Munich in Beijing
CLAUSEN, CHRISTOPHER
Second Thoughts MUNICH IN BEIJING By Christopher Clausen Fifty-two years after it ended, the Holocaust remains a conspicuous and reproachful presence in American public culture. The...
...We have a State Department to work out such details...
...Meanwhile, Vice President Al Gore and a succession of other notables have been lining up to pay their respects (and drink champagne) in Beijing...
...A murderous, heavily militarized, hypernationalist dictatorship that dreams of regaining old possessions—for Taiwan, read Sudetenland or Polish Corridor— and dominating its continent has gotten its way whenever it stands firm...
...It evokes far more attention—in Hollywood, in the publishing industry, in political rhetoric —than it did 30,40 or even 50 years ago, when many more people had memories of the real horror...
...Hong Kong is next, the Saarland of China...
...As Clinton prepares for his own visit to China, his policy toward that country is not just misguided...
...Standing up to the bad guys, giving aid and comfort to their enemies, is what you're supposed to do if you're President of the United States...
...In preparation for assuming control on July 1, Beijing has already repealed the colony's Bill of Rights and sworn in a puppet Legislature to replace the one the people of Hong Kong elected in 1995...
...The 20th century has endured three great totalitarian states that murdered millions of their own and other people: the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Communist China...
...So have rampant Chinese espionage in this country and the attempt to influence American policy by the use of illegal campaign contributions...
...Meanwhile Chi Haotian, the Chinese Defense Minister who supervised the massacre of democrats there on June 4,1989, was recently honored by a visit to the White House...
...Regardless of what one calls it, the Third Reich's attempt at genocide is in no danger of being forgotten...
...Hollywood has yet to make a major movie about the Soviet Gulag, although the facts about that archipelago of murder have been known for decades...
...Bill Clinton, a much more powerful figure, is risking the security and good name of the United States of America with hardly anything to show for it...
...Moreover, letting it displace evils of the present as the single case in which unambiguous moral judgment is permissible denies one of the most important reasons for preserving its memory...
...We learned in the Cold War that there are a lot of intermediate steps between appeasing tyrants and declaring war on them...
...The Dalai Lama, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has never been invited because the Chinese government would object...
...We look back with hindsight and think: Ah, the issues were clear then...
...Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's recent book, Hitler s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, has made him a celebrity not only in this country but throughout Europe, especially in Germany...
...History suggests that such forthrightness makes your country more secure as well as more honorable...
...Remember the Goddess of Democracy on Tiananmen Square...
...Holocaust studies" is now an element in many school and college curriculums, while a succession of art exhibitions commemorates, in a variety of ways, the destruction of Europe's Jews...
...As a result, paradoxically the Holocaust exists in a realm of its own, useless for preventing future versions of itself...
...In this respect they differ from those who came of age during World War II, for whom Munich and appeasement were the model of bad policy...
...Oskar Schindler made money off the Nazis, but he saved a lot of lives by risking his own...
...The differences are mostly in favor of Chamberlain...
...The Clinton Administration's inability to maintain either principle or consistency in foreign relations is sometimes explained in historical terms...
...Exactly what policies the United States should follow to contain Chinese expansionism and encourage political freedom is admittedly a complicated question of means...
...People understandably continue to track down Nazi war criminals, but so far no one has been tried for the crimes committed by the former Soviet Union...
...Brought back into the real world and used as a historical analogy, the Holocaust is forever in danger of being trivialized or misapplied...
...The President's friend Steven Spielberg should tell him that it's a disgrace...
...That ought to be so regardless of how feeble and outnumbered the dissidents look or how powerful the dictatorship...
...Then there's China, where the camps are still going strong and the dictators still rule...
...There is no Auschwitz in China at the moment, but Tibet, occupied since 1951, has seen an unending Kristallnacht...
...Maybe one consequence of becoming such a universal symbol is to lose all particular significance...
...Those who came of age politically during the Vietnam War, it is said, distrust a "moralistic" or "interventionist" foreign policy...
...Whatever one may think of Goldhagen's book, Spielberg's film, or other specific manifestations of this interest, keeping the cultural memory vivid is altogether a good thing, to honor the victims and—many would say —to prevent the appeasement of future Hitlers, the toleration of future holocausts...
...The instability that followed the death of Leonid I. Brezhnev may be a good analogy for the uncertainty that is following the death of Deng Xiaoping...
...Or it may not...
...Whatever a realistic policy toward China might be, a decent one requires at least making it clear to everybody that—always, everywhere—we support the democrats and oppose the dictators...
...In the name of diplomatic realism, defined primarily in terms of business opportunities, the Clinton Administration long ago gave the world's last largescale totalitarian power a green light to lock up all its dissidents with impunity...
...Only 10 years ago all the realists in the State Department assumed the Berlin Wall would be with us indefinitely...
...No matter what the calculus of probabilities, our aim should be to hasten the moment when Communist China undergoes the same transformation as the Soviet Union...
...At least as many victims died in Lenin and Stalin's camps as in Hitler's...
...One of these regimes still exists...
...Probably it has no idea...
...The folly of simultaneously abandoning human rights, security interests (we help China modernize its Armed Forces so it can dominate East Asia), and economic advantage (we run a huge trade deficit with China) has been exposed in detail lately by both liberal and conservative writers...
...The Clinton Administration has been sending mixed signals about what it will do if Beijing tries to seize that island by force...
...Engagement" was the very policy the world rejected in dealing with South Africa...
...Taiwan, the Chinese have made clear, comes soon, willingly or not...
...Apart from George F. Kennan, no diplomatic eminence is still around who came of age before Munich, when the great negative example was the calamity of 1914, a World War that might have been avoidedby flexibility and good will...
...Appeasement and ambiguous intentions never lead to stability, as Czech-born Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright of all people must know...
...At the same time, however, other worldclass evils have been getting shorter shrift...
...Capitalism and prosperity didn't bring about democracy in Nazi Germany or in a great many other places...
...In February the State Department announced that this goal has now been achieved in full...
...The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened in 1993, soon became one of the most visited Washington museums...
...No wonder it's so popular in Germany, a country whose guilty conscience has not kept it from appeasing Serbia, Iraq, Iran, China...
...who knows yet...
...The weak states that surround it hasten to propitiate...
...It was the big thing that Ronald Reagan, who got so many other things wrong, got mostly right...
...A few remembered that popular use of the term Holocaust (for what the Nazis called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question) itself derives from a 1978 television miniseries bearing that name...
...The hero who blocked the tank at Tiananmen Square eight years ago is presumably dead...
...Anti-Nazism today is the historical equivalent of a free shot, totally devoid of controversy or the necessity to choose between live alternatives...
...Opposition to, as well as support for, our present China policy crosses party and ideological boundaries...
...A stable transition from one despot to another is the last thing we should be helping along...
...These rationalizations are so absurd, one doubts that the people who make them really believe them...
...Despite its fitful evolution toward capitalism, China raises many of the issues summed up in the phrase "Never again...
...There are conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats on every side of the question...
...For those who had no personal or immediate family involvement in its crimes, does Nazi Germany really represent much more than a familiar scare and a feelgood form of moral nostalgia...
...Leading a much weaker country than today's United States, he abandoned appeasement after less than two years in office and regretfully prepared to stop Hitler by force if necessary...
...More powerful democratic governments in Europe and the United States excuse their own retreat by murmuring about regional stability, democracy as the inevitable result of capitalist prosperity, and the paramount need for "engagement...
...But it's hard to figure out a coherent set of means when your ends are so vague...
...Nazi Germany peacefully regained the industrially important Saar in 1935...
...When NBC broadcast Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List in February, sponsor and commentators alike treated the occasion reverentially, as though the movie had acquired the same moral status as the events it portrayed...
...But America, as one of our Cold War Presidents said, can do better...
...Perhaps the departure from the Administration of former National Security Adviser and failed CIA nominee Anthony Lake, a powerful supporter of the present policy, will strengthen the hand of those who want to change it...
...Every generation of policy-makers seems to learn the opposite of the lesson that would best apply to the circumstances it actually has to confront...
...Historical parallels are never exact, but there are, at the very least, disquieting similarities between British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy in 1938 and Bill Clinton's in 1997...
...Indeed, the very use of the word evil to describe any recent event besides the Holocaust violates the instinctive relativism of late-20th-century Europe and America—a situation that makes the Holocaust tempting to use as a rhetorical analogy (to Bosnia, Rwanda, Kurdistan) because of its exemption from relativism, but ironically unavailing because of the uniqueness of the exemption...
...There was no reason for standing up to Hitler at the time of Munich that does not equally apply to China now...
...not a single known opponent of the regime remains at large inside China...
Vol. 80 • March 1997 • No. 5
