"Nowadays, it's easy to regard such schemes as impossibly far-fetched," said Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5. "But at the time it was reasonable to believe that after the Allied victory there would remain a dangerous postwar Nazi underground which would continue a secret war."The linked story is talking about some schemes the Nazis were cooking up at the end of WWII. Reading the story I was thinking, well, yeah, you could do all that stuff, and if done properly it could cause considerable trouble. At that point, the outcome of the war was already determined. None of these schemes would have changed that, the German's just didn't have the resources anymore.
So the schemes may have been pointless and futile, but at no time did I ever consider them far-fetched. They were the kind of actions I would expect from a desperate organization. So Christopher Andrew, whoever he is, gets a black mark in my book.
It's kind of like the yahoos who claimed that no one ever imagined a terrorist attack would come via an airliner. I read a story about an attack via a passenger liner forty years ago, so I certainly considered the possibility. I can't imagine everyone in the security business is a dunderhead, though once you get politics involved everything starts to look stupid.
There seems to be a kind of blanket of stupidity over the world. It order to reach the largest number of people you apparently need to dumb down your message so even third graders can understand it: "nothing bad will ever happen, everything is all safe and warm and you don't need to worry about a thing, the establishment will take care of you". Saying something intelligent seems to light a fire under the stupidest people who are then compelled to make a big fuss, which will capture an audience of dunderheads, and will annoy anyone who has anything better to do. Some people enjoy arguing with idiots, and the media loves to report these arguments.
I am sorry to be wasting your time with this, but the line I quoted just irritated me to no end.
1 comment:
There is also the point that the Germans prize public order and they are good at following orders.
Partisan warfare and fighting an occupier are messy things. Because Hitler insisted on immolating his country by continuing the war, there probably wasn't much of Germany which hadn't been bombed or fought over.
When Germany surrendered, there were very few left interested in fighting on. And a surrender is an official order to one side to "knock that shit off."
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