A Familiar Place

Victor Davis Hanson writes on the familiarity of the place we find ourselves as a civilization. How to understand the madness that prevailed in the late 1930's when the world stood at the brink of war and yet would not take the steps that could have averted that cataclysm.

When I used to read about the 1930s — the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China — I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism.

Of course, the trauma of the Great War was all too fresh, and the utopian hopes for the League of Nations were not yet dashed. The Great Depression made the thought of rearmament seem absurd. The connivances of Stalin with Hitler — both satanic, yet sometimes in alliance, sometimes not — could confuse political judgments.

But nevertheless it is still surreal to reread the fantasies of Chamberlain, Daladier, and Pope Pius, or the stump speeches by Charles Lindbergh (“Their [the Jews’] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government”) or Father Coughlin (“Many people are beginning to wonder whom they should fear most — the Roosevelt-Churchill combination or the Hitler-Mussolini combination.”) — and it is even more baffling to consider that such men ever had any influence.

Not any longer.

He goes on from there in his usual, brilliantly written style. The moral bankruptcy of moral relativism. The failure to be able to distinguish between good and evil. The failure of too many people in the West to be able to face reality, substituting their skewed vision and values. Misplaced compassion playing into the hands of those who would kill the compassionate.

Read the whole thing.