Appeasement in Our Time

 
In the comments on Belmont Club yesterday, Wretchard said:

It is supremely ironic that the outcome of political correctness may ultimately be a consociational world; a world divided into mutually hostile ethnno-religious groups restrained only by mutual fear. The world as Lebanon and the Balkans. The logical outcome of Muslim “rage” at any real and imagined slight is that every Hindu, Sikh, Jew, Orthodox Christian and just plain old Christian has the right to take the same offense. Historically, political correctness hasn’t been ‘understanding’ but its reverse -- the process of feeding little bits of unresisting ethno-religious groups to the most aggressive ones -- though it has pretended to be otherwise. It is, in a word, the ultimate form of political cowardice, though it has gone by many names at the expense of Cambodians, Poles, the dark races of the world and most of all the Jews.

But at the limits, this kind of appeasement at the expense of others eventually generates its own backlash. That’s why the Balkans and Lebanon are what they area, a place where everyone has retreated to their final line. So if Newsweek was hoping for yet another abject and groveling apology for an incident that wasn’t even true they may get it this time; and maybe even next time. But one day they won’t get it at all. On that day they will have scuttled their own vision of a one world; scuttled it by their own hand and they will not have the wit to know that they themselves had done it.

The current political meaning of the word “appeasement” did not emerge until the period between the First and Second World Wars, when it was applied to the catastrophic behavior of the Allies towards the emerging Axis dictatorships. Prior to that time appeasement would have been a strategic decision from weakness against a stronger enemy: Give him what he wants to buy us time until we can escape or grow strong enough to defeat him.

Until 1939, Germany was manifestly not stronger than the Allies, and Italy never was. But all through that ghastly decade the Allies appeased the two strutting thugs: German rearmament, the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the invasion of Abyssinia, Anschluss, the atrocities in Spain, and then the climactic moment in 1938 when Chamberlain stood on the airport tarmac waving a piece of paper and declared “Peace in our time!” after selling the Czechs to the Nazis.

There are two factors that make modern appeasement distinctive:

1. The appeasing power faces a foe acting out of vigorous ideological and political zeal, while lacking that characteristic itself.
2. The appeasing power abases itself before a weaker opponent.

These conditions have characterized the behavior of the West not only towards the Fascist dictatorships, but also at times towards the Communist empire in the later stages of the Cold War, and now towards the Islamist thugs in their various guises.

An examination of each factor may prove instructive.

1. The appeasing power faces a foe acting out of vigorous ideological and political zeal, while lacking that characteristic itself.

In our confrontation with the Great Islamic Jihad this condition becomes apparent. Reverse the cultures and imagine what would happen if a group of jihadis in Mosul threw a copy of the Talmud into the sump. Would Hasidim across the globe take to the streets in sidelocks and yarmulke, overturning cars and burning buildings?

One has one’s doubts.

Or, if a herdsman in Waziristan fed an Urdu Bible to his goats, would Christians rise up as one in outrage from Brisbane to Baltimore?

I wouldn’t bet on it.

But Islam, ah… that’s different.

Islam demands from the West, and often receives, a special status not accorded any other religion in the world. A performance artist who defecates on a picture of Christ or covers a menorah with condoms can not only expect no condemnation, but is likely to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. But someone who so much as dog-ears a page of the Koran can expect the full wrath of the Ummah to descend on him, and will likely have to go underground and live under an assumed name. Just ask Salman Rushdie.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice implicitly accepted the special status of Islam when she said, “Disrespect for the Holy Koran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be tolerated by the United States.” Why? Since the United States tolerates disrespect for the Bible and the Talmud, why is the Koran different?

No wonder the Islamists think they’ve got us whupped.

2. The appeasing power abases itself before a weaker opponent.

This one is hard to figure out: what makes a stronger power kowtow to a weaker one? Is it out of a feeling of guilt, that we are somehow responsible for the degraded state of our foes? Or is it maybe a sense of “fair play”, that somehow we are obliged to level the playing field and create circumstances in which our enemies can confront us on approximately equal terms?

In any case, the result is to blindfold and shackle ourselves in preparation for a struggle against those who would kill us without compunction.

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Why do appeasers appease? What are their goals?

In Chamberlain’s case, it was a desire that life return to normal, that things might continue as they had been. The gentlemen of England could continue their activities in Parliament and the City, enjoying the matches at Wimbledon and Lords, retiring to Hertfordshire for extended weekends of pheasant shooting, and not thinking overmuch about what was happening to people in the Sudetenland. And, as Wretchard has pointed out, not dwelling overmuch on what might happen to the Jews.

The case can be made that Chamberlain knew that the return to normalcy would not last long, that he was buying time to modernize Britain’s armaments and prepare for the inevitable conflict with the Third Reich. But in September of 1938, for public consumption, it was “peace in our time”. It is understandable that Hitler thought the Czechoslovakia of 1938 would be reprised in Poland in 1939.

If we are in the GWOT equivalent of September 1938, what will be our equivalent of September 1939?

And why are we appeasing Muslims now?

Presumably we want things to continue as they have been; we want to return to our jobs and our televisions and not think too much about Christians in Indonesia or women in Saudi Arabia. With a little more time, we can figure out a way to stave off the Jihad Apocalypse, and maybe avoid the moment when Islamic zealots acquire nuclear or biological weapons and use them.

With a little more time we can finesse the bomb away from the mullahs in Iran. We can keep the Musharraf regime in Pakistan intact. We can look the other way while thousands or millions of people are slaughtered in Darfur and the Congo and Uzbekistan and Syria and…

We can return to normal. If we have to give the Palestinians Gaza or the West Bank or the Right of Return, well, that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it? After all, peace in our time is worth a few million Jews.