In message <F0C0923A7961D046A2061CDB3F62BCD701FB8717@scinmail01>, Tim
Cummings <[log in to unmask]> writes

>I think it was more like Neville's pursuit of peace through a piece of paper
>and allowing the Brit's armed forces to dwindle is what set up the disaster
>you describe.  If he had a big stick to back-up that piece of paper maybe
>things would have been different.  But his social programs were deemed more
>important than security.  And look where it got them.

Sorry, Tim, but you are absolutely miles off-beam here.

Please consider:

The timescale of Germany's self-rearmament, its legality, and what
action was taken by other nations as a result;

Whether Chamberlain actually had any social programmes (what were they,
pray?), and if so, whether it is a matter of record that spending on the
armed forces was curtailed as a direct result;

Even if armed forces spending had been greater, how big a stick would
have been needed to curb Hitler's ambitions?

Whether in Britain, there were many people who favoured not just
appeasement, but actual liaison (at a time when the full implications of
Nazism were not widely known, of course)

If you have seen the film Cabaret, then you will have seen the overt
attractions of Nazism given their airing (the impossibly clean-cut
blonde young Aryan singing 'Tomorrow belongs to me', contrasted with the
sleazy KitKat club) alongside the darker side - persecution of the Jews,
beatings, assumption of privilege, the losses of privacy and free
speech, etc.

It does perhaps show how those who did not see (or chose to ignore) the
darker side could be attracted, and even in Britain there were
sympathisers.

I don't know how the hell we wound up with Churchill when we did, but we
were damn lucky to do so.... his views were rarer than they should have
been in the upper echelons.


Anyway, we have Remembrance Sunday over here, and Remembrance Day on the
actual 11th, in which we honour the dead of the Great War (as it was
called until World War II), and all wars since. We honour the living
ex-servicemen and women too, but the focus is on remembering the dead.
And there is no triumphalism - there is no place for it in such
remembrance.


I see Bush is coming here presently; the authorities have been quick to
deny that they came under any pressure to mount exclusion zones around
him, and have said that there will not be any. However, it has just come
out that there *was* such pressure. But there aren't going to be such
zones...

Perhaps I will stroll up to Buck House, which is just round the corner
from me, and see if I can successfully apprise the Prez of my views on
the Iraq war. In a spirit of free and frank discussion, of course, but
one which I could not, apparently, adopt in the Land of the Free...

It's a paradox that we oh so reasonable Brits get (and can get) a lot
more worked up about this stuff than you are able to. That guy that got
arrested, for instance; here, if that happened, there would be tens or
hundreds of people demanding to be arrested as well, for the same thing,
just to give the police a severe logistics problem.

Of course, we also rely on the common decency of the police, as well as
the safeguards in our law, that we won't get taken out the back and have
the sh*t kicked out of us.

We're very good at the sort of mass civil disobedience, expressed on all
fronts from quiet individual persuasion through legal challenges, to
overt demonstration that made (for instance) the Poll Tax untenable.

But Bush does need to know, if he doesn't already, that there were very
many people here opposed to the 'war' against Iraq, even before we all
quite realised the extent to which the governments of the UK and the US
were prepared to lie to us to promote their cause.

None of this, of course, takes away from the individual worth and
bravery of those who are serving in Iraq, and of those who died there;
but that takes away from those who sent them there.

In WWI, our troops were described as 'lions led by donkeys'.
Hee-haw, Mr President. Hee-haw, Prime Minister.
--
Roy Brown        'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd     useful, or believe to be beautiful'  William Morris

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