Interview Rachel Maddow, following an interview he did on his show with Kevin James, a republican blowhard radio host who kept using the term appeasement, but when pressed by Matthews to define appeasement or to explain what Neville Chamberlain did to appease the Nazis, he could not answer.
MADDOW: Great. Amazingly, what we saw was only part of the exchange with Kevin James. And you never really did get an answer to your question to him, did you?
MATTHEWS: Well, two dozen times I asked him what he was talking about and he couldn‘t tell me. I mean, these words, like, you know, appeasement and Munich and sellout and cut and run. You‘ve got to be real careful about the historic references. You can‘t just say things.
And the problem with the ‘30s was not talking to the enemy. It was giving away countries. Giving away Czechoslovakia. Ultimately having to fight after the polish invasion. I mean it was serious business. And, you know, information isn‘t bad. Talking isn‘t bad. In fact, I wish everybody had read “Mein Kampf” a long time before that war. They would have been able to move faster.
MADDOW: The thing that is important here is not just that you had a guest that didn‘t know the historical reference he was parroting. He had obviously either been told to say or thought to was supposed to say. There‘s a real substantive problem with appeasement being this buzz word being thrown around without anybody interrogate what appeasement really means. It‘s become this summary for talking to our enemies, right? That‘s what you were getting at in trying to get a ...
MATTHEWS: The whole mind-set of the last several years, let‘s put it that way, since 2000, has been to shut up critics. If you don‘t like a war policy you get branded with a name. You are unpatriotic. You are a cut and runner, you are an appeaser. You can‘t argue politics in America anymore. You can‘t question power. Because if you question it, you‘re going to be drummed out of acceptable society. You are going to be called an appeaser.
These magic words are used for one purpose, to shut you up, so that they can proceed with the policy. And I think that‘s a real problem. I just was at Washington U. today, Rachel, and I made the point that in a society like ours, arguing over policy, arguing over what our role should be in the world shouldn‘t be unpatriotic or seen as unpatriotic. And many—most cases should be seen as the essence of patriotism. Giving a **** about our policy, what it ought to be, arguing, standing up and having a real debate. We didn‘t have that when we went to war in Iraq. Some, it‘s the media‘s fault. People were intimidated in challenging this president and his war policy. And I think we‘re better off with a hot debate, I think.
MADDOW: Do you think that this is something new? Do you think that this is something specific to our current contemporaneous politics that we‘ve got these buzzwords and bumper sticker slogans, whether it‘s appeasement or fighting over there so we don‘t fight them here or they hate our freedom. Any of these terms. Are they designed to be repeated and not to be interrogated?
MATTHEWS: Well, just look at the way people are basically exterminated or tried to be exterminated. Bill Maher makes a comment which may not have been the right comment, but he was making a point he was trying to make about stand back weaponry compared to people killing themselves. You can argue about the niceties of that. The Dixie Chicks say something about the war and they shouldn‘t have said it overseas, but they said it.
The shutting up of opposition is critical to running a country in an undemocratic way. Let‘s put it that way. So you have buzzwords like appeasers or cut and run and they are used over and over again by the most mindless people. The trouble with them is they tend to work. The dittoheads can use them. Anybody can use them and they seem to have the same effect. They cause people to run from criticism.
MADDOW: I think it‘s not only used as a slur, it‘s also part of the way they advance the agenda. Part of the way politicians now talk about things they want is through slogans that don‘t necessarily make sense. And maybe that‘s always been true in American politics. But when it‘s about war it feels almost criminal to me. I don‘t know.
MATTHEWS: The use of the word WMD, we never heard that phrase, that became a huge phrase in the early part of the decade. WMD because it conflated the idea of the fact that they had chemical and biological weaponry with the idea they had nuclear weaponry. They didn‘t have to say nuclear anymore, just WMD. You can say terrorist conflated what happened to us on 9/11 with the countries we don‘t like like Saddam Hussein. Conflating terms all the time.
That‘s another trick of this language. I‘m not really happy with phrases like “homeland security.” Is there anywhere else we‘d protect beside our homeland? What‘s wrong with just national defense? Oh, because homeland refers to just part of the area we‘re defending. I get it.
MADDOW: Yeah.
MATTHEWS: Some of this language is very foreign. And I think it‘s used for bad purposes. But we know that. It's to shut people up.
Straight talk from a brilliant man. And before you psycho NeoCons start talking about how he is just media savvy liberal. Be aware the Chris Matthews more often than not votes Conservative, by his own admission. Even voting for Bush (cringe) in 2000.
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