Where Are We Going?

Abstract

Some of us who are old enough to remember the 1930s had an eerie feeling these past few weeks that we were being transported back into that period when, as we now know, international tensions were steadily rising to their culmination in the outbreak of the Second World War. Beginning with German rearmament in 1935, there was a crescendo of treaty violations and aggressions let loose by the partners in the Berlin-Rome (later Berlin-Rome-Tokyo) Axis, all in the name of anticommunism which was the official and loudly proclaimed aim and purpose of the Hitler-Mussolini alliance: occupation of the Rhineland (1936), conquest of Ethiopia (1935-36), German- Italian invasion of Spain (1936-39), Austria (1938), Czechoslovakia (1938), finally Poland (1939). All famous victories over communism, the root of all evil and the mortal enemy of humankind (remember Hitler's vivid metaphor of Czechoslovakia being "a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany"). In what is perhaps history's greatest irony, what prevented the rest of the world from falling victim to the same murderous rampage of naked aggression was communism in the shape of the USSR. Ronald Reagan, please take note.

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