Lest we forget ...
Seventy years ago today Britain declared war on Germany at the start of WWII.
There followed six years of sacrifice ad many thousands of brave men and women gave their lives to prevent the victory of perhaps the most evil cause the world has ever known.
That sacrifice must never be forgotten. Now should we forget that the sacrifices were greater than might otherwise have been necessary, and that Nazism came closer to establishing a new Dark Age, because the majority of leaders and people in the Western Democracies failed in peacetime to grasp the severity of the threat or to prepare for the challenge that they would face.
There are those who argue that the threats faced by the free world today are even worse than those of earlier ages. When it is used in an attempt to justify the erosion of centuries old liberties, that argument is overplayed. The threats presented by Hitler's Germany seventy years ago, or by the former Soviet Union in my youth, were incomparably greater than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong-il, and all their like put together.
Nevertheless, we are born into a dangerous world, and it is as true today as it ever was that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
This country is sometimes accused of being obsessed with the history of World War II. But perhaps, when we remember how this country and our commonwealth stood alone against murderous dictatorships which ruled practically the whole of Europe and Asia, in a war which more than almost any other in history really was a battle between good and evil, we have something to be proud of. Let us seek to be a people who the heroes of 1939 to 1945 would be proud to have as their descendants.
There followed six years of sacrifice ad many thousands of brave men and women gave their lives to prevent the victory of perhaps the most evil cause the world has ever known.
That sacrifice must never be forgotten. Now should we forget that the sacrifices were greater than might otherwise have been necessary, and that Nazism came closer to establishing a new Dark Age, because the majority of leaders and people in the Western Democracies failed in peacetime to grasp the severity of the threat or to prepare for the challenge that they would face.
There are those who argue that the threats faced by the free world today are even worse than those of earlier ages. When it is used in an attempt to justify the erosion of centuries old liberties, that argument is overplayed. The threats presented by Hitler's Germany seventy years ago, or by the former Soviet Union in my youth, were incomparably greater than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong-il, and all their like put together.
Nevertheless, we are born into a dangerous world, and it is as true today as it ever was that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
This country is sometimes accused of being obsessed with the history of World War II. But perhaps, when we remember how this country and our commonwealth stood alone against murderous dictatorships which ruled practically the whole of Europe and Asia, in a war which more than almost any other in history really was a battle between good and evil, we have something to be proud of. Let us seek to be a people who the heroes of 1939 to 1945 would be proud to have as their descendants.
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