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February 19, 2008
Hitler, and How History Repeats
Striking quote in an interview with the author of a new book about how Hitler exploited the hopelessly ill-considered Treaty of Versailles for his own political purposes:
Hoelterhoff: You take care to connect the problems of the Treaty with the disasters of today.
Andelman: The countries that were created had little relation to any natural existing boundaries and put together a whole host of different personalities, nationalities and religions that really had no business being together.
Hoelterhoff: Were they just stupid?
Andelman: The lack of knowledge, the lack of interest is really astonishing. The American adviser was actually an expert on the Crusades which means his expertise on the Middle East ended somewhere around the year 1400, so you have to ask yourself what kind of information were they using to draw these boundary lines?
Ah, how history repeats itself.
[via Bloomberg]
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Thanks for your comments!!
Incidentally, the name of the book (which is a most compelling read if the author does say so himself!) is
"A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today" [www.ashatteredpeace.com] .. available at Amazon and most book stores !
All the best,
David A. Andelman
Harold Nicolson was a participant in the peace conference and a sharp critic of the Big Three (Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau). He wrote to his wife: "darling,it is appalling, those three ignorant and irresponsible men cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake."
Good call! The funny thing is, you would think that anyone who REALLY studied the crusades understood history enough to know about the historic relationships in the region.