Sunday, March 16, 2014

Nitwits -- And The Need To Protect The Volksgenossen

Team of Nitwits reconvened | Power Line: "Bloomberg News reports that 60,000 Russian troops are massed across the Ukraine border. What are they doing there? They are apparently awaiting the results of the secession or consolidation vote concluding in Crimea. They are standing by to enforce the will of the people, of course, and perhaps extend it further into Ukraine. It is an impressive and audacious display of force. Readers familiar with Hitler’s prewar playbook know what comes next. Timothy Snyder is the formidable historian of Eastern Europe and author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. In the New York Review of Books post “Putin vs. reality,” he provides a short course on the echoes that eluded John Kerry in his “Putin is so nineteenth-century” routine. (“This sort of argument, the need to protect the Volksgenossen, was used to significant effect by Adolf Hitler in 1938 in enunciating German claims to Austria and then to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.”)"