Nationalism....... An Effective Weapon?

There have been many instances of genocide and ethnic cleansing throughout history.  However, the German eviction from Poland and Czechoslovakia after World War II was unique.  The Germans were removed from these countries mostly based on their actions in these German occupied countries during World War II.  This unique case of ethnic cleansing defers in the sense that a former oppressor became the oppressed by the very people they were persecuting.  This case was also unique in the long gory history of genocide and ethnic cleansing as it was the only time that the world’s superpowers actually helped facilitate this move.  This is not to say they condoned the brutality thrust upon the Germans during this time; yet they knew about these atrocities, and did little to stop them. 

            It can be argued that the Munich Pact of 1938 was the catalyst for the major problems in the region.  This Pact, organized by The United Kingdom and France, was an appeasement to Hitler which granted him control of the Sudetenland, a heavily industrial region of Czechoslovakia meant to feed the Hitler war machine.  There was a glaring omission at the conference which drafted this Pact.  No one from Czechoslovakia was invited to the conference, nor were they consulted about the decisions being made about their homeland.  This confirmed the allies’ view of the inferiority of Eastern Europe and would leave a lasting impression on the people of Eastern Europe.

            Fast forward to the end of the war to the victims of Nazi cruelties in Poland and Czechoslovakia, who were first betrayed by the superpowers and then degraded by Nazis.  This induced a “them versus us” mentality to Eastern Europe which ignited a strong nationalistic sentiment within these two countries.  This table of nationalism had no seats for Germans and removing them from their countries was the only way the Polish and Czechoslovakians could deal with the situation.  The United States, Great Britain, nor the Soviets did little to stop these efforts to completely wipe out the presence of Germany in these two countries.  They did use railways to transport Germans to U.S. occupied territories, but these railways were inefficient and unreliable resulting in many German deaths during and waiting for this transportation. 

            Fast forward again to 2013 and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaking on the crisis in Syria in which Bashar Al-Assad is trying to force this same sense of nationalism on his people, only this time it is having the reverse effect.  His people are suffering because he is forcing a desperate iron-clad sense of nationalism on the people of Syria.  The pro-government militia called shabeeha are arresting, torturing, and killing those thought to be anti-Syrian or anti-government and are killing innocent civilians in the process.  Surrounding countries such as Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey have taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees but have recently limited the flow due to the countries inability to handle this immense flow of victims.  John Kerry has been urging the United States to enter the conflict and has been quoted as saying “this is our Munich moment”.  Suggesting that if the U.S. continues to refuse to aid the people of Syria and appease Assad’s tyrannical nationalism, we could be looking at another situation like the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe in the sense that we know about it, but are doing little to stop the atrocities taking place.  How many lives must be lost before the cost is too great?

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/10/10/jonathan-kay-the-real-lessons-of-munich/