Walter Williams: the Appeasement Disease

Walter Williams addresses the failings of appeasement, and unlike most (who cite Hitler as the ultimate example) Williams does not fail to address the outrages of communism:

Quite interestingly, Western leftist appeasers exempted communist leaders from the harsh criticism directed toward Hitler, even though communist crimes made Hitler's slaughter of 21 million appear almost amateurish. According to Professor R.J. Rummel's research in "Death by Government," from 1917 until its collapse, the Soviet Union murdered or caused the death of 61 million people, mostly its own citizens. Since 1949, the communist Chinese has been responsible for the death of 35 million of its own citizens.

To avoid strong and determined action in the war on terror is to take up the mantle and the ring of Neville Chamberlain's impotence.

posted by Dennis on 09.04.04 at 08:55 PM





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It is hard to measure Mao's genocide, because he merely cut off the food to a couple of provinces that were overpopulated. Perhaps some Chinese will emerge with a good history of the Mao period to educate their own people and also to embarrass the Western apologists. Surely there will be a Solzhenitsyn of China some day, if he is not madly scribbling already.

LarryH   ·  September 4, 2004 09:14 PM

Rather than see a rightist conveniently generalize about "Western leftist appeasers," I would have preferred to see Williams name specific leftists who gave Communist governments a pass -- and specific leftists who harshly condemned and combatted Communism. I would also prefer that these rightists acknowledge when fellow rightists appeased Communism.

Who among Bush's critics is really advocating appeasement? It seems to me that most of them are advocating that we battle real terrorists, not proxies.

Mike A.   ·  September 5, 2004 02:47 AM

We at Classical Values did just that recently when the NAACP reared its socialist head, viz. Julian Bond. You can find more about Bond, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and even the Kerry-Edwards connection here, here, here, and here.

If you're a regular reader you won't need Walter Williams to name names, because we do.

Red-baiters all.

Dennis   ·  September 5, 2004 08:45 AM

Leftist appeasers? Owen Lattimore for one (a "victim" of McCarthy). Or perhaps he was not so much an appeaser as a Communist himself. Sone years ago, I heard Michael Parenti speak on NPR, and he defended the Hitler-Stalin Pact dividing up Poland, and even went so far as to say that the Poles _welcomed_ the Soviet troops. Excuse my language, but that was just about the biggest load of bullshit I ever heard in my life! But, again, Parenti qualifies as more of an outright Communist. So, why did NPR give him a respectful audience?

Henry Kissinger. His whole "detente" policy, which included not inviting Solzshenytsin to the White House because it might offend the Soviets. The continual denunciations of and sneers at President Reagan for daring to call the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire" (which it was).

When Reagan predicted that Communism would go down as "another sad, bizarre chapter in history, whose last pages are even now being written, they ridiculed him, as also when he said: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Throughout the Cold War, "liberals" said that Communism was here to stay, that it was invincible, that it was "the wave of the future", that we must "coexist" with it, that it was in many ways superior to our own system and that we should "learn" from it -- and that Reagan was a fool for opposing it.

After it fell, they then turned around and said that they had predicted its collapse all along -- and that Reagan was a fool for having seen it as a threat.

A lot of "intellectuals" went over to Communist China in the 1970s and came back and told us what a utopia it was and how much we had to "learn" from it. One of these was Shirley McLaine, who said that the Communist system was superior to our own because they believed that (in her words) "the group is more important than the individual". I hear she's into "channelling" spirits of the dead now. I hope someday she "channels" one of the tens of millions of "hungry ghosts" who died at the hands of those who believed that "the group is more important than the individual".

Shirley McLaine was an intellectual? Who woulda known?

ROTFL.

BTW, I've never heard Kissinger be referred to as a leftist or a liberal. Quite the contrary. Nor would I consider him an appeaser. I might consider him an accommodationist, but it should be recognized that the 1960s were not exactly the safest of times. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the ongoing war in Vietnam that Nixon's Republican predecessor (Eisenhower) had stupidly gotten the US involved in, guerilla insurgencies in Central and South America and Africa are only a few of the problems that Kissinger and Nixon were facing.

raj   ·  September 6, 2004 05:01 PM


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