In his keynote address at the Jerusalem Conference on February 20, Bernard Lewis discussed Iran’s active pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. But even withoutwmds, Lewis noted, Iran is still extremely dangerous. Adolf Hitler, he reminded his audience, never had weapons of mass destruction. And look at what that man accomplished with his non-nuclear arsenal.

Several speakers at the Jerusalem Conference talked about how slow democratic societies are to confront an ominous threat. The day before Lewis spoke, Israeli Professor Uzi Arad explained why Western elites find diplomatic policies of appeasement so attractive. “The opposite of appeasement—an effort to blunt, to contain and to confront—clearly entails a higher risk of direct confrontation, which may then erupt in some conflict. When faced with this choice between deferring … or taking the risk of immediate clash, all democratic societies by their nature are not prone to want to go to war. It is not in their ethos.”

Prior to World War ii, Western democracies exhausted every diplomatic option in order to appease Adolf Hitler and to avert armed conflict. It resulted in the deadliest war this world has ever seen. Were it not for Winston Churchill’s leadership, the Allied reaction to the spread of Nazism would have been too little too late. Yet, when considering the devastation of World War ii, it would be hard to argue that we almost waited until it was too late.

It was too late.

Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu recently said, “Churchill once spoke about the sleep of democracies and that they are only woken up by the jarring gong of danger, usually when it is about to be too late. So far, they’ve woken up in time. But not really, because the last time we’ve had a totally implacable ideology, a very violent one—actually messianic in the form of Nazism—they didn’t wake up in time. Yes, the West was saved. But we know how many millions died, including millions of our own people” (February 20).

Because of our failure to confront a demonic madman, 50 million souls died in the Second World War.

The High Cost of Appeasement

Within months of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Winston Churchill presciently warned during a parliamentary debate, “There is danger of the odious conditions now ruling in Germany being extended by conquest to Poland, and another persecution and pogrom of Jews being begun in this new area.”

Yet, even by the end of the 1930s, much of the world looked upon Hitler’s persecution of Jews as a purely internal German matter. No one confronted his implacable ideology. In a speech to the Reichstag on Jan. 30, 1939—six years after he became chancellor of Germany—Hitler lifted all remaining shreds of his veil to conceal the plot to exterminate an entire race. “In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it,” Hitler said. “I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the Earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

Even before this satanic prophecy, Hitler’s Lebensraum had already been set in motion, beginning with the rape of Austria in March 1938. In September of that year, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, transferring Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland into the hands of Hitler on the condition that the fuehrer would make no further territorial demands.

“The idea that safety can be purchased by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion,” Churchill warned. Chamberlain, on the other hand, proclaimed “peace for our time” in front of cheering throngs of Brits. He prophesied to Lord Halifax, “All this will be over in three months.”

A little more than three months later, Hitler prophesied of the annihilation of the Jewish race. A couple months after that, he helped himself to the rest of Czechoslovakia. It took six months for him to violate the terms of the Munich treaty. In six years, he annihilated one third of the entire Jewish race.

Yet, it wasn’t until Hitler’s September 1939 invasion of Poland that Britain finally awakened from its long, deluded slumber. It would be more than two years after that before the United States joined the Allies in fighting the forces of tyranny and oppression—and even then, only after being bombed at Pearl Harbor.

In The Gathering Storm, Churchill wrote about how the “laws of war” had been obliterated by the Nazi regime. In prior conflicts, for the most part, both sides would meet on the battleground, away from civilians. But during World War ii, “every bond between man and man was to perish,” Churchill wrote.

Crimes were committed by the Germans under the Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record. The wholesale massacre by systematized processes of 6 or 7 millions of men, women and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror the rough-and-ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pigmy proportions. Deliberate extermination of whole populations was contemplated and pursued by both Germany and Russia in the Eastern war. The hideous process of bombarding open cities from the air, once started by the Germans, was repaid 20-fold by the ever-mounting power of the Allies, and found its culmination in the use of the atomic bombs which obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It was at the very end of the Second World War, when American bombers destroyed two cities with weapons of mass destruction, that the worldwide slaughter of 50 million human beings finally ended. As horrific as that nightmare was, imagine how much worse it could have been had Hitler started World War ii with wmds.

The Final Chapter

When President Roosevelt asked Winston Churchill for input about naming the Second World War, the prime minister unhesitatingly blurted out, “the Unnecessary War.” As Churchill wrote in The Gathering Storm, “Up till 1934 at least German rearmament could have been prevented without the loss of a single life. It was not time that was lacking.”

It was Western will, of course, that was in short supply. Even as late as 1939, Western leaders were hoping to avert armed confrontation by appeasement. Churchill wrote his series of books on the Second World War to document how it could have been prevented. “We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger,” he wrote—“how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.”

If the pages of history have already been written about the consequences of acting too late when the world was at the threshold of entering into an atomic age, what will be the consequences of non-response this time around—in the age of nuclear proliferation?

Commentator Mark Steyn said in a speech earlier this month, “We have already seen something worse than the appeasement of the 1930s. We don’t have the same excuse that Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax had 70 years ago because our appeasement is done knowing the full consequences of what happened last time around. I think that makes it worse” (February 11).

What makes it worse still is that a new generation of Hitlers will have nuclear weapons at its disposal.

Mankind hasn’t been in this position before, to borrow Winston Churchill’s prose. And if that was true in 1929, think about what it means today. Notice what Churchill wrote in 1925, a full 14 years before Hitler began his rampage:

May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp, or dockyard?As for poison gas and chemical warfare in all its forms, only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book.

More than three quarters of a century later, we are now compiling material for the last few chapters of that dreadful book. These are the chapters Jesus Christ referred to when His disciples asked Him for the sign of His Second Coming and the end of the world. “For then shall be great tribulation,” Jesus said, “such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened” (Matthew 24:21-22).

Only in a nuclear age could this prophecy be fulfilled.