Cotton Eyed Joe, Back for good, Country House. Three of the number one hits of 1995. Remember them? seem like yesterday? 16 years ago, still pretty fresh in the memory. Think how fresh in the memory The Great War was to the people of Britain 16 years after it ended, when Hitler started to throw his weight around europe.
It was just around this time when the dust had settled and people had begun to gain just a little bit of perspective regards the biggest human catastrophe the people of the world had ever inflicted on themselves. Around a million British men had died, whole communities ripped from the country. Made worse by the realisation that it was needless, a twist of fate mixed with bad diplomacy, arrogance, badly entangled national treaties mixed with the jingoism and short sightedness of the national press. Most of all, people were starting to realise that it wasn’t just as easy as ‘Germany was to blame’, therefore we should punish them. Germany had been caught up in this European tragedy as much as anyone. This was all as fresh in the mind as ‘Back for good’ is for us today.
The one thing the country had decided was that it was to be the war to end all wars. This was mixed with an inkling of regret and guilt about the treaty of Versailles and and a smidge of respect for how Hitler seemed to be getting the country back on its feet.
Harold Macmillan wrote in his memoirs (yes, i read such crap) that in the 1930s people regarded the new phenomenon of Air War similarly to how we now (in the 60s) regard nuclear war. It was a terror, which would bring war to the home land killing countless women and children. The prime minister in the mid 30s, Baldwin, reflecting on how arial bombing had been used in the spanish civil war lamented that any future wars would simply be about which side could kill the most women and children in their homes, quickest. He wasn’t being melodramatic, he was calling it like he saw it, as he ordered the building of bomber aircraft.
On the eve of war, after Hitler had broken the Munich agreement and entered Prague, Chamberlin asked his generals to estimate how many casualties should be expected on the home front. They told him, 150,000 deaths in the first week.The truth was, terrible as it is, that slightly less than 150,000 people were killed by german bombers over the 6 years of the war. A tragedy but multiples less than was feared. They literally thought that if they couldn’t stop a war happening most of the people in the country would be dead soon, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters. Anything was better than war, Churchill was principled and probably right but he was going to get us all killed, and should quiet down.In to this comes Chamberlains quote, which is used to damn him.
“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing!”
There are two strains of appeasers and they shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush. There are the nazi lovers, Mosley and the black shirts, and his sympathisers like Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard, high profile but few in number. Then there are the other sort, who just wished to avoid war, wished to go the extra mile, These people were misguided as it turned out Hitler was, well, Hitler and had to be fought through force of arms but this didn’t necessarily seem to be the case at the time, and 15 years after Cotton Eye’d Joe and Austin Powers, i fear that i would wrongly have been in the appeasement camp.
There’s definitely part of me that thinks its a bad thing for a government to be in power for too long, it gets tired, complacent and corrupt. Crop rotation gives government life and energy. Cameron seems like an empty suit, but energetic, creative and non-idealistic. For all the demonising and bluster from the Tory haters he’s be on the left of the Democratic Party if he were American. But no, I just don’t see there being any strength in depth. I like Davis on civil liberties, i like Gove when he’s on Newsnight Review talking eruditely about culture, but he gets very slappable when he puts on his Education Spokesman hat. Osborne? f**k off.
I watch a fair bit of TV, and i listen to a fair bit of music. Maybe 3-4 hours of each a day. I’d sooner be without music than TV.
someone’s house’.As soon as this realisation had set in, my mate 
£400, 5 days in New York for the millennium! We couldn’t believe it. We’d heard of people spending thousands on things like this. (It goes without saying that neither of us HAD £400, but when you’ve got a credit card what’s the difference between £-300 and £-400… right?). New York, Times Square, for new years, for THE new years, too much to pass up.
