Applebaum has written an eminently reasonable piece here in calling for an end to the deceitful political practice of raising the specter of Hitler and “appeasement” when debating foreign policy and how to deal with enemies and trouble spots. Applebaum rightly calls that practice what it is – simple-minded, reductionist thinking that has the purpose of falsely branding one’s opponents, surrounding oneself in a cloak of righteousness, and cutting off reasoned debate.

However, I can’t help being taken aback at how this piece is a complete reversal of a piece she wrote in early 2007, shortly after Saddam Hussein’s execution. In that piece (<link>), called “The Totalitarian Template,” Applebaum put forward the simple-minded, reductionist argument that there was one and only one model of totalitarian dictatorship, which in all cases was expansionist in its aims. This model constituted a “20th-century totalitarian tradition” that ran in a direct line from Hitler and Stalin, on to the likes of Pol Pot and Nicolae Ceausescu, and right on into the 21st Century with Saddam Hussein. She claimed that despite this “pantheon of modern dictators” and the clear model they all adhered to, nonetheless “in the 90-odd years since modern totalitarianism first emerged in Europe, neither the United States nor anyone else has ever learned to understand such regimes or even to recognize them for what they are.” In that piece it was Applebaum who was simplistically tossing about the label of “appeasement” and the example of Hitler in dealing with the threat of Saddam Hussein, writing that “[w]hen Hitler first emerged, the outside world's first instinct was to appease him. . . . When Saddam first emerged, our initial impulse was to ignore him.” At that time, I wrote a post that took Applebaum to task for “simplistically lump[ing] together the ‘totalitarian’ regimes of the past century” and her inability to “differentiate between totalitarian regimes/rulers and their different aims and capacities to realize their aims.”

Fast forward to May 2008, and Applebaum is offhandedly pointing out “the unpredictability of totalitarian regimes” and obliviously criticizing comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Hitler. Well, she’s right this time, and better late than never I suppose.

In my post to her piece last year, I wrote that “there is no single ‘template’ for totalitarianism, nor any single course of action in dealing with these regimes. Rather, the more rational and difficult challenge is to understand each regime for what it is and for the threats it represents, [and] to devise a course of action for dealing with each . . . . It’s been a long and rough road to this kind of outlook for our country, but thankfully it’s 2007, not 2003. Applebaum has some catching up to do.” It seems that Applebaum has finally caught up. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be possible for Pres. Bush’s die-hard defenders. But I expect this election year will show the die-hards that if you can’t catch up, you’ll be left behind.