Fateful Choices
By Ian Kershaw

I've recently read Professor Ian Kershaw's book Fateful Choices, a book subtitled "Ten decisions that Changed the World 1940-1941". Early in the Second World War, there were many extremely consequential choices to be made around the world. The fate of many millions of people was to be affected.

The book was good but very dense in parts, with a concentration on some of the minutiae of the process involved. For some the process was quite tedious to describe, with a lot of back and forth between the rulers, ministers, the military or parts of government. This was the case for the USA and Japan. I was surprised at some of the debate inside the Japanese government, although Kershaw makes it plain that there was only one road that was likely to be travelled: conquest and war. For the Nazi government, only one person mattered, the Führer. This was also the case for Italy, although Mussolini's hold on the levers of power were much weaker than Hitler's. To me, the most fascinating was the War Cabinet in Britain, taking some days to hammer out a collective decision on whether to fight or seek "terms". Churchill was only recently elevated to Prime Minister and had to tread carefully. In the end, it is unlikely that the decision could have gone any other way.

A section later in the book stood out to me because of its echo of some more modern concerns. Here in the United Kingdom in the year 2026 and there has been mention of a "decline" of the country for a few years, also a number of attacks on Jews and a rise in anti-semitism. This seems to be a problem manifesting in both Europe and the USA.

From "Berlin/East Prussia, Summer-Autumn 1941", page 441 (Penguin paperback) :

That Germany's "redemption" could only come about by "removing" the Jews had been one strand of political culture stretching back to Richard Wagner - though neither the great composer nor practically anyone else imagined this to mean physical extirpation. Amid widespread conservative-reactionary cultural pessimism framed by a lost war, the end of the monarchy, socialist revolution and a hated democratic system, anti-semitism found a fertile breeding ground.

The phrase "cultural pessimism" stands out because it seems to be something becoming pervasive. As stated, this can be a dangerous development if it leads to the search for scapegoats. Europe has a bad history of hatred and we must never forget that. Whatever the targets and however the hate is reformulated.