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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsInto the storm: the horror of the second world war
Eighty years ago the worst conflict in history began, killing up to 85 million people. It also shaped modern Britain and its relationship with Europe
by Neal Ascherson
The Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg once wrote that war comes very early to the theatre. He stands around for a long time in the wings, waiting for his performance to begin.
Nearly a century later, its generally assumed that the second world war was inevitable. Was it? In contrast to all the intriguing arguments about the origins of the first Great War, most people accept that this war was long foreseen and that its cause can be reduced to a single word: Hitler. That consensus is too comfortable not to be challenged.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that we who lived through those times knew that there would be a war, even as we sketched out unconvincing scenarios for avoiding it. Many have blamed the Versailles peace treaties of 1919 for designing a Europe of unsatisfied nationalisms to which Hitler merely put the torch. Will Dysons 1919 drawing Peace and Future Cannon Fodder is the most dreadfully prophetic of all political cartoons. The Big Four world statesmen are emerging from Versailles, past a naked toddler labelled 1940 Class, and French prime minister Georges Clémenceau is saying: Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping.
But the Versailles settlement might not have ended in catastrophe, even though it made some sort of resentful German revival inevitable. Fascism was the trouble fascism in a time when the liberal democracies were too weak to resist it or to defend the Versailles status quo. France and Britain were never, until the very end, quite able to grasp that the dictators were not rational, that deterrents did not deter them and that a diplomacy which offered concessions seemed to them an admission of weakness.
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2019/sep/01/ascherson-into-the-storm-second-world-war-outbreak
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September 1, 1939...........................
wendyb-NC
(3,330 posts)"... dictators were not rational ..., "
They still aren't. Sound like some revolting old orange menace, in the peoples house?
turbinetree
(24,720 posts)If they were rational they wouldn't do what they do........................pathological malignant narcissism.
And whats really bad is when someone hasn't outgrown there childhood tantrums of being a bully.......................
Wounded Bear
(58,709 posts)Jeffersons Ghost
(15,235 posts)In reference to the OP; What about this "tyrant?"
bobbieinok
(12,858 posts)turbinetree
(24,720 posts)&
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sand-and-steel-9780190601898?cc=us&lang=en&
And will take a look at your reading:....................Wado................
bobbieinok
(12,858 posts)bobbieinok
(12,858 posts)3rd, 4yh lines of poem
....Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire...
(And toward the end)
Faces along the bar
Revel in their ordinary day
...