The New Adolf Hitler?

By TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

In the war over Kosovo, one weapon is being used by both sides: Adolf Hitler. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic accuses the West of acting like Hitler and appeals to his people's proud memories of the Partisan war against Nazi forces. And isn't the German Luftwaffe engaged in the NATO bombing? Meanwhile, in justifying that bombing, U.S. President Bill Clinton says, "What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier? How many people's lives might have been saved? And how many American lives might have been saved?"

So Clinton, we understand, is Churchill. But hold on. Who has been the American President for the past six years while this Milosevic-Hitler has been rampaging through the former Yugoslavia? And whose Administration has been seeking peace in our time by negotiating with him? So perhaps, after all, Clinton is not Churchill but the British Prime Minister whose policy of appeasement Churchill fiercely criticized in the 1930s: Neville Chamberlain.

Tricky things, historical analogies. They tend to cut several ways. But they also help clarify thought, if only by showing up the differences between then and now. Let's try five for size:

1) Kosovo as Kosovo, the Milosevic version.  Once again the Serbs are engaged in a heroic defense of Kosovo, as they were against the Turks in the great battle of 1389. Today Serbian propaganda appeals constantly to this mythology of martial sacrifice. There's only one problem: the Serbs lost the battle of Kosovo in 1389.

2) 1999 as 1914  Clinton used this one too, recalling that World War I started in this part of Europe. Here the differences are revealing. In 1914 the great powers of Europe lined up on opposing sides. Today they are united--except for Russia, but it won't go to war for Serbia.

3) Milosevic as Hitler  Well, not exactly. Milosevic is the most dangerous European leader of the 1990s. He is a menace, a thug, a postcommunist villain who has cynically manipulated nationalism. He has blood on his hands. But his state does not have either the power or the ideological will to conquer Europe. While Germany under Hitler grew ever bigger, Yugoslavia under Milosevic has shrunk. The element of truth in this analogy is President Clinton's point about appeasement: the longer you put off standing up to aggressive dictators, the higher the price. If we had called Hitler's bluff when he remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, 50 million lives might have been spared. If we had stood up to Milosevic when his forces besieged the Croatian town of Vukovar in the fall of 1991, perhaps a quarter of a million men, women and children might still be alive. But we--West Europeans and Americans--didn't, and so we now face the prospect of...

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