From JPOST.com by David Horovitz, February 24, 2008 ::: 18 Adar I, 5768:
Sir Martin Gilbert [official biographer of Winston Churchill and prolific World War II historian] ... emphasize[s] that the mistakes of 70 years ago cost the free world a terrible price. He explains how those mistakes came to be made. And in so doing, he provides a historian's context for today's challenges, a guide to today's perplexed leaders that we had all better fervently hope they follow.
...."A grave mistake was made in the 1930s in finding all sorts of reasons for not regarding the Nazi threat as being a serious threat. Therefore, when you're working out your thoughts on the current situation, about fundamentalism, just remember that it is very easy for highly competent, educated, civilized, sophisticated people to find excuses and benign explanations for everything that happens," he says....
..."The main argument towards the [Nazi] threat was: 'It must modify; these are extremes which surely will modify.' ....'This can't really be that grave a threat. This can't be truly an evil force,' and, 'Well, it's not really what it seems." ...
....The ostensibly "alarmist" Churchill (who was to take over as prime minister in May 1940) had been warning all through this period that by the time the apologists woke up and belatedly recognized the need to "take a stand," the means to mount an effective fightback would be much reduced. And so it proved: When the bitter truth of Nazi ambition could no longer be apologized away, with the invasion of Poland in 1939, says Gilbert, "you'd lost your allies, you'd lost territory, you'd lost raw materials. You were in the weakest possible position."...
...To give just one example, Gilbert asks: Would 55,000 members of [the Royal Air Force's] Bomber Command have been killed if we [Britain] had prepared our air force properly in 1936, 37, 38, 39, instead of pursuing this extraordinary belief that you could do a deal with Germany; that you could even have some sort of disarmament; that it was 'only fair' to allow Germany to build up to your level because they had been 'so cruelly and wrongly disarmed at Versailles'? All this loose thinking arose from the basic premise that Germany wasn't a threat."
The "Other part of this equation," Gilbert says, is the question of allies. Britain's two late-1930s prime ministers, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, were firmly set against bringing in the Soviet Union as an ally. Churchill, second to none in his opposition to Communism, argued nevertheless that the Nazis were effectively the only enemy, and that alliances needed to be constructed with everybody who was threatened. Under parliamentary pressure, Chamberlain did send a mission to Moscow, but with instructions to stall. Yet had British policy been to create an alliance of threatened states, Gilbert stresses, "Poland could not have been conquered. Hitler was only able to conquer Poland via the Nazi-Soviet pact by basically partitioning the country. And the Holocaust, of course, was a Holocaust of Polish Jewry..."
Now Gilbert allows himself to foray into the present. "When you are looking today at the role of the United Nations, of NATO, of the various forces that can combine [to deal with Iran], the Soviet analogy may be quite good here: if you can't get Russia on line, China, then you're already in a terribly weak position. Then you're in the same position as Britain and France were..." And so, regarding the Iranian nuclear threat, "it is absolutely essential that you tackle it with everybody who is in danger. And presumably everybody is in danger....
...."Do I have faith that the leaders know what the situation is? ... Yes. If they don't, then we're in real trouble." ...
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