Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
The Huck and his critics
Mike Huckabee shakes ’em up again
THERE HE goes again, embarrassing all of us respectables by telling us some things we’d rather not hear, even if he was just repeating what others have said again and again and in fulsome detail.
What others? The mullahs in Iran, who keep promising to “destroy,” “annihilate,” and “wipe Israel off the map” with “a Big Holocaust . . . .”
It’s a familiar routine by now, too familiar for nice people to take Mike Huckabee seriously when he warns that those who would let Iran have its Bomb are “marching Israelis to the door of the oven.”
“Ridiculous,” says The Hon. Barack Obama, and “sad” too. And his disbelief is echoed by leading Democrats, Jewish groups, and everybody else who just can’t take Mike Huckabee seriously.
It was all enough to bring back what Neville Chamberlain told his Cabinet when another worrywart, Winston Churchill, kept saying that this new German dictator meant it when he talked about wiping out the Jews.
What nonsense, snorted Mr. Chamberlin: Why, Churchill talked as though the Germans wanted all of Europe. How absurd. The wild stories of stormtroopers leading anti-Semitic pogroms were all rubbish. If the persecutions were as widespread as Winston Churchill claimed, Mr. Chamberlain explained, Reich Chancellor Hitler would get wind of them and jail those responsible. “But to hear Churchill, you would think that the Fuehrer wanted to kill every Jew in Europe!” (Laughter.)
It wasn’t just Neville Chamberlain who refused to believe Herr Hitler was serious, and now it’s not just Barack Obama who thinks Mike Huckabee has gone too far, way too far.
“Inflammatory,” Hillary Clinton called the Huck’s comments, just as various English lords and ladies, leading politicians and diplomats and intellectual lights in general dismissed Mr. Churchill’s words back in the somnolent 1930s. Among them: Anthony Eden, Lloyd George, Arnold J. Toynbee . . . a whole Burke’s Peerage of dignitaries.
The German fuehrer was “a born leader, a magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose”—to keep the peace. That was Lloyd George in the
Daily Express.
In this country, the sage Walter Lippmann was telling his readers in the New
York Herald Tribune (May 19, 1933) that Hitler was persecuting the Jews only to appease the masses, that he didn’t really intend mass murder.
N.B., or note well: Neville Chamberlain and his peers were not evil men, just suckers. (Sound familiar?) Unfortunately, that distinction may have been lost on the men, women and millions of children who were marched to the gas chambers, the killing fields, and, yes, to the doors of the crematoria in 1941, 1942, 1943 . . . . right up to the last days, even hours, of the war.
As for Germany’s Jews—as refined, assimilated, and cultivated a bunch as you could find anywhere, including art collectors, physicists, scientists, writers, financiers—they took refuge in the common belief that It Can’t Happen Here, not in modern, advanced, scientific Germany, not in the fatherland.
Today the head of the Anti-Defamation League in this country, Jonathan Greenblatt, calls Mike Huckabee’s comments “completely out of line and unacceptable.” This is America, after all. Why get so excited?
ONE OF the leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination—Jeb Bush—sounded dumbfounded by Mike Huckabee’s remarks: “. . . the use of that kind of language, it’s just wrong. This is not the way we’re going to win elections, that’s not how we’re going to solve problems.” Maybe he’s too busy depositing campaign contributions from other members of the Republican establishment to take any talk of a second Holocaust seriously. After all, the important thing is to win elections, not worry about the fate of some endangered little country that’s always making waves. Right?
Wrong. Tragically wrong. Back in the blithe 1930s, those who could see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil then would learn just how wrong they had been in the murderous ’40s.
The same types are just as mistaken now in the blind 2010s. But in a curious way it speaks well of them. For when confronted by the face of absolute Evil, they’re people of such good will that they just can’t believe it exists.
It was C.S. Lewis, theologian and scholar, author of Mere Christianity and
The Screwtape Letters, who pointed out that Satan’s most powerful weapon is that so many people can’t believe He exists.
When, oh, when will we learn that the world’s dictators mean what they’re saying? Clearly we haven’t learned to do so yet.
Maybe it takes a Bible-believing Baptist preacher from Arkansas to acknowledge the existence of pure Evil in the world, and understand that Satan still goes to and fro in the land, walking up and down in it, seeing what mischief he can stir as he sells Peace in Our Time or some other panacea guaranteed to be just as effective, foolproof, assuring and, in the end, just as homicidal.