We’ve just watched Sink the Bismarck! (starring Kenneth More, 1960), and it’s, like, y’know, so full of Teutonophobia! I mean, what were they thinking when they made that movie?
You would’ve thought that, once the Germans started bombing London every day, and shooting people all over Europe, that at least some part of the British public would’ve embraced the Third Reich, and asked soul-searching questions like “Why do they hate us, and how can we get them to like us, what can we give them?”–oh, wait, they already tried that for eight or nine years and it didn’t work. They practically gave away the store to the Nazis, and still they got bombed.
Does the Western world suffer from amnesia? They all very nearly went down for the count, Hitler very nearly won the war–and they could have stopped him seven or eight years sooner with relatively little expenditure of effort.
But that’s the question that history asks us all the time: “Have you already forgotten? Have you lost all the lessons taught you by experience?”
I’m afraid that if Hitler came back for a second try today, he’d find it pretty easy going.