Gracchus

Munich is everywhere; Hitler is everyone

Over on Ecrasez L'Infame I posted an item about the recent Senate vote to deny legal protection to the inmates of the American concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Five Democrats, including of course reliable war-and-terror cheerleaders Joe Lieberman and Mary Landrieu, crossed the aisle to Support The Torturers (now there's a bumper magnet for you).

Vile Joe, whom no enormity can make blush, explained his vote: "A foreign national who is captured and determined to be an enemy combatant in the world war on terrorism has no more right to a habeas corpus appeal to our courts than did a captured soldier of the Axis powers during World War II."

Talk about multum in parvo; there's a whole world of ideological obfuscation in this comment. It would take a book to unpack it all. As a general rule, though, when somebody compares a current situation to Pearl Harbor, or Munich, or an opponent to Hitler, you can safely assume you are dealing with a hardened liar. World War II, the least typical of our wars, has become the template which every imperial adventure since then has been made to fit, either by outright lying about the facts, or just by repeating the analogy over and over until, like a stone hollowed out by dripping water, the public mind becomes numbed to the grotesqueness of the comparison.

(One fairly obvious failure of analogy, of course, is that while the captives at Guantanamo Bay resemble Axis prisoners of war in that they don't have the rights of US civilians, they also don't have the rights of prisoners of war. Heads we win, tails you lose.)

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