The Red-Capped Prophet

An article from Matthias Doepfner appeared in the Oz on Monday...

....and since the Oz won't publish me (and quite rightly), I'll publish myself..

(apologies for no link to the original - if someone can find one I'll chuck it up straight away).

The trick, as Sherlock Holmes once told Watson, is to twist theories to suit facts, rather than twist facts to suit theories. Mathias Doepfner, writing in the Australian of 1/08/05, seems, regrettably, to fit into the latter category. As polemic it rates very highly, but as a cogent argument his article leaves a lot to be desired.

He begins by asserting that it was the inaction of Europe that “cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives”. This ignores the fact that while ultimately wrong, the policy of appeasement was rooted in the experience of World War I, which the US had largely been spared. The flower of a generation had lain buried in Europe for less than twenty years, casting rather a shadow over the policy decisions of the 1930s for the Western powers. It was not cowardice, but rather a lingering horror for war, that led the Chamberlains of the time to strive for peace at all costs.

Furthermore, it was the harshness and severity of the Treaty of Versailles that had created the conditions essential to the rise of Hitler in the first place. The German nation, crippled and humiliated after the war, could see in Nazism the restoration of its pride, and its rise from the ashes of shame and defeat. The sort of suppression of Islamic thought and expression that Doepfner appears to favour would simply provide a modern template for moderate Muslims, oppressed in what is, after all, their own countries, to see in radical leadership a hope of resurrection.

Doepfner apparently sees also the establishment of Communism as the dominant ideology in Eastern Europe, and the horrors of Bosnia and Kosovo, as further examples of European reticence to engage evil.

What would Doepfner prefer to have occurred? A nuclear confrontation of Dr Strangelove proportions? No-one is defending the oppressive regimes of the Soviet satellite states at that time, but it can only be selective amnesia that allows us to forget the US’s support of similarly repressive governments in South Korea, Vietnam and others. And with regard to Bosnia and Kosovo, the US had to be shamed into action as much as the EU did. No nation-state can look on those events with pride – to draw comparisons, and postulate that Europe’s leaders were somehow morally deficient when compared to the actions of any other country, is simply ludicrous.

The crowning achievement of Doepfner’s revisionism, though, is of course his remark that Europe “generate[d] a mentality that allowed it to ignore the almost 500,000 victims of Saddam Hussein’s torture and murder machinery”. Conveniently ignored is the origin of much of that machinery – the United States itself.

Realpolitik is almost always morally ambiguous. The United States of some revisionists’ fantasies is a white knight, tilting at the windmills of evil empires across the world. But like any other nation, the US has at times supported cruel regimes, repressive governments and perpetrators of evil when they supported what it perceived as its national interest.

Where was the moral superiority of the US when Donald Rumsfeld sold Saddam Hussein weapons? Where was its moral leadership when it supported the Taliban? Or to address Doepfner’s history lesson, where was the US’s fortitude as it waited three years to enter World War II in Europe, and that at the instigation of the Axis powers rather than it’s own?

And where was Europe’s supposed moral cowardice when it opposed apartheid in South Africa (against the expressly voted wishes of the current US Vice-president, it might be added)? Where was this moral cowardice when the Polish Pope John Paul II stood against communism, in his homeland and elsewhere?

This sort of selective memory only serves to encourage a world-view that is predominantly dichotomous, and manifestly ill equipped to deal with the real world. No one country is pure, and no one grouping of nation-states is inherently wrong.

But the real flaw in Doepfner’s world-view is revealed when he states that “there is a sort of crusade under way…consisting of systemic attacks by Islamists”. The difference between Muslims and radical Islamic terrorism is akin to the difference between the Germany of today and it’s neo-Nazi, lunatic fringe movements – a distinction one would have thought particularly pertinent and obvious to Doepfner.

And herein lies the quandary for those who would draw parallels between the situation of today, and the situations of yesteryear. Even if the facts of history suited the prejudices of those who would destroy multiculturalism, there remains the reality that there is no Islamic nation-state to invade, no marauding country to resist. There is only a large body of Islamic peoples, within Europe and elsewhere, who only wish to live peacefully and patriotically within the countries of their adoption or birth. And a radical minority who are so disillusioned that they see violently criminal acts as their only recourse.

Not all terrorists are Muslims, and not all Muslims are terrorists. And one sure way to make sure that more young men are attracted to the anti-West message of extremists is to make the place of their birth as inhospitable as possible.

Multiculturalism is not to blame for terrorism, and neither is European leadership. The roots of this cancer lie far deeper than any simplistic Enoch Powell-isms. Arguments consisting of polemical, black-and-white contributions might gain an audience, but if they simply ignore facts they find difficult to handle, they only contribute to the problem, not the solution.
It’s anything but elementary, my dear Watson. But that’s no good reason for making it seem that way.