PS: This is ridiculous, I'm the one supposed to be dissing the USA. These days I find myself defending King George II
...and you do it so well too, Maurice. Thanks ;-)
I just heard Alistaire Cooke on BBC, who sounds more and more like a living voice from out of the history books these days (he's 95). He said that he was not making a conclusive remark on Iraq, and he knew that historical analogies are generally false, since no matter how similar the situations, some crucial detail is always different, but the current "crashing tide of words" reminded him so strongly of the debate of the mid-thirties.
At that time, the majority of British voters signed the "peace ballot", the cry everywhere was "disarmament and solidarity" (meaning trust in the League of Nations), Chamberlain's return from Munich was greeted with cheers in the streets and in the Parliament, and the one lone dissenter who called for British rearmament and considered Munich "an unmitigated defeat" was very properly booed down.
So Hitler marched into the Rhineland, Italy conquered Abyssinia, and then Hitler first was given most of Czechoslovakia, and then took the rest of it. And nothing was done in response, though much was said.
Alistaire Cooke thought he should reminds us of the nature of the debate in those days, since all today's statesmen were toddlers or unborn in those days, but he was a grown man of thirty and remembers it well. |
