Seventy-fours years ago today we stood shoulder to shoulder with our closest ally, issuing an ultimatum to a Fascist dictator who had overstepped a red line. And the rest is history – in fact the only history that most people know anything about.
One of the things the Syrian crisis has shown is just how much the Second World War dominates public discourse in Britain and the US. The last week has seen a flowering of dubious WW2 analogies, with ‘appeasement’ being bandied around by MPs and lots of usually sensible people making references to 1938, Chamberlain and Churchill. John Kerry has said that Assad is like Hitler because he used poison gas, even though, as the Guardian pointed out, Churchill used it too.
Assad is nothing like as threatening as Hitler. Sure, Nazism influenced the Ba’athists, and somewhere down in Bashar’s headquarters I’m sure you’ll find some 100-year-old with a dueling scar, a limp and a monocle still running Syria’s torture operations.
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