The avoidable war: Lord Cecil and the policy of principle, 1932-1935. Volume 1Transaction Publishers - 389 páginas As historian Gordon Craig has observed, "Americans are deeply ambivalent about history, choosing instead to follow the imperative of moral absolutes; they are uncomfortable with the idea of national interest as a guiding principle of policy, preferring motivations that are nobler." What does the national interest require? What does morality command? These issues bedevil us in Bosnia and Rwanda today as they did yesterday in the Persian Gulf and in Somalia. Such questions were fully played out in the era that led up to the dominant event of our century, the Second World War. The Avoidable War details how the war, its destruction, and its consequences could have been avoided. This original interpretation of history also provides insights into ways of preserving peace that can guide contemporary diplomacy. J. Kenneth Brody describes an incomparable galley of characters: a chief villain, Hitler; a thoughtful, conflicted, and human Mussolini; a fatuous Ramsey MacDonald; an uncharacteristically silent William Churchill; a smaller than life Stanley Baldwin. Above all, he rescues from undeserved obscurity the noble and inspiring figure of Lord Robert Cecil providing a thorough, controversial reappraisal and sympathetic portrait of Pierre Laval, his policy, and his character. Brody is the first to tell the story of the Peace Ballot, the first modern public opinion poll, created by Cecil in 1935. In this privately organized referendum on issues of war and peace, the British voted overwhelmingly in support of disarmament and morality rather than the national interest. Unfortunately its results helped bring on the war they worked so hard to avoid as, instructed by the Peace Ballot, the British met brute force with arms limitations proposals, the love of peace, and exalted ideals. Under cover of those ideals they betrayed a trusting ally, France. In doing so, they reaped a whirlwind of wartime consequences. The first of a two-volume series sheds new and original light on the origins of the Second World War. It is a study of both modern British history and a period of French history usually consigned to darkness. It also explores the role of morality in policymaking. This is a very human story of the passionate devotion to peace and justice of the proponents of the Peace Ballot and their supporters, and of the paradoxical and perverse result they achieved. |
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... attack or aggression . They were the victors of 1918 and they had added to their estates the spoils of that victory , the former German colonies and the mandates and protectorates that had once been prov- inces of the Ottoman Empire ...
... attack was a new form of warfare which could overcome Britain's formerly splendid isolation from the continent and put its great cities at the risk of destruction . Germany was therefore forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to build or ...
... attack the Soviet Union in June , 1941 , and to declare war on the United States in the aftermath of the December 7 , 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor . That delivery would come only at a terrible price . Three years and three ...
... attack on the humane values which Britain and France cherished and which Adolf Hitler scorned . Nazi Germany proceeded methodically to violate each and every restraint of the Treaty of Versailles . It built an army based on new ideas ...
... attacked by the other ? 5,898 18,498 4. Should the manufacture of armaments by private enterprise be prohibited ? 20,415 4,8193 The poll showed overwhelming support for the League , for the Disarmament Conference and for a ban on the ...
Conteúdo
1 | |
7 | |
15 | |
27 | |
Mussolini | 33 |
AngloSaxon Attitudes | 45 |
Adolf Hitler | 61 |
Arms Control1932 | 85 |
Voting For Peace | 173 |
An Abyssinian Incident | 201 |
A Double Challenge | 219 |
Stresa | 263 |
Arms Control1935 | 287 |
The Triumph of the Peace Ballot | 309 |
Notes | 337 |
Bibliography | 361 |
The German Challenge | 99 |
France and the German Challenge | 125 |
Britain and the German Challenge | 141 |
Index | 367 |