Does this sound familiar? "Please tread on me."
Max Boot in the LA Times compares appeasement and anti-war attitudes of the "intelligentsia," in 1940 and today:
Savage naively wondered, "Who is to say that a British victory will be less disastrous than a German one?" Savage thought the real problem was that Britain had lost "her meaning, her soul," but "the unloading of a billion tons of bombs on Germany won't help this forward an inch." "Personally," he added, with hilarious understatement, "I do not care for Hitler." But he thought the way to resist Hitler was by not resisting him: "Whereas the rest of the nation is content with calling down obloquy on Hitler's head, we regard this as superficial. Hitler requires, not condemnation, but understanding."
Read the whole thing.
OK, I get it: Hitler - and Germany - needed love maybe, or therapy? Remember "Better Red than Dead" ? The Pacifist Left had the same idea during the Cold War, too, and Vietnam. Boot's piece has got me thinking about pacifism and its necessary corrollaries - the ideas that nothing is worth defending, and that evil does not exist. I read that, in England, it is a crime to assault a burglar or an intruder. You are supposed to just call the cops...I mean the Bobbies. Is that like calling the UN? Not in my house - we are ARMED, thanks to the US Constitution. Don't tread on Maggie's Farm. We know about evil and were raised with firearms, and we shoot first and ask questions later. If you can still talk, which would be doubtful, with a face - and brain - full of #6 birdshot. It is called "lead poisoning."
