ChosenRebel's Blog

Repeating History

Three hundred five pages into the second volume of William Manchester’s epic biography on Winston Churchill, I found a series of paragraphs that should haunt the politicians and political leaders of the West. Unfortunately, I fear that most of them are dull and insensate to the threat of repeating history. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in September of 1939 didn’t happen in a vacuum. There were precedents and cowardice and missed opportunities. But the world would not act because of fear of offending Hitler. It was foolish but it happened. It happened because people didn’t want it to happen and so they tried to ignore it and wish it away. But evil has to be confronted or it grows becoming more evil with each passing day. 

“After the slaughter of ten million young men twenty years earlier, a renewal of the struggle seemed incomprehensible. The German people hated war as passionately as their once and future enemies, but in the Reich public opinion was forged by the state to an unprecedented degree. The Nazi Reichskulturkammer determined what was taught in the schools, the music people heard, the content of radio broadcasts, the books they read, what was published in the newspapers, the churches they attended, and the plays and films they saw. The Führer, they were told over and over, was working toward noble goals and making a supreme effort to save the peace. Those who threatened it, who hated Germans because the aryan race was superior to their own, were unmasked each year on the anniversary of the Nazi party — the Nuremberg Reichsparteitag, held in September.

The average Briton was better informed. To be sure, The Times was not the only paper in which rogue editors disgraced their craft by the distortion or outright suppression of the facts. Nevertheless the truth was there for those who cared to know. A majority chose to ignore it. Confronted with the prospect of another world war, they sought refuge in escapism. Londoners whose dreams were haunted by Nazi storm troopers could leave their night-mares in the checkroom at the St. James’s Theatre, while they watched Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance; or at the Duchess, where Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green was playing to packed houses; or at His Majesty’s Theatre, where the hight point of the evening would be hearing a quartet sing “The Stately Homes of England” in Noel Coward’s Operette, which ran through 133 performances.

If you wanted to forget Japanese aggression in China and mutual aggression in Spain, a smorgasbord of entertainment lay before you: Len Hutton scoring 364 runs against Australia in the Oval Test Match; or in the book department at Harrods, P. G. Woodhouse’s The Code of the Woosters, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. From across the Atlantic came new works by Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Nathanael West. The United States also presented, to enthusiastic theatre audiences, Life with Father and Rodgers and Harts’s The Boys from Syracuse; and, on what was then called the silver screen, Gone with The Wind, the Wizard of Oz, and Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.      (pages 305-6)

These were the entertainments of the Western world, while the Nazi’s were creating a terror machine and the Japanese where already subjecting Chinese and Korean populations to cruelties that are still remembered today with bitterness by families in those countries. The world was moving toward war and almost no one but Roosevelt in America, and Churchill in England, seemed to be paying any attention. The result was that growing unchecked anti-semitism around the world. Is there a parallel to our time?

A growing unchecked anti-semitism around the world

Do a google search on that one. Mine listed 16 million hits in .36 seconds.

Let’s take a peek back at what was happening while the West was Amusing Itself to Death with entertainments and escapism coupled with willful ignorance of history and facts. In Vienna, that great cosmopolitan city of art and beautiful music, anti-semitism was inflamed and cruel. (By the way, back in May of this year, before the Hamas war on Israel started, one source reported that anti-semitism in the United states was at an all time high.)

“They rounded up the people walking in the Prater on Sunday last, and separated the Jews from the rest. They made the Jewish gentleman take off all their clothes and walk on all fours on the grass. They made the old Jewish ladies get up into the trees by ladders and sit there. They then told them to chirp like birds. . . . You may take a man’s life; but to destroy all his dignity is bestial. This man told me that with his own eyes he had seen Princess Stahremberg washing out the urinals at the Vienna railway-station. The suicides have been appalling. A great cloud of misery hangs over the town.” (pages 308-9)

It was 1938, World War 2 was officially, according to historians, was a year away from its official beginning with Germany’s invasion of Poland, but that “would have been news to the Chinese, the Ethiopians and the Spaniards.” (p. 308) Here’s what was happening around the world:

• September 18, 1931 Japan invades Manchuria.
• October 2, 1935–May 1936 Fascist Italy invades, conquers, and annexes Ethiopia.
• October 25–November 1, 1936 Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sign a treaty of cooperation on October 25. On November 1, the Rome-Berlin Axis is announced.
• November 25, 1936 Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan sign the Anti-Comintern Pact. The pact is directed against the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement.
• July 7, 1937 Japan invades China.
• November 26, 1937 Italy joins Germany and Japan in the Anti-Comintern Pact.
• March 11–13, 1938 Germany incorporates Austria in the Anschluss.
• September 29, 1938 Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and France sign the Munich agreement which forces the Czechoslovak Republic to cede the Sudetenland, including key Czechoslovak military defense positions, to Nazi Germany.
• March 14–15, 1939 Under German pressure, the Slovaks declare their independence and form a Slovak Republic. The Germans occupy the dismantled Czech lands in violation of the Munich agreement and form the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
• March 31, 1939 France and Great Britain guarantee the integrity of the borders of the Polish state.
• April 7–15, 1939 Fascist Italy invades and annexes Albania.
• August 23, 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression agreement and a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe into spheres of influence.  

Source: The United States Holocaust Museum Website

Are you watching the news? The rise of anti-semitism is a signal that the world is moving toward a repeat of history. Are you praying? Are you living passionately for and like Jesus? The world has no hope apart from Him. Nothing but Him, nothing but Jesus will do.