California Recall: Arnie and the Hitler Quote

The "money quote" will be all over the place by Friday morning. Here's ABC's version:

ABCNEWS obtained a copy of an unpublished book proposal with quotes from a verbatim transcript of an interview Schwarzenegger gave in 1975 while making the film Pumping Iron.

Asked who his heroes are, he answered, "I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it."

He is quoted as saying he wished he could have an experience, "like Hitler in the Nuremberg stadium. And have all those people scream at you and just being total agreement whatever you say."

I was surprised to see that two very partisan Democratic bloggers, Atrios and Hesiod, both kind of shrugged this off.

Come on, guys, this isn't something to fold on. Austrians may not typically have the more cosmopolitan perspective educated Germans might have. But they aren't morons. An Austrian who would say something like that in 1975 knew darn well what he was saying.  In fact, if he had said something like that on Austrian television, there would at least be speculation on whether he had violated the country's anti-Nazi laws.

I have a photo from the 08/18/94 issue of Die Presse (Vienna) showing a smiling Schwarzenegger shaking hands with Austrian far-right leader Jörg Haider at the Austrian premiere of Arnold's film True Lies. The story is about the governor of Arnold's home province Styria making a deal with Haider's party over some hopelessly obscure office.

But it reminds me that Haider, notorious for his praise of the Third Reich, has never been publicly quoted as praising Hitler that explicitly. And Haider is a political pariah in most of the European Union for making less admiring comments  about Hitler than that.

Austrian society tolerates anti-Semitism more than it should. But anybody that believes that was some harmless comment that any Austrian might have made in 1975 is way off base.

Tags: california politics, california recall, jörg haider, schwarzenegger

The Munich Agreement (Pt. 2 of 2)

Winston Churchill, no admirer of the Soviet regime, was a dissenter in Parliament on this whole issue. He correctly judged that Nazi Germany was a far greater threat to England at this time than the Soviets were and advocated cooperation with the Soviets to contain Germany.

Czechoslovakia was in no military position to resist alone. So they allowed the German army to enter their country and seize the territory Britain and France had agreed for them to give up. At this point, the USSR was left facing a Germany with a vastly expanded armaments industry that also had an improved geographical position to attack the USSR.

So Stalin made a deal to carve up Poland, not the first time in history Germany and Russia had done so. That brutal deal gave the USSR badly-needed time to build up its military and prepare for the German attack they knew would eventually come.

No easy or indisputable lessons for the present can be drawn from this. But one thing that strikes me is that the leaders of Britain and Germany let hope and ideology override a practical evaluation of the risks. Among other things, believing that the extreme ideological hostility of the Nazis and the Communists would prevent an alliance, the Western leaders put the USSR in an isolated position where they were at immediate risk of attack and defeat, forcing them into a radical course change in foreign policy.

It's also important to remember that Hitler's invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, the three major events that produced the Second World War, were wars of aggression. Germany attacked them without provocation and seized their countries. That experience very much shapes not only the theoretical thinking of European leaders, but their practical policies and their attitude toward international law. 

Some may think that EU countries like France and Germany made the wrong judgment in the case of Iraq. But their understanding of the dangers of "aggressive war", as the crime of unprovoked invasion was called at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, very much shaped their response to Bush's Iraq War. And they continue to influence European concern about the risks - and legality - of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war.

Tags: appeasement, munich agreement, second world war, world war ii

The Munich Agreement (Pt. 1 of 2)

Charlie Eklund at the The Other Shoe posted a brief note on the 1938 Munich Agreement.  He suggests that the recent impasses in the Security Council over Iraq was comparable, and asks if France's Jacques Chirac was comparable to Daladier of that time.

Historical analogies are probably more often misleading than helpful. So I think it's important to try to understand these events on their own terms. Hitler had begun a major rearmament program essentially from his first day in office.  In 1934, he backed a coup attempt in Austria by the Austria Nazis. The Austrians resisted, but MussoliniÂ’s Italy also pledged to support Austria in a conflict with Germany. At the time, those things enough threat to induce Hitler to back off. In 1935, he had illegally moved the German army into the Rhineland in violation of his treaty obligations, and the French chose not to resist. In early 1938, he marched into Austria, whose internationally isolated, clerical-fascist regime chose not to resist.

Then Hitler began using his ethnic-German Fifth Column in Czechoslovakia to agitate against the alleged oppressions of the Czechoslovak government (not all of which were inventions of German propaganda). Hitler intended to seize the western area of Czechoslovakia, which among other things would give him a crucial boost in weapons-production capacity.  At this point, the combined armies of the later anti-Hitler alliance in Europe were clearly stronger than Germany's.  Czechoslovakia was a democracy and the government was ready to resist.

Stalin's Soviet Union offered to defend Czechoslovakia militarily if Britain and France would also agree to do so. Britain and France were not only concerned that the Soviets might have other motives than defending the territorial integrity of the Czechoslovak democracy, and their suspicions were probably well founded. But Chamberlain and Daladier also hoped that Germany and the USSR would balance off each other, or even go to war with each other and thereby weaken the two powers that most threatened to destabilize the established order in Europe.

Tags: appeasement, munich agreement, second world war, world war ii

No WMDs in Iraq: Is This Still News?

I wouldn't want to see it get overshadowed by the Arnold-groping or Rush-doping stories.

But when I saw the headline "Kay Says No WMD Stock Found in Iraq," my first reaction was, "Is this really still a news story?"  This is starting to be like the running joke on the Saturday Night Live news in the 1970s: "Francisco Franco is still dead."

"We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone," Kay said in a statement obtained by Reuters.

Translation: We haven't found jack. And we don't expect to.

But multiple sources have told the team that "Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled CW (chemical warfare) program after 1991," Kay said. And information found so far suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop and produce and fill new chemical warfare weapons was "reduced -- if not entirely destroyed."

Kay concluded that "whatever we find will probably differ from pre-war intelligence. Empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information."

Now Bush is requesting another $600 million as part of the $87 billion supplementary request for Iraq to keep looking for those WMDs. If you need to forge more documents like the "Niger uranium" papers, it can be done much less expensively than that.

It would really be a heck of a lot cheaper to just say, "Okay, we lied."

Tags: iraq war

Chuckie Watch 8: Chuckie vs. "The Media"

CHARLIE DANIELS' mood seems to be swinging back a bit away from the Dark Side in his latest, "Media Missing." It's about a theme he's hit before, claiming that things in Iraq are just ducky, except that The Media keep reporting bad news. This is a theme we've been hearing more and more lately from defenders of the Bush policy.

Chuckie relies on a device popular on rightwing Web sites of quoting from anonymous letters allegedly from soldiers in Iraq, which just happen to mirror the official line of the moment on the war. This routine is dubious for a number of reasons. Especially since there are a number of news outlets that vet soldiers' letters according to normal journalistic criteria. There's plenty of credible sources for such quotes without this anonymous-soldier schtick, especially when the quotes are totally supportive of official policy.

Yeah, the news from Iraq is great. Except for the one or more American soldiers killed each day. And the daily ambushes. Or check out this story from Robert Fisk of the London Independent, one of the few Western reporters in Iraq who speaks Arabic, about a guerrilla attack in Baghdad (click on "Missles Strike at Heart of US Occupation):

[O]ne eyewitness described how - after firing the third rocket - the man left four more missiles lying on the road and then drove away as slowly and calmly as he arrived. Dozens of American troops arrived in the street minutes later but their attacker was gone, his missiles killing no one but making headlines round the world. The message was obvious: now even the very centre of the US occupation, the most fortified compound in Iraq with the Rashid, the former Presidential Palace - now home to US proconsul, Paul Bremer - and a conference centre, is unsafe.

Maybe Chuckie is getting letters from soldiers who know how to say "hi" in Arabic and they get nice smiles from Iraqi children. But the story that's driving the fate of the occupation is more likely to be found elsewhere. Not reporting it would just make it easier to cover up for policy failures.

Chuckie ends all his rants by asking us, "Pray for our troops." Maybe before the next war, Chuckie could also pray for a little better judgment before he cheers mindlessly for putting American troops in harm's way.

Tags: charlie daniels, chuckie, iraq war, robert fisk

Spain and Germany Try to Work Out Differences

It's entirely possible that in 20 years, maybe less, people will look back at this time and say that the most important development for freedom and democracy in the world was not the military dominance of the United States or the fight against Islamic extremism, but the development of the European Union.

German Schancellor Gerhard Schröder just met with Spanish President José María Aznar to discuss a range of European issues including easing tensions arising from Spain's support of the US and Britain on the Iraq War.

Schröder is the most prominent social-democratic leader in Europe right now, with many EU countries under conservative governance and Britain's Tony Blair badly damaged in Europe by the Iraq War. Aznar is one of the most respected conservatives in Europe, because he's credited with transforming his Partido Popular (PP), which is the historical successor to Franicsco Franco's party, into a fully democratic force.

The tone of the meeting was friendly, which was important in itself. As the EU Observer notes, "Mr Schröder teased the Spanish conservative that he [Aznar] could not greet him with his bandaged right arm, jokingly noting 'of course it is the right that is broken'." Although in reality, the PP has stronger voter support at home than Schröder's "red-green" coalition right now.

Aznar's support of the Iraq War did not alienate Spain from its EU allies to the extent that Blair's did with Britain. But both Aznar and Schröder are committed to strenthening the EU, though they have differences on the new European Constitution now being debated. Aznar has also been critical of the exceptions given to Germany (and France) allowing them to exceed EU targets on budget deficits.

They also discussed the development of common European armed forces. Aznar made a point of publicly emphasizing that the EU common force was not meant to compete with NATO or to rival the US. That's the position of Germany, as well. But what no EU country wants to say publicly is that the Bush Administation's unilateralism, especially in Iraq, has drastically undermined Europe'sconfidence in the NATO arrangement.

Tags: deutschland, españa, gerhard schröder, germany, josé maría aznar, iraq war, spain

Rush Moves On

Rush Limbaugh is a racist blowhard?  Who would have thought it?

I mean, except for anybody who has listened to his radio program.  Or heard him on TV.  Or read one of his books.  Or checked out his Web site.

Tags: authoritarianism, racism, rush limbaugh