Gumby wrote:
And yet, the world would be in a much weaker position without that arrangement — as distasteful as it might be. (Perhaps that's the reason why countries go along with the arrangement.) Hitler would not have been defeated by a group of small non-aggressive nations.
I guess UK politicians agree with you. The UK seems to do its best to wiggle into playing the mini-me role for the US in its military adventures.
I just don't agree though. The world "would be weaker" in what sense? What if the next Hitler is at the helm of the single superpower's military? Hitler was defeated by the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union had instead been independent countries (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia etc) that had come together to fight him then I think that also could have defeated him. I think dictators always fall anyway. To my mind the key lesson from WWII was about the failure to ensure safe passage of refugees:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
"According to authors Rabbi Ted Falcon, Ph.D & David Blatner in Judaism for Dummies, when the “St Louis was turned away from Cuba…, America not only refused their entry but even fired a warning shot to keep them away from Florida’s shores”?.[6] Legally the refugees could not enter on tourist visas, as they had no return addresses, and the U.S. had enacted immigration quotas in 1924. Telephone records show discussion of the situation by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, members of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet, who tried to persuade Cuba to accept the refugees. Their actions, together with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, were not successful.[7] The Coast Guard was not ordered to turn away the refugees, but the US did not make provision for their entry.[8] As St. Louis was turned away from the United States, a group of academics and clergy in Canada attempted to persuade Canada's Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to provide sanctuary to the ship, which was only two days from Halifax, Nova Scotia.[9] However Canadian immigration officials and cabinet ministers hostile to Jewish immigration persuaded the Prime Minister not to intervene on June 9.[10]
Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis while the ship was docked in the port of Havana.
(It is unknown why Captain Schröder did not proceed to the Dominican Republic, as the Dominican Republic at the Evian Conference in July 1938 offered to accept 100,000 Jews.)
Captain Gustav Schröder,[11] the commander of the ship, was a non-Jewish German and an anti-Nazi who went to great lengths to ensure dignified treatment for his passengers. He arranged for Jewish religious services and commanded his crew to treat the refugee passengers as they would any other customers on the cruise line. As the situation of the vessel deteriorated, he personally negotiated and schemed to find them a safe haven (for instance, at one point he formulated plans to wreck the ship on the British coast to force the passengers to be taken as refugees). He refused to return the ship to Germany until all the passengers had been given entry to some other country.
US officials worked with Britain and European nations to find refuge for the travelers in Europe.[7] The ship returned to Europe, docking at Antwerp, Belgium, on 17 June 1939.[12] The United Kingdom agreed to take 288 of the passengers, who disembarked and traveled to the UK by other steamers. After much negotiation by Schröder, the remaining 619 passengers were allowed to disembark at Antwerp; 224 were accepted by France, 214 by Belgium, and 181 by the Netherlands. They appeared to be safe from Hitler’s persecution.
The following year, after the German invasions of Belgium and France in May 1940, the Jews were at renewed risk.[13][14] Without its passengers, the ship returned to Hamburg and survived the war.
St. Louis Captain Gustav Schröder negotiates landing permits for the passengers with Belgian officials in the Port of Antwerp.
By using the survival rates for Jews in various countries, Thomas and Morgan-Witts, the authors of Voyage of the Damned, estimated that 180 of the St. Louis refugees in France, 152 of those in Belgium, and 60 of those in the Netherlands, survived the Holocaust. Adding to these the passengers who disembarked in England, of the original 936 refugees (one man died during the voyage), roughly 709 survived and 227 were slain.[15][16]
Later research by Scott Miller and Sarah Ogilvie of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gave a more precise, higher total of 254 deaths:
"Of the 620 St. Louis passengers who returned to continental Europe, we determined that eighty-seven were able to emigrate before Germany invaded western Europe on May 10, 1940. Two hundred fifty-four passengers in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands after that date died during the Holocaust. Most of these people were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór; the rest died in internment camps, in hiding or attempting to evade the Nazis. Three hundred sixty-five of the 620 passengers who returned to continental Europe survived the war."[17]