Marie Harf, Nazi Jobs, and Liberal Denial

Conservative Review ^ | February 19, 2015 | Jeffrey Lord

[2ndDivisionVet]

Marie Harf, the deputy spokesperson for the United States Department of State, is now the face of the Obama foreign policy in dealing with Islamic terrorists. Said Ms. Harf to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews as reported by Fox News:

“We're killing a lot of them, and we're going to keep killing more of them. ... But we cannot win this war by killing them," department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on MSNBC's "Hardball." "We need ... to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it's lack of opportunity for jobs, whether --" “…If we can help countries work at the root causes of this -- what makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47 instead of trying to start a business?”

Got that? All this endless beheading and murder is about a lack of jobs.

Harf was immediately the subject of mockery. Then the kid from Granville, Ohio – in the best style of her badly learned East Coast snobbery that is always the telltale sign of insecurity – went snooty. “We cannot kill every terrorist around the world, nor should we try. How do you get at the root causes of this? It might be too nuanced an argument for some, like I’ve seen over the last 24 hours [in] some of the commentary out there, but it’s really the smart way that Democrats, Republicans, our partners in the Arab world think we need to combat it.”

Ah yes. Marie Harf doubles down on one network show after another. It’s all about the nuances and we peasants out here just aren’t smart enough to understand.

But let’s take her seriously – because in fact at this point it’s more than safe to assume that what Harf said was not some whimsical thought of her own but rather one of the core beliefs of her superiors in the State Department and the Obama White House. In fact, as seen in this Voice of America interview, Undersecretary of State Richard Stengel made the very same argument back in November of last year, with Stengel – a former Time magazine editor – saying: “There are structural problems in the Middle East and the Arab world that can sometimes make Daesh’s attractive, attractive to young men who don’t have jobs, who don’t see a great future for themselves…” So, with that in mind?

Marie Harf, meet the full employment Nazis.

Was Harf – who has a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Indiana University (with concentrations in Jewish Studies and Russian and Eastern European Studies) and a Masters in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia – skipping class when the subject of jobs in Nazi Germany was discussed? Assuming it was ever discussed? Well just in case let’s go back in time and take a look.

William S. Shirer was one of the most famous American foreign correspondents of the era from the mid-1920s through 1940s. Hired by Edward R. Murrow to report for CBS News, he spent years living in and covering Europe, with much time spent in Germany where he recorded the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis – aka: the National Socialists. Eventually he would record his experiences in a series of bestselling books, one of the most prominent a thousand-plus page tome titled The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. In which Shirer, who died in 1993 – when Marie Harf was barely a teenager – discusses exactly what Marie Harf believes is the answer to violence-inclined political actors. To wit: jobs.

Again, Ms. Harf’s idea – and her bosses’ idea – is that if the “opportunity for jobs” was available, terrorism would be if not obsolete at least hobbled.

Records Mr. Shirer of jobs in 1936 Nazi Germany:

Hitler was liquidating the past, with all its frustrations and disappointments. Step by step, and rapidly…he was freeing Germany from the shackles of (the World War I-ending Treaty of) Versailles, confounding the victorious Allies and making Germany militarily strong again. This was what most Germans wanted and they were willing to make the sacrifices which the Leader demanded of them to get it: the loss of personal freedom, a Spartan diet (‘Guns before Butter’) and hard work. By the autumn of 1936 the problem of unemployment had been largely licked, almost everyone had a job again and one heard workers who had been deprived of their trade-union rights joking, over their full dinner pails, that at least under Hitler there was no more freedom to starve. ‘Gemeinnutz von Eigennutz!’ (The Common Interest before Self!) was a popular Nazi slogan…(and) there was no doubt that the masses were taken in by the new ‘national socialism’ which ostensibly put the welfare of the community above one’s personal gain.

“ All those jobs [Hitler ensured for his fellow countrymen] did was provide the prosperity that enabled Hitler to build his military – and then to use it in his quest for a thousand-year Reich – resulting in the worst war in human history with civilian and military deaths totaling an estimated sixty million human beings. ”

Shirer also notes that “from February 1933 to the spring of 1937, the number of registered unemployed fell from six million to less than one million.” In other words? By 1936 and 1937 Nazi Germany was brimming with what the nuanced Ms. Harf and her employers see as the answer to Islamic – oops – make that Brand X terrorism. Jobs. Lots and lots of jobs.

And yet? In March of 1936, with all those Germans dining on their “full dinner pails,” Hitler began the first of his military moves that would lead to World War II. He “re-militarized” the Rhineland, sending in 32,000 troops and police into a territory that had been demilitarized by the Versailles Treaty. If, as Hitler himself acknowledged, the French government had challenged him militarily he would have been forced to withdraw….and the road that led to global disaster might have been blocked. But it wasn’t. The French, wobbly and indecisive, flinched. And a fully employed Nazi Germany was rewarded for what in reality was terrorism.

In other words what Marie Harf and her superiors at State and the White House propose as some sort of answer to terrorism has been tried – with Adolph Hitler himself making sure that his fellow countrymen had economic prosperity with lots and lots of jobs. And all those jobs did was provide the prosperity that enabled Hitler to build his military – and then to use it in his quest for a thousand-year Reich – resulting in the worst war in human history with civilian and military deaths totaling an estimated sixty million human beings.

Let it not be forgotten that Osama bin Laden was the son of a billionaire. And with all that inheritance, the business that bin Laden chose was Islamic terrorism. So too Mohamed Atta, who was at the controls of American Airlines Flight 11 when he ran it into the World Trade Center on 9/11 and had an engineering degree from Cairo University. Bin Laden and Atta were not – are not – alone in being Islamic terrorists who were either rich, well-educated or both.

What is really at play with Harf’s “jobs” answer is nothing more – or less – than 1960s liberalism at play in the world. As the late Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Theodore H. White noted of liberals on foreign policy in his bestselling book on the George McGovern campaign – The Making of the President 1972 – the liberals’ cardinal tenet, long gone from the days of FDR, Truman and JFK, was “War is Bad- and the American military was almost, if not quite, a criminal institution, wasteful and profligate of life and treasure; patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels, and the adventure in Vietnam ‘immoral.’”

Nothing, say again nothing, has changed with these people. Except that they are now in charge. In fact, Harf’s ultimate State Department boss is John Kerry, the self-same Vietnam vet whose fame rests on a single 1971 appearance as a young lefty vet in front of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee populated and run by “nuanced” liberals who sat placidly in agreement as Kerry said of his fellow veterans that they had:

…personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

This infamous speech – made ten years before Marie Harf was even born – would eventually launch a campaign by Kerry’s still-angry fellow veterans to defeat his 2004 presidential candidacy – and they succeeded.

Let’s be clear.

Marie Harf is no ditz. She is a smart, accomplished and professional woman – whose political, foreign policy and national security views are marinated in sixties liberalism. It is unlikely that someone with a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Indiana University (with those concentrations in Jewish Studies and Russian and Eastern European Studies) and a Masters in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia has never heard of William L. Shirer. Much less is it probable that she doesn’t know Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany was filled with jobs for Germans.

What is probable to the point of certainty is that, as with her employers, Marie Harf is a disciple of the liberal Gospel of war is bad and its modern leftist corollary – that Islamic radicalism is not the problem.

Marie Harf – like John Kerry decades ago (not to mention both Kerry and Barack Obama right now) – believes that the real problem in the world is America. And even though there is evidence aplenty with both the full-employment, job-rich Nazis of the 1930s and the billionaire Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden of current day that jobs and a surfeit of money have nothing to do with German empire building or Islamic caliphate restoration, Ms. Harf will hold fast to liberal denial. And think it is sheer brilliance to do so – which is exactly why she resorts to the snooty “nuance” remark.

Make no mistake, this is denial. Liberal denial. And there is nothing nuanced about it, either.

[Frank_2001]

Excellent post!!!