Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online - The Present Farce - Should we laugh or cry as we watch history come full circle?


Hanson writes one of the best articles yet on the current way history is repeating itself. Read.

Louis Bonaparte was no Napoleon. And when the pathetic nephew came to power in France aping his tyrannical uncle, Karl Marx in 1851 dismissed the silly charade with the famous line, "History always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, and the second as farce." Marx was stealing from Hegel and Engels, as he often did; but the truth of that dictum has never been more evident than in the recent sad spectacle surrounding the pygmy tyrant Saddam Hussein and the echoes of 1930s Western appeasement.


Saddam — in capability but not intent — is no Hitler. Even though he still tries to talk grandly about British and American decadence, blusters about liquidating the Jews, and counts on the indifference of France, his Republican Guard is hardly a Waffen SS and his scuds no more advanced than Nazi V-2s 60 years ago. Gassing the Jews while Europe watches is with us again: but while Germans once built nightmarish factories of death like Auschwitz, Saddam counts on a few missiles armed with Sarin gas to do the same to those huddling in plastic-lined rooms with their babies in gas masks.


Once more a weak French prime minister — Mr. Chirac sounds eerily like Edouard Daladier — scurries about, worried about everything but rising anti-Semitism in his own country, his hospitality for the thug Mr. Mugabe, and the shady deals of French companies. The German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's sordid past reads like brownshirt-Lite, or at least something out of the creepy cabarets and the street brawls of Old Berlin. His boss Gerhard Schroeder screams to mass rallies about a "German Way" — as if millions troubled over a stagnant economy can again sway from far left to right or back in the blink of an eye. The slur "cowboy" (a favorite word of Hitler's) has now returned to the German political lexicon, as we all again struggle to fathom whether the massive demonstrations of the unhappy in the New Berlin are nationalist or socialist in nature — or both.[...]