|
|
|
|
From Holocaust to
hyperpower
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - The importance of this week's
recognition by the United Nations of the Nazi
Holocaust lies as much in its relevance to today's
international realities as it does to the
historical significance of the liberation of the
Auschwitz death camp by Soviet forces 60 years ago
on Thursday.
As noted by UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan and other speakers at the
memorial's inaugural session on Monday, genocide -
as in Rwanda in 1994 and possibly in Darfur,
Sudan, today - has not been confined to the
systematic annihilation of some 6 million Jews and
hundreds of thousands of Gypsies in Europe.
Of course, the modern-day international
human-rights movement owes its birth and moral
force in many ways to the universal revulsion that
followed the discovery of the concentration camps.
But the Nazi Holocaust also lies at the
core of the neo-conservative world view that has
animated and given coherence to much of the George
W Bush administration's post-September 11, 2001,
foreign policy that itself is changing the world,
albeit not necessarily in ways that either Annan
or the international human-rights movement would
approve.
"For those of us who are involved
in foreign and defense policy today, my
generation, the defining moment of our history was
certainly the Holocaust," former Defense Policy
Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, a central
figure in the US neo-conservative network, told
the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) as US forces
drove toward Iraq two years ago.
To Perle,
who like many neo-conservatives is Jewish
(although most US Jews are not neo-conservatives),
the Holocaust is irrefutable proof of the
existence of "evil" - a word that recurs
frequently in their discourse. World events are
viewed as a perpetual battle between, as one of
their heroes Reinhold Niebuhr called it, "the
children of light" and the "children of darkness".
In the last century, "totalitarianism",
whether of the right or the left, was the evil.
But, as noted by the highest-ranking
neo-conservative in the Bush administration in a
talk late last year, evil never dies and now takes
the form of what some call "Islamo-fascism".
"The thing that hasn't changed,
unfortunately, is that there still is evil in the
world," said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz. "It is a fascist totalitarianism not
fundamentally different from the way it was in the
last century - no more God-fearing than [the Nazis
and communists] were."
Significantly, the
White House chose Wolfowitz - rather than a top
State Department official - to speak as the US
representative to the Holocaust ceremony at the
United Nations on Monday. Wolfowitz, a close
friend and colleague of Perle since 1969, when
they both arrived in Washington, did not mention
that all members of the family his father left
behind in his native Poland in the 1920s died in
the Holocaust.
A similar fate befell the
family of the father of the under secretary of
defense for policy, Douglas Feith. Dalck Feith, a
leading Philadelphia businessman and
philanthropist, managed to survive the Holocaust,
which, however, took the lives of both his
parents, four sisters, and three brothers.
These men, key players in the Bush
administration's foreign policy for the past three
and a half years, obviously do not see the
Holocaust - and the notion of "evil" in
international affairs - as a relic of history.
For neo-conservatives, the fact that the
United States played a decisive role in the defeat
of the evils of Nazism, fascism, and communism in
the last century offers compelling, if not
conclusive, evidence of its redemptive,
beneficial, and "exceptional" mission in world
affairs. It justifies the idea that its freedom to
act should not be constrained by multilateral
organizations or even international law if evil is
abroad.
International politics, then -
conceived as a battleground between good and evil
- presents a moral challenge for neo-conservatives
that transcends simple legalisms, as expressed on
the eve of the war with Iraq by commentator
Charles Krauthammer.
"By what moral
calculus does an American intervention to liberate
25 million people forfeit moral legitimacy because
it lacks the blessing of the butchers of Tiananmen
Square or the cynics of the Quai d'Orsay?" he
asked in reference to the argument by some that
Washington should not go to war without the UN
Security Council's approval.
For
neo-conservatives, the 1930s - the period that, in
their view, created the conditions for the
Holocaust to take place - offer the major lessons
for preventing such a catastrophe in the future.
First, in their view the rise of Adolf
Hitler within Germany resulted from the moral
weakness of the Weimar Republic, particularly the
failure of democrats and liberals to defend it
against extremists of the right and left. Their
humanism, relativism, and secularism gave rise to
a nihilistic spirit in the general population that
ultimately made it receptive to the Nazi appeal.
Thus, while neo-conservatives extol liberal
democratic ideals in their rhetoric, they spend
much of their time trying to discredit liberals.
A similar phenomenon - albeit on the
international level - also helped bring on the
Holocaust. Like liberals in Weimar, the "liberal
democracies" of prewar France and Britain failed
to confront German rearmament and expansion and
instead pursued a policy of "appeasement". This is
a serious charge in the neo-conservative lexicon
and one wielded without fail by neo-conservatives
whenever any political figure or foreign ally
suggests compromise or negotiations with perceived
enemies, be they Nicaragua in the 1980s, Serbia in
the 1990s, or Iran or North Korea today.
A
corollary of the "appeasement" lesson is the
necessity at all times of having overwhelming
military power against any possible challenger.
While "soft power", such as economic pressure,
cultural influence, etc, has its uses, ultimately,
according to the neo-conservatives, it's "hard
power" that counts in international affairs.
Indeed, just as the failure of France and
Britain to arm quickly in the face of Hitler's
challenges actually emboldened him to become more
aggressive, "the main threat arises not from the
United States' being too powerful, but from its
being perceived abroad as weak", wrote Frank
Gaffney, another Perle chum who heads the Center
for Security Policy in Washington.
The
final lesson derived from the 1930s is the
overriding necessity of keeping the United States,
which is seen as the greatest force for good in
international relations, engaged with the rest of
the world and preventing it from taking what yet
another Perle colleague and DPB member, Kenneth
Adelman, calls the "default option" of US foreign
policy: isolationism. Washington's disengagement
from Europe in the 1930s, in their view, also
contributed to the rise of Hitler.
For
neo-conservatives, the most effective way to avoid
a return to isolationism is to identify enemies
that may pose future threats against which public
opinion can be rallied, as they tried to do in
early 2001 against China, when a US spy plane was
forced down and its crew held on Hainan Island,
and then against "Islamo-fascism" after September
11.
A former neo-conservative, the late
New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once
cited this tendency as the reason he broke with
the movement in the 1980s. "They wished for a
military posture approaching mobilization; they
would create or invent whatever crises were
required to bring this about," he wrote.
And thus Perle, in his 2004 book An End
to Evil, pulled no punches in laying out the
stakes in the current "war on terrorism": "For us,
terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and
the war against this evil, our generation's great
cause ... There is no middle way for Americans: it
is victory or holocaust."
(Inter Press
Service) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
Asian Sex Gazette Sex and Religion News
|
|
|
