communists had 54 and the liberal Deutsche Staatspartei 25. The two other most significant rightwing parties were the Duetsche Volkspartei with 45 seats and the Deutschnationale Partei with 73 seats.

So, if you were an American looking at German politics in 1928, how worried would you have been about the NSDAP? Even if the Internet had been around then, how much time would you have spent searching out their Web sites? In fact, the NSDAP at that point looked to be a party in decline, its Parliamentary representation having fallen from 32 in 1924 to 14 and then to the 12 of 1928. It was the onset of the Great Depression in Europe in 1929 that gave the NSDAP its fateful boost. In the 1930 elections, the increased their representation to 107 seats. Prior to Hitler becoming Chancellor in January, 1933, the NSDAP's electoral strength peaked at 230 seats in early 1932, which made it then the largest party in Parliament for the first time, and then fell in the elections of late 1932 to 196.

From 1929 onward, anyone who was paying attention to German politics was paying attention to Hitler and the NSDAP. But the real failure of judgment wasn't a failure to listen to Hitler's words. They didn't get votes in those parliamentary elections without practicing the usual political arts of targeting pleasing messages to various segments of the public. Not all of their public positions in 1928-32 turned out to be blueprints for their policies.

The most significant failure on the part of Western nations was failing to recognize the inherently threatening nature of his military buildup, which was at the center of Hitler's domestic economic program from the day he became Chancellor. And a failure to develop foreign policies and military policies consistent with them to be able to contain Germany once they began to revise the Versailles Treaty limits by force with the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March, 1936.

So, the bottom line here is that Bush's little history lesson was as ditsy as most Republican pop history is. The main thing he seems to be trying to do is to inflate the menace of Osama bin Laden running a terrorist network from a cave or village hunt in some godforsaken corner of Wazirstan or wherever he is to the military threats represented by Nazi German and by the Soviet Union at the height of their power.

For that amount of threat inflation, I guess you need to come up with some pretty creative alternative history.

Tags: authoritarianism, bolshevik revolution, bush, germany, german politics, lenin, republican party, soviet union, third reich