Eileen F. Toplansky:
In 1938 Dorothy Thompson, known for being the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, penned the following: “Write it down that the democratic world broke its promises and its oaths, and capitulated, not before strength, but before terrible weakness, armed only with ruthlessness and audacity.” Thompson’s words echo much of what is currently occurring in the world today.
In 1939 Thompson was recognized by Time magazine as the secondmost influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt. In Thompson’s Let the Record Speak, one is hard pressed not to see certain similarities today with what occurred a mere 76 years ago in the world. The players may be different but the fascist urge — be it Nazism, Marxism, Communism, or radical Islam — is still quite evident. Thus, Thompson wrote
The world has been treated to a display of brute force which is entirely in harmony with the Nazi Weltanschauung. Exactly what has happened has been predicted for years by independent students and reporters of National Socialism. The whole program could have been charted by any one of us. And that the procedure should be bolstered by egregious lies might also have been predicted. Still, the leaders of the Third Reich evidently believe that there is no limit to the credulity of the human race [emphasis mine].
Consequently, we have a President of these United States who impotently stands by as President Putin annexes the Crimea while the White House “repeatedly insists that Russia’s move is illegal and won’t be recognized.”
Paul Roderick Gregory reminds his readers that “[c]ivilized countries understand that wars over territories threaten the foundation of world peace. Apparently Putin does not.” Thus, …” [a]n agreement between nations, freely reached, can change a border. But no state may use force or threat to compel another to surrender any part of its territory. Territorial integrity thus takes territorial conflict off the table and removes what, in the long course of history, has been far and away the most frequent cause of war.”
It is why C. Bradley Thompson in his 2012 piece entitled “Why Marxism? Evil Laid Bare” asserts that “it is the single worst blight to have affected human life over the course of man’s entire history; and second, those who advocate it represent the very definition of human evil and must be openly judged and condemned accordingly.” In fact, “the only thing that compares to the fanaticism of the communist revolutionary in our world today is the Islamic jihadist.”
In her March 16, 1938 post, Dorothy Thompson asserted that
…as Jews are beaten in the streets, as men and women of the most eminent distinction are condemned to exile, imprisonment and economic ruin, as a smooth, swift, ruthless organization proceeds to totalitarianize… nothing that is happening is worse than what has been happening in Germany itself for five years; nothing has happened that was not planned; nothing has happened that was not predicted; nothing has happened of which the world was not given a blueprint in advance!
And as the radical Islamic world, natural heirs to the fascist urge, surges in power in Europe as well as in America, recent survey results indicate that slightly more than half of French Jews interviewed believe there is no future for Jews in France.
In May 1938 the prescient Thompson wrote that
the only advantages which the dictatorships possess today derive from the clearness of their policies and from the fact that the imaginations of their leaders encompass a wider range of possibilities.
Thus, “the failure to comprehend the dictatorial mind is the greatest weakness of democracy.