Thanks so much for your excellent engagement and with your knowledge deployed to this debate:-
Who is to blame for the 1914 catastrophe that saw the 1917 nonsensical Balfour Declaration and the even greater catastrophe of the 1940s leading to the ongoing massacres in Israel/Palestine, to this very day?
Having only recently discovered the delights of Robert Harris and his most recent entertaining novel, I’m now reliant on him, too, for my history!
“Whenever a crowd is running one way, it's my instinct to run the other. It's just part of my contrariness, I think.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/29/robert-harris-interview-officer-spy
This has echoes of the London crowds, hardly discouraged by Churchill and his thrill at the prospect of war, being so fervently in favour of war in Europe in the hot summer of 1914. Indeed, thinking the war would all be over by Christmas so, ‘We’d better get in quick’! Page 70 has the Cabinet horror of Winston craftily suggesting, “how can we, with any honour, remain neutral?”
Harris has Asquith saying “that a general European war would be a calamity. Our immediate policy is equally obvious: to strain every sinew to prevent it”. But he never did! He was too distracted and thinking that: “A large part of his job was arithmetic.” (p 70) What a wonderful joke. A truer word is never said but spoken in jest. This, for the leader of the most powerful empire in the world. Harris hit it on the head!
Yesterday, I read a New York Times piece on Harris. He was quoted as saying, “I re-read the Gospels before writing ‘Conclave’. They are more revolutionary than Marx or Engels.” EXACTLY! The Magnificat and the Sermon on the Mount are both far, far too revolutionary for us poor humans to act on. To try non-violence is utterly outrageous and unacceptable!
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