In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit. —Napoleon Britain’s former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, still crisply lucid at eighty-five, recently compared the present situation in the world with that in Europe before World War II. “Speaking honestly,” he declared, “I would say that we are now at 1935 or 1936.” He went on to warn: “We can save ourselves only by looking at the realities, and by organizing the resistance which we must create if what we have won in two world wars we shall not lose in the third.” In the late 1930s the nations in Hitler’s path had time to stop World War II before it started, but they ignored the warnings and frittered away that time. In his “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946 Winston Churchill recalled: Last time I saw it all coming, and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind.
