The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns history and the correct use of it. History is to be learned from, not relived. Individuals are using lots of analogies to World War II recently, and they are sounding more ridiculous as time passes.
According to Jarrett Stepman at The Daily Signal, western media and political elites try to use history – particularly World War II – to analysis current events.
Every single political event and leader
is, like a broken record, compared to some bad Marvel comic version of its
World War II self. Trump is Hitler. Trump is Neville Chamberlain. Russian
President Vladimir Putin is Hitler. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is
Winston Churchill. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is Winston Churchill and
the leader of the free world.
Stop!
For a time when millennials were coming of
political age, the Harry Potter comparisons were repeated ad nauseum. The
eventual response to Harry Potter analogies eventually just became, “read
another book” and eventually the comparisons died down.
And that’s what I’m saying now. Pick
another event in history besides World War II, please.
It isn’t always Munich in 1938. Not every
politician you don’t like is Hitler. Not every aggressive foreign power is the
Third Reich. And not every attempt at peace is Neville Chamberlain-like “appeasement.”
And if you are going to go with a World
War II history analogy, at least get the facts straight.
I’d like to make this point about
Churchill based on actual history because there has been quite a bit of digital
ink spilled in claiming that Zelenskyy is like Churchill and that criticizing
him is like the U.S. suddenly stabbing Churchill in the back while he was fighting
Nazis.
Frankly, Zelenskyy’s public eruption with
Trump was very un-Churchill-like. Churchill was a wise and clever statesman who
knew exactly the position that the U.K. was in during the war. He knew that, as
he said t the Tehran Conference in 1943 with FDR and Josef Stalin, between the
American buffalo on one side and the Russian bear on the other, England was no
more than a sad little donkey.
So he flattered and gently cajoled FDR and
Stalin both publicly and privately….
I keep seeing this sentiment on social
media that the United States should give Ukraine whatever it wants and take
nothing in return as reward for their heroism against the Russians. Somehow
this is supposed to be comparable to our relationship with Churchill in World
War II, which was one of perpetual self-sacrifice.
Wrong.
Certainly, we often fought and died
together. But the United States didn’t help the U.K. simply out of charity and
kindness. It was a natural alliance of need and common interest, but we also
took the Brits for all they had.
The loans the U.S. extended to them – the war
material we gave them – came at a great cost. The U.K. only finally paid back
the loans from the U.S. in 2006, and it had to do so with interest.
Rightly or wrongly, American leaders were
ruthless with an ally of far more consequence and power than modern Ukraine….
We didn’t go running to fight World War
II, we were pushed into a deeply unpopular war by world events….
So please give the shallow history lesson
a rest for a bit and let the president meet with Putin jaw-to-jaw before we
rush to war.
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