Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…he duration of the war, which includes members of the Liberal Party and also the Labour Party as well as conservatives, that it is by no means certain that he is going to be able to deliver the goods. And it is also coincidentally the same day that the Germans launched Case Yellow, Operation Yellow, the invasion of the low countries in France. So these are tumultuous events, to put it mildly. And it is also the case that only a couple of weeks before, Paul Reynaud has taken over his Prime Minister of yet another coalition government in France from Daladier. So political turmoil is very much the watchword at this time for the Western democracies, just at the moment that the Germans are making their hammer strike into the West. This might be a good moment to bring up this idea that has been circulating recently brought up by Darryl Cooper, who hyperbolically stated that Churchill was the quote, chief villain of the Second World War. To give a good faith interpretation of that, I believe he meant that Churchill forced Hitler to escalate the expansion of Nazi Germany beyond Poland into a global war. So Churchill is the one that turned this narrow war, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, into a global one. Is that accurate? No, I don’t think it is, not least because the decisions over Poland were made by Chamberlain’s government when Churchill was out of government. So Churchill wasn’t even involved in that decision-making process at the time. No, I don’t think so. Again, I go back to Britain’s position in the world in 1939. If you say, “We are going to defend the sovereignty of Poland,” and then you don’t, that looks really bad globally. Britain’s prestige would plummet. It would lead all sorts of problems. You are saying that you are giving carte blanche to dictators to just run amok and take whatever territory they want. You are risking a future upheaval of the global order away from democracies into the hands of dictators. In the West people believe in democracy and believe in advancement of freedoms of people. To echo the words of Roosevelt in August 1941, they’re responding to a world free of want and fear. Now obviously, there are still some issues with the form that democracy takes in the 1930s. It’s not democratic for everyone. Try saying that if you are in Nigeria or India or whatever, or if you’re in the black Southern states of the United States. But the aspirations are there. And I think that’s an important distinction. And I think by saying that Churchill is the chief warmonger of the Second World War, I think, is ludicrous. It’s the same thing about the bombing. The detractors of strategic air campaign always go, “Yeah, but Germans had the Holocaust, but weren’t the Allies just as bad just killing all those civilians?’ It’s like, no, because the moment Hitler stopped the war, the bombing would stop. The moment the war stopped in Hitler’s favor, the killing would continue and be accelerated.…

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