At the dedication of the World War II Memorial yesterday, President Bush delivered what some consider to be his most eloquent
speech to date. For him, I confess, it was good. Yet contained within it was a rather subtle re-statement about the President's disdain for intellectuals. Speaking of the rise of Hitler, Bush said
There was a time, in the years before the war, when many earnest and educated people believed that democracy was finished. Men who considered themselves learned and civilized came to believe that free institutions must give way to the severe doctrines and stern discipline of a regimented society. Ideas first whispered in the secret councils of a remote empire, or shouted in the beer halls of Munich, became mass movements. And those movements became armies. And those armies moved mercilessly forward -- until the world saw Hitler strutting in Paris, and U.S. Navy ships burning in their own port. Across the world, from a hiding place in Holland to prison camps of Luzon, the captives awaited their liberators.
This was the only reference in the President's remarks to "educated" or "learned" people, and his mis-representation of history astounded me. After all, Adolph Hitler himself had only ten years of education before he dropped out of school--hardly an "educated" or "learned" man, and his followers were by and large no more advanced in their educational background. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more bizarre this appears--why did Bush single out the "educated" and "learned" in the rise of Nazism and Fascism? And why has nobody called him on it?