I don't see why you bring up Churchill now, there are no parallels
between the Nazi issue in the 1930s and Iraq of 2003.  Or are there?

Germany had lost a war to America, but was not occupied by American
troops after WW1.  An ardent Socialist by the name of Hitler took
control of Germany by murdering the opposition at the appropriate time
and place.  He ruled Germany with an iron fist, had his own secret
police and terrorized the population and his neighbors.  He rejected the
treaties that had been signed after Germany lost WW1 and undertook to
develop weapons of mass destruction in secret and stored them in another
country for a time (USSR, a friendly country.)  When he was strong
enough he openly displayed his armies and their new weapons and the
League of Nations talked, tried to appease him, but basically did
nothing and refused to enforce its own sanctions and treaties.  France
along with Britain led the appeasement process.

Meanwhile in Britain, the former Lord of the Admiralty, currently
serving in parliament, was screaming about a grave and gathering danger
with Germany arming in secret, defying the sanctions and treaties.  He
was mainly ignored and even threatened with expulsion if he did not keep
quiet about the issue.  At the same time, the US ambassador to England,
Joseph Kennedy, (the father of John, Robert and Ted (the Swimmer),) was
reporting to FDR that Hitler was not a danger to the US.  He was even
urging FDR that America become friend with Socialist Germany.

Three days after Germany (shortly thereafter joined by the USSR) invaded
Poland, Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany and resigned as PM.
Churchill was asked by the king of England to form the next government
and lead Britain into the war years.  As Germany captured most of Europe
and started preparations for Operation Sea Lion, launching the Blitz,
Churchill was asking, pleading, begging for 50 WW1 vintage US destroyers
to be lent to England and the Commonwealth forces.  Ambassador Kennedy
was advising FDR that England would not last long and that America
should not give the destroyers to England because that would anger
Hitler against America.  He suggested instead that America get along
with Hitler after Germany overran the British Isles as it would
inevitably do, (according to Kennedy who sympathized with the Nazis.)
Kennedy was urging the withholding of supplies and weapons to the troops
fighting the powerful forces of National Socialism.

You see there are no parallels between the two events.  :)

Oh, in the event, FDR ignored Kennedy's advice.  The destroyers were
given to the British and Commonwealth forces.  Six of them went to the
Canadian Navy.  My uncle served as an officer on one of them,  doing
convoy escort duty in the U-boat infested waters of the North Atlantic.
Hazardous duty indeed.  He passed away last month.

Denys

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of Roy Brown
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 5:36 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Veterans' Day 2003

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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