1939 and 2009: The parallels are eerie
What do Barack Obama and Neville Chamberlain have in common? Even more than you thought already says Jonathan Rosenblum. THE PARALLELS between today and the earlier period are eerie. Chamberlain, like US President Barack Obama today, enjoyed an overwhelming majority in Parliament. His party whips enforced party discipline with an iron hand - think Rahm Emanuel - and backbenchers who stepped out of line jeopardized their political futures.Read it all.
In another interesting parallel, Chamberlain enjoyed almost across-the-board fawning support from the press and the BBC. That included self-imposed censorship on the information reaching the British public. After the Anschluss, British papers carried no pictures of the hundreds shot in the first days after the Nazi takeover, of the tens of thousands arrested and sent to concentration camps, or of Nazi soldiers forcing Jewish doctors, lawyers and professors to scrub streets and clean toilets on their hands and knees. When reporters asked Chamberlain about such matters, he snapped at them for believing "Jewish-communist propaganda," and that was the end of the matter.
The British press ignored both the massive German arms buildup prior to the war and the pitiful state of British preparedness. Both before and after the conflict started, it suppressed mention or quotations from Hitler's speeches that would have conveyed a much different impression of his goals. As a British TV character tartly observed 40 years later: "It is hard to censor the press when it wants to be free, but easy if it gives up its freedom voluntarily."
Chamberlain never read Mein Kampf, in which Hitler laid out in startling fashion both his future plans for the Jews and for German conquest. Far from viewing Hitler as an evil man, Chamberlain believed him to be a "gentleman," with whom he could do business. He was more than once shocked to find that Hitler had lied to him, even though that too was foreshadowed in Mein Kampf. Said future prime minister Harold Macmillan: "He didn't believe people existed [who would] say one thing and do another... It was pathetic, really."
According to Olsen, Chamberlain "could never bring himself to believe that [Hitler and Mussolini] wanted to go to war. Clinging to the security of his ignorance, he created a peace-loving image of them that defied reality." For a decade, the English and French did nothing in response to fascist aggression in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Austria and Czechoslovakia, and precious little even in the wake of the German invasion of Poland.
France and England thereby encouraged Hitler to believe they were too weak to prevail - a judgment in which he was very nearly right. That should have taught us - but did not - that those who hope to avoid war via appeasement inevitably end up fighting later on worse terms.
At no point did Chamberlain recognize that Hitler constituted a mortal threat to Western civilization. As a consequence, he displayed far more ruthlessness in fighting those within his own party who dared challenge his policies than he did in fighting Hitler.
By the way, one other parallel between Chamberlain and Obama: their disregard for Jews.
One of the greatest controversies of Chamberlain's premiership concerned the government's policy on the future of the British Mandate of Palestine. After successive commissions and talks had failed to achieve a consensus, the government argued that the Balfour Declaration's aim of a homeland for Jews in Palestine had been achieved now that over 450,000 had settled there and proposed a quota of 75,000 further immigrants, with restrictions on the purchase of land. These proposals were set out in the MacDonald White Paper of 1939, so named after the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Malcolm MacDonald.It was NOT dropped (I have no idea where Wikipedia got that and it should be corrected). In fact, the White Paper was used to prevent hundreds of thousands of Jews from emigrating to Israel from Europe, condemning them to death in the gas chambers.
The introduction of the White Paper caused massive outcry, both in the Jewish world and in British politics. Many supporting the National Government were opposed to the policy on the grounds that it contradicted the Balfour Declaration. Many government MPs either voted against the proposals or abstained, including Cabinet Ministers such as the Jewish Leslie Hore-Belisha. Although adopted, implementation was slow; when the Government fell the following year, the plans were dropped.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:15 PM
7 Comments:
The British lost their empire and the only reason Hitler didn't conquer the UK was his obsession with Russia. Had he chosen to concentrate on England when it was weak, he could have finished it off and history would be looking very different today. The truth is Obumbler's appeasement of Iran, like Chamberlain's appeasement of Germany, will not bring about peace but set the stage for another world war.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
why are there no news media stringers in iran?
friends:
a thought occurred to me this morning, over a cup of tea.
and that is, why are there no news service "stringers" in iran. in every middle eastern country beside iran, the countryside is strewn with native reporters and cameramen, zipping hither and yon, recording this and that, which is dutifully reported by the euro or american media outlets as absolute verity. (and, if you will, almost every instance of "paliwood" that we know of involves these stringers.)
the fact that the stringers are sometimes less than reliable, does not deter the msm from utilizing them.
so, how come we don't have independents with cameras and recorder machines, zipping around iran, and fitting in with the indigenous population (because they are in fact the indigenous population), and providing us with coverage of what goes on in that country, under virtual news blackouts.
17 deaths during these demonstrations? what utter bullshit.
now, were this palestine or lebanon, every night on the news, they would be showing stringer produced footage, and dutifully intoning that such is reality, as reported by the stringers. this has, of course, produced some of the most blatant misrepresentations of fact every seen, but, as noted above, it does not stop the networks from running it, and verifying their authenticity.
al dura, anyone?
i think there is a simple truth here.
and, that is, that the news media do not report the news, and no longer even pretend to. they are driven by propounding agenda, just as surely as any political party, ... , which, as a matter of fact, they simply are. they are liberals. they don't give a shit whether something is factually accurate or not, so long as it propounds "truth" as they see it. an israel airplane bombs a building, and a child is killed? so what if it didn't happen where it was filmed, it had to have happened somewhere, now didn't it. france 2 still proclaims the "truth" of the al dura hoax, and will forever, because to them it fits in with their perception of reality, and "higher truths", as they believe and know them ideologically to be.
so, what does the absence of stringer footage from iran tell us? that there are no stringers in iran?
hardly, all the news agencies would have to do would be to give a fellow a cell phone, and tell him, go film stuff. some might get caught, more wouldn't.
i believe what is tells us in fact, is that the msm has an agenda not to accurately portray the events in iran, and not to portray a series of events in which people aim to wrest freedom from a brutally tyrannical regime. (you would think it the opposite, wouldn't you.)
no, the msm has an agenda not to do so, and its stems from two reasons.
1.)not to embarrass the obamanation, nor to hinder his "misbegotten" policy of "engagement" with iran, and
2.)to portray the events in iran as they are, and to report upon them as they are, would lend credence and support to the notion that george w. bush's policies in iraq and iran were correct, and that nascent democracy does exist in the middle east, and that it can be encouraged, fostered and nurtured.
in short the mainstream media do not report events on the ground as they happen in iran, because those facts and events do not fit in with the ideology of the msm, ... , in fact, they rather negate and expose the lie of most of that same ideological cast.
in short, the media suppress the news, because it is not the news that they want. they would support a tyranny in iran, before they would broadcast the truth. so, they sit on their fucking dead and fat asses in their offices in teheran, and say, "we are prohibited from covering this, so we report what the government of iran wants us to." i have never seen a more damning admission from an intellect: surely, it is the same as saying, "i am a fool."
cowardly fucks, in other words, is what they are.
they promote an agenda. this is not totally surprising, because so did anton chekhov when he wrote "the cherry orchard," and so did leo tolstoy when he wrote "the brothers Karamazov," and, for that matter, so did samuel clemens/mark twain when he wrote "tom sawyer" and "huck finn." and so did upton sinclair, when he wrote "the jungle." they wrote of ideas and a view of the world that they wanted to promote.
but notice something here, if you will. they avowedly and admittedly wrote fiction, (except of course, for sinclair, and i say that a bit tongue in cheek.)
the news agencies are professedly not to do this. they are supposed to report fact, and let the readership perceive it via all their little filters, prejudices and beliefs, and then decide the "ultimate truths" of the matter.
the simple fact is, the msm wants to skip the intermediate process describes above, and simply "tell" us what the truth is, in effect, of course, making them the ultimate arbiter of truth.
this is the ultimate truth of the matter. the media wishes to rob you of your independent powers of observation, reflection, and decision as to what reality is. and, for the most part, being the lazy farts that you are, you have abrogated this function to them, by putting up placidly, complacently, and passively to something that goes on before your very eyes. before you minds, and your capacity to think for yourselves. most of you are too lazy to care.
that is why there are not any stringers in iran, or their footage is not being run. because what they would portray is not the truth the media wants to spoon feed us, and it does not meet their liberal nor their foreign policy agendas, which of course, are the agendas of obama and his coterie of fools and sycophants.
a funny thing happened to me on the way to the forum, ... , i figured this out.
i thought that you might like to now, and share your thoughts. you know, have you decide for yourself, where the truth lies. if you can get up off your dead butts and perform the intellectual and mental functions necessary to do so
Not all the British papers and magazines were quiet. The photo-journal the Picture Post ran a hard-hitting spread entitled "Back to the Middle Ages" about the Kristallnacht which depicted in graphical detail the persecution of the Jews and the savage Nazi policies.
Re the White Paper you are correct and Wikipedia - as so often - is way off.
Hitler had a small navy as a result of Versailles, like Napoleon before him he couldn't conquer Britain. The best he could hope for was a peace treaty. There are those who argue that Hitler limited by a treaty with Britain might not have exterminated the Jews.
On of those adherents is that scumbag Buchanan, howeber that doesn't necessarily negate the theory
Daniel, the Nazis violated their limitations and produced their U-boat fleet and their main battleships, which reeked havoc with allie ships and convoy lines.
Had Hitler not turned to Russia, they would have directed so much more of their physical resources to both air and sea military manufacturing for the assault on Britain.
Although Britain was underesourced in 1945, Hitler did make the mistake of attacking Russia in the winter. The Germans may have landed in Britain, but they would never have succeeded in victory.Britons will never be slaves, and to underestimate the fighting quality of the Brits would have been to their detriment. We did, blow a bugle in 1945, and it was two years later, when the Americans heard it.
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