The appeasers, apologists and ‘useful idiots’ have been out in force over the festive season, busily lighting candles,*declaring*‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ and proclaiming that the murderous attack on the Christmas market had nothing to do either with Islam or mass immigration.*Thinking of them prompted me to pluck from my shelf one of my favourite books, a slim tome entitled ‘Ourselves and Germany’, written in the winter of 1937 by the Marquess of Londonderry. Otherwise known as Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, or ‘Charley’ to his pals, the Marquess could neither write well nor read men well, but his book is nonetheless riveting. It’s a timeless reminder of where an educated man’s moral cowardice and intellectual stupidity can lead.
The Marquess resigned as Secretary of State for Air in 1935, and spent the next two years scuttling back and forth to Germany as an unofficial emissary of Appeasement. Hitler, who extended his distinguished visitor ‘every consideration and courtesy’ was simply misunderstood by the British people, wrote Charley. So were Hermann Goering and Joachim von Ribbentrop, and that was the fault of Britain’s ‘cheap and popular press’, which twisted their words and turned the minds of the public against the Third Reich.
Charley wasn’t a bad man; he was just an arrogant and gullible one, who like many educated men of the era, was taken in by Hitler. The Fuhrer, for all his faults, was adept at hoodwinking his enemies by telling them with a polite smile what they wanted to hear.*The Marquess’s cousin was Winston Churchill, who never misread Hitler, and he crops up in another book I’ve recently read, ‘Conquering Islamic Totalitarianism’, by François Fillon, the centre-right candidate in France’s presidential election.
Fillon asks his readers to imagine for a moment if, in these sombre times, they could think of*‘Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle, sitting at their desk, head in their hands, moaning ‘Where are we heading? Who are we? What is our identity?’.’ He scoffs at the idea, and in the next paragraphs declares that the West must look to the two wartime leaders for inspiration ‘faced with Islamic Totalitarianism’.
It’s a fight on two fronts, explains Fillon, against the Islamists themselves, and against the left, whom he damns for their ‘imbecilic sophism’, adding that they are ‘ideologically blind’ and suffering from a ‘paranoia of Islamophobics’. He makes no apology for drawing parallels between Nazism and Islamic extremism and vows to extinguish the ‘Spirit of Munich’ that he says permeates much of left-wing ideology. ‘Because let there be no mistake’, he writes, ‘these are the same people who bleated for pacifism and collective security in the 1930s when Hitler began re-arming a Germany still weak. These are the same people who cowardly celebrated the sinister Munich Agreement and claimed that peace had been saved’.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/islamofascism-appeasement-biggest-dangers-facing-west/
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