Have we seen this picture before?

 Winston Churchill believed World War II should have been called “the Unnecessary War.” As he explained it, “there never was a war more easy to stop than that [World War II].” Instead, the world suffered the bloodiest conflict in human history.

When Hitler took power in 1933, many foreign diplomats were already familiar with his violent nationalist ideology.

In 1936, Hitler brazenly remilitarized Germany’s Rhineland border with France. Remilitarization directly threatened French national security.

In early 1938, Hitler forced Austria into the Third Reich by threatening to invade. Immediately, unprecedented anti-Semitic violence broke out across Austria. The Western Allies responded with a collective shrug.

Many British and French political leaders had staked their hopes on appeasing Hitler to avoid war. Appeasement was a fatally flawed policy.

The infamous Munich Conference in late 1938 revealed the costs of appeasement. Hitler had demanded an integral part of Czechoslovakia. Britain and France should have supported the strong pro-Western democracy against Nazi aggression. Instead, they sold out the young nation by accepting Hitler’s claims. The Czechoslovaks were not even invited to Munich.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich declaring that he had obtained “peace for our time.” That peace would prove short-lived.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcarlin/2019/09/04/world-war-ii-how-western-leaders-failed-to-stop-the-nazi-rise/?sh=33fd89ef24e7

From our 21st-century point of view, it is hard to imagine World War II without the United States as a major participant. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, however, Americans were seriously divided over what the role of the United States in the war should be, or if it should even have a role at all.

The US ambivalence about the war grew out of the isolationist sentiment that had long been a part of the American political landscape and had pervaded the nation since World War I.

Most Americans still believed the nation’s interests were best served by staying out of foreign conflicts and focusing on problems at home.

Isolationists believed that World War II was ultimately a dispute between foreign nations and that the United States had no good reason to get involved. The best policy, they claimed, was for the United States to build up its own defenses and avoid antagonizing either side.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/great-debate

WHY am I posting the above? The answer should be obvious:


Is it now too late? 


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