Lessons Not Learned From WW2

Lee Duigon

Imagine you’re all of 22 years old, and you already have your own reality show on British television, you’re famous—and you’re what they call an “influencer.”

Wow. What’s that? Well, you have scads of followers on social media: people who look up to you, and take you for some kind of oracle. If you tell them something’s cool, they’ll think it’s cool (maybe “think” is the wrong word here; but let it stand). They watch you on TV and breathlessly await your next utterance.

And the beauty of it is, you don’t have to know squat! It’s not your wisdom that influences people—good grief, no. It’s your fame. You’re on TV! What you say must be important! They’re even calling you an influencer, so there must be something to it.

And what do you do with your position of influence?

You stare goggle-eyed into the TV camera and tell all the folks out there that British schools shouldn’t teach their students about World War II anymore… because it’s “too intense” for them.

Ta-dah! You have achieved 100 percent pure uselessness. The only possible improvement would be for the schools to teach the kiddies nothing at all—and make ‘em go to school regardless.

Our influencer isn’t prepared to go that far. He wants the schools to “teach” their students all about Climate Change (OMG we’re all gonna die in just 12 years unless all the world’s governments get together and DO SOMETHING!!) and the evils of Brexit—guaranteed to bring about the Day of the Triffids, don’t you know.

But World War II? That’s “too intense” for kids who’ve just been assured they’ll all be drowned by rising sea levels or baked to a crisp by runaway Global Warming. So much better just to sweep it under the rug. They don’t even need to know it ever happened. It can be turned into a mere legend, like the Trojan War. They can take down Winston Churchill’s statue while they’re at it.

It’s too bad, because there are lessons we could all learn from Britain’s role in World War II. You don’t have to be British to profit from them.

Studying the run-up to the war, we can be appalled by the careless ease with which the British ruling class sold out the British people, because they believed that opposition to Hitler’s Germany would hurt their own financial interests.

We can be astounded by the alacrity with which the British news media—the owners, not the frustrated reporters whose urgent dispatches were willfully buried or ignored—stifled what should have been alarming news, necessitating, in the interests of national self-preservation, a powerful response. The news giants, one and all, mocked and belittled anyone who tried to alert the nation to its peril. In the course of their labors, they invented fake news. That was when it started.

Equipped with those lessons from history, the British public might wonder if now their ruling class might be selling them out to globalism, and to those who seek to do by lies and flattery what Hitler just barely failed to do by military force. And the reason for it hasn’t changed: a lust for wealth and power, at their countrymen’s expense.

They might come to learn that their news media has had an awful lot of practice at not telling them the truth, and refuse to have their opinions guided by them anymore. Just as they minimized the threat of Nazi Germany, they now maximize the threat of Climate Change. The payoff would be a global government with themselves in charge of it, sitting pretty on the peak of the pyramid.

Much too intense for ordinary people, isn’t it?

There are compelling reasons for not listening to today’s influencers, just as there were for yesterday’s.

Because the central lesson in all this is that the war might have been avoided: but wasn’t.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/. Stop in for a visit; a single click will take you there. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/.

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net