A History Lesson

© Dale Franks, 1997

In 1933, the German president, Field Marshal von Hindenberg, appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of the German Reich.  This was done after three national elections in one year, during each of which the Nazis won a plurality of votes. For years Hitler had said that he would rearm Germany, take back the lands given to other countries after World War I, and seek “living space” for Germany in Eastern Europe and Russia.  Now he was the democratically and constitutionally appointed Chancellor of Germany.

Soon after that, the German parliament, the Reichstag, banned every political party in Germany except for the Nazi party.  Hitler himself was given the legal title of Fuehrer, and given power to rule the country by decree.  All of this was done in a perfectly constitutional manner.

The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, prevented Germany from having a standing army of greater than 100,000 men.  Hitler immediately defied the treaty and began the rearming of Germany.   The world community was represented at that time by the forerunner of the UN, an organization known as the League of Nations.  They did nothing to stop Hitler.

In 1935, Hitler ordered the army to retake the Saarland.  The Treaty of Versailles demilitarized this region of Germany and its administration was placed in French hands.  A relatively small force of Germans entered the Saarland and occupied it.  The French, with an Army of 45 divisions, did nothing, as did the League of Nations.

Emboldened by this lack of response, Hitler publicly repudiated the Treaty of Versailles.  He stated that henceforth, Germany would assume her rightful place among the nations.  The League of Nations did nothing.

In 1936, he annexed Austria.  In 1938, he did the same to Czechoslovakia.  All this time his armies got larger and became better equipped.  In all this time, the world community did nothing.

Indeed, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, went to Germany and personally met with Hitler.  As a result of that meeting, Chamberlain signed the Treaty of Munich, which in effect gave Germany the freedom to deal with Czechoslovakia as she chose. Chamberlain, and the rest of the world’s leaders, believed that if they gave Hitler enough, he would be satisfied.   The policy was called “appeasement”. Chamberlain returned home waving the Treaty of Munich, declaring that he believed it brought “peace in our time.”

It did no such thing.   On 1 September 1939, the German Army invaded Poland.  Britain and France, who had signed a mutual defense pact with Poland, were obliged to declare war on Germany.   For the second time in a generation, a World War was fought in Europe.

Each time that Hitler defied the world community, they did nothing.  Each time they did nothing, Hitler became stronger, and the price for stopping him became higher.  Eventually, there was no choice but war.  When it was finally over, somewhere between 35 and 50 million people were dead.

That is the past.   Let’s look at the present.

Saddam Hussein is not Hitler.  Not yet, at any rate.  But there seem to be many people in this country, and in the world community who are content to allow him to become one.

In the 1980’s, Saddam was faced with a civil uprising of the Kurdish minority in Iraq.  To deal with that uprising, he used chemical weapons of mass destruction.  They were used indiscriminately on Kurdish civilian villages and there is no way to tell how many of his own people were killed.

In 1990, Saddam brutally invaded Kuwait, and had to be forced out of that country by war.  At the conclusion of that war, he signed an international cease-fire that placed upon his government certain obligations.

Now, he is unwilling to face those obligations.  He is demanding that American personnel be removed from the UN weapons inspection teams.  He is threatening to shoot down UN-sponsored reconnaissance overflights that are designed to check his compliance with the cease-fire terms.  This is not a crisis of American intransigence, or of unreasonable demands by the world community, it is a crisis of Saddam’s own making.  Saddam Hussein should be forced, by whatever means are necessary, to comply with the Gulf War cease-fire, or to face the consequences.

George Santayana wrote, “Whoever fails to learn from history is condemned to relive it.”  We have already seen once in this century what happens when a cruel dictator is appeased.  I doubt any of us wants to see it again.  But if we allow Saddam to do as he pleases, the price for stopping him will become higher and higher as time goes on.

The time to stop him is now.

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