Even Peter Beinart, who usually slams comparisons to Munich, agreed that “Aquino’s reasoning has some merit.” Beinart noted in a blog post for the Atlantic that “The South China Sea, like the Sudetenland, is strategically valuable…The Philippines enjoys a defense treaty with the United States, as Czechoslovakia did with France. Yet there’s good reason to believe that the war-weary Washington of 2014—like the war-weary Paris of 1938—would rather see Manila capitulate than risk world war. Above all, China today—like Germany in the 1930s—is a country converting its tremendous economic vitality into military might.”

Meanwhile, the U.N. Human Rights Council this week declared that North Korea is committing “crimes against humanity” that are in some respects “strikingly similar” to Nazi practices. No, there are no gas chambers or crematoria in Pyongyang (yet). But must every regime’s abuse reach Holocaust-level atrocities before we acknowledge that some aspects may be comparable?

The 400-page U.N. report describes the systematic torture and starvation of more than 100,000 North Koreans in dozens of internment camps. The “crimes” for which they are imprisoned range from disagreeing with a government policy to accidentally misspelling the name of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. North Korean women who become pregnant as a result of relationships with non-Koreans are declared to be defilers of the sacred Korean minjok, or race, and are subjected to forced abortions. It’s not identical to Nazi Germany, but the echoes are certainly disturbing.