The Day After |
From the Gilboa hills which I look upon every day the stillness seems to belie everything. I see the weariness of a society where war has ceased to be an event and has become a daily condition. In the British summer of nineteen forty five two months after the collapse of Nazi Germany Winston Churchill with an eighty three percent approval rating was removed from power by the very hands that until yesterday had cheered him. The British electorate operated on a distinction that Churchill himself failed to make that the temperament required to win a war is rarely the same as that needed to rebuild a devastated nation and voted for Clement Attlee a man of such unassuming presence that Churchill used to say that when Attlee entered an empty room the room stayed empty.
The ghost of the nineteen thirties with the unemployment and hunger of the Great Depression still etched into the body politic haunted the ballot boxes and the soldiers returning from the front wanted to know if the country they had fought for would be better than the one they had left behind. The Beveridge Report published in nineteen forty two........