By Jeremy Salt

The collective west will surely have to pay a heavy price one day for its culpability in this evil. Israel should have been stopped decades ago.

One of the most lethal failings of the human species is the refusal to learn from history. The past is the guide to the future, which is why, by ignoring or not even knowing it, the ‘civilized’ west, in particular, lost its way.

Where we are now is where previous generations have been before, on the brink of war. Governments are ignoring genocide in one part of the world while making war and planning the next one in another.

In 1914 the Balkan states gave the final tug that pulled Europe into a world war and now another state on the periphery of Europe, Ukraine, is threatening to pull it into another one, if Israel and the US do not get in first with a war on Iran, now in an advanced stage of preparation.

In global affairs, ignoring history is like driving without a road map to guide you to where you’re going. History tells us that the three most dangerous states in the world in the 1930s were fascist Italy, national socialist Germany, and imperial Japan. Today, the two most dangerous states in the world are the US and Israel.

They have joined forces to wipe out Palestine and the Palestinians. They are committing the worst atrocities in modern history. The world has never seen anything more vile than what it is being forced to watch now, but governments in the collective ‘west’ are refusing even to utter a word of condemnation.

Stopping mass murder is not even on their agenda. Enabling it is. They are complicit, culpable collaborators. It is the most shameful thing in modern history, eclipsing any horror we have seen since 1945.

The dirtiest word in the 1930s was appeasement. The second dirtiest, in the western collective of political and corporate elites at least, was Bolshevism. The two fused in the ruling class, pandering to Hitler and Mussolini, the strong men who would block socialism and build order out of chaos.

Their means were hardly in line with liberal democratic principles, but as the means served the end, they could be justified. Churchill admired Mussolini, while past and present government ministers flew to Berlin to engage with Hitler.

In September 1936, Lloyd George, British prime minister from 1916-22, met Hitler at Berchtesgaden, describing him later as a “born leader of men” and a “magnetic and dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose,” even if his methods were “not those of a parliamentary country.”

Seeing that in 1933 Hitler had used the Enabling Act to abolish all political parties and trade unions, Lloyd George’s remarks severely understated the reality. By the time of his arrival in Germany, tens of thousands of communists, social democrats, former union leaders, gay men, and Roma were already in concentration camps.

In October 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia), using poison gas in 1936 to prevent a repetition of the disaster in the 1890s, when an invading Italian army was pulled apart by the army of the Negus.

The response by Britain and France was not to demand an Italian withdrawal. In the Hoare-Laval pact, their solution was an “exchange of territory” that would allow the aggressor to keep much of Ethiopia. The plan foundered on the rocks of European outrage, but Ethiopia received almost no help, and Italy stayed in occupation until 1945.

In March 1936, Hitler sent German troops into the Rhineland, demilitarized in the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty crippled Germany’s recovery from the war, so challenging it head-on had widespread support.

It was not just the treaty, however, but whether Britain and France were prepared to stand up to him that Hitler wanted to test. He was beside himself with anxiety because Germany was not ready for war. Had Britain and France called his bluff, he would have had to retreat but they did not.

In July 1936, the Falangists launched the uprising that began the Spanish Civil War. A European pact of non-intervention didn’t work. Hitler’s Condor Legion supported the Falangists on the ground and from the air, while Russia sent arms to the republican government in Madrid. Otherwise, its only other support came from the international brigade.

Behind the lofty refusal by the British and French governments to provide arms to both sides lay the need to stop the spread of communism in western Europe. In Spain, it seemed to have got its foot through the door.

Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were rough, but they got the job done. For the same reason, the same governments supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. They disliked him, but they disliked Iran more. So, they gave Saddam the weapons and intelligence he needed to fight Iran to a standstill,l and when that was done, they invaded Iraq and killed him.

Appeasement in the 1930s led directly to the Second World War. The lives of

70-80 million people were extinguished, at a time when there was not one nuclear weapon on the planet.

The British writer Claud Cockburn called the 1930s the “devil’s decade.” The litmus test of backbone in the 1930s was standing up to the Nazi and Fascist threat. Now it is Gaza, where a colonial settler state created and backed by the ‘liberal democracies’ is committing genocide with their consent.

In the 1930s, newspapers and the radio were the only public sources of what people knew. It is not as if they were even-handed. In Britain, amongst the pro-fascist media, both the Daily Mail and The Times ran propaganda for the Nazis. So did the New York Times, whose correspondent in Berlin, Guido Endris, was an open Nazi sympathizer until the war broke out.

Not only were political and wealthy social elites sympathetic, but corporations profited from their trade relations with Germany and Japan right up to 1939, despite their antisemitism and the atrocities they had already committed.

Most of the raw material Japan needed for war was provided by the US and Britain: lead, 66.2 percent from the ‘British Empire’ and 33.83 percent from the US; nickel, 94.8 percent from the empire; copper, 92.19 percent from the US; zinc, 48.2 percent from Britain; asbestos and mica 100 percent from Britain; scrap iron and steel, 91.01 percent from the US (the detail here is taken from Victor Gollancz’s 1942 book Shall Our Children Live or Die?, pp.98-99).

Exports to Britain from 1934-39, worth at least 100 million British pounds at the time, helped Germany to pay for the raw materials needed for war. Under the Payments Agreement of 1934, it acquired millions of pounds (billions today) worth of British armaments. The question to be asked is why; the answer clearly is that, despite moral reservations, a well-armed Germany was the safest bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism.

US corporate collaborators with the Nazis – before the war and in some cases during it – included Ford, IBM, ITT, Coca-Cola, General Motors (through its Opel subsidiary), Standard Oil (providing tetraethyl lead, a necessary component in aviation fuel), Alcoa (aluminium), Chase National Bank and Dow Chemicals (materials for synthetic rubber and explosives).

The modern parallel is the supply of war materials by US, British, and European corporations to Iraq in the 1980s, including those needed to make chemical weapons, so that it could destroy Iran. They profited by tens of billions of dollars. (In the eight years after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US government paid contractors at least $138 billion, with at least $72 billion going to the top ten.)

The current litmus test of morality is Gaza, and again, the ‘liberal democracies’ are not just failing but openly betraying the principles they purport to stand for, as all the world can see.

This is not the radio and newspaper media world of the 1930s. The genocide is flaunted by Israel, deliberately pushed into the world’s face as if to say: what are you going to do about it?

Social media provides the details in videos of mass and individual murder and the hellish torment of Palestinian civilians by ‘soldiers’ who mock them and sneer at their distress. They are not soldiers at all but heavily armed cowards in uniform picking on their favourite targets, defenceless men, women,n and children.

The politicians know all this but do nothing to stop it. Even worse, they supply Israel with arms and maintain trade and diplomatic relationships instead of at least showing the Israeli ambassador the door.

“Why didn’t we know?” This is a question future historians will be asking of the present time, although, as reproduced here, it was asked in 1942 by George Sava, the British but Russian-born surgeon and writer, in his book School for War.

Throughout the 1930s, all the red lights were flashing, but governments in the ‘liberal democracies’ reacted the same way then as they are reacting now.

They are looking away. They are ignoring. They are suppressing. They are justifying. They are pandering to the aggressors. They are punishing not the genocidalists but their opponents.

Aggression abroad is matched by aggression at home, where anyone speaking up for Palestine is the target of police state brutality, prosecution, imprisonment, and deportation. In the US, ‘extraordinary rendition’ has now been transferred to the home front, with Louisiana taking the place of Guantanamo Bay.

By aiding and abetting Israel, these governments are complicit in genocide, even as it moves the world inch by inch towards a conflict of which Gaza will probably be seen one day as the spark.

The collective west will surely have to pay a heavy price one day for its culpability in this evil. Israel should have been stopped decades ago, but instead was indulged year after year. “Why didn’t we know?” Where this would lead, the future historians will ask, far too late, but we did know.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.