In Case You Missed It...

Saturday night, Alice H. caught the Seattle Times' Bruce Ramsey changing a key paragraph from a column, which included the statement What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable, all in an effort to make the world safe for appeasement again.

Michael Goldfarb picks up on this stealth edit, unacknowledged by the paper, and notes, wryly, that at least Ramsey practices what he preaches: Facing aggression from "a few hundred" irate Internet brownshirts, he re-writes the offending paragraph to appease us.

Hey, Pussy Boy? Appeasement doesn't work, which we'll now prove by further ridiculing and rubbishing you. You've added dishonesty to your previous resume of leftism, Hitler apologetics, stupidity, naivete, and unhinged hackery.

Incidentally, his rewrite hardly helped.

The original pro-Hitler apologetic:

What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable. He wanted the German-speaking areas of Europe under German authority. He had just annexed Austria, which was German-speaking, without bloodshed. There were two more small pieces of Germanic territory: the free city of Danzig and the Sudetenland, a border area of what is now the Czech Republic.

Um, it isn't "now" part of the Czech Republic, it always was, at least in modern times. (Or at least it was part of Czechoslovakia before it broke into two states.) I'm not sure of his intent here, but his description of the Sudentenland suggests that which country it was a part of has only recently been settled.

The stealth-edited appeasement of the aggressors beleaguering him:

The narrative we're given about Munich is entirely in hindsight. We know what kind of man Hitler was, and that he started World War II in Europe. But in 1938 people knew a lot less. What Hitler was demanding at Munich was not unreasonable as a national claim (though he was making it in a last-minute, unreasonable way.) Germany's claim was that the areas of Europe that spoke German and thought of themselves as German be under German authority. In September 1938 the principal remaining area was the Sudetenland.

Ah. Now it wasn't unreasonable "as a national claim," though he allows that Hitler may have been "unreasonable" in making this reasonable national claim.

Clarification: Just to be clear, he rewrote the entire article without noting he'd done so, not just the quoted paragraph. Thanks to Alice H. for pointing that out.

Jerkoff, the guy had been railing about expanding the German Reich for years. Not only is it wrong in the first place to ratify the conquests of an aggressive psychopath as Chamberlain did (a big talker that Obama obviously considers something of a maligned hero), but it was also quite obvious to many sensible people -- among them, Winston Churchill -- that granting Hitler the Sudentenland would not satisfy him, and in fact would only encourage him to demand more and seize more territory by force.

This asshole seems to be suggesting that appeasement is getting a bad wrap because, honestly, who could ever have predicted it would turn out badly?

Well, genius, quite a few people predicted that. Quite a few people called this "appeasement" at the time and stated it would encourage Hitler by showing the weakness of Europe.

I'm still positively shocked that even an over-the-moon leftist could, at this late date, engage in apologetics for Hitler and his co-conspirator Chamberlain -- and furthermore believe that doing so actually aids his beloved Obamessiah.

I'm sure appeasing Iran by conceding it the bomb and permitting its murderous support of terrorists will work out just as splendidly as Chamberlain's magnificent Peace in Our Time talk did.

Next from Bruce Ramsey: The Khmer Rouge -- Misunderstood Warrior-Poets.

posted by Ace at 02:26 PM

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