At dawn on April 9, 1945 the Nazis stripped Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer naked at the Flossenburg concentration camp, led him into the execution yard and hung him without a trial. Adolph Hitler ordered them to do it. Two weeks later the United States 90th and 97th Infantry Divisions liberated the camp and a month later Nazi Germany capitulated.
Bonhoeffer was a highly regarded academic theologian. Two days after Hitler came to power, in 1933, Bonhoeffer immediately left the safety of his ivory tower and publically opposed the Nazi regime. He recognized the evil of Hitler and the Nazis and felt compelled to act on it. He delivered a radio address opposing Hitler and was cut off in mid-air. In 1933 he raised the first voice advocating church resistance to Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, stating that the church must not simply “bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke of the wheel itself”.
Bonhoeffer worked with the German Underground and in the 30’s secretly moved from one village to another conducting what came to be known as “seminaries on the run”. A man of his stature could have safely left Nazi Germany but instead he chose to stay and resist – even though he was eventually forbidden to publish or speak in public. Bonhoeffer was implicated in various plots against Hitler – which, upon discovery, led to his execution.
The Islamic State (ISIS) is the Nazi horror of our time. Both of these powerful visceral movements are essentially assaults on Western civilization. They have no use for modernity which is characterized by the use of reason, the rule of law and belief in the ongoing progress of mankind. Nor do they respect or acknowledge individual human rights. Their bloody aggression knows no boundaries.
The Teutonic Nazi’s were pagan in both their ceremonies, symbols and brutality. The Nazi Swastika dates back 3000 years and was used as a symbol of well-being and good fortune in many ancient cultures – until forever condemned after being used by the Nazis. ISIS yearns for a bloody apoplectic return to the Caliphate of the 7th century. They offer brutal dictatorship and the fanatically religious Sharia law which justifies terrorism, oppression, slavery and murder of non-believers.
As bizarre and strange as ISIS seems, it would be a serious mistake not to take seriously its threat to Western Civilization – and the world. In the early thirties, Hitler and the Nazi’s seemed comical to many – with Hitler often compared to a clown – until he got into power and then it was too late. Accordingly it concerns me that several members of our Massachusetts Congressional delegation have balked at President Obama’s request for a three year authorization to use force against ISIS without regard to particular international boundaries. The President’s 3 year request doesn’t seem unreasonable to me as ISIS is essentially fighting us and the rest of the civilized world everywhere without regard to international boundaries. Obama wants to take the fight to where the enemy is – and not wait until the enemy lays its bloody hand on our homeland, which may be imminent anyways.
A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that Americans by a margin of two-to-one support deploying U.S. ground troops to fight and destroy ISIS. But our congressional delegation is skeptical and hesitates. One Congressman flat out turned down the President’s request the day he issued it – without inquiring into the details or seeking a dialogue on the matter. Several others want specific details and assurances of success, commenting that this is a matter for Iraqi’s alone to handle – while the President states that any on-the-ground combat by U.S. forces would be limited to rescue operations, intelligence gathering and special ops forces missions to take out ISIS leaders. ISIS is fighting us everywhere they can – it seems logical to fight them everywhere they are.
Remarking on why he fought against and resisted Hitler and the Nazis, Pastor Bonhoeffer stated “the ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live”.
If the universal and immediate threat of ISIS is not enough to justify military action against this deadly and growing menace then we should think about the world we leave behind for our children. After all, we enjoy our freedom and liberty today because a generation before us finally took up the fight against a similar deadly threat to world peace and civilization as we know it. They left their children safe and free – will we do the same?
I am appalled by what ISIS is doing. I share the desire to do something. I am very dubious of the comparison to Nazi Germany, especially when used to support unspecified “military action”.
Nazi Germany was a single nation ruled by a single person. ISIS is a collection of extremist groups who have overthrown or taken over a collection of regional nations. Nazi Germany was a single nation that had been defeated a few short decades before Hitler, and was ostensibly a democracy at the time of Hitler’s ascent. ISIS has no similar history.
Each misguided war in recent US history — Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan has been justified using Nazi Germany and the claim that each was “a similar deadly threat to world peace and civilization as we know it”. Those were abject failures, in part because each was so very different from Hitler and Nazi Germany. In fact, neither they nor ISIS was similar to Hitler and Nazi Germany at all.
In fact, at it’s heart, the entire “War on Terror” was justified on similar grounds, and has been an unmitigated disaster for the US. A disaster, in part, because just this faulty logic has been used by terrorists to turn our “War on Terror” into their own most powerful tool against us.
ISIS exists because of our blunders since 9/11.
Such beating of the war-drums, especially while we face a dilemma with Iran and a dilemma with Israel, strikes me as both exceedingly dangerous and exceedingly myopic.
However we handle ISIS and the threat it represents, surely we should not again make the same blunder we made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
somervilletom: A few points regarding your comments:
1. As noted in Obama’s request and again in my article ” the President states that any on-the-ground combat by U.S. forces would be limited to rescue operations, intelligence gathering and special ops forces missions to take out ISIS leaders” Additionally the request is limited to 3 years. This is not a request to invade with a large army as you suggest. That would be inappropriate. Those kinds of wars may well be obsolete – at least for the U.S. – and is not the proper way to fight terrorists, in my view.
2. We are not talking Vietnam or another Iraq invasion. We are talking about a limited, focused action against very bloody and deadly terrorists. Doing nothing means they will continue and expand – as they are actually doing both here and in Europe.
3. The differences you point out about Hitler and the Nazis is actually irrelevant to the point of how threatening Nazi Germany was to the world – and it was not all Hitler’s fault or responsibility as you suggest – but that is a different topic.
4. You provide no support for your assertion that ISIS is the result of 9/11. Failing to fight ISIS because the IRAQ invasion was a scam and failure is simplistic and does nothing to solve or face-up to a very serious threat to world peace.
5. Backing off because we have problems/dilemmas with Iran and Israel does nothing to help address the threat of ISIS and is a sort of surrender because the problems are complex and the task very difficult – which it is. Its a complicated and tough neighborhood.
6. We are not looking to repeat any blunders of the past. What is being requested is authorization to appropriately address the problem in a limited, focused way and for a limited period of time. That is how we got Binladen. I assume you don’t object to how we got Binladen ?- or that we did.
7. I also note that you offer no solutions to fighting ISIS. There is an active war going on ( they have declared it and are acting on it) – so what do you suggest we do to defend ourselves?
ISIS is a band of thugs pretending to be a world power. They gain legitimacy when countries the size of the United States are panicked into making war on them. They are not a military power; they can’t field a single armored division, build even one fighter plane, or float a warship worthy of the name. They can’t remotely compare to Germany, which had the most formidable military machine in Europe.
ISIS is best ignored. Regional powers, looking out for their own interests, will be more than enough to take care of ISIS if it does not self-destruct.
Radical Islam has been given too much attention; this is not a doctrine that is likely to appeal to much of anyone in non-Muslim countries, and it is, in essence, a rejection of the modern world. It is embraced out of desperation by Muslim people whose interests have been too long ignored by local regimes and their western backers, but it can never bring its followers anything but poverty, ignorance, and backwardness. Left to itself, it must disillusion its supporters and melt away; but by fighting it we give it credibility and thereby perpetuate it.
If that will not convince you that ISIS should be left alone, consider that ISIS perpetrates outrages because it wants to provoke our anger. Only by doing so does it see a road to power.
Leave ISIS alone, and before long, the next heads it cuts off will be its own.
And he has my full support.
The first sentence is wrong, we ignored ISIS and called them a junior league Al Qaeda only to see them take over a third of Syria and a quarter of Iraq. That said, your second sentence is correct. Regional powers are already taking care of ISIS. While both sides are loathe to admit it, just as America used the Iranian backed Northern Alliance as a proxy ground force in the opening phases of the Afghan War, it is now using an Iranian backed ground force in Iraq as its ground proxy and providing it with intelligence and air power. Both sides deny coordination and both sides are lying.
So far it has worked out great, and with this nuclear agreement moving our relationship from toxic to neutral, expect greater and more open coordination against ISIL from our Iranian frenemies*.
*this term is actually quite useful for the modern state of International Relations and should be officially adopted! It works for China, Pakistan, Brazil, and could soon work for Cuba and Iran as well
What do they really think will be the result? Say they are successful in provoking us, and we bring down all the wrath of God we can muster on their heads. Won’t they be utterly destroyed – and I mean DESTROYED in the “Carthaga Delenda est” sense? How does that help them? They really should be careful what they wish for if they know what is good for them.
I strongly recommend this piece in the Atlantic for getting a sense of where they come from. Unlike Al Qaeda, ISIS depends on territory for its very existence. Their goal is territorial control over the historic caliphate. They have no desire to attack Europe, attack North America, or attack American interests outside that stated geographic area. This is why denying them territory, and winning victories on the ground is essential for their destruction.
I am also confident their inability to govern will eventually come back to bite them, after another year of ISIS rule, I doubt most Iraqi Sunni’s will want to keep them around. Just as the British people begged the Stuarts to come back after a decade of Puritanical rule under the Roundheads, I am more than hopeful the Sunni’s will come back to the central government as the lesser evil.
The scenario I described above is more rather than less likely to come to pass if this continues to be an Iraqi led fed on the ground, American ground troops turn this into yet another occupation of Iraqi territory by foreign fighters. ISIS is doing a great job by itself in that role, rallying the Iraqi people against it.