ANGLING TO APPEASE:

The Church's shameful record of appeasement (Andrew Roberts, 13/10/2002, Daily Telegraph))

To go to war was unconscionable, said the Archbishop of Canterbury; it might even be asked "if in any circumstances so horrible and so futile a thing as war is ever justifiable" in the modern world.

The United Nations was "still the only permanent instrument for preserving international order, justice and peace". Furthermore, the Government should be looking at ways of putting "an end to the insane arms race", rather than preparing for war. Of course Saddam was guilty of "almost brutal reliance on force" but, the primate believed, "to some of us at least the torturing perplexity was whether it was right or wise, even in order to protect the basis of international order, to urge a war that might have destroyed civilisation itself".

In fact, of course, the words are not those of Dr Rowan Williams, the in-coming Archbishop of Canterbury, today, but of his predecessor at the See, Cosmo Gordon Lang, in the House of Lords debate at the time of the Munich Agreement; I have merely replaced Hitler with Saddam and the League of Nations with the United Nations.

It serves to show that the Church of England has long been opposed to dealing with dictatorships. Indeed in that debate of October 5, 1938, Lang even went so sickeningly far as to say: "We sincerely hope that this measure of appeasement may lead to others in its train."

Unfortunately, the trains that got rolling were the ones taking Jews to the East to be murdered. If war is never justifiable then such trains will ever be rolling. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 14, 2002 8:32 AM