Peter Hitchens
speaker
821 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Sep
Peter Hitchens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And politics is one of them, I think.
Well, some people said that.
I think there were three people in the cabinet who were worried about it.
Two of them were John Burns and John Morley.
John Morley, probably the most intelligent person in British politics at the time, who actually resigned secretly, Asquith asked him to keep it secret over preparations for war, trying to prevent it.
And Asquith, I think, had serious doubts about it himself because, again, he was a clever man.
But he was afraid that if he didn't declare war, then his government would fall and a pro-war coalition would form between the pro-war elements of his own party and the Tories, and that he was panicked into it.
It wasn't a rational decision.
It was largely a panic and made on...
partly on the grounds that things had got out of control, which they did very rapidly.
Barbara Zuckerman's The Guns of August is probably the best description of how this happened.
It wasn't, no one sleepwalked into war, absolutely not at all.
The Germans quite deliberately
deliberately encouraged Austria into a confrontation with Russia in the hope that it would lead to war.
And it was an accident.
It's untrue.
But the diplomatic events which followed, particularly between Britain and Germany,
Basically, matters are getting increasingly out of control because we didn't realize that we were talking to a Germany which was absolutely set on war.
And Fritz Fischer's great book makes this quite plain.
There's no doubt in my mind Germany wanted a war, but they wanted a war with Russia.
Showing 601–620 of 821 · page 31 of 42
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