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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas M. who wrote (13910)	2/28/2003 11:21:27 AM
From: Mao II	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

Comparisons between Iraq and Nazi Germany are ludicrous. M2

To: Thomas M. who wrote (13910)	2/28/2003 12:10:02 PM
From: Mark Konrad	Respond to of 25898

History, not fantasy, Tom: [I imagine that most of us here would like to think that, had we been in Britain in say 1934 or '35 or '36, we should certainly have been on Churchill's side. We'd have said, "Yes, it's true about the German air force." In fact I don't think ten percent of us would have been with him. He was a ranting nuisance. Out of power, he had two obsessions: India and Hitler. When he got up to speak, he would rant about India as the "Jewel in the Crown," or about the imminent peril of Hitler. We must remember that even by the 1930s the country was exhausted still from the enormous slaughter of the First World War. There were two slogans going around: "Peace at any Price" and "Against War and Fascism." Surely two of the silliest slogans. One might as well be "Against Hospitals and Diseases." But these contradictory slogans were accepted because at that time most people in Britain felt they would do anything to get rid of Hitler - except fight him. And that was what they perceived Churchill wanted to do. Churchill himself denied this. He said truthfully afterwards that there was "never a war easier to prevent" than the Second World War. But from exhaustion and wishful thinking, the people did not believe in his mission of "peace through preparedness." He was regularly booed in the House of Commons. "Here he comes again," they'd say, "with the German air force and its growth estimates." Which, oddly, in the beginning were not spectacularly different from the Prime Minister's own estimates.] continuing... [The other thing I particularly remember, as we're moving from 1936 on to 1938, was Churchill's obsession with the Nazis in the air. Contrary to our imaginative recall, most of the time he did not excite the House of Commons, he bored it. Then came Munich and his speech of lamentation. There was no applause when he got up and said, "We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat." Everybody was weeping and cheering the sainted Chamberlain. On into 1939-40 and the "Phoney War." Still nobody was thinking of Churchill as Prime Minister. With the cataclysm of the 10th of May, when the Nazis invaded the Lowlands - Luxembourg, Holland and Belgium - the war was truly on. And as we all know, within 12 hours Chamberlain was out and Churchill was in.] excerpts from Alistair Cooke, Keynote Speech, Churchill Society International Convention Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 27 August 1998 Alexandr Solzhenitsyn has described "the spirit of Munich." In his Nobel Prize lecture in 1972, he warned that: "The spirit of Munich is not a thing of the past . . . I would venture to say that the spirit of Munich is predominant in the 20th century. The entire civilized world trembled, a snarling barbarism suddenly re-emerged and moved into the attack [and] it had nothing to fight with but smiles and concessions. The spirit of Munich is the illness of the will-power . . . of those who have given in to the desire for well-being at any price. . . . Such people, and there are many of them in the world today, choose to be passive and retreat, just so their normal lives may last a little longer, just so the move to austerity may not happen today. And for tomorrow, it will be all right, you'll see . . ." [Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the State, genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation….utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality [all these things] constituted a picture of … fatuity and fecklessness which, though devoid of guile, was not devoid of guilt, and though free from wickedness and evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries which, even so far as they have unfolded, are beyond comparison in human experience.] excerpt from "The Gathering Storm," Winston Churchill And I assume you disagree with Albert Speer, too?--MK--