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| Iraq |
| Saddam's Lidice: the dictator's trial reveals a telling historical parallel. |
| 2006-03-08 |
| Wall Street Journal EFL; go read it all. In the late spring of 1942, the world learned the name Lidice. Czech resistance had assassinated deputy SS chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, and Adolf Hitler ordered Heydrich's successor to "wade through blood" to find the killers. Nearly 2,000 innocent civilians were murdered by the Nazis without turning up the culprits. So the decision was made to obliterate an entire village, so that the world would know the price of Nazi blood. On the evening of June 10, German troops sealed off the Czech mining village of Lidice, chosen because two of its native sons were serving in Britain's Royal Air Force. They gunned down Lidice's 173 men in groups of 10, shipped the women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp and deported some of the remaining children to Germany. Next the Germans had the village razed, its graves dug up and its rubble buried. Finally, they proudly broadcast the details of what they had done. The world got the message. "If future generations ask us what we are fighting for," said U.S. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, "we shall tell them the story of Lidice." Fast forward 40 years and to another village, this one called Dujail, in Iraq. In July 1982, Saddam Hussein was nearly killed there when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade. The dictator's reprisal came swiftly: That night, security forces arrested 350 villagers, including 15-year-old Ahmad Hassan Mohammad. . . . Of Mr. Mohammad's 10 brothers, seven were murdered by Saddam's henchmen, along with 141 others from Dujail. As with Lidice, Dujail was razed and its orchards bulldozed. Also like Lidice, the purpose of the massacre was not to dispense justice but to make an example of the villagers. "You people of Dujail, we have disciplined Iraq through you," Mr. Mohammad recalled one of the torturers saying. Now come to the present. Last week, Saddam acknowledged in court that he had ordered the summary trial that led to the execution of the villagers and the destruction of their farmland. "Where is the crime?" he asked, claiming that as president of Iraq all his actions were lawful. Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trial famously adopted a similar defense. . . . . . . We tend to forget that, for all of Iraq's current troubles, the U.S. and its allies deposed a dictator whose methods and purposes were eerily similar to those of the Nazis, even when it came to a comparatively small massacre such as the one in Dujail. That's something in which Americans can take justifiable pride, as much as the World War II generation did in defeating the Nazis. And it's something to which critics of the war, at least those who profess sincere concern with human rights, ought to give some thought. . . . The John Murthas and John Kerrys and Cindy Sheehansand Pat Buchanans need to be repeatedly reminded of this--whatever your intentions in opposing the war, you are as a matter of objective fact approving and enabling (in the pop psychology sense of being Saddam's "enabler") the massacare of Dujail. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #2 Great WSJ editorial, putting matters in proper perspective. May Saddam & Co. realize the same pain they inflicted on these innocent victims of Dujail. |
| Posted by: Captain America 2006-03-08 08:13 |
| #1 On the Hitler/Saddam parralel : normally I hate the reductio ad hitlerum, but in this case I'll make an exception, since the baas party's actual translated name was "pan-arabic national-socialist party". The baas is a *nazi* party, not in the msm sense ("you oppose gay marriage, you're a nazi"), but in the actual, national-socialist, Hitler-inspired sense... and yet, you had all thoses euro pols, whose legitimation is their guilt-inducing sacralization of their "opposition" to nazism ("it's either us, or the nzai wolf will come back and bring us to the darkest hours of our history"), who not only supported and had ties with Saddam, but sometimes were his personal friends (like Shiraq)... and now, they complain about the removal of the only "secular", "western-friendly" leader in the ME, and long for the goold old days... what a bunch of phonies abnd hypocrits! The links between national-arabism, or national-islamism, as you would call it, and historical nazism are many, and still manifest not only in ideological stances, but also in "details", like the *nazi salute* still used by the hezbollah, the baas, and the hamas. On an unrelated note, I'd really recommand this site about nazism, since the (false) idea that fascism and nazism were RIGHTwing was the greatest achievement of post-WWII communist propaganda, and still explains a lot the incredible shift to the left of the ueuropean political landscape. Hitler was a leftist. |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-03-08 07:41 |