Europe Manfred Gerstenfeld

DR.MANFRED GERSTENFELD: EUROPEAN APPEASEMENT NOW, SAME AS BEFORE WWII……..

 

This is a great lesson to be learned from history. There is never a lack of politicians who desire to view situations as they want them to be, and not as they actually are. Formulating policies along those lines is a fool’s errand.

NOTE: Dr.Gerstenfeld had this op-ed published at YNET, and is republished here with the author’s consent.

Op-ed: European appeasement before World War II reminiscent of current EU attitudes

By Manfred Gerstenfeld

Published: 05.28.12, 17:11 / Israel Opinion

A variety of major elements in today’s delegitimization of Israel by European agitators recall what Jews experienced in the late 1930s. To study this thoroughly would require a huge effort. Formulating a few key ideas about this however, could easily come from reading a single book which covers that period.

One example is Duff Cooper’s autobiography, Old Men Forget. The author is a former British Conservative minister. He was First Lord of the Admiralty – a British title for the Minister of Marine – at the time of the Munich agreements. On 29 September 1938, England and France abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler by agreeing that it had to give up part of its territory to Germany. This Sudetenland was mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans and all the Czechoslovak fortifications were there. This led to the German occupation of the entire country six months later.

Shortly before Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke on the radio. Cooper writes that he had no words of sympathy for Czechoslovakia, which he was prepared to betray. “The only sympathy expressed was for Hitler, whose feelings about the Sudetens the PM said that he could well understand.”

Cooper resigned from the cabinet immediately after Munich. This act required great courage. Chamberlain was at the height of his popularity as the agreement promised “peace for all times.” In reality, this meant a respite of less than a year until war broke out after the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939.

Cooper often quoted from his diaries. On 22 May 1938, at the time of continuous vicious German verbal attacks on Czechoslovakia, he wrote about a cabinet meeting, “The general feeling seemed to be that great, brutal Czechoslovakia was bullying poor, peaceful little Germany…It was decided to send off a telegram to tell the French to go carefully and not to rely too much on us, and another to urge the Czechs to make large concessions.”

In diluted form this resembles the European Union’s ongoing criticism of Israel and Europe’s tip-toeing around the “peaceful Arab world” where many thousands have been slaughtered by their own countrymen.

In September 1938, another cabinet member Viscount Hailsham, said to Cooper: “It all depends on whether we can trust Hitler.” Cooper asked, “Trust him for what?” He has got everything he wants for the present and he has given no promises for the future.”

 Do Arabs want peace? 

Can one trust Arab states or the Palestinians today? The great majority of Egyptians want to abolish the Camp David peace treaty in which their country got back Sinai without fighting. The Palestinian Authority glorifies murderers of Israeli civilians and names youth camps, streets and schools after them. Oslo agreements did not go quite that far. Today we know that this agreement enabled the Palestinians to gradually mobilize large parts of the Muslim world against Israel.

 After the outbreak of the Second World War, many British displayed an attitude that Poland was lost anyhow, so why should Britain continue to fight against Germany? Former Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George suggested in Parliament that the British government should consider any proposals for peace. Cooper reacted by saying that Lloyd George was suggesting surrender.

 While the Germans were spending huge amounts of money on propaganda, the British were allocating none. Shortly after the outbreak of war, Cooper left for the United States on a lecture tour. Before he left, Chamberlain sent a high-ranking official over to request that Cooper abstain from saying anything that might sound like British propaganda.

In his autobiography, Cooper wrote that in retrospect this demand seemed almost incredible. “A former cabinet minister arrives from England and his country has just entered on a great war and he is advertised to lecture all over the United States on topics of current interest. What will his audiences expect of him except information about this war, the causes and the prospects of it? How can an Englishman give such information without presenting and defending the cause of his country? And what better form of propaganda could there be?”

Since Oslo, we have had some Israeli governments emulate Chamberlain’s foolish position. They claimed that “if you do good, you do not need public diplomacy.” The current government does not adhere to that absurd maxim, but there is certainly vast room for improvement in the presentation of Israel’s case to the world.

 

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld has published 20 books. Several of these address anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism 

5 Responses

  1. This time around the US should not spill blood to help their unappreciative, anti-Semitic a##es.

  2. PC MC appeasement of gradually developing, parallel Sharia-compliant communities in the West stems from humanitarian racism, above all else. Let’s remind ourselves of the words of Manfred Gerstenfeld, who defined the term humanitarian racism as follows: (Behind the Humanitarian Mask: The Nordic Countries, Israel, and the Jews)

    “Such humanitarian racists think—usually without expressing it explicitly sometimes not even being conscious of it—that only white people can be fully responsible for their actions while nonwhites cannot (or can but only to a limited extent).”

    “A humanitarian racist is best defined as someone who attributes intrinsically reduced responsibility for their acts to people of certain ethnic or national groups. This racism is a mirror image of the white-supremacist variety. Humanitarian racists consider—usually without saying so explicitly—that only white people can be fully responsible for their actions; nonwhites such as the Palestinians cannot (or can but only to a limited extent). Therefore, most misdeeds by nonwhites—who by definition are “victims”—are not their fault but those of whites, who can be held accountable. One of the many consequences of this distorted attitude is that nonwhites are falsely perceived as passive victims, never acting, only acted upon or reacting. As humanitarian racism has hardly been investigated, the many ramifications of this discriminatory attitude are also ignored. One of these is that by considering certain people unable to be fully responsible for their actions by nature, one implicitly degrades them to a subhuman status and ascribes to them characteristics found in animals. They cannot be held responsible because they cannot overcome their urges and are not expected to have rationality or morality. One among many resulting distortions of humanitarian racism is the confusion of criminals and victims. Another is an inversion of perpetrator and victim. These scantly studied phenomena are related to other false beliefs such as that the problems caused by certain hooligans among non-Western immigrants in European societies are solely the result of socioeconomic factors. Very often criminal inclinations and antiwhite racist ideology are also at play.”

    “Ignoring minority racism is yet another collateral phenomenon of humanitarian
    racism.”
    (https://jcpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Nordic.pdf)

    In the 21st century, it becomes immediately apparent that moral relativism as the fundamental cornerstone of PC has turned into a “tail between the legs” policy and has become – although originally part of the contrived rhetoric of the so-called anti-imperialist left – a pervasive disorder that has infected our political “elites” as a whole, regardless of their particular ideology or party political stance. Although humanitarian racism holds its own inconsistencies, it can however perfectly serve as nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to a situation Western leaders don’t want to face up to: PC gathers around the blatant untruth that Islam is purportedly “a culture” rather than a pre-modern ideology (aka religion) that seeks to submit the whole of Mankind to a transcendent, static Absolute Moral Truth that is both ill-suited and damaging to the evolution of civilization’s intricacies in an ever-changing, modernizing world, full of complexities to which Islam can give no satisfying answers.

  3. Thus, humanitarian racism seeks to deliberately victimize the Muslims as an oppressed minority from a viewpoint that can only be described as a post-colonial guilt trip. Multiculturalism has it that we can’t possibly “treat these people the same way as we do our own kind, because this particular background culture is fundamentally unable to attain the same standards as we do, so we have to exempt these people from having to comply with our own norms and values”, or something to that effect. Complacently denoting Islam as a culture therefore has to lead to the Islam-critical communities collectively being branded as “a bunch of racists.” Those who want to wage war on civilization, complying with the discriminatory and dehumanizing core aspects of Islam, like Mohammed Merah, have to be designated consistently as victims of socioeconomic and psychosocial factors that lead to profound “personal frustration”. As a consequence, PC appeasement wreaks further havoc on civilized societies. Salafi Islam becomes mainstream in Muslim communities that self-segregate and become Sharia-compliant, these communities will turn to parallel judiciaries to solve legal issues, Islamic uniformity (as the logical consequence of the totalitarian aspect of Islam) will be enforced by moral police and in the long run, Western societies will increasingly find that PC appeasement of the Muslim “victim” has turned into an exercise that reaps absolutely NO rewards for our civilization in the long run. PC appeasement leads to the classical conditioning of the Muslim’s behavior as if he were a “Pavlovian dog”: The deeply ingrained negative attitude of the Islamic doctrine towards general human rights, equality of men and women and the compliance with secularized law and order (the only guarantee those rights will be extended to all) will be reinforced by instrumental conditioning that builds on total impunity, as a result of our political leaders’ complacency, which is the very backbone of political correctness.

  4. In the long run, the self-delusional PC MC attitude is mollycoddling the poisonous snake of Islamic totalitarianism and unadulterated Muslim Moral Supremacy that bites the hand that inadvertently feeds it. The consequences are for the long haul, alas. Unless politicians start getting real soon, maybe, and stop assuming that appeasing Muslims can serve as a short-term solution to “keeping the peace”. Lest we forget it, it has to be reiterated explicitly: the peace we so desperately want with Muslims will never be reciprocated. Never ever, whatever PC solution we think we might have !

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