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The Millennia-Long What?

When I used to read about the 1930s — the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China — I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, […]

When I used to read about the 1930s — the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China — I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism.  ~Victor Davis Hanson

As Mr. Hanson can only be too aware, the United States not only “spoke out” during the 1930s but more or less openly sympathised with Nationalist China in its war with Imperial Japan and in the end embarked on a misguided do-gooding policy of embargoing Japan that led, willy-nilly, to their attack on our territories.  This was not out of deep regard for the “millennia-long promise of Western liberalism”‘ (whatever on God’s earth that means), but out of concern for the commercial interests of the Eastern establishment in China, but Hanson is deceiving his readers if he pretends that America did not take some kind of stand during the 1930s.  I know that’s what it says in the Neocon Handbook to American History, but, alas, as with everything else in their manuals it is untrue.  It was this interest in China among the high muckety-mucks of the Northeast that propelled us into conflict with Japan, contrary to our national interests, just as the interest in Asian markets and projecting naval power across the Pacific had informed the aggressive intentions of annexing the Philippines. 

The story of American policy in the Far East is not one of “isolationism” or indifference, but of increasing involvement leading to tragic and avoidable conflict.  As for the “millennia-long promise of Western liberalism,” I have to confess to having no idea what he is talking about.  “Western liberalism,” which, c. 1938, meant Anglo-American liberalism with a French twist (there was a grand total of probably no more than a dozen parliamentary democracies in the 1930s), did not have “millennia-long promise,” but has represented a brief, probably ephemeral experiment in political change that had existed, at best, since around 1642 and in any meaningful form only since 1688.  Within two centuries of its birth, it decayed into centralism and imperialism in its host countries.  More to the point, western Europeans and Americans probably thought that preserving liberalism had something to do with preserving it first in their own countries, on the assumption that it was not going to flourish anywhere else, rather than being unduly concerned for the rule of the Negus of Ethiopia or the nature of the regime in Rome.  Dangerous, foolish, interventionist people worry about other people’s business and seek to “fix” their problems.  Everyone else worries about the concerns of their own country, as it should be.

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