[Livia]

Originally Posted by angus58

Well perhaps if he wasn't being shouted down and people did him the courtesy of listening to what he had to say, we would have had his views on that.

Has everyone forgotten one crucial fact and that is that Ben is JEWISH - in fact he is the only Jewish contestant in the house. Far from defending Hitler I got the impression he was trying to say that there were other ways Britain could have handled Hitler. Revisionists would say that in 1940 when Britain's back was to the wall the Germans offered a number of peace deals and guarantees to Britain and her empire but they were refused. America was still pursing an isolationist policy and the Russians had a non-aggression pact at that time with the Germans.

Had Britain decided to engage in talks with the Germans, who knows whether the genocide that followed could have been averted by diplomatic intervention. We shall never know because by then Churchill was PM and was intent on pursuing the war, rejecting any peace talks. It is no coincidence that when the war was over, the voters overwhelmingly voted him out of office as he was seen as a "war monger".

So FFS give Ben a break. He is a Jew and I guarantee he does not condone the genocide that was inflicted on the Jewish people during Hitler's regime; I believe he was trying to say that Britain had other options on the table in 1940 other than all out war, and had these other options been explored, who knows how the course of the war would have gone?

Good post Angus. Balanced and informed.

Furthermore, at the end of the war, the allies decided it would do Europe no good to keep Germany in rags, so we rebuilt their country at our own expense. We had borrowed an enormous amount of money from the USA in order to be able to afford to fight a war at all, and we only finished paying that war loan back in December 2006. Germany is now a major manufacturer and economic power, while we're... well, a bit wobbley economically and we produce nothing. In fact we've sold off most of our family jewels too; Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Land Rover... they're all German now.

I don't disrespect the valour of the generation that pulled us through the war, nor the sacrifices they made. I respect absolutely that we had to do something, but with the benefit of hindsight I think we would have been in a much better situation now had we been able to negotiate a peace instead of fighting for it.