Heil Boche
Source Ian Murray
Date 02/10/12/14:53

'Hi, Bush' to `Heil Boche'


"HISTORY," says T.S. Eliot, "has many cunning passages." What an irony that
the Germany which destroyed the 20th century is poised to save the 21st. The
people who voted the Third Reich have now voted "No" to the invasion of
Iraq. For if Gerhard Schroeder has won a surprise second term it is entirely
because his rival first raised Iraq and Schroeder chased him to say "No" to
Bush. Europe now has its John Foster Dulles to stall another Suez in the
West Asia.

The Bush Doctrine has elevated "regime change" as the foreign policy
alternative to national sovereignty and collective security under the U.N.
Charter. Saddam must go. Arafat must go. The US will decide who is a good
`un and who a Bad Boy. And if they will not do as told, the entire
population will be bombed to smithereens.

We have been here before. "Regime change" is what Hitler insisted on in
ordering the Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg to quit in favour of
the Nazi quisling Artur Seyss-Inquart when the Chancellor committed the
outrage, in Hitler's eyes, of ordering a plebiscite to ascertain whether the
Austrian people wished to be absorbed into the German Reich.

"Regime change" is what Hitler then demanded in Prague. President Edouard
Benes held out in the hope of his allies - France, Britain and the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) - coming to his rescue. The Soviet Union
was willing but France refused unless Britain obliged. Instead of
mobilising, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew (twice) to
Hitler's feet. Waving a piece of a paper, he landed back in London
proclaiming "Peace for our time". Germany then marched into Czechoslovakia
without a shot being fired (an example Bush would wish to emulate by
threatening Saddam into submission). Hitler then personally supervised
regime change in the Hradacny palace.

Next was Poland's turn. Hitler demanded that Colonel Josef Beck go and
Berlin decide who will rule in Warsaw. Beck demurred. The Brits suddenly
discovered their resolve. And the Second World War began. Some fifty million
died in the cause of "regime change". That is why the German Minister of
Justice bluntly compared the actions of Bush to those of Hitler. Bush is
readying to do to Baghdad what Franco and his Nazi allies did to Guernica.
Listen to Churchill College, Cambridge, historian Piers Brendon in his
masterly panorama of the 1930s, The Dark Valley:

"Waves of aircraft flew abreast to carry out the first European exercise in
carpet bombing." The first flight dropped six bombs containing a ton and a
half of explosives in the center of Guernica. It "caused havoc among
passengers waiting for the Bilbao train, gashed open the front of the Hotel
Julian and left the station plaza strewn with smashed bodies and smoking
debris. A cloud of dust mushroomed skywards and witnesses heard the `wild
shrieking of a terrified people.' Every fifteen minutes the raiders
returned. They pulverised the town, creating a miniature fire-storm in its
ruins. They destroyed three-quarters of the buildings." Priests in the Santa
Maria church tried to extinguish an incendiary bomb "with communion wine.
Whether the inhabitants prayed or screamed, fled or cowered, they were
purused by flights of fighters which, `like flashing dancing waves on
shingle', machine-gunned them from as low as 200 feet."

The unbounded horror of it all was captured by Pablo Picasso on canvas.

What Bush is threatening Iraq with if Saddam does not go the Benes way is
what Mussolini did to Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then called) when Emperor
Haile Selassie refused to yield up his nation as an Italian colony. Here is
historian Brendon again on the terrible consequences which followed from the
technology of the Western war machine unleashed on a lesser breed:

"[The Ethiopians] swarmed like a feudal host, some with spears and swords,
others with antique rifles and colourful bandoliers. They lacked almost
everything a modern army needs. They had no supplies save what they and
their camp followers could carry - mainly bags of millets. They had no
medical services apart from a few Red Cross volunteers in tents, which the
Italians eventually bombed. They had no war-planes, hardly any artillery and
little mechanised ground support. They had no proper communications and
since their code was never changed the Italians could decipher the few
wireless messages that were sent. The Ethopians had no coherent strategy and
no fixed chain of command. All they had was a common purpose and boundless

What followed might well follow in Iraq:

"though generally ill-led these warriors showed Spartan contempt for danger,
throwing themselves bodily at machine guns, fighting tanks as though they
were wild animals. `It was an incredible spectacle,' said Haile Selassie,
`men in cotton shammas attacking these steel monsters with their bare

When tanks and machine guns failed, Italy resorted to poison gas and
saturation bombing from the air. The poison gas left its victims looking as
if "someone had tried to skin them, their sores caked with brown scabs, men
and women alike, all horribly disfigured, and little children too." As for
the attack from the air, Vittorio Mussolini, the son, like George Bush, of
the man who started it all, had this to say of a bombing raid he personally
led: "A little group of Ethiopian cavalry was blooming like a rose when my
fragmentation bombs fell in their midst. It was great fun and you could hit
them easily."

Will Saddam surrender without a fight like Benes in Czechoslovakia - or
fight to a terrible end like Beck in Poland? No one knows. But as at Munich,
one concession is being used to extract another. Collective security is
being torn up as comprehensively as when Hitler occupied the Rhineland and
Mussolini marched into Abyssinia and Imperial Japan invaded Manchuria and
Stalin entered the Nazi-Soviet pact. We are summoned to the bar of history.

The U.S. features agency which distributes world-wide a weekly column by me
has baulked at carrying the piece that follows. After 225 years, American
democracy, it seems, is still not resilient enough to take it on the chin.
But I am in excellent company. For George Orwell, who finished his
blistering attack on Communism under Stalin, Animal Farm, in 1943, could not
find a British or American publisher because `Uncle Joe' was then their
war-time ally. I am grateful to Frontline for agreeing to put itself, second
only to Saddam Hussein, in the American line of fire. Incidentally,
``Boche'' is the French pejorative for German soldier, in use since the
First World War. However, the resemblance between Bush and Boche is not
merely onomatopoeic!

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