Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler has gone down in history as one of the worst decisions of the modern age. 6,000,000 Jews eventually lost their lives through the Holocaust. Chamberlain may have secured peace for his time, but the long-term consequences were horrific.
Many have wondered where Chamberlain came up with the phrase "Peace for our time"
At best, it was a hollow boast, at worst, it was an intentional attempt to postpone conflict by attaching it to the future. "Let our children fight fascism, but not us."
Chamberlain's boast is similar to a statement made by King Hezekiah of Judah (739 BC - 687 BC) over 2,000 years earlier.
The prophet Isaiah had told Hezekiah that problems were on the horizon for the nation of Judah:
5 Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord Almighty: 6 The time will surely come when everything in your palace, and all that your predecessors have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord. 7 And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon. (Isaiah 39:5-7)Read again the awful things that Isaiah says are coming on the next generation of Jews.
1. All the nation's treasures will be 'carried off to Babylon.'Now listen to Hezekiah's response to Isaiah's words:
2. Nothing will be left in Judah.
3. The king's own children will be 'taken away' to Babylon.
4. The king's sons will become Eunuchs.
5. The Jews will serve the king of Babylon as slaves.
8 “The word of the Lord you have spoken is good,” Hezekiah replied. For he thought, “There will be peace and security in my lifetime.” (Isaiah 39:8)Chamberlain, Hezekiah, and ... we who live in the United States of America in 2019.
We all think alike.
We don't mind that the national debt is over 22 trillion dollars and at some point, the government will collapse under the strain of debt.We don't mind...
We don't mind that credit card debt hits a record 4 trillion dollars and people will one day be unable to pay back what they owe, plunging the economy into a depression worse than the 1930s.
We don't mind that the infrastructure of our country has fallen apart and it will be impossible to repair the outdated grids, bridges, dams, and power plants when the system collapses.
We don't mind that cries for expanding socialism in the US guarantees a collapse of the capitalistic business economy that built the United States.
Because "There's peace for our time."
21 comments:
Excellent article!
I find myself wondering if we are not doing the same thing in the church, settling for human engineered growth instead of conversions because it pays the bills and keep the doors open "in our generation."
Linda
What should happen now?
Do we raise taxes on the middle class?
Do we 'privatize' Social Security?
Do we 'excuse' companies that robbed their employee's pension accounts and destroyed their workers' chances of a decent retirement income?
Now that we have made the rich richer, how must we now get this paid for?
The rich NEED that money so they can hire lobbyists to further their interests in Congress.
The rich NEED that money so they can buy-back corporation stocks, to keep control over their corporations.
Do we need a new 'Ryan Plan' to squeeze the working middle class and the working poor?
Isn't it a bit late to speak about an increase in the national debt? Of course it went up as the tax cut which benefits the top one-percent of the top one-percent of our citizens takes effect.
We working people and retired people will have to pay as we always have paid, but to gut Social Security and pensions and Medicare and to eliminate 'safety nets' for the mentally-challenged and the handicapped seems a great price to enable enormous tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.
Did you ev3r meet with Helen Stamp?
Hello
What are we seeing happening at this present time?
We are seeing the influence of the Little Horn Beast of Daniel 7:8-11: -
Daniel 7:8-11: - 8 I was considering the horns, and there was another horn, a little one, coming up among them, before whom three of the first horns were plucked out by the roots. And there, in this horn, were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking pompous words.
. . . . . . .
11 "I watched then because of the sound of the pompous words which the horn was speaking;
We are also seeing Satan preparing his Good and Faithful servants and providing them with the means of oppressing their fellow man while he will be locked up in the Bottomless Pit for 1,000 years.
We are presently seeing the Sixth Bowl continuing to be poured out during this present time and the preparation taking place to begin drawing all the kings of the earth towards assembling their armies in sight of Jerusalem at Armageddon in our near future, when the timing of the single verse prophecy of the Lesson of the Fig Tree heralds when the beginning of the Summer season of Harvest of souls will start.
Around 100 years ago we saw the seventh Bowl poured out During and shortly after WW1 when the cities around Jerusalem were levelled, Babylon was remembered once more in 1926 after a period of some 2,000 or so years of being desolated and devastated so that God's wrath can be poured out once more on it, and . Jerusalem was partitioned into 3 parts after WW2.
We have seen the King of the north lead a coalition of nations into Babylon/Iraq to heal the land instead of fulfilling God prophecy of destroying that nation and land.
We are seeing the Jeremiah 50-51 prophecies being fulfilled for those same nations who entered Babylon to heal the land coming to fulfilment along with the prophesied Climate Change with the earth's temperature rising ever so slightly to affect the weather patterns of the whole earth.
What are we seeing at this present time? God's prophetic word coming true and this present age, which has still a little further to go, will end with great signs and wonders happening in the heavens and here on the face of the earth when the wicked heavenly host and the kings of the earth will be judged and imprisoned in a pit after which God establishes His Everlasting Kingdom here on the earth.
With the judgement of the Gentile kings of the earth after their trampling of God’s sanctuary for 2,300 years, all of Israel will be redeemed/saved and God will make like new again, nearly the same covenant, that He had made with Israel at Mt Sinai, which they willingly entered into, but rebelled against, but with some subtle changes for them to enter into the covenant to once more become a Kingdom of Priests, a Holy nation and His possession amongst the Nations. God will draw Israel to Himself and will plant them in a fertile field/soil and teach them about His Kingdom which is contain within the foundational truths that came down from Heaven as a rock. After this period of teaching to be Priest and a Holy nation, the Summer season of harvest will begin and the river of life will swell to become a river so wide that it cannot be crossed.
This is what I am seeing happening as told within God's word, as I understand it.
Shalom
Wade,
America’s Great Depression years were 1929-1941. My grandmother lost her farm to the BANK. They put her furniture by the edge of the road.
Being born in 1932, much of my life I thought a depression was ‘right around the corner’. Around the age of 8, I began to save coins. I buried them at the top of a high creek-bed. A year went by with me adding to my collection. My dream was when we had no money, I could say, “I’ve saved money!”
Well, that didn’t happen because the depression didn’t come and a flood took my money down the creek.
Ops, I’m living up to my nickname, “Forgetter”. I’d finished the 8th grade, so I was 15 when I started saving money.
His Everlasting Kingdom here on the earth
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrIliShUwAAoXIr.jpg
Rex, sounds like the current took your currency out of the bank and divested it abroad? :) Ken
A favorite quote from Thomas Paine which, I think, relates perfectly to selfish and thoughtless generations:
"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."
Thomas Paine would say, with conviction: "Tell me what I must sacrifice for the good of my children, my grandchildren. Test me and see there are no limits to my sacrifice for the common good."
Now the overwhelming sentiment is:
"Give it to me now and let my grandchildren pay for it."
Compare the official response to the attack on Pearl Harbor and 911.
Pearl Harbor: Sacrifice
911: Spend
"Thomas Paine would say, with conviction: "Tell me what I must sacrifice for the good of my children, my grandchildren. Test me and see there are no limits to my sacrifice for the common good.""
NP - I've enjoyed reading some of Tom Paine's work and would like to think if he were still alive he'd spend the time researching these events you speak of like 9/11 (or the school shootings, etc) instead of believing the official narrative - for the good of his posterity.
Very few people I've met have spent more than an hour or two researching and asking critical questions. Putting in over a hundred hours just on 9/11 alone has led me to see that the official report is pure deceit and lies. No surprise they are spending while most Americans gladly give up their liberties in exchange for "safety"! Ken
https://www.ae911truth.org/
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuC_4mGTs98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3xgjxJwedA
Ken, I don'y suffer from over-confidence in the ethical behavior of government, but my point was not to accuse government of malpractice. Rather, my point is that we all are expressly tempted to sacrifice honor for expedience, and I believe this was the point of the original post.
Until and unless I am quite willing to have MY benefits reduced, knowing it will lead to some privation and lowering of my standard of living, then my complaints about the national debt will ring hallow. Everyone can find out, for example, how much of their social security benefits were actually funded by employee and employer contributions. To the extend that I do not object to the government's borrowing money from my grandchildren to fund my benefits, I have failed Thomas Paine's test. We will continue to elect politicians whose very future is guaranteed by never asking us to sacrifice.
You may be right. The government may have covered up the facts of 9-11. But their perfidy is no worse than Hezekiah's cowardice. Our ours.
Ken,
I believe you’ve made the best analogy I’ve heard in a long time. :)
Tom Paine's generation was as good at kicking the can down the road as any other generation has been. That is why they put a 20-year ban on abolishing the slave trade into the Constitution. The 800,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War paid the price for that procrastination, and our nation is still suffering from the effects of this choice to this day.
It's easy to criticize Chamberlain: his comment sounds idiotic under the clarity of hindsight. But at the time, Britain was in no shape militarily to start a war with Germany in late 1938. It's also not clear how Britain and France could have prevented the conquest of Czechoslovakia, since all of Czechoslovakia's neighbors (including Poland) actively supported the German invasion. Furthermore, the British and French public were in no mood for war, and would likely have entered into the war far less enthusiastically than they did 11 months later.
What is true is that America has repeatedly applied the "lesson" of Munich to ill effect. We could easily have avoided the Vietnam war and its horrible losses (55,000 Americans and 1.4 million Vietnamese) had we been willing to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh, who had once been an enthusiastic admirer of the US. Ditto the Iraq War, our repeated interventions in Latin America, etc.
History is complicated and we should not be too quick to draw simple lessons from it.
Wade,
Respectfully, credit card debt is not $4 trillion. I believe you are referencing total consumer debt, which includes auto loans, Student loans, personal loans, etc. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/21/consumer-debt-hits-4-trillion.html
Credit card debt debt is at $1 trillion, with delinquencies near all time lows. Student loan debt, however, is 50% greater, at $1.5 trillion, and our Baptist-affiliated schools are not providing a lower cost solution, unfortunately.
Heavily Redacted MUELLER REPORT
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
" To the extend that I do not object to the government's borrowing money from my grandchildren to fund my benefits, I have failed Thomas Paine's test."
I hear you, Nathan, but my concern is that's merely like treating a heart problem with aspirin when heart transplant is the only long-term fix. Folks need to address more of the root problems like I think Tom Paine would. Ken
Nathan, I'm not sure to which Tom Paine you're referring.
In his last publication, _Agrarian Justice_, The Founding Father Tom Paine actually advocated for publicly-funded pensions for the old, as well as for a universal basic income, to be paid for by a property tax on wealthy landowners. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice
That's pretty much the definition of "borrowing money from grandchildren to fund my benefits."
Everette, I'm not elevating Mr. Paine to some level of retrospective perfection. I'm just making the case that when push comes to shove, our current generation is quite happy to avoid sacrifice at the expense of our grandchildrens' well-being.
And I'm also saying that we have historical examples of some few people who passed this ethical test in some stressful and trying circumstances.
Given our current situation I wish more citizens (most importantly I) would choose needed sacrifice over an increasing burden of debt passed to our progeny.
But for now I rejoice in the truth of a resurrected Savior!
Nathan,
Most people I know commit one of two great fallacies when they look at history. These are: 1) that the past was terrible and that everything nowadays is awesome; or 2) that the past was wonderful and everything nowadays is terrible. In general, the first group of people tend to be younger and more progressive, and the second group tends to be older and more conservative, but they're both wrong.
Life (and history) isn't that simple. We can find heroes and villains at every point in history. Sometimes, they are the same person. Pierce Butler, for example, was a wealthy South Carolinian who routinely risked his life to support the American cause during the Revolution, whose support for the Patriot army left him financially ruined. He was also a notorious slave trader who was personally responsible for inserting the Fugitive Slave Clause into the Constitution.
Was he a hero? Or a villain? It's complicated.
As for today, there are plenty of people who would be happy to pay higher taxes and/or accept reduced benefits to reduce the debt. However, those people don't get elected to higher office, or when they do, they insist that someone else do the sacrificing. This has unfortunately always been the case, throughout both American and world history.
But thankfully, as you note, we don't worship someone like that. We serve a Risen Savior.
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