Winston Churchill « Dr Alf's Blog

Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and from 1951 to 1955. Deutsch: Winston Churchill, 1940 bis 1945 sowie 1951 bis 1955 Premier des Vereinigten Königreichs und Literaturnobelpreisträger des Jahres 1953. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

People who demand that Germany should have a foreign policy need to be careful what they wish for because when their leaders were less circumspect we did not like the end result.

Since the time of Marcus Aurelius Caesar, who made an appearance via an actor in the film Gladiator which depicted the prosecution of the war of subjugation the Romans waged against the rebelious Teutonic tribes, people have been trying to contain Germany that was too big for Europe and too small for the world. The Romans did not succeed despite their best efforts at the time.

By 1885, at the height of British Imperial power, the German levels of productivity were such that we felt threatened. By 1911, the Kaiser was widening the Kiel Canal to take E-Boats, as depicted in a black and white photograph contained in an authorized biography of Sir Winston Churchill, which I was given at the age of 9.

At the Paris Air Show, before World War II, the Messerschmidt 109 was on open display but nobody realized its significance, as the world’s most advanced plane of its type, until it was too late.

In recent times, the Bosnian War was caused by Chancellor Kohl recognizing Bosnia, something the Serbs were never prepared to accept and funneling billions into Croatia, its former wartime ally.

Now we have switched to ‘quasi-economic warfare’, with VW Audi the world’s second biggest car-maker, after the Chinese and a series of economic alliances both inside and outside the West.

Germany no longer wages wars with guns, tanks and bullets but influences matters from behind the scenes, by ensuring that its goods and services are the ones people choose to buy, and by creating networks of offices, all around the world, rather than just outsourcing everything as we and the Americans tend to do much more often.

Certainly, we need the Germans to provide escort vessels for their exports and we need them to apply their engineering superiority to the building of ‘killer-robots’ and ‘super-drones’, which can be deployed, if required, in large numbers to kill terrorists.

That is foreign policy enough, along with the effective control of the EU, as exercised by Chancellor Merkel. More than that, it will be a case of “We should have taken greater care over what we wished for”.

John Gelmini

An HDR image of Parliament and Westminster Bridge (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thank Dr Alf for reblogging Simon Wren-Lewis’ article. On this occasion I disagree with Dr Alf’s view about the impact of the severity of the UK’s austerity regime.

For me personally, Simon Wren Lewis is writing nonsense.

The floods and the lack of timely response to them is typical of the way this country handles every emergency, threat or major risk.

Typically, no lessons get learned and the same mistakes are made again and again and again, irrespective of whether the country is doing well economically or not.

At home, I have a biography of Sir Winston Churchill, which I was given for my 8th birthday. In it, there is a picture of the Kaiser walking with Churchillian 1911 and pointing to the widening of the Keil Canal which was subsequently used to try to sink merchant shipping in World War 1 and starve the UK’s population to death.

Before that in the 1850s, we had the MOD issuing left footed boots to our troops in the Crimea.
During the 1930s, when Hitler, financed by Wall Street and the City of London through arrangements made by Hubert Schact, Hitler’s Finance Minister and Jacob Schiff, was rearming, Churchill was the lone voice trying to get the Government to rearm.

The response to the floods is down to misguided spending priorities on overseas aid, warmongering and budgetary malfeasance not austerity.

The £12 billion wasted in overseas aid is a good example of this as is the proliferation of local authorities and local authority workers who need to failed to listen and by 1940 the country was bankrupt.

The floods are not David Cameron‘s Hurricane Katrina and the poor response has to do with misguided priorities like £12 billion gbp in overseas aid, which should have been stopped years ago, £600 million sent to Syria, billions spent on failed IT projects, the NHS, payoffs to failed quangocrats. They are also down to wastage and probably malfeasance in the management of budgets and projects and in the case of Somerset too many local authorities, drainage boards and officials.

John Gelmini