The Good War: A Cautionary Tale
Opinions vary with respect to the ongoing conflict in Iraq, but we can all agree that the struggle for Europe, 1939-45, was “the Good War.” Or can we? Not if Pat Buchanan is right, and he presents a serious argument in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, one of the finest achievements of his career. His principal thesis is that the war guarantee given to Poland by the British government on March 31, 1939, turned a German-Polish confrontation into a general European war, one that led to the death of millions (including victims of the Holocaust) and to destruction on an unimaginable scale. Placing the decision for war in the hands of the Polish government was all the more inexcusable and inexplicable because the dispute in question revolved around Hitler’s reasonable demand that Danzig, an ethnically German city, be joined to the Reich and because the British were in no position to back up their guarantee.
This is an argument that Buchanan made in A Republic, Not an Empire, and it won the approval of George F. Kennan. The British government, Kennan wrote in a personal letter to the author, “would have been better to shut up, to rearm as speedily as possible, and to avoid further formal commitments of any sort, while waiting the further turn of events.” As usual, he was right, but Buchanan was left with an obligation to sketch out a counterfactual history. It is this. Had Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain not acted precipitously in presenting the war guarantee, Hitler, who did not want war with Britain, might never have waged war against the West; he would have satisfied himself with Danzig, or swallowed all of Poland before turning on Soviet Russia. The war, if it came at all, would have been restricted to the East.
This, of course, must remain a matter for speculation. The impression one gains from this thoughtful book is that Hitler, though an evil man, was, at least in his conduct of foreign policy, reasonable and relatively restrained in his objectives. Buchanan is certainly right to insist that the Nazi Führer had no serious plan to conquer the world; his was a European universe. Nevertheless, I think it a mistake to approach him as if he were a crude Bismarck; he was a reckless adventurer and, unlike Stalin, he posed a clear and present threat to the entire continent. Driven as he was by a demonic will, I doubt that he would have contented himself with Danzig, or even with domination of the European East.
And something more. Buchanan rightly observes that the Treaty of Versailles was a monument to stupidity and vengeance. While the Germans bore some responsibility for the coming of the Great War, they were not alone guilty—far from it. And despite Woodrow Wilson’s endless prattle about “self-determination,” he, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George never permitted Germans to choose the state under whose authority they wished to live. As a result, Hitler could make a compelling case for the Reich’s claim to the Sudentenland, Memel, Danzig—even Austria.
But as Buchanan knows, “self-determination,” even if music to American ears, is a recipe for endless conflict. What people want matters, but their will must always be weighed against competing and equally important considerations, including historical claims, militarily-defensible frontiers, rational boundaries, and political stability. The Sudeten Germans wished to live in the Reich, but the victorious Allies had, however unwisely, awarded the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia, in part because the new state required a defensible border to the west. It was territory belonging to what was, after all, a sovereign state.
Buchanan has little difficulty convincing us that the war produced unspeakable evils and, like a growing number of historians, he does not attempt to relieve the Allies of moral responsibility. The fire bombing of German cities, filled with men, women, and children who were noncombatants, marked what Paul Johnson has called “a critical stage in the moral declension of humanity in our times.” So did the forced repatriation of Russians and the expulsion from their homes of millions of Germans.
Buchanan places much of the blame for these crimes on Churchill, whose reputation, particularly in recent years, has suffered blows from which it may never recover. The war seemed to bring to the surface the dark side of his character. Certainly his visceral hatred of the Germans, as a people, dulled his moral sense and clouded his judgment. As A. C. Grayling points out in Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, the bombing campaigns that Churchill authorized, had they continued much longer, would have opened the Allies to a charge of waging a war of annihilation.
And what of Churchill’s fawning but apparently genuine admiration for Stalin? It is one thing to recognize that the war could not be won without the Red Army, but another to pretend that the Man of Steel was other than a coldly calculating mass murderer. When the United States entered the war, Kennan gave it as his opinion that, insofar as American interests were at stake, material aid might be extended to the Soviets, but that “we should do nothing at home to make it appear that we are following the course Churchill seems to have entered upon in extending moral support to the Russian cause.” Nor in Kennan’s view, should aid have continued once the last German soldier had been driven from Russian soil. That was not a view shared by FDR, who was, if anything, even more ready than Churchill to be deceived by “Uncle Joe.”
Buchanan’s subtitle, How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, points readers to another important thesis, namely that Britain lost its empire and Great Power status as a result of foolish decisions to wage wars—against the Boers, the Kaiser, and Hitler. British decline should, he believes, serve as a cautionary tale for the United States, the imperial successor.
Thanks in no small measure to the wisdom of George Kennan, the U.S. won the Cold War without leading its citizens and the world to Armageddon. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country began to pursue a foreign policy all too reminiscent of that which led to Britain’s decline; it reached its nadir when, in response to the 9/11 attacks, President Bush sent the nation on a quixotic mission to democratize the Middle East—if not the world. Like British statesmen before him, he led his people into an ill-advised war—and began to imagine himself the Churchill of his generation. And so, according to Buchanan, he is.
Comments
In reviewing the events up to the beginning of the war, one is struck by
just how moderate the Nazi demands on Poland were. The so-socalled
Marienwerder points included a demand for Danzig and a plebiscite
in the corridor region down to the town of Marienwerder. What is
striking is the lack of demands for any territory around Posen (Poznan)
and around Upper Silesia. The Posen territory awarded to Poland after
WW1 hadn’t even expressed its opinion in a plebiscite, unlike Upper
Silesia, which voted about 59-41 for Germany, and yet Hitler didn’t even
ask for this in his demands (though perhaps he would have later once
Danzig and the corridor were in the bag.). Another indicator of Nazi
moderation that year was the fact that after Germany annexed Memel from
Lithuania, Germany desisted from further aggressive acts against
that country, did not turn it into a protectorate etc. Similarly,
Nazi annexation of Austria did not unleash new demands for Hungarian,
or Yugoslav/Slovenian territory. Of course all bets were off once the
war started, but at least in the pre-war era, German moves, with
the obvious exception of the unjustified and outrageous annexation
of Bohemia and Moravia, were understandable from the perspective
of Wilsonian self-determination.
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Excellent and judicious commentary by Lee Congdon. Thanks.
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“There never was a good war, or a bad peace.” Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Josiah Quincy on September 11, 1773. The Hamiltonians claiming their view is the only view of the Founding Fathers also ignore Washington, Patrick Henry, and George Mason.
The people of Europe threw flowers and cheered as their boys marched off to fight in WWI. It was only when a generation died and it was shown to bea vile waste of life they scape-goated monarchs. Odd the politicians and political generals paid little.
The monkey in the White House and Condi are polishing his bust of Churchill claiming they will be vindicated.
Americans of Irish heritage should remember the Black and Tans. A British paramilitary group in uniform backed by Churchill to murder and terrorize the Irish. DeValera sent a low level delegation to Churchill’s funeral and refused to send condolences to his widow.
Bomber Harris gassed innocent Iraqis to terrorize them into submission at the behest of Chemical Churchill, then Secretary for War and Air. Phosphorus bombs, war rockets, metal crowsfeet [to maim livestock] man-killing shrapnel, liquid fire, delay-action bombs. Many of these weapons were first used in Kurdistan in the 1920’s.
The ANZACs remember Churchill.
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I entirely agree with Boyd that Lee has produced an excellent essay full of judicious
statements. The problem with grasping the demonic quality of Hitler’s regime is that
too many people have bought into the neocon stupidity that Hitler equalled Kaiser
Wilhelm who equaled Bismarck. Hitler represented Bismarck in about the same way that
Obama and Hillary represent the legacy of George Washington.
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Well done. The fact that neocons like Sharansky portray Kennan as an amoral calculator with ice water in his veins shows how little they know about “realism,” which is not the simplistic rejection of morality in politics. If only Bush had learned more from his hero Churchill: as colonial secretary to Lloyd-George, Churchill urged the British in 1922 to pull out of Iraq after a year of troubles in that “ungrateful volcano.” What is taking the neocons to admit failure?
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Friends,
Excellent article on a critical subject. There is nothing new in PJB’s book, judging from the reviews, both pro and con. What is important: PJB will give a much wider circulation to that which is already known but which has been kept quiet to avoid bursting the received wisdom bubble.
The war criminality of FDR and Churchill was covered in my 2005 book The Unauthorized World Situation Report. More recently, the Churchill connection was addressed in March on my website. Go to <www.PatrickFoyDossier.com> and click on “Crackbrain McCain Plays Churchill Card”. Francis Neilson is the man to remember and to revere.
In “Crackbrain” I sum it up: “… like the present conflict in Iraq, World War II was just another fraudulent, self-destructive war, albeit on a grander scale. Senator McCain and most folks do not see it that way, granted. The current enlightenment says we should worship Churchill and FDR. That question will be taken up in a separate dispatch.”
Patrick Foy
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Any praise of de Valera must be tempered by what a louse he was. The SOB did not care for lives of Americans. We forget the behavior of the majority of the Iriah too easily during WWII.
From something I have written:
“One of the survivors of the 1916 Irish uprising against the British was New York born Edward de Valera. Tenuous claim to American citizenship saved de Valera from execution after his arrest in 1916. Born in New York in 1882 of a Spanish father and an Irish mother, young de Valera was sent to live in Ireland after his father died. Once there he adopted the Gaelic Eamon to replace Edward. A cynic might question his mother’s motives in sending the boy back. After remarrying, she never had her son sent back. She was to die in the United States in 1932. Was this unkindness and abandonment by his mother the root of de Valera’s attitude toward the United States? The confusion of not having love within the family and the substitution of teary-eyed love of country, meaning Ireland, has passed through Irish-American families for generations. In late January of 1942 American troops landed in Northern Ireland. Coming so soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, this was not an unexpected development. de Valera blasted the American action as meaning recognition of the “Quisling government” in Belfast and support for partition. The needs of the United States were of no, or very small, consideration to de Valera. Yet, the opening of the sea lanes by American and British naval forces enabled Eire to feed itself during the war years...”
“Not surprisingly some Irish-Americans continued to place concerns for Ireland above those for the United States. Writing in the Boston Sunday Globe of March 1, 1942, Joseph A. Conry, former member of the House of Representatives, reviewed his efforts to drum up support for the war. In the Globe in February of 1941 Mr. Conry had advocated annexation of Ireland by the United States as a protective act. This projected benevolence was not well received, but rejection did not deter Mr. Conry as he wanted independent Eire under de Valera to furnish three ports for use by American forces. Making an obligatory reference to de Valera as a “great, big-hearted man”, Mr. Conry opined de Valera’s love for a united Ireland had clouded his judgment to the importance of the war...”
“Mr. Conry noted that de Valera had no hesitation in taking part in American domestic politics when it suited his purposes. When General Frank Aiken came to the United States in April 1941, he boldly stated his purpose was to get armaments from the American people through their government to defend Ireland. Mr. Aiken (as he was then known) later was accused of Nazi sympathies as Minister in charge of censorship in 1945 by a deputy in the Irish parliament, but was defended by de Valera...”
“de Valera on the death of Hitler went to the German Legation and expressed condolences to the German Minister. For this he was roundly criticized, but George Bernard Shaw in his own manner congratulated him. Shaw thought the actions of the Irish gentleman and Spanish grandee when he threatened to preserve Irish independence by fighting all invaders to include England, Germany and the United States with his 40,000 man army proved his Christian chivalry which many pretend to admire. His noble heart must be recognized even if his worldly wisdom would be questioned...”
“When the Allied victory was announced in Dublin, bitter street fights with police fighting rioters lasted for three days. Initially the disturbances were confined to those who thought Ireland should have fought in the war and those who thought she should not have fought. An Irish newspaper, the Sunday Independent, maintained government censors prevented publication of an article praising American General George Patton, but did permit the publishing of one praising Field Marshal Erwin Rommel...”
“This attitude by the Taoiseach was not without support in the United States. On Memorial Day of 1945, just three weeks and a day after the war in Europe ended, the Kings County Board of the Ancient Order of Hibernians announced the resolution it had adopted at the Knights of Columbus Institute in Brooklyn. This resolution upheld the neutrality of Eire during the war: “This neutral position saved the lives of men, women and children of the Irish nation”. Further affirmed was that neutrality had been maintained by virtue of the great courage, intelligence and sincere Christian desire for peace of the Irish people”. Almost fifty years later that the hyphenated Irish of America would condone the treacherous neutrality of the government of the old country while not remembering the dead of America still rankles...”
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I was once having breakfast with a visiting Professor from the UK and was praising Collins and demeaning deValera at the Army-Navy Club. He looked at me and said, “you read Tim Pat’s book then?” I had indeed read Tim Pat Coogan’s book on Collins but friends in Ireland thought deValera behind Collin’s death. He certainly tried his best to assassinate his character.
Churchill came close to invading and occupying Ireland to secure the ports for use in anti-sub activities. If I would have been in Ireland and Britain did that I would have certainly supported armed resistance.
deValera was in the US fund raising while the Republican forces were fighting the English. But he would probably have been shot by an English firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol if not for his American citizenship.
Roger Casement saw the Congo and abuse of the Putamayo in Peru the Boer War and became decidedly pro Irish independence. He tried to raise Irish troops in Germany and get arms but the English had to stretch the Treason Act to hang him at Pentonville Prison in 1916.
Churchill knew there was submarine activity and let the munitions laden Lusitania be sunk to bring the US into the war.
DeVelera had a lot of reasons to fear Churchill. I wonder how many American Republicans would have dismissed the Irish as terrorists at worse and liberals at best? DeValera was a louse of the first order though.
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McConnell defended the TAC decision to run the review here:
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2008/06/09/buchanan-lukacs-and-tac/
This guy also talked some smack.
http://bannedindc.wordpress.com/2008/06/09/mcconnell-and-his-critics/
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Back in the real world, Germany chose war, not Poland. Germany, not Poland, made an alliance for war with Stalin.
It’s very simple. The contry that invaded, chose war. Germany invaded Poland.
Congdon and Buchanan are self-deluding.
Stop rewriting history to meet current agendas.
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“The good war” with our man of the century at the helm leading us on to Christian utopia should be enough to dispel any doubt regarding just how Orwellian our aggrieved times. Patrick has done the world a courageous service by his revisionist re-ordering of the actual facts. E.g., the initial carpet-bombing of civilians, long accredited to Hitler has long been a false sin laid at the feet of Hitler’s Germany, making one wonder what else may lie buried under our victorious version of history? The lies evidently continue to serve some purpose - for who/what we might ask?
As for the neutrality of Ireland one is reminded of the perhaps not so silly quote by G.B. Shaw, as cited by Frank Harris: “The 100% American is 99% village idiot. “
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From reading PJB’s book and other histories of the period, it would seem that the evidence points to the fact that Hitler had no real grand strategic design other than Lebensraum. He was frequently surprised by western responses to his moves, and operated on a mostly ad hoc basis, taking what was in the offering.
If Britain had not declared war and brought the rest of us eventually in, and Hitler had gone east as he prophesied, even if successful in defeating the Russians, it would have taken exorbitant time and resources in trying to digest the huge bear.
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World War Two is the “Good War” to many and as such serves as the founding myth of the American
Empire. The events in Europe and Asia in the years 1938 through 1941 are all too often used as
proof of the necessity of American interventionism. After all, the Germans were at the gates of
Moscow and Japanese were feasting on European colonies in Asia. Pat Buchanan has done us
a great service in pointing how the blunders of men like Churchill, Grey, Eden, and Wilson
resulted in the conditions that led to Second World War. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were
blowback from the Great War, a war that would not have been the disaster it was if not for
the unnecessary intervention of Great Britain in 1914 and the United States in 1917. In this
respect, the two world wars should serve as a cautionary tale of the hazards of interventionism.
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Rick Johnson has hit the nail on the head. Hitler’s designs were entirely in the east-and any conquest of Russia would have tied him up for decades absorbing it all. There was no danger to either the English or the Americans.
As to the wisdom of Hitler’s attack, he made the right choice. Otherwise Stalin’s summer 1941 offensive would have communized all Europe by 1942. “Demonic” Adolf actually saved western civilization in 1941-an achievment for which he has yet to receive credit.
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“...unlike Stalin, he posed a clear and present threat to the entire continent.”
Lee Congdon simply does not know his history. I realise the study of the Bolsheviks is deprecated by those with much to hide, but Bolshevik Communism was an international revolutionary movement promoted and supported from Russia whose aim was the overthrow by aggression or internal coup d’etat of all democracies to become satellites of Russia. Hitler was well aware of this and determined to oppose it in Germany and elsewhere. He was not successful because of British and French interference and it was only the belated intervention of the US that prevented the whole of Eurasia including China becoming an Empire controlled from Moscow. (Mao ever was armed and controlled from Moscow). If Lee Congdon believes that Germany had not a perfect right to oppose by all means the fate which was planned for it by Stalin, I think he must imagine that the Bolsheviks were far more benign than their track record would suggest.
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Mr. Gongdon wrote: “The Sudeten Germans wished to live in the Reich, but the victorious Allies had, however unwisely, awarded the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia, in part because the new state required a defensible border to the west. It was territory belonging to what was, after all, a sovereign state.”
The old Hapsburg “Holy Roman Empire"--the Austrian Hungarian Empire---had been falling apart prior to WWII. If WWI had not split it apart, it would have fallen apart of it’s own dead weight.
I’m ambivalent about Buchanan’s view of the justification for Munich and the destruction of the Czech State, for a German minority among a sea of Slavs. Czechs had been trying to convince the Hapsburg Monarchy to assume the crown of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia for years. It was always derailed by the German minority, who didn’t want to give up their priviledged status over a Slavic population. If the Hapsburg monarchy had agreed to this simple request, it would have resolved a lot of the problems in Bohemia.
A independent “Sudenland” was completely unreasonable, the Bohemian mountains WERE the natural defensive boundary of Bohemia from the time of the Hussite Wars.
Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich was a calculated effort to buy time until Britain rearmed. And like most English, they had no more sympathy for the Slavs as well as hatred of the Germans.Churchill was a bloodthirsty British Imperialist, and his goal all along was to preserve the gains that the British Empire made in WWII. He wanted to preserve the status quo of Versailles, and keep the German nations diminished and weak.
But this is all water under the bridge. Buchanan’s goal with this book is to remove the nonsense about the “Good War”, and therefore undermine the neo-Con/Israeli argument that the current “ar against Terrorism” is morally the same as the “War against Fascism”.
All this “War for Democracy” in the mideast will do is set the stage for another conflict in the 21rst Centrurey
that will bring even more destruction and destroy the USA just as WWII destroyed the British Empire.
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I am no fan of Churchill but the Second World War was caused by German aggression. Hitler was a madman who led his country to destruction.
As for Hitler having no quarrel with the West.This fanciful nonsense. He invaded and conquered France and if the RAF hadn’t stopped the Luftwaffe he would have invaded Britain as well.
Buchanan is right about one thing though:if this was a good war, what the hell would a bad war look like?
RB London
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To Forthurst and others who like the “Hitler was a victim of the Brits and Reds” thesis: you don’t know your history!! Lee is right that Stalin threatened Europe less than Hitler. Here are some factoids:
1) Stalin undermined socialist movements elsewhere around the world, even locking up western leftists dumb enough to visit Moscow
2) right up to Operation Barbarossa, Stalin thought that Hitler wouldn’t attack Russia, and that the peace pact would hold
3) Uncle Joe did all he could to undermine the Reds in Spain, leading to Franco’s victory
4) even after the war, Stalin was jealous of other communist movements, as in China; Mao did his own thing.
Stalin was a SOB in the worst sense, but he desired accommodation with Hitler for some time. He even liked the term “national socialist” to describe his regime. In short, he was a more calculating imperialist than crazy Adolf.
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Unfortunately most comments were from a western, more specifically American perspective. Chou En Lai and many Asians have a much different interpretation.
Chou told James Reston, ex-sportswriter and most influential political columnist of his generation, that the United States suffered comparitively little in both world Wars and benefitted greatly.
Reston after hearing Chou still hated the Japanese wrote that he was gladdened that Americans do not hate, but that we forget. This moronic remark exemplifies the abysmal perspective that the American media brings to world events. Once again I remind readers that Hirohito’s Japan killed far more Chinese than Hitler’s Germans killed Slavs and Jews. Once again the US was the great supplier of the Japanese war machine for much of that time.
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It’s very easy for anti-strauss and his ilk to totally underestimate the real and perceived threat which Bolshevism posed to Europe, if unlike Germany, you did not have it on your doorstep. Good old uncle Joe, what a great guy, signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and annexed Finland, Latvia, Estonia, and a lion’s share of Poland where throughout his new vassal states he introduced a benign governance best illustrated at Katyn.
At the end of the war he occupied and remained in much more of Europe and was belatedly perceived for what he had always been. Of course communism meant nothing to the Bolsheviks, it was merely a cloak to hide their villainous ambitions so why would Stalin approve of communist movements in other countries unless they were under his control? As to Mao, I presume you were aware that Stalin held his son hostage for many years to prevent Mao becoming too independent? read some history yourself before you start lecturing.
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Egad, forthurst, you are so ignorant! Nobody was saying that Stalin was a great guy. (can’t you read?) And please tell me of all the communist movements which Stalin controlled in other nations (without undermining them in the process). Are you aware that Stalin didn’t give a rip over the world communist reaction to the Ribbentrop Pact? Stalin was a horror, yes yes, and he threatened Europe. But once again, he was more of a threat to his fellow Reds than Hitler was to his fellow Browns.
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The fall of France in the summer of 1940 was precipitated by that country’s declaration of war
against Germany in September 1939. This lured Hitler westward when his ambitions were in the East. Now Buchanan is arguing counterfactual history so it is conjecture to suggestthat Hitler could have been contained and his regime would have eventually moderated, much like Stalin’s after his death in 1953. Given the catastrophe that “the Good War” was and that it ushered in the Cold War and nuclear age with all its potential horrors, Buchanan’s point is well taken.
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Back in the real world, Germany chose war, not Poland. Germany, not Poland, made an alliance for war with Stalin.
It’s very simple. The contry that invaded, chose war. Germany invaded Poland.
In real world, RonL, hundreds of pages of serious scholarship are
not dismissed so flippantly—unless one has an agenda.
Congdon and Buchanan are self-deluding.
Well, RonL, someone around these parts certainly is. You’re
increasingly sounding like the Sid Cundiff of World War II discussions.
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