After winning the 2012 Indiana GOP United States Senate primary, Republican Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock appeared on the May 9 edition of CNN’s “Starting Point.”
There occurred this exchange between Mourdock and the show’s host, Soledad O’Brien:
MOURDOCK: What I’ve said about compromise and bipartisanship is I hope to build a conservative majority in the United States Senate so that bipartisanship becomes Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government, reduce the bureaucracy, lower taxes, and get America moving again. The stimulus plan hasn’t worked.
O’BRIEN: So what I hear you say is that you’re not going to compromise. In fact, the only compromise you’ll do is really getting other people on the other side of the aisle to come to your side of the aisle, which, I guess, is the definition against compromise. You said this in the New York Times–
MOURDOCK: Well, it is the definition of political effectiveness.
Richard Mourdock
Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler couldn’t have phrased it better.
Adolf Hitler
Anyone wanting to understand how Republicans intend to apply such a philosophy need only consult history.
On February 12, 1938, two Chancellors—Adolf Hitler of Germany, and Kurt von Schuschnigg of Austria—met at Hitler’s retreat at Obersalzberg. At stake lay the future independence of Austria.
Although Austrian by birth, Hitler considered himself a German. Annexing Austria, he believed, would ensure its return to “the Great German motherland.”
HITLER: “I have only to give one command and all this comic stuff on the border will be blown to pieces overnight. You don’t seriously think you could hold me up, even for half an hour, do you?
“Who knows—perhaps you will find me one morning in Vienna like a spring storm. Then you will go through something! I’d like to spare the Austrians that.
“The S.A. [Hitler’s private army of Stormtroopers] and the [Condor] Legion [which had bombed much of Spain into rubble during the three-year Spanish Civil War] would come in after the troops and nobody–not even I–could stop them from wreaking vengeance.”
British historian Robert Payne noted in his 1973 biography, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler: “Schuschnigg was not a coward, but he showed fear, and it was precisely this look of fear that Hitler was waiting for.
“He had worked out the program of intimidation very carefully. The thunder and lightning in the morning; then a period of calm, when the unsuspecting victim might believe he had relented; and then he would come in for the kill with such savage fury that there would be no resistance.”
After lunch, Hitler presented Schuschnigg with an ultimatum:
- Austria must join in an economic union with German.
- Austria must lift its ban on membership in the Nazi Party (which had assassinated the country’s previous Chancellor).
- Within three days there was to be a general amnesty of Nazi prisoners.
- Three key government ministries—of war, interior and finance—were to be given to members of the Nazi Party.
With these in their possession, the Nazis would be able to take over Austria in two to three weeks.
At first, Schuschnigg refused to sign. He explained that the Austrian constitution did not give him the power to sign it. But Hitler insisted—threatening to invade Austria otherwise.
Schuschnigg, a virtual prisoner of his host, facing the destruction of his country by a powerful and aggressive neighbor, signed. It marked—until the defeat of Germany in 1945–the end of Austria as an independent nation.
Seven months later, in September, 1938, Hitler gave another exhibition of his “negotiating” methods. This time, the target of his rage and aggression was Czechoslovakia.
So, once again, he opened “negotiations” with a lie: The Czechoslovak government was trying to exterminate 3.5 million Germans living in the “Sudetenland.”
This consisted of the northern, southwest and western regions of Czechoslovakia, inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans.
Then he followed this up with the threat of war: Germany would protect its citizens and halt such “oppression.”
For British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the thought of another European war erupting less than 20 years after the end of World War I was simply unthinkable.
Neville Chamberlain
Something had to be done to prevent it. And he believed himself to be just the man to do it.
He quickly sent Hitler a telegram, offering to help resolve the crisis: “I could come to you by air and am ready to leave tomorrow. Please inform me of earliest time you can receive me, and tell me the place of the meeting. I should be grateful for a very early reply.”
Once again, another head-of-state was prepared to meet Hitler on his home ground. Again, Hitler took this concession as a sign of weakness.
And Chamberlain’s use of such words as “please” and “grateful” only further convinced Hitler of another impending triumph.
