WEBCommentary Guest

Author: Bruce Walker
Date:  February 26, 2006

Topic category:  Other/General

Weimar Iraq


What is the difference between Sinisterists and normal people? Sinisterists – Fascists, Bolsheviks, Nazis and other gangs – hope for misery.

What is the difference between Sinisterists and normal people?  Sinisterists – Fascists, Bolsheviks, Nazis and other gangs – hope for misery.  The Bolsheviks summed this up in the maxim “The worse, the better.”  The greater the despair, the more likely that those who lust for power can seize power.  What we are facing today in Iraq is the specter of Sinisterism.  This accounts for the apparently contradictory collaboration of groups that hate each other in opposing the creation of a peaceful, free and relatively democratic Iraq.

Perhaps we should begin calling Iraq, with its nascent democracy, “Weimar Iraq.”  Iranian mullahs, Baathists, Syrian oligarchs, al-Qaida and the rest do, indeed, hate each other with the same hatred that any gangs during Prohibition fighting for “territory” to exploit hated each other, an analogy made by a commentary author in 1940 noted in my new book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, but they hate even more those who would truly liberate people from the control of violence.

It is useful to learn that during the decline of the Weimar Republic just how this imperfect but safe democracy fell and Nazism arose.  The typical Kindergarten story is that Nazis and Bolsheviks brawled on the streets of German cities and that had the Nazis not won, democracy would have survived.

Many diverse contemporaries during the crucial years from 1930 to 1941made it quite clear that to seize power Nazis collaborated with German Bolsheviks and that German Bolsheviks collaborated with Nazis.  What should surprise moderns is that historians have believed Nazis (who celebrated “The Big Lie”) and Bolsheviks (whose philosophy explicitly says that lying is acceptable) and have ignored the many popular books by sensible, humane and consistent authors during these years.

When those supporting the Weimar Republic of Germany (like those supporting Weimar Iraq) tried to explain the benefits of integrating Germany into a peaceful Europe, Nazis and Bolsheviks organized beforehand out to disrupt their non-Sinisterist opponents.  Bolsheviks, whose votes could have prevented Hitler from becoming Chancellor by joining with democratic parties, did precisely the opposite.  We now know, unmistakably, that the Bolsheviks positively wanted Hitler and the Nazis to gain power (assuming that he would fail and they could launch a bloody counter-revolution.)

Some critics of the war in Iraq and the President’s campaign to liberate the world assume that those liberated will be ingrates.  They probably will.  So what?  How much better if Germany in the 1930s and 1940s had been the cynical and selfish Germany of Gerhardt Schroeder, dedicated to wasteful social spending and too craven to confront evil!  Such a Germany would never, ever have begun a world war.   Militarist Japan has become Weimar Japan.  Russia today is much better for the world than the old Soviet Empire with twice the territory and satellites beyond that equal to Russia today.

This does not mean, of course, that we should not be grateful for the support Japan is giving us in the war on terrorism or glad that Angela Merkel is a conservative, pro-American Chancellor of Germany (or that her popularity is sky high) or that the Conservative Party now runs Canada (also with an unexpectedly popular Prime Minister Harper.)  Certainly Lady Thatcher was important in helping win the Cold War, something that a Labour Prime Minister in that era would not have been.  And this does not mean that a pro-American party in Spain losing an election is not bad – but our friends lost an election, not their freedom, not their right to vote, not their right to emigrate.

Rather what it means is that our expectations should be that the rest of the world evolve into nations like Spain, Greece, Poland, South Korea, Taiwan and other self-absorbed democracies with a natural tendency toward the self-interest of market forces and peace rather than violence and crude propaganda driving policy and popular sentiment.

There is an analogy in geopolitics to a peaceful society filled with people who are polite and who are rude; with people who are boorish and who are interesting; with people who are diligent and who are slothful.   While rude, boorish and slothful individuals in a free society detract, somewhat, from the common happiness, this is an annoyance which is naturally corrected by individual choices. 

When we are piqued with the French, we boycott French goods.  Reason, self-interest and free debate keep Sinisterists like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or Mao from snatching power.  So let us hope for Weimar Iraq to prevail, with all its messiness, and do all we can to prevent it ending like Weimar Germany.

Bruce Walker


Biography - Bruce Walker

Bruce Walker has been a published author in print and in electronic media since 1990. He is a regular contributor to WebCommentary, Conservative Truth, American Daily, Enter Stage Right, Intellectual Conservative, NewsByUs and MenÕs News Daily. His first book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie by Outskirts Press was published in January 2006.


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