The Tragic Farce of the Bush Administration
The widely popularized quotation
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce” actually comes
from Karl Marx, the German political theorist and social philosopher who wrote:
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages
occur, as it were, twice. He has
forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
Today, August 21, 2008 is the
fortieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the
democratic reform movement known as the Prague Spring. Four days later, the Democratic National
Convention opened in Chicago to riots and tear gas. The United States, bogged down in a colonial
war in Vietnam, was powerless to help the Czechs. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who turned 60 on
August 26, 1968, did not attend the convention.
I predict President Bush will not attend, and will barely be mentioned
at, the Republican convention this year.
Bush and Johnson both came to power
by undemocratic means and both started colonial wars. Johnson became president after the
assassination of John F. Kennedy and Bush stole the 2000 election with the
complicity of Al Gore and the Supreme Court.
Johnson plunged the United States into a war in Vietnam based on a
tissue of lies and Bush lied the country into a war in
Iraq.
Because the United States is
militarily stretched in both Iraq and Afghanistan, it is powerless to respond
to the Russian invasion of Georgia (not that the Georgians do not deserve to be
smacked hard for their attack on the Ossetians.) Instead, the United States has agreed to
install missiles in Poland. This is
guaranteed to restart the Cold War, if not a hot one.
The Russians have a different
discourse on the history of World War II.
The Russians hold the Poles primarily responsible for the failure to
stop Hitler at Munich. France, Britain
and the Russians had a mutual defense pact guaranteeing the territorial
integrity of Czechoslovakia. When Hitler
threatened to annex the Sudetenland, Russia mobilized to send troops to fulfill
its obligation to defend Czechoslovakia, but Poland refused to permit the
Russian troops to transit its territory. That is why Stalin agreed to the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, secretly agreeing to the partition of Poland as the
price to get Hitler to attack in the west before turning on the Soviets.
Even today,
the Russians feel that their sacrifices in defeating Hitler are unappreciated
in the West. Vladimir Putin, the former
deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, still takes the sacrifices of the Russian
people in that war very seriously. A
really great book about World War II from the Russian perspective, in addition
to Volume 1 of Nikita Khrushchev’s Memoirs, is Russia At War 1941 – 1945 by Alexander Werth. This book is
a real eye opener for anyone who thinks D-Day was a big deal. D-Day was every day on the eastern front.
So, Bush has bankrupted
the country, presided over the first external attack on American soil since
1814, if not 1941, bogged us down in a colonial war, and revived the specter of
nuclear annihilation. Let that be a
lesson to anyone who thinks that Bush won the 2000 election. Bush and NATO are pursuing Hitler’s foreign
policy in Europe, recognizing the independence of Kosovo and the dismantling
Yugoslavia on one hand, while defending the territorial integrity of Georgia on
the other.