Wednesday 16 December 2009

Collusion

My dying computer has just swallowed a whole page of blog. Very discouraging! It was to say that I'm reading a brilliant book The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion by Finkel and Leibovitz. It shows, with massive documentation, that Chamberlain was not a peace-lover hoodwinked by evil Hitler but a scheming warmonger who thought, like most of the Conservative Party, that they could use Hitler to destroy Soviet communism. Chamberlain told Hitler he could have a free hand in Eastern Europe as long as he didn't attack the West and the British Empire. It was only when Hitler made his pact with Stalin in August 1939 that Chamberlain realized he might make war on France and Britain, but even then he still hoped for an accommodation. Only the invasion of France put an end to his machinations.

Britain had already shown complete contempt for the League of Nations and all it stood for. We had allowed Mussolini to invade Ethiopia, Japan to take over Manchuria, Hitler to remilitarize the Rhineland, rebuild his armed forces and annex Austria, and we had said nothing when Germany and Italy helped Franco to overthrow the elected government of Spain. And yet here we are seventy years later showing exactly the same contempt for the United Nations and international law, conducting foreign policy as if all that matters is the protection of our misconceived interests, propping up corrupt governmments and arming crazy dictators. There can be no peace without justice, but do our governments even want peace?

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