PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum - View Single Post - Excellent passage from Sir Winston Churchill

t walgamuth · #6 02-09-2008, 09:12 AM

Churchill is one of my favorite leader/ authors too. Actually nobody who did as much in their life ever wrote like he did that I am aware of. He supported his fairly lavish lifestyle by writing from a fairly early age.

Trying to draw a parallel with today's islamic movement to Hitler's rise is apples and oranges though.

Hitler used conventional armies and equipment to do his deeds. Finding them and destroying them was no picnic but very dooable as long as you were willing to pay the price for the equipment and men. It was well worth the investment of course. True, if he had been confronted earlier many many lives ....millions....would have been spared. The people of England and France did not want war though and were willing to engage in the fantasy that Hitler could be satisfied by giving him this and that. But each time he consumed the offerning and kept building more equipment and larger armies until he was stronger than any one country ('til we got invooved).

The Islamic terrorists are guerrilas and as such are so dispersed it is just a totally different thing to find and destroy them. I suppose it can be done but this situation in Iraq is not the way to do it. If they would oblige us and assemble into large armies that we could destroy with our army destroying weapons it would work.

Why we are there really has little to do with destroying Islamic fundamentalism. It is an attempt to gain control of the oil rich region by men who think only in terms of oil and money.

This may be a good goal for the US in some ways but it has turned out to be like trying to destroy an invisible lethal gas with a shotgun.

Trying to combat the Islamists may be the right thing to do but the trick is how to do it?

Unfortunately it is a battle of increments and will be measured in terms of generations not years.

I have read Speer's book. It is a fascinating read. He was the only high ranking Nazi who said "I am guilty"...and the only one (save the crazy one who flew to England) who was not executed for his war deeds. He wrote his memoirs in prison and released them when he got out, I believe, and made a nice income from it. It was easy to see how a young architect got sucked into the Nazi machine since there was no work available outside it for an Architect. He turned out to be an excellent organizer and was eventually in charge of all munitions production for the Reich. His line was "I did not know what was happening in the death camps but I could have found out and did not, so I am guilty." Apparently he did improve the food rations for some of the prisoners who were working as slaves in muntions production.

Tom W