“I think it is very interesting when you reread the history of the late Thirties and the Second World War, the degree to which there was a very big disagreement between people as to how to deal with the Nazi threat. Not disagreement that it was a threat, but how to deal with it. And it seems almost extraordinary to us now that there were people arguing throughout the 1930s that actually the way to deal with Hitler was to make a gesture of disarmament. Now we look back and say, ‘How on earth could anyone have thought that was sensible?’ But that was for a time in fact the predominant view.
The second thing is how big a gamble politically President Roosevelt was taking in committing America, first of all to helping, and then to committing forces. It is sometimes forgotten that in the prewar presidential elections each of the candidates had to line up and say, ‘on no account will we get drawn into any European conflict’. And that’s why this transatlantic alliance is felt so keenly on their side as well as ours.” – Tony Blair, understanding how the Anglo-American alliance is as critical to the survival of freedom today as it was sixty years ago.
QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “The last war showed only too clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan “Stop Hitler!” would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here … The American people can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties.” – John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, Meyer Schapiro, and other leading American intellectuals, in Partisan Review, Fall 1939. (Thanks to David Gelernter in the Wall Street Journal.) Reads just like the New York Review of Books today, doesn’t it?
SACRED INSTITUTION WATCH: J-Lo gets hitched again. It’s her third exercise of her civil rights, and she’s only 34. Her husband just got a divorce from his previous wife last Monday. The heterosexual lifestyle is destroying marriage, isn’t it?
The Dish 