No Churchill

I've been staying away from blogging a lot lately- seems like the world is going to hell and the people in power just don't care. Case in point- Olmert handing over millions of dollars, weapons, prisoners and amnesties to Fatah. Result- the Al Aqsa Brigades declare their intention to continue to fight. And Fatah don't even pretend to be renouncing violence. It's beyond absurd.

At the weekend Orson Scott Card's essay about the global warming fraud was linked somewhere on the blogosphere (and it's well worth reading too) but another recent essay caught my eye there too- and it seems to be one that should be disseminated far and wide. If others are writing about it and I've simply missed it- well, maybe you did too, so here it is. It's a difficult piece to quote, you really need to go and read it all to get the full impact of the comparisons between pre-WW2 Germany and today, but here's a taster-

Chamberlain kept treating Hitler as if he had rational goals, as if he could be appeased -- kept peaceful by giving him what he wanted. But these "troublesome young men" in Parliament understood the truth: That Hitler responded to every concession as if it were a message telling him that Britain would not stand against him no matter what he did.

Far from appeasing Hitler, Chamberlain's policies were encouraging him to be more and more reckless.

Sound familiar?

If you do not believe the threats of an insane enemy and destroy their war capacity early, when it can be cheaply done, you will pay for it in blood and horror.

Then think on this-

[T]here is another huge question mark hanging over Isfahan and Natanz: why is the government in such a rush to enrich fuel, when it has no nuclear power plants in which to use it?

Western civilisation is beginning to burn and the politicians are playing their violins. In the years to come we may have to pay for their short-sightedness with a nuclear conflagration. We keep hearing some of them mouthing comparisons between the Cold War and the conflict against global jihad today- but none of them will say out loud that the threat of nuclear war, either with a state like Iran or with terrorists like Al Qaeda, is as much alive today as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Back then the public at large knew the threat was very real and they were rightfully scared, today the majority seem to be whistling with their fingers in their ears. And of curse the major difference between jihadists and communists is that the latter only wanted to win- they weren't actually too keen on dying in the process. Right now we face an enemy that not only operates largely from the shadows (where do we point our nuclear deterrent?) but is also rather keen on being martyred in the process of fighting us. Threatening to kill them if they attack us isn't a tactic that is going to work.

I just hope that it doesn't take the detonation of a nuclear device to make the people who weren't woken by 9/11 to realise that we're in the early stages of a war that, despite the tragedies of then and since, could be about to enter a much more terrible phase.