Sep
12
“This is one of the broad themes of “1939”: that as the crisis grew ever more urgent, each party to it withdrew into a “narrow mental box” that “contained its own moral universe.” Germany’s leaders “almost certainly convinced themselves that the war against Poland was entirely justified on moral terms, however criminal the actual plans for war.” By the same token, “on the British and French side the search for a justification that had an immediate meaning was found in the concept of honour… . It had a simplicity that cut through all the other arguments surrounding the justification or otherwise for launching war, and narrowed the moral outlook of the democracies to a single word.” Like the American leaders of 2003, impelled by the self-created illusion that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, the leaders of 1939 went to war as much on the wings of fantasy as out of political, military or diplomatic necessity.”
Jonathan Yardley - Review of Richard Overy’s “1939: Countdown to War”
