James Holland: commitment

Transcript context

…And there’s so many deep lessons there. So, now, you have written so much. You have said so much. You have studied this so much. What to you, looking at World War II, is the lessons we should take away? Well, I suppose it’s what happens when you allow these individuals to take hold of great power and great authority and make these terrible decisions. If you allow that to happen, there are consequences. You have to recognize the moments of trouble when they arise. So when there are financial crisis, you know that political unrest is going to come, and you need to be prepared for that. You need to be able to see the writing on the wall. You can’t be complacent. Complacency is such a dirty word, isn’t it? You’ve got to keep your wits, and you can’t take things for granted. You’ve got to recognize, I think, that the freedoms we enjoy in the West are… They’re not necessarily permanent, and you need to make the most of them, while you’ve got them, and cherish them and consider what happens if the milk turns sour and what the consequences of that are. I mean, that’s the overriding theme. Because, although I don’t think there will ever be a war on the scale of the Second World War, you’ve only got to look at pictures of those opening days of the war in Ukraine and see knocked out Russian tanks and dead bodies, bloated bodies all over the place. Put that into black and white, and it could be the road out of Falaise in 1944. It could be any number of German battlefields in World War II. And the similarities in the trenches and the people hiding in foxholes, that’s horribly reminiscent, as are the huge casualties that they’re suffering on both sides, whether they be Russian or Ukrainian. And it’s a shock. It’s a shock to see that. It reminds you of just how quickly, I think, things can descend. I mean, that’s the other thing. That point I was making about how quickly Germany descended from this amazing nation of arts and culture and science and development and engineering into one of the Holocaust. I mean, life is fragile, and peace is fragile, and you take it for granted at your peril. And you take for granted, at our peril, that nobody will use nuclear weapons ever again. And that’s not a thing we should take for granted.…

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