White Lies, Black Borders, and Red Lines
7th May 2013
Guy Somerset doesn’t believe the same things that everyone else believes.
Every schoolchild is taught that the evil Germans invaded Poland in 1939 because they loved killing people (usually infants). This crippled account of history with hatred as its crutch continues throughout high school and university only to be mended, to the extent it ever is, in graduate school or by self-education. Then the inquisitive mind learns that the war was perhaps not entirely caused by Germans’ insatiable need for babies’ blood.
Lamentably an area known as the Danzig Corridor was to drag Britain and France into a continent-wide conflict that resulted not in the legitimate surrender of a Polish strip of historically German land, but instead the sacrifice of Poland to decades of Soviet tyranny. Some heroic individuals foresaw this and attempted to avert it.
In the end, Britain and France blundered into a charnel house that need never have existed, and it was largely in the service of promises, assurances, and treaties with Warsaw. After all, they reasoned, had not Germany crossed a red line?
Thankfully history never repeats itself and the United States is blithely in the process of threatening the Syrian government over a set of red lines that the US drew.
That’s sarcasm, incidentally.