Parallels from the past for those who don't know history

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Sometimes it is more essential to define the nature of evil than good By Jonathan Rosenblum
Upon his first visit to one of the liberated death camps, Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "There are those who ask what are we fighting for. Let them come here and see what we are fighting against." Eisenhower's remark contains an important insight: Sometimes it is more essential that one define the nature of evil than that one define what is good. About the latter, there will inevitably be many opinions. But they need not prevent a consensus from coalescing around the definition of evil.
I was reminded of that point last week as I watched The Third Jihad, the third in a trilogy of documentaries on the threat of radical Islam produced by Raphael Shore and Wayne Kopping. Towards the end of the documentary one of the experts interviewed, former CIA intelligence officer Clare Lopez declared, "The real war is between the values of freedom and barbarism. If we are not willing to recognize the battle as one for our civilization, we might as well give up right now."...
(Prior to and during WWII some refused to recognize this battle)...following the Nazi invasion of Poland, Chamberlain pursued it half-heartedly and dreamed of an imminent peace....The parallels between today and the earlier period are eerie. Chamberlain, like President Obama today, enjoyed an overwhelming majority in Parliament. His party whips enforced party discipline with an iron hand — think Rahm Emanuel — and backbenchers who stepped out of line put their political futures on the line. In another interesting parallel, Chamberlain enjoyed almost across the board fawning support from the press and the BBC. That included self-imposed censorship on the information reaching the British public. After the Anschluss, British papers carried no pictures (or articles on the consequences)...When reporters asked Chamberlain about such matters, he snapped at them for believing "Jewish-Communist propaganda," and that was the end of the matter.The British press ignored both ...German arms build-up prior...and the pitiful state of British preparedness.... it suppressed mention or quotations from Hitler's speeches that would have conveyed a much different impression of his goals. As a British TV character tartly observed forty years later, "It is hard to censor the press when it wants to be free, but easy if it gives up its freedom voluntarily."
Chamberlain never read Mein Kampf,...Far from viewing Hitler as an evil man, Chamberlain believed him to be a "gentleman," with whom he could do business....Said future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, "He didn't believe people existed [who would] say one thing and do another. …It was pathetic, really." Chamberlain,...''could never bring himself to believe that [Hitler and Mussolini] wanted to go to war. Clinging to the security of his ignorance, he created a peace-loving image of them that defied reality." For a decade,...nothing in response to ...(Ethiopia), Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and precious little even in the wake of the German invasion of Poland. France and England thereby encouraged Hitler to believe they were too weak to prevail...those who hope to avoid war via appeasement inevitably end up fighting later on worse terms.(Chamberlain never recognized Hitler's threat and was more ruthless fighting dissidents in his own party.)...
The inability to recognize Hitler as evil incarnate is the most frightening parallel to today. ...Reagan was reviled by Western elites for...the Evil Empire, as was ...W. Bush for grouping Iran, North Korea, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq together as the Axis of Evil.
The West still remains incapable of acknowledging evil or giving credence to the pronouncements of evil men. Ayatollah Khomeini long ago made clear that he was prepared to see Iran go up "in flames," if the worldwide rule of Islam were thereby furthered. Mutual assured destruction, says Bernard Lewis, the greatest living authority on Islam, is for Ahmadinejad, "not a deterrent but an incentive." Surveying the scene in Beslan, where Chenyan Muslims killed nearly 300 Russian schoolchildren, one of the speakers on The Third Jihad puts the point succinctly: Why should those who don't hesitate to send out their own children to be killed hesitate to kill other peoples' children? Yet the highest wisdom in the West today is to not take seriously the threats of Ahmadinejad or the speculations of the Iranian leadership about the mathematics of a nuclear exchange with Israel. They are not madmen, we are constantly told.
President Obama has no taste for confrontation with radical Islam (only with Israel). He cannot even admit that it exists. Evil, it seems, is one of the few words that does not come trippingly off his tongue.