25 Jan 22
“Men who are ‘easy as an old shoe’ are generally of as little worth”
Charles H Spurgeon
Righteous indignation?
Don’t bet your life on it, and be careful about promises, made so casually!
As the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa saw thousands of captured Dutch settlers’ families die in filthy British “concentration camps” (a term invented by British in 1901, not Germans in 1941), native Dutch settlers (Boers) were confident European nations would rise-up in righteous indignation against the British.
It was a naive pipe-dream! Although Britain had few friends, European nations couldn’t have cared less!
British atrocities in South Africa were scarcely reported, and quickly forgotten in any event.
No one came to the aid of the Boers!
A mere three decades later:
By the late 1930’s, all of Europe was increasingly nervous about Nazi Germany’s aggressive rearmament program, begun in secret in the 1920s (as it was a clear violation of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that ended WWI). More recently, Germany was openly building the most modern military in the world, and it was massive!
Such a formidable force could have only one purpose:
Conquest!
Everyone knew it, of course, but no one wanted to acknowledge it, because that would make former allies uncomfortable with themselves and with each other, as it may become necessary for politicians to admit they had been blindly, naively stupid, something all politician are too vain to ever consider!
So, Hitler happily played all these self-righteous saps like a cheap ukelele (much as Putin is currently playing JRB and the rest of NATO).
Poland was told by France and the UK not to mobilize, in spite of the formidable Nazi military build-up at its border, as such a logical defensive move might “upset” Hitler. In the same breath, both Chamberlain and
Petain assured the Pols that both their nations would fly to Poland’s defense should the Nazis dare invade!
Both France and the UK feared Soviets as much as they did Nazis, as Lenin’s, and now Stalin’s, murderous brand of expansionism was as well known as Hitler’s! Trotsky and Lenin had first disarmed, then murdered, tens of thousands of Cossacks and other minority populations in 1919, and that was just the beginning of “purges” in Stalin’s “Communist Paradise”
So to the French and British, keeping aggressive Germans as a buffer between them and the Soviets seemed like a good idea!
In September of 1939, Nazis precipitously invaded Poland. Soviets simultaneously invaded from the other side. Germany and Soviet Russia, outwardly hating each other, had made a secret agreement to divide Poland.
Germany and Russia would be at war with each other less than two years later!
Despite all their pious, solemn promises, neither France, nor Britain lifted a finger to help the hapless Pols, who had been dumb enough to believe their empty rhetoric and faithless “assurances!”
Within weeks, Poland was overrun, followed by the wanton slaughter of tens of thousands of Polish POWs and innocent civilians, ruthlessly perpetrated by both Soviets and Nazis. Today, this and most other atrocities of the era are neither studied, nor appreciated.
Did anyone really think Hitler would stop his territorial conquest at the Sudetenland, or when he marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia shortly thereafter?
Did anyone think Hitler would stop with Poland?
Does anyone today think Putin will stop with Ukraine? Do you suppose Polish are nervous all over again?
Do you suppose anyone believes the JRB Administration, nor the rest of NATO for that matter, will really stand in Putin’s way?
“There are no ‘new mishaps.’ There are just new people doing old mishaps!”
Naval Aviators’ Axiom
/John
