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Americans especially—aren’t aware that the tolerance for Jews in Europe is only fifty to a hundred years old and that it’s never gone deep. It didn’t touch Poland, where I was born. Even in the West—what about the Dreyfus case? No, no. In that respect Hitler represents only a return to normalcy for Europe, after the brief glow of liberalism.
Martin Luther had broken the back of the universal Church; now Hitler was challenging Europe’s unsteady regime of liberal capitalism, based on an obsolete patchwork structure of nations.
On May 10, the English and French were still the victors of Versailles, still masters of the seas and continents. By May 17 France was a beaten, almost helpless nation, and England was hanging on for her life.
As France was caving in, people began at last to perceive that a main turn of mankind’s destiny now hung on flying machines. Of these there were only a few thousand on the planet.
By keeping back the twenty-five squadrons from the lost Battle of France, he acted toughly, wisely, and ungallantly; and he turned the war to the course that ended five long years later, when Hitler killed himself and Nazi Germany fell apart. This deed put Winston Churchill in the company of the rare saviors of countries, and perhaps of civilizations.
The old regimes are simply not competent for the industrial age. They’re dead scripts, molted skins. Europe’s made a start on replacing them by a lot of wholesale murder—the usual European approach to problems, and that’s all the First World War was about—and
But a downed British pilot, if he were unharmed, could soon take another plane into the skies. The German pilot had only a few minutes of flying time in which to do battle, for our fighters had a fuel limit of ninety minutes or so, most of which was consumed simply in getting to the scene and returning to base. The British pilot, as soon as he had climbed to combat altitude, could fight until he ran out of bullets or gas.
said the President. “A very bad thing. If the moment is coming, it isn’t here. Meantime I shall just have to go on being called a warmonger, a coward, and a shillyshallyer, all rolled in one. That’s how I earn my salary. Get a good rest, Pug.”
Had Japan invaded Siberia in 1941, the German drive to Moscow would have succeeded. The Russian counterattacks in December would not have been mounted. The Bolshevik regime would either have fallen or made a second peace of Brest-Litovsk.
The whole hope of Axis victory in World War II lay in keeping America divided and soft until the time came to deal with her as an isolated unit without allies.
Overnight a hundred thirty million quarrelsome, uncertain, divided Americans became one angry mass thirsting for battle.
Roosevelt rammed through Congress gigantic war plans and expenditures which a few days earlier would have been utterly inconceivable. The Congress, which in August had extended a mild draft law by a single vote after weeks of debate, now unanimously passed fierce declarations of war, and all Roosevelt’s long-plotted stupendous war programs, in a matter of hours.
Not once did real staff talks take place among the “Axis” armed forces. England and America were having such conferences a year before Pearl Harbor!
There is no morality in world history. There are only tides of change borne on violence and death.
