Egypt's Military: Doing What Germany's Should Have Done in 1933
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described the Muslim Brotherhood as a "largely secular" organization with "no overarching agenda." This was a rather unusual characterization of a group whose motto is: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." If that is secular, what might the religious be?
In this struggle for power, some people will win; others will lose, but it is important enough that both sides are willing both to take and to lose lives to reach their objectives. Tut-tutting on the sidelines makes the United States appear ridiculous. Instead of just deploring violence, we should be appraising the character of the moral principles animating the two sides in this conflict and supporting the side that more closely comports with our own. And yes, that may require the choice of a lesser evil.
Unfortunately, the German military did not move against Adolph Hitler when he became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Had they done so, Europe and the United States would have been spared a world of woe. Had that happened, would the American government have tried to intervene at the time, insisting on a restoration of Hitler, who had been democratically elected by a plurality of the German people? Would we have insisted that our democratic creed required us to do so? These questions answer themselves. We would have been grateful to the German military for doing so. We should likewise have some appreciation for what the Egyptian military has done to save its country and, by the way, preserve U.S. strategic interests in that area of the Middle East.
All that assumes (must .. resist .. Godwin) that we would have had the foresight, in 1933, to know what we knew about Hitler by 1942. A few among us then did but they were roundly ignored. Recall that both Bolshevik socialism and national socialism had claims on American attention spans and admiration then. Ditto in Europe. Had the German army moved on Hitler (and with what, they were still very much in disarmament mode) Hitler's SA might have stopped them. European powers might have stopped them. Hitler might have ended up stronger than ever. |
Posted by: OldSpook 2013-08-20 |