Back With a Vengeance BY DANIEL JOHNSON September 27, 2007 URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/63529 Dictators are back with a vengeance. In Rangoon the Burmese junta butchers Buddhist monks, while over at the United Nations the international community wrings its hands. The world needs a new Charlie Chaplin to do justice to the grotesque spectacle of Robert Mugabe comparing President Bush and Tony Blair to Hitler and Mussolini. But the president of Iran is in deadly earnest: a nuclear 9/11 is beyond satire. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be pleased with his visit to New York. By using the world's most dramatic metropolis as a grandiose backdrop, he has guaranteed himself a global audience for his vile propaganda. Nothing new in that, you may say. The president of Iran is merely following in the footsteps of Khrushchev, Arafat, and other despots who used the U.N. as a platform for their own self-aggrandizement. Mr. Ahmadinejad's travelling circus, however, is more ambitious than anything seen before. And it requires a very different response if he is to be prevented from doing grave harm. The Dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, John Coatsworth, told an interviewer that Columbia would have invited Hitler himself. This seems to be taking the concept of freedom of speech a little too far. Fortunately, the opportunity never arose because the great dictators of the past did not, in general, like to appear abroad. Hitler rarely travelled beyond the borders of Germany and Austria, where his public appearances could be carefully staged. He expected foreign leaders to come to him, as Neville Chamberlain did to Munich, with disastrous results. Mussolini was much the same. Soon after he gained power, the Duce put in an appearance at the Locarno Conference in 1925, where European statesman had gathered to sign a peace pact. Mussolini was annoyed that his proposal to hold the summit in Rome had been turned down in favour of neutral Switzerland, though he made up for it with a spectacular entrance, arriving by speedboat on the lake. Thereafter, he rarely set foot outside Italy. Stalin, too, demanded that those who wished to speak to him should come to Moscow. When Hitler offered a secret treaty to carve up Poland and the Baltic States in 1939, neither dictator would risk his prestige by flying to the other's capital, so the pact was signed by the two foreign ministers, Ribbentrop and Molotov, instead. The Nazi invasion made Stalin even more morbidly suspicious, and more than two years passed before he would agree to meet with the other Allied leaders abroad. Only after the decisive battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, when the tide had turned in his favor, did Stalin join Roosevelt and Churchill at Tehran in November 1943. The advent of television gave dictators new opportunities for global grandstanding, but it took a long time for them to grasp its potential. Mao neither travelled the world nor broadcast to it either, instead preferring the oriental tradition of the ruler shrouding himself in secrecy. His Chinese communist successors have followed suit. Of Stalin's successors, Nikita Khrushchev alone saw the propaganda value of appearing in person abroad, but the first Soviet leader to exploit it to the full was also the last: Mikhail Gorbachev. Globetrotting was left to the second rank dictators - Josip Broz Tito, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez. In the Islamic world, the demagogic example of the Egyptian pan-Arabist Gamal Nasser was followed by others. The Libyan tyrant Muammar Gaddafi has what passes for charisma, but his support for terrorism caused him to be ostracized in the West, which limited his chances to satisfy his insatiable appetite for the limelight. Saddam Hussein, his rival for Arab hegemony, rarely left Iraq for fear of being overthrown. Yasser Arafat was only too happy to fill the vacuum, despite his unprepossessing appearance, and his carefully choreographed appearances transformed him from pariah to patriarch. The most improbable press star of all, Ayatollah Khomeini, used his rare appearances in Parisian exile to turn himself into a symbol of Islamic revolution. Now, however, it is the cadaverous visage of Mr. Khomeini's even more bloodthirsty disciple, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that is suddenly ubiquitous on our front pages and screens. The most illiberal of regimes has turned the tables on the most liberal of societies. To reduce a great university to the level of a bully pulpit is quite an achievement. His choice of venue is not, however, accidental. The universities of the West have done more to undermine its values than any other institutions, and they harbor some of the most extreme forms of self-hatred. Mr. Ahmadinejad thus is not just trying to grab a little free publicity: he seriously intends to test the readiness of liberals to give America's declared enemies the benefit of the doubt. Confident that the virtues that used to underpin a free society have been hollowed out by a generation of radical relativism dressed up as postmodernism, the Iranians judge that the American campus is ripe for an Islamist takeover. His challenge to the historicity of the Holocaust is an Archimedean lever to overturn the moral basis of Western civilization. New Yorkers have not taken this challenge lying down, I am glad to say. Their protests echoed around the world. But this is only an Iranian reconnaissance raid in what promises to be a long-term attempt to take the cultural jihad into the heart of America. In this propaganda offensive, the U.N. acts as a Trojan horse, the diplomatic pretext for Mr. Ahmadinejad's attempt to hijack the American public square. It's time that New Yorkers asked themselves whether the price of playing host to the U.N. is not too high. I wonder whether the Iranian president would be quite so eager to speak at the U.N. if it were not sited in Manhattan, but in, say, Mogadishu. . <http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=11648958/grpspId=1705447214/msgI d=43151/stime=1190896872/nc1=3848618/nc2=4776366/nc3=4840951> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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