The Weekly Standard's Jonathan V. Last makes a point worth pondering in his weekly e-mail:
George W. Bush has taken a lot of heat for failing to bring Western Europe online for the war on terror. There may be some merit to that charge. But every so often a little window into the soul of Europe opens and it makes me wonder if there was anything that any president could have done to get them to take terrorism seriously.Take, for example, the latest poll from Die Zeit. According to the German weekly, 20 percent of Germans believe that the U.S. government was behind the September 11 attacks. That's 1 in 5 Germans. If you look at only respondents under 30, the number jumps to 1 in 3.
Even if you think Old Europe is the past, those numbers should scare the beejeezus out of you. We're not talking about Oman or Syria here--Germany is as mainstream, educated, and first world as it gets. And not only do 20 percent of Germans think that U.S. government blew up the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, but among the younger cohort--the people who will be rising to power in the next two decades--33 percent buy into what is as nutty a conspiracy theory as has ever existed in modern times.
I would submit that whatever George W. Bush's diplomatic failings, a people who believe, contra all evidence, what the Germans do, are beyond persuasion. They are beyond evidence. And logic. And reason.
And however buffoonish they may seem to you and me, people like that are dangerous.
Well said.
Posted by Alan at July 26, 2003 11:40 AM