The world is outraged by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. As environmental disasters go it is somewhat huge.
People talk right now how Israel is bad oh so bad for killing nine people from a convoy meant to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
People talk about North Korea's nuclear aspirations and sinking of a South Korean ship near their territorial waters.
People think that Obama is a National Socialist.
People can talk or think all they like. We might well have ended up in far worse place had courage, luck, and determination to defeat evil not occurred. North Korea with three nuclear weapons? How about a Hitler's Germany with not only nuclear weapons but orbital space weaponry?
The younger we are the more it seems to be that we forget what happened before, that allowed us the luxury of being outraged at 9 deaths.
Here are some books to read to give a thought to a different outcome, and, a different future. Tomorrow is June 6, 66 years after the Allies began the final drive towards defeating Racist Nationalism in Germany. God bless all who died there, who bought my freedom through their sacrifices.
In addition to different outcomes from war, imagine the environmental disaster that could have come, from a world possessing nuclear weapons and being willing to fight a war to end all grievances, using them. The oil in the Gulf of Mexico today would seem a pittance compared to the devastation of the nuclear consequences of the war that didn't happen.
People like to think we earned the future, but we inherited it. People like to think that we are better than others for our enlightened views. But those views came from living in a world where 6 million Jews were gassed or baked in ovens, because they were Jewish. That hundreds of thousands of Roma people were executed or experimented upon, because they were Roma.
This world inherited its enlightenment from the past, where people made choices to fight what appeared to be evil. And I thank God they did.
4 comments:
alex, this is a leave for thought blog.. it does not matter if it is one or thousand of life that taken, it just should not happen!! no one is wrong for shuddering from the loss of a few if it is what they are xposed to,it is better to feel empathy than none at all. as for the outcome of the war, they are indeed so many possibilties of outcomes... if the third reich were so heavely armed and well prepared compared to their opponents , is it not to wonder why their desire of supremacy and control were put to a stop? and this despite having so many collaborators in the invaded countries starting from the govs to the comon people . (it was not only a racist movement or else why invade other countries with the pretext to eliminate the jews?) ( i see more motives than rascism, but somewhere along the line hitler and consorts got all mixed up) but their thirst for power and dominion were foiled as ot was for all conquerors in the past!
Merci my friend, merci.
If I were to read one of these books, which one should it be>
I think if you want easier reading, versus more academic reading the Hitler Victorious is a very entertaining read, but for the more serious What If volumes 1&2 cannot be beat. Invasion is brilliant, and for a one event considered book it is well worth reading, it is perhaps the most frightening because it so well lays out how Hitler might have knocked the British out of the war if he had given the order to commit to Operation Sea Lion. The invasion of the UK by German and Axis forces.
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