Into 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, it’s 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 Dyson’s 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...........................
= new reply since forum marked as read
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.......................
In reference to the OP; What about this "tyrant?"
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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sand-and-steel-9780190601898?cc=us&lang=en&
And will take a look at your reading:....................Wado................