Stealing some verbiage from Claude Berube’s excellent post, I cannot help but be struck by reports that Mohamed ElBaradei, the erstwhile UN Nuclear Watchdog, is looking to partner with the Muslim Brotherhood in the creation of a Unity Government in Egypt that does not include the National Democratic Party of current President Hosni Mubarak.
While some immediately grasped such a possibility as a way out of the current unrest in Egypt, to the less optimistic, the historical parallels give pause, even alarm. ElBaradei, a moderate secularist, partnering with an Islamist organization with questionable allegiances and associations, seems an unlikely alliance to be certain. ElBaradei has shown no inclination for ruthlessness in seeking power, while the Muslim Brotherhood has never shown the slightest tendency for compromise, in fact, none other than the eventual seizure of absolute power.
A coalition in which someone like Mohamed ElBaradei will be able to contain the ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood has been tried before. In the dying days of the Weimar Republic, as Germany teetered again on the edge of chaos, such a dangerous and improbable partnership was formed between a moderate with little taste for political violence and a fanatical and ruthless political party with no such inhibitions, with a leader bent on absolute power. When elderly President Paul von Hindenburg dismissed General Kurt Schleicher on 28 January 1933, the Weimar Republic came to an end. Franz von Papen, the Roman Catholic monarchist and erstwhile Chancellor, talked Hindenburg into appointing Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship, with the promise that he, Papen, as Vice-Chancellor could control Hitler and his Nazis once Hitler was in the government. Papen’s underestimation, and Hindenburg’s acquiescence, remain some of the most tragic miscalculations in all of history.
That something similar might happen in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood pushing a moderate ElBaradei aside, gaining and consolidating power as an Islamist government likely friendly to Iran, Syria, and other Islamist states largely unfriendly to the United States and her interests, would be a diplomatic disaster of considerable proportions. Control of the Suez Canal, and the loss of one of the few US allies in the Arab world, hangs in the balance.
The Canadian Press reported that Hamman Saeed, leader of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, recently declared that “unrest in Egypt will spread across the Mideast and Arabs will topple leaders allied with the United States.”
Incidentally, the Hitler Cabinet was formed on 30 January.
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While this post was not intended primarily to compare the Muslim Brotherhood to the Nazis, but rather to illustrate the historical trend that moderates and extremists rarely share power for long, it remains a historical fact that the Muslim Brotherhood aligned with Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists, and their rabid anti-Semitic policies and views. While the Nazis are gone, the Muslim Brotherhood remains, with views largely untempered.
To pretend otherwise is unwise in the extreme, and verges on intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
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Update on 1 December 2011
True to form, ten months hence, we see the Muslim Brotherhood “entering the political process” and quickly reneging on nearly every promise they made.
A minority party formed around street thugs and extremists wins a minority of the Parliamentary seats, and demands to be the entity to form a new government?
