Republican Representative Allen West, a Tea Party favorite from Florida, weighed in on President Obama’s 10-year security agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. In the agreement, Obama pledged continued support to Afghanistan once NATO combat troops leave in 2014. “I look at what happened between President Obama and President Karzai as a 1930s, Chamberlain, Hitler moment,” Representative West told radio host Frank Gaffney. “There is not going to be peace in our time.”
I’m not quite sure what this analogy is supposed to prove. Is Karzai supposed to be Hitler? Whatever complaints one has with Karzai – and I have plenty of my own – he’s clearly no Hitler, and he doesn’t appear to have designs for world conquest.
As a general matter, the Chamberlain-Hitler-appeasement analogy is much overused and is often a sign of lazy thinking, as is the case here.
Representative West, it’s probably worth pointing out, also recently told a town hall meeting that “there’s [sic] about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party,” referring to their membership in the Congressional Progressive Caucus. (West’s defense of his comments can be found here.)
This is not simply an unfortunate comment but an ugly one. Communism is associated with immense and even incomprehensible humor horror, from the estimated 65 million deaths under Mao in China; to the more than 20 million Russians who perished under Stalin and Lenin; to the almost two million Cambodians – comprising around one quarter of the entire population – who died under the Pol Pot regime. Communism has been responsible for forced labor, slavery, starvation, mass executions, and wholesale slaughter. Surely West must know this. And so for him to characterize his (very) liberal colleagues as Communists, and then to defend the claim, is a form of slander.
West would do himself, his party and his cause a world of good if he decided to jettison the corrosive and insulting rhetoric.
Peter, I usually enjoy your commentary, but here I think it is clear that West was referring to obama's giving in to the Taliban, not Karzai.
To label the analogy "overused" and "lazy thinking", implies there is another analogy to use, yet none was put forward. Ironically, the article immediately compares one actor's actions with another when the implication was of a situation, not individuals. Then jumping on the second superficial bandwagon, calling Progressives, Communists, was more referring to the statist concept, as opposed to your 'great leap forward' to the death of a large amount of persons….I guess we can leave eugenics out of this. n nSo is this article a rant? That is how it reads.
Yeah, there a lot of Communists or revolutionary Marxists/Trotskyites in the United States who even whitewashed Soviet barbarity without actually lining up the mofos against the walls. They weren't tyrants but they fellow travel they did and some were card-carrying CPUSA. Pete Seeger. The Hollywood Ten. Izzy Stone. The neoconservatives before they were neo or con. Not to mention the revolutionary types our own President hung out with (Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn), the former according to accounts actually reworking if not writing the writers blockage of O's autobiographical detritus. The Democrats regularly deploy unhinged vitriol against their targets–even little Davie Alexrod called the Koch brothers and Karl Rove "contract killers." As O says, if they bring a knife to a fight, bring a gun.
Here's how it works (coming from the righteou Jacobo Timerman) hatred leads to fantasies which leads to violence. He knows something about it. The right in this country today is doing this and it's very anti-American.
I am a big fan of Peter Wehner, but I disagree with his criticism of Alan West's statements. I think that West's positions are right on, and I would like to hear more of them. Mr. West was referring to "appeasement", not Hitler. Intellectual giants Bruce Thornton and Victor Davis Hanson, among others, are saying the some thing. West's linkage of Communism with the Progressive Labor Caucus is also totally correct. He meant that the ideologies were identical, not that those Democrats were in favor of terror and mass murder.
Facts that are unhelpful need to be buried or disavowed, Pablo. If our GOP betters have taught us anything, it's that our electoral success hinges upon becoming more and more like progressive Democrats — tethered to belief that perception is reality, and that reality that doesn't poll well needs to be managed and finessed and massaged into a more palatable incarnation for the "moderates" and "independents" the GOP relies upon to win elections.
West's point was tha Obama looked like Chamberlain at Chamberlain's weakest, most naive moment, which just happened to be when Hitler was hanging around. n nIt's a shame Chamberlain didn't have an equally photographed and recorded moment when being taken for a fool by Stumpy the Clown, but that's just the way momentous moments in history shake out – sometimes a bad guy is lurking in the viewfinder.