Carey Rowland's blog

What Mr. Lincoln said

. . .at Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania:

. . .we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate--we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. 

It is better for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

President Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

The Conspiracy thing

Ok so I met this guy who's convinced that this whole big mess is a conspiracy, most especially the 911 thing. And he had me convinced for a few milliseconds that maybe he's onto something, what with mysterious fluctuations in airline stock prices the day before the towers went down, and that its all oil but I knew that anyway and that cheney knew what was going on and it was all a big plan because you know the govment is out to get us and to get us all constricted into a police state, and now we are in a police state and that explains a lot and theres plenty of proof on the internet that it wasn't passenger planes that did the damage on 911, that it was missiles that hit the pentagon and that there were some asbestos problems in the towers that nobody wanted to fix because it would be too expensive and so the conspiracy arranged to have the towers destroyed and that there is no record in history of a steel structure going down without being calculatedly imploded and that the #7 building was imploded because of incriminating evidence that needed to be disposed of so as not to implicate the mayor and there was a puff of smoke at the grassy knoll and so forth and none of this is really new but you know what? it doesn't worry me because Jesus said:

"You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end." Mt 24.

So in a way I already knew about this because we can see and sort of feel that there's something rotten in danmark or somewhere or maybe everywhere you go on earth and we know this because Paul said:

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places." Eph 6.

So it is not new and this conspiracy thing is really very old and there's nothing new under the sun because its pretty obvious that humans are fairly well messed up maybe even rotten to the core and actually ridden through like bullet holes with depravity which is the old term for the sin nature before sin became in the popular way of thinking just an old freudian repression instead of the undeniable reality that it really is which is plain to see if you look around among the rubble and detritus of our civilization's underpinnings and yes I have discovered this sin nature in my very own damn self but Jesus saved me, back in 1978. That doesn't release me from any responsibility to try and do right in this life, but it does release me from the burdens of trying to correct everybody else's messes, or even try to figure it all out and protest, a la quintessential existential dilemma.

And so maybe you're a marxist and you think that I'm imbibing the opiate of the people by accepting religion and Jesus and so forth but hey its a free country or at least it used to be but I'm free no matter how you slice the rumor mill because Jesus has set me free now put that in your pipe and smoke it. Or maybe you're a fascist and you think my religion is irrelevant and based on old mythologies and legends and is therefore no defense against your will to power. We shall see, you damned bully. 

Well there is no denying there is some bad shit going down in this world and maybe there's very little we can do about it because we're all tied down to just makin a livin', doin' the 9 to 5 if were lucky enough to still have a job, and we know they're cooking the unemployment numbers so as to manipulate us and its probably closer to 20% if you include all the people who would still like to be employed but the statisticians think they've given up. (Don't ever give up.) and like I said before what else is new?, and so forth, cuz we don't any of us have time to correct all the bad stuff. But its not your fault anyway. Just take care of your own bad self and do what you need to do. Remember Jesus said:

"…but whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes."

So if you are a conspiracy buff you would do better just to put your faith in Jesus instead of trying to figure out all the bad stuff in this world. And if you are one of the Conspirators, then you better get right with God before its too late, and end your wicked ways.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress.

 

Inevitable forces in history

There's only so much that a man can do. There's only so that any nation can do, to put a stop to inevitable forces of destruction during their lifetime.

That's not to say they shouldn't try. We've got to somehow oppose the evils in this life, in this time. 

This is what I'm thinking about as I research my current writing project, a novel about inevitabilities in the year 1937. Fascism, was a damn near unstoppable force during that time, although the Allies were later able to pull it off when they had defeated the Nazis of Germany, Italy, and Japan by 1945. But there were eight years of pure hell before the beast was put back in his cage.

However, there was another rising tide during those turbulent times of the late 1930s and '40s-- communism. It was in the background.  Over  yonder in Russia, eastern Europe and China, the ideology of Marx and Lenin was a slumbering giant.

Consider the plights of two military leaders (later political leaders) of that time: Tomas Masaryk of Czechoslovakia and Chiang Kai-shek of China. These two men and their armies were contending against the terrible fascist war machines of their era.

But life is never simple, and the perils of war are never predictable. In Czechoslovakia, Tomas Masaryk was trying to lead his fledgling democratic nation into an alliance with the Allies of the west, most specifically France. However, Vladimir Lenin's revolutionary mustering of the Comintern would inevitably blind-side the Czechs and overtake their democratic impulses, but that didn't happen until the late 1940s, after a whole damn world war, the Second! one, had been fought and driven into the dust of tragic history.

In the 1920s and '30s. the Czech leader, Masaryk, had his hands full trying to deal with the after-effects of German-Austrian militarism (left-over from WWI) even as the fascist beast began to raise its ugly head again as Hitler's zombified nazi war machine.

So it was quite sensible, quite understandable, that Masaryk did not want to take sides in the Russian civil war--communist Reds against nationalist Whites. Masaryk didn't want to involve his people in a bloody Bolshevik struggle when there was still so much to be dealt with on the German side of his problems.

While developing an alliance with the French in the aftermath of WWI, Masaryk and his Czechs neglected the Russian bolshevik threat from the east.  But that same Russian bear later reared up in the late '40s and overtook the Czechs anyway.

How could Tomas Masaryk have known? It was all he could do to handle the snake-pit of military and political evils on his western front. 

There's only so much a man, or the nation that he is leading, can do.

Chiang Kai-Shek had the same problem in China. His nationalist armies were fighting Mao Tse-tung's communist Reds in the 1930s. Meanwhile, just across the sea, the fascist imperial Japanese were about to devour half of China (and all of China if it could have). The Japs took advantage of the Chinese infighting between Chiang and Mao's opposing forces, until the Japanese threat became so undeniably serious. Both Chinese factions had to lay low against each, even in some cases work together, to run the damn Japs back to their island.

But then after all that had blown over--after the World War in which millions had died--in the late 40s, Mao's unstoppable communists ran Chiang Kai-Shek and his Kuomintang army off the mainland to Taiwan.

There's only so much a man can do. Communism, during the 1940s, was a slumbering, though inevitable, giant in both Europe and Asia. Now, alas, seventy years later, the whole idea of communism--the whole Marx/Leninism platform-- has kind of ground itself into a post-1989 skid; it lingers confusedly with its finger occupying its nose as the world arranges itself into a new set of slings and arrows and inevitable evils and the heroics that oppose them.

Go figure.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

 

The one thing that ends politics

A politician was talking about the unfortunate condition of his government: 

Since the economic had begun…

…growing numbers of Agrarians maintained that the state was ungovernable without their participation, and that their party was the only one capable of managing the state…In the summer of 1933, Beran himself was of the opinion that the rising root of aggravation was an exaggerated school education, and (that), for a child subjected to education, a country person 'began to stink of horse piss.' 

'We have the most educated proletariat…the government has to perform miracles, so as to be able to maintain an army of tramps who mainly despise work…so that an unemployed worker would not have to leave town for the countryside and ask a farmer for a job.'  

The state would never get out of its difficulties without reducing lavish unemployment benefits, 'this social monster which the socialists have created…' 

The politician who presented this position was Rudolph Beran, a leader in the Agrarian party of Czechoslovakia during the 1930s. His assessment was supported largely by rural folks who populated a region known as Sudetenland. Many of the these Agrarians were ethnic Germans whose loyalties were gravitating, during the '30s, toward support for German occupation of their region of the Czech lands. The passage above was quoted from The Life of Edvard Benes, 1884-1948, by Zbynek Zemen with Antonin Klimek (Oxford, 1997) 

However, after a while the extremist rhetoric didn't really produce much benefit to anyone. In 1939, all the polarizing politics that had been cranked out between fascist and communist extremes in eastern Europe went up in smoke, because Hitler's war blew all the manipulative politics to smithereens.

Europe in the 1930s was a festering boil of political infection and belligerence that eventually erupted as World War II. At the  core of the contagion was a warm-up war of opposing ideologies:  fascism and communism. Fascism was being force-fed by Germany and Italy.  Communism was perpetrating through the nascent Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, led by Russia.  

Pretty much the whole developed world was suffering through an economic depression. The democratic nations, primarily France, Great Britain, and their smaller allies, were grasping at security straws. In their faltering attempts to preserve peace and what was left of prosperity, the liberal democracies were attempting to follow a political course between the two extremes of fascism and communism. This was no easy agenda, given the extremities with which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Russia were polarizing their own internally bloody pathologies along with the other nations under their influence.  

The most fervent expression of these death-wish ideologies was being hammered out in eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia and Poland, two regions or "nations" that had long been areas of exploitative manipulations between the larger powers, were destined to become the flash points of the world's next "great war"--the one that the last "great war" (1912-1918) had purported to avoid.

Czechoslovakia was a fledgling democratic republic during the '20s and '30s, having been established in the remnants of the Austria-Hungary empire that had dissipated after 1918 and the end of World War I. But this new Czech nation was a fragmented check-list of ethnic groups: Czechs, Sudetan Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, and a few others.

A multiplicity of political identities in 1930s Czechoslovakia generated a swirling frenzy of discontents. The most intense Czechoslovakian rivalries were in the western border districts,  the Sudetenland, where a  plurality of ethnic Germans held to Deutschland traditions and loyalties. This hotbed of opposing discontents is where World War II found its first militarized eruptions. 

During 1938, Hitler's impudently pagan will-to-power intimidated British and French politicians into submissive strategies of appeasement. The Munich Pact conceded Sudetenland to the third reich, and assigned the Czechs to an impotent role as pawns in the game. Czech leaders had not even been consulted; nor were they present when the sellout deal with the devil was signed in Munich in September. The Nazi wehrmacht's ensuing occupation of Sudeten Czech lands set the terrible stage for Hitler's invasion of the Czech lands in March 1939.

But Czechoslovakia was just a wehrmacht warmup for the full-scale blitzkrieg of Poland that came in September of '39. That's when the Allies finally woke up to smell the smoke of hitlerian deception and destruction. Then they began to mobilize the Allied resistance that ultimately became successful by 1945. But World War II was no walk in the park.

A lot has changed in our world since then. Today our politics and war rationalizations display a few discernible parallels with those turbulent times past. Now the players on the stage are the same, but different. European ideological extremities have synthesized somewhat, a la Hegelian dialectics, morphing to "the West." Meanwhile in Eurasia the old kid on the world block--Islam--rises as a newly energized force-field. It will exert  polarizing effects to religiously neuterize our old ideologies into kaffirific irrelevance. Could be a volatile situation, especially if you factor in the spark-breathing dragon in the far East.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

 

 

Shades of things to come

 It might have been seventy million years ago that a large asteroid hit the earth somewhere near Cancun.  And it might have been that the big space-tossed boulder would have thrown such a cloud of dust and disturbance into the earth’s atmosphere that it probably  altered the pecking order of biological  kingdoms for thousands or even millions of years thereafter.

Earth shaking events.  They happen.

It might have been that the severe rearrangement of earth’s biomes had put a major crimp on the old dinosaurs.  Maybe they became like DOS after Microsoft, just slipping down into the dark hidden recesses of the new program, relegated to subterranean, hydrocarbon pools of potential energy, their giant-generating introns and exons having been unraveled and liquefied like the assets of international  corpuses and cartels that would later profit from their demise.  It might have been that the superbad, supermad totally-rad reptile kings and queens of the jungle could no longer compete with the smaller, sleeker, smarter, uppity mammals who  were in the ascendancy and currently favored by the committee for Natural Selection.  It might have happened that way. And maybe the superbad supermad totally rad reptile kings and queens of the jungle found themselves faltering, over the next few eons, losing their command of the playing field, becoming more and more baffled  at their waning ability to throw their weight around any more, until finally they just, maybe, gave up the ghost and conceded their diminished reptile role to those miniscule, dust-lickin’ mutated cousins who would  later distill all that serpentine angst  and alienation into a venomous infusion of death—inflictible  on those new-kid-on-the-block mammals who were ruining the neighborhood. Equipped with  the ugliest, hissingest triangulated  head that God ever allowed on a breathin’ creature, these slitherin’ peabrains  could nevertheless still proudly carry on, simply by opening their mouths, the dominance and intimidation of their ancestors. Speak of the devil……

“Watch out for the damn snake!” yelled Simon.

from chapter 19 of Glass Chimera

And this just in, Cen0zoically speaking...from Ezekiel, at the River Chebar, among the diasporas:

" Thus says the Lord God, 'Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal. I will turn you about, and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords--"

"...Persia, Ethiopia, and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet, Gomer with all its troops..."

Stay tune for more planetary updates on the continuing crisis of Darwinian survival of the fittest on the third rock from the sun.

The Ghost

That Occupying spirit face, it hauntifies my mind--
a smirky mask with painted smile upon its face of ghastly white.
Oh! what a ghostly site.
With black-lined clownish bizarrity
it mocks authority,
and conjures up signs of somethin happnin here;
what it is aint exactly clear.
Now fhe windmills of my mind  crank out shadowy spectres from long ago:
the port huron statement and
four dead in ohio.
I see the ghost of  My Lai massacre;
it stalks my g-generation like a smear--
blood on our hands from the tip of an agent-orange-spiked spear.
Out damned spot!
Have you come to splotch us again?
Out, I say, with the dire trespass of dow jones culpability
and exploding napalm fire like some howling banshee.
As puff the magic dragon who used to frolic in autimn mists
so our innocence has spiraled up in smoky days,
with unwelcome images from a Gulf of Tonkin haze.
Deja vu
I feel this wallstreet visitation is a spectre of impending trouble:
calling into question all the blood guilt ever known by man, double
and all the carnage ever splattered on to span
upon a waste and wanton land;
Who's responsible for this?
And my mind misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars
shall bitterly begin
with these Occupying rebels
whose consensual zeal would snuff out the wallstreet conniption fit
of capitalism's big collateralized debt obligation zit,
as if the heart of depraved man could be improved upon a bit.
Oh shit!
This protest, in its collective sensibility,
is presumed more pristine
than corporate culpability,
with its globalized guile and leveraged guilt.
Does their urgent cry for egalité
cloak some fateful guillotine strategé?
A reign of terror from the tyrrany of the ninety-nine
to thrash out the fattened one-percent piggy kine?
Will this produce a future gulag or a forced labor camp,
a cultural revolution led by a raging tramp?
Who's responsible for this?
this fermenting mobbish contagion
transgression upon our convulsing nation.
It renders ashen white our neo-wallstreet mask
and calls us to blot out the bloody task
of human business.
Out! damned spot, we cry unto the whispering wind.
lay on us no more collateral damage to offend.
And ask not for whom that damned bell  tolls;
now it peels again and again unto our restless souls.

Our ancestral refugees left ghoulish tales from long ago and far away
of the dachau and  the auschwitz and the hitlerian birkenau.
And we hear ghastly tales from the so-called other side
of how they perished in stalin's gulag, and in the mao's "cultural revolution" millions died.
By their calculated rearrangements of the classified human chain,
they bound our bloody attempts to declassify into some ghoulish arbitrary game,
where the shedding of guilty blood, for the intent to make everything right
became an instant reply of human cruelty, sprinkled with bloody fright.

Now we the piggy capitalists, have we crossed that same damned line?
Have our reckless swapping one-percent cast unbearable load upon the ninety-nine?
Do you Occupyers now propose to judge their fatcat games
with social restructurings to expunge their selfish shames?
Good luck with that;
it'll be a cold day in hell
when we know for whom that bell
tolls.
Our capitalist souls?

Let them come to New York!

In 1944, as the combatants of World War II crept wearily toward  their blood-bought peace, econimist Friedrich A. Hayek wrote:

"Contemporary events differ from history in that we do not know the results they will produce. Looking back, we can assess the significance of past occurrences and trace the consequences thay have brought in their train. But while history runs its course, it is not history to us. It leads us into an unknown land..."

Three years earlier...

It had been the unprecedented wilderland of World War II that provoked, in 1941, Dr. Hayek to wrestle his incisive thoughts down onto some kind of intelligible mat. He began to jot some observations about that death struggle  embroiling Europeans in ferociously destructive warfare at that time.  What emerged from his typewriter three years later was an historical opus which he named The Road to Serfdom.

But back in '41 on this side of the Atlantic, you (or your grandparents) may remember... 

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we Americans joined the Allies in their war to defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan. Together with the British, Russians, the resisting French, and a few other courageous nations, our brave soldiers collectively ran the Nazis into the  European ground,  and then chased the defeated Japanese back onto their island.

From 1945 onward after that terrible war, a widening political rift developed between us Americans and our former comrades-in-war, the Russians. We are a freedom-loving, constitutional democratic republic. The USSR was at that time a communist state. We wanted to make the world safe for democracy. They wanted to foment a worldwide revolution in order to overthrow what they considered to be our corrupt capitalist system, and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat, the working classes.

For several decades the defeated Germans were thereby divided into two countries, one on each side of this politico/philosophical struggle. The dispute was known euphemistically as the Cold War. West Germany was being rehabilitated according to our democratic traditions, beginning with our American leadership as provided through Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. East Germany was being ruled by the communist Russians, led by Josef Stalin and then Nikita Kruschev. Those Germans in the western half of their country joined us western Allies as advocates of free democratic-republican government. Their countrymen in the east part of Germany were stuck with being occupied by the USSR communists.

The strange treaty arrangements that had followed negotiations after WWII divided not only the German nation, but also its capital, Berlin. This bizarre situation was further complicated by the fact that Berlin is located geographically in eastern Germany. Since the Allies insisted that the German capital not be yielded totally to the Russians, Berlin became a divided city of east/west, even though it was located in the midst of eastern Germany. West Berlin, or the western half of Berlin, became a (literally) isolated enclave city-state of western political freedom in the midst of communist East Germany. The freedom-seeking citizens of West Berlin were totally surround by communist, Russian-dominated East Germany.

But many Germans of the east were not content to stay on the totalitarian side. So many fled to West Germany, and many escaped to West Berlin. But the Russian overlords didn't like this, so they built a wall in 1961 to keep the imprisoned east Germans from getting over to the free side.
But then along came, also in 1961, John F. Kennedy. Formerly a naval officer in the Pacific part of WWII, he had since been elected our American President. He took the mantle from President ( and former Commander of the Allied troops) Eisenhower. Jack Kennedy had kept his eye on Germany; he had been in the Oval Office less than a year when he decided to visit the Germans and give them some much-needed encouragement.

Those  wall-ensconced west Berliners extended an enthusiastically fond welcome to President Kenndy. Standing at the Brandenburg Gate, in the very shadow, as it were, of the odious Wall, he told the eager Berliners:

"There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future... Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin. Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."

A very good point, that, Mr. President.

He also told them:

"When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades."

That day of liberation did come for the Germany people, and for all the citizens of  Berlin. Twenty four years later in 1987, another American president, Ronald Reagan, stood in the same Brandenburg Gate location and spoke boldly to the Germans gathered there. He used the occasion to challenge the top-dog Russian wall-keeper:

"Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

In 1989, the Russians did tear down the Berlin wall, and the divided Germans were united once again--this time not in a nazified third reich-- but in a democratic nation.

The great tide of freedom as expressed in democratic, constitutioanl government, and led by our American republic,  achieved at that time, along with our freedom-generating allies, another landmark victory. The USSR gave up the abusive Stalinist ghost and decided to join the free world.  I'm hoping the Chinese government will one day permit, or be required to enable, such political liberty.

However, as Friedrich Hayek had been trying to express back in the '40s, history and its struggles are never as clearcut as we would like to think.

The 9/11 attack on World Trade Center and its ensuing terrorism may be a harbinger of a new death-struggle between ancient worldviews on the global horizon. While its true that developed nations have conducted a century of economic debates and political wars--both hot and cold--over freedom vs.totalitarianism, now that old ideological kamph is synthesizing.  Communism (and fascism, as two peas in a rotten statist pod, whether they admit it or not.) are reconciling with "democracy"as strange bedfollows  into a dialectical tension of constituionally-arbitrated political battles: socialists vs. libertarians, democrats vs. republicans.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or back at the caliphate, the real death-struggle among humans has reverted to guess what?--religion!

Go to New York City and see the hole in the ground. It was not dug there by communist workers, nor was it blasted by fascist fanatics.  That rapacious gap was inflicted as an airborn, calculated casualty careening  waywardly on a fateful collision course--a path plotted between Islamic hegira and liberty-hugging westerners. Let the world come and see.  Let them come to New York! Let them come and see the hole in the ground.

We've got a new brave-new-world morphing here. The once-new brave-new-world is devolving back into an old brave-new-world. Its a different kind of beast we're dealing with, much more vindictive than the animal spirits on Wall Street. And its zealous vehemence is much older than either communism or democracy. Now is the time for  citizens in this  land of the free and  home of the brave to reach deeper into our spiritual heritage than politics or youtube will propel us.

Turn or burn.

Glass half-Full

Mr. Baldwin is us.

In the mid-1930s, when Adolf Hitler began his big push to re-arm Germany, nobody in the world really knew or understand what the mad dictator had in mind. The once-and-future enemies of Germany--England, France, and Russia, were somewhat alarmed at the initial stages of Hitler's expanding wehrmacht.

He got their attention when he sent German soldiers to re-occupy the Rhineland in 1936. Third Reich belligerence became even more apparent when Hitler ordered the anschluss of Austria in 1938 and then the military occupation of the Sudenland in Czechoslavakia in March 1939. But when, on September  1 of 1939,  Adolf Hitler cranked up his war machine to invade Poland, the Allies knew that they would surely have to put a stop to German aggression, and so they declared war.

And those Allied nations, especially Britain, were really scrambling to equip their fighting men with military equipment and weapons. They were playing catch-up ball. Nazi aggression was taking them by surpise.  But not really, because a few vigilant leaders, most notably Winston Churchill, had recognized the signs of war to come before everyone else did, and had advised their governments accordingly.

So its not like the British didn't see it coming; its more like they didn't want to see it coming, and so they had failed to make adequate preparations. When the necessity for defense of Europe and of Britain itself became woefully obvious, politicians began to accuse each other of dropping the ball on military readiness.

We can never really do enough in this life to prepare ouselves, individually or collectively, for the storms and roadblocks to come. Most times, governments and folk are caught unawares, blindsided, by the catastrophes on planet earth. You know the ones I'm talking about--floods, earthquakes, nuclear accidents, wars, climate change, depressions, etc.  And even if people are not totally clueless about the imminent dangers, their institutions are generally underfunded and overextended when the  card houses begin to crumble.

Mr. Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister 1935-37, was a primary target of those who, in 1939 and thereafter, were looking for scapegoats. Although he had advocated for military rearmamant during his time of leadership, he had not, it seemed, done enough to get the job of military preparedness done adequately to meet the real needs when push later came to shove.

In his 1975  book The Past Masters,  Mr. Harold MacMillan, who later served as Prime Minister 1957-63, wrote this about Stanley Baldwin:

"The truth is that, like many other people, he could not believe that there could be a man in the world so wicked and so lacking in any kind of moral feeling as Hitler. Baldwin's life had been cast on the whole in pleasant places. He had had to deal with a lot  of people in varying degrees of good and evil in their character...(but) He had never believed that there could be a living devil.  So although the full development of Hitler's career came after his (Baldwin's) resignation, he was unable to attune his mind to the thought that in this century of 'progress' the world might be hurled for a second time into the abyss of destructive war."

Nevertheless, the worst happened anyway.  And I think most of us are like Mr. Stanley Baldwin.

Smoke