Bonfire of the Manichees
In Justin Logan’s imprecation against argumentum ad hitlerum, I think there’s one sentence I disagree with:
It is particularly bizarre that those who view American power as having an almost magical ability to transform the world also believe that any number of two-bit dictators measure up to the threat posed by Hitler.
The conjunction of these beliefs doesn’t strike me as bizarre at all. I’d go so far as to say the one conviction implies the other. The whole is simply the Great Man theory of history after bombardment by gamma rays. The US government can write its will across the canvas of the world with fire and money, if it has the fortitude to try. And so can other leaders. That pretty much every other leader has a lot less fire and money to write with is taken as a temporary advantage American power must seize. Otherwise, the two-bit dictator will, by dint of conquest and plunder, become a four-bit dictator, and so on, and so forth, until eventually he has built a board with a nail in it that’s so big it can destroy all life on the planet. At which point the canvas is all punctured and raggedy and America can’t write on it any more.
It looks like two cracked ideas, but it’s really one: the world of their daydreams and nightmares is far more malleable than the world the rest of us live in.
Comment by Monte Davis —
November 7, 2007 @ 8:29 am
Logan’s sensible distinctions between Nazi Germany and the putative Caliphate won’t gain any traction with the bed-wetters, because they fall back at once to
To which the appropriate response is “Well, then: maybe it’s time to get serious about real non-proliferation and international controls — the kind those dreamy idealistic scientists were talking about in 1946 — instead of tacitly counting on ‘we have got / the Maxim gun and they have not’ as we have for most of the last 62 years.”
That a small device can destroy a city, and that access to such devices has inexorably become easier, is logically independent of fantasies about Islamofascism.
NB also how assertions about the unique, lunatic “undeterrability” of an Ahmedinejad (or for that matter Kim Jong-Il) implicitly ascribe sweet reason to the Stalin of 1951 or the Mao of 1966. Who’da thunk it?
Comment by Jonathan Goff —
November 7, 2007 @ 10:22 am
Another issue I’ve noticed with the Hitler analogy is that it is pretty much based on a counterfactual–ie that had we preemptively attacked Hitler instead of giving in at Munich, that the end result would’ve been much, much better. While I grant the possibility is there for a much better outcome, there are also good odds for something just as bad or much worse as well. For instance weakening Hitler and Western Europe at the same time while not weakening the USSR might have made the Cold War a lot different for instance. On the flip side, it’s not even 100% sure that had we not intervened in WWII that Hitler would’ve won. A just as likely possibility is that Hitler and Stalin would’ve wiped each other out, possibly sparing us the Cold War.
That’s the problem with counterfactuals–they’re just as impossible and useless as prognostications about the future, and just as prone to error due to conveniently leaving out any messy complications that my contradict one’s theory. People who rest their hat on the Hitler analogy are basically claiming to be doubly prophetic–ie that they can see the future of what will happen if we do act as well as what will happen if we don’t act.
~Jon