At one point, I was asked about my political heroes, and one of my answers was "Neville Chamberlain."

Heh! Back in '65, after reading E.H. Carr's The 20 Year Crisis, which analyzed events from 1919-1939 in terms of the real, (realpolitik),the ideal, (international law), and the tension between them, I wrote a very ill received paper for a course in inter-war history for which a very aged Sir John Wheeler-Bennett was the guest lecturer, in which I defended Chamberlain's attempts to deal with Hitler as being a genuine attempt to address legitimate concerns on the part of another country and of giving Hitler the benefit of the doubt. But the point of the course, which I failed to take, was to establish an equivalence between the "appeasement" of the '30s and the anti-war movement of the '60s. One of the points that came up was the famous English mid '30s resolution not to fight for King and Country, and how most who took the oath ended up fighting.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."