Well, the danger to our country in 2006 is even greater than it was in 1938, in at least one respect: The destruction may well be borne into our midst not by armies, air forces, or ships, but by suicidal individual terrorists. ~Michael Novak

Now I wouldn’t want to ruin Mr. Novak’s amusing fantasy life with anything so dreary as facts, but in 1938 there was no immediate threat to the United States, certainly not from Germany and not even from Japan, though FDR was working assiduously to make sure that they would become our enemies.  The country that was mainly in danger in 1938, as it turns out, was Poland, though that had not stopped Poland, along with Hungary, from grabbing some territory from the Czechoslovakians.  The involvement of Czechoslovakia’s other neighbours in the Munich land-grab is part of the Munich deal that latter-day fanatics don’t tend to remember because it forces them to remember that the principle of ethnic self-determination that their hero, Wilson, had propagated was one of the central justifications for the entire debacle.  They have, of course, learned nothing, apparently remembering little about these events except what fits the narrative of appeasement and unrelenting fascism.  People in this country write about how “it feels like 1938 all over again” (Novak’s own words) as if we were Britons, Frenchmen or Poles.  Last I checked, we were not.