Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [146]
The belief that Germany had been treated unfairly after World War I was concocted by documented crackpot John Maynard Keynes in his 1920 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace.13 When the Nazis came to power and war broke out, Keynes’s insane thesis was immediately enshrined as a form of religion among foreign policy experts. You see! If only we had appeased the Teutonic brutes and rebuilt their cities, this never would have happened!
The stabbed-in-the-back theory was easy to implant because when World War I ended, there were no foreign troops on German soil. Having no firsthand experience of the devastation of war, Germans weren’t particularly averse to it. (In that sense, they were like modern liberals who have no idea what it’s like to be physically attacked, and are therefore not particularly exercised when it happens to conservatives.)
A contrary theory was tried on the Germans in World War II, when the Allies announced that they would accept nothing but “unconditional surrender” from the Axis powers. By the time Germany surrendered, Allied troops had seized control of every part of the country.
This time, they got the message. Germany has been as peaceful as a lamb since then—other than during World Cup soccer season. It’s always a liberating moment when you realize some timeworn shibboleth was just a cockamamie liberal idea that’s been repeated so often even you believed it.
Japanese kamikazes were pretty fanatical, too. Who would have imagined the architects of the Pearl Harbor attack were governable? Two well-placed nuclear bombs put an end to the legendary Japanese belligerence.
Similarly, Russian tsars are criticized for overreacting to peaceful protests in 1905 by firing on the crowd—which historians claim led immediately to the revolution of 1910 (leaving the question of how “immediate” it was with a five-year time lapse). Another view is that the tsars shut down the mobs quite effectively in 1905 but compromised with the mobs when they rose again in 1910, and that it was the appeasement the second time around—not what had happened five years earlier—that was ineffective.
By the time Nixon became president of the United States, it was almost too late for this country. But the mob knew Nixon wouldn’t tolerate riots. Even after the butterfingered Weathermen blew up some of their own, they kept setting bombs. That didn’t stop them. But the shooting at Kent State shut down campus riots pretty quickly.
The same was true for New York City when Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. In a city that had been a criminal bacchanal, he enforced a “zero tolerance” policy toward crime, arresting every turnstile jumper—to the evident displeasure of the New York Times. Within a few years, the “ungovernable city” was the safest big city in the country and property values went through the roof.
Napoleon said that if only King Louis XVI had shown any force against the revolutionaries, “victory would have been his.”14 Would you worry more about someone who hates your guts, or someone who hates your guts and has just had the crap beaten out of him? With liberals, as with Muslim terrorists, it’s more important that they fear you than they like you.
It is the rare individual who does not succumb to horrendous physical pain. Unfortunately, benign and advanced civilizations generally lack the will to apply it.
Tranquil, law-based societies are the most vulnerable to attack because those with an interest in defending it are calmly following the law. They don’t like disorder even in defense of order. But as Evelyn Waugh said, barbarism “is never finally defeated.” And if our present society falls, he warned, “we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.”15
Republicans are the party of peaceful order; Democrats are the party of noisy, violent mobs. Republicans would do well to remember that George Washington sent troops to crush the Whiskey Rebellion. Abraham Lincoln used the U.S. military to squash racist—and Democrat-led—riots in