[Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include 'The Strange Death of Tory England' and 'Yo, Blair!' He is writing a book on Churchill's reputation and legacy.]

Seventy years ago today Neville Chamberlain gave his famous broadcast telling the nation that we were at war, before Parliament met in emergency session that Sunday morning. Among those who spoke was the newly-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, in one of the shortest and finest speeches of his life, one of the least known – and most relevant today.

For 10 years Winston Churchill had been out of office – through his own choice – well before he became the most prominent critic of appeasement and of the Munich agreement in September 1938. Within months of Munich, that policy was seen to have failed, as the rump of Czechoslovakia fell apart and Hitler arrived insolently in Prague. There was much clamour in the press for Churchill to be brought back into government, but Chamberlain waited until his return to the...

The paleolibertarians have never been Herbert Hoover fans. Listen to Murray Rothbard, the godfather of paleolibertarianism -- an economist who hated not only the New Deal and desperately yearned for a return to the gold standard, but also wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve, the Social Security Act, the income tax, the Internal Revenue Service, and even the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789. From"The Myth of Herbert Hoover:"

In all previous depressions, the Federal government had pursued a laissez faire attitude, keeping hands off and letting market forces bring about recovery quickly; and the recovery always came, no matter how steep the depression at the start. But Hoover had long determined that he was not going to pursue such a"reactionary, Neanderthal" course....

...In pushing through his program, Herbert Hoover created virtually all the lineaments of the New Deal; the New Deal was in fact Herbert Hoover's creation, and historians, now removed from the...

[Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by The Daily Star.]

If there is a moment, a place, a person, and a legacy that come together to bring sadness to all Arabs, they are upon us this week in the 40th anniversary of the September 1, 1969 revolution that brought Moammar Gadhafi to power. There is nothing to celebrate today in Libya, other than a colossal waste of that country’s human and natural resources over four decades.

This is also a day of calamity for the modern Arab world, not only because of what Libya has suffered and squandered, but also because Libya is only a severe example of the self-inflicted distortions, waste and misfortunes that have defined much of the Arab region since independence. This is also a moment that should spur some quiet reflection by all those in the West who deal with the Arab world with shameless self-interest.

Gadhafi’s Libya is everything we always dreaded we would become, as independent states, societies,...

[Klaus Wiegrefe is a journalist at Spiegel.]

A few days after returning from Vienna, Hitler, beaming with joy, told Goebbels "Czechoslovakia is next." Goebbels noted in his diary: "The Führer is wonderful. A true genius."

To Goebbels and Hitler, European dominance seemed within their grasp. Eighteen months later, they would take the final step into World War II.

Hitler met with Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten German Party. In 1919, the Allied victors had incorporated Sudetenland, which had formerly been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into Czechoslovakia. However most Sudeten Germans rejected the newly formed nation, which discriminated against them. Particularly hard-hit by the Great Depression, many Sudeten Germans became increasingly enthusiastic about the chancellor in neighboring Germany.

In March 1938 Henlein, referring to the government in Prague, told Hitler: "We must always demand so much...

Seventy years ago today, Adolf Hitler's armies streamed across the western border of Poland, plunging Europe into that six-year-long cataclysm known as the Second World War.

These years would see the virtual extermination of European Jewry in concentration camps, the names of which have passed into history as places of almost unimaginable suffering. Indeed, the scale of Jewish martyrdom in the war has no equal, for almost 80 per cent of the 7 million Jews living in Europe had perished by 1945.

But of the actual states caught in the war, none suffered as terribly as Poland – its territory was overrun and partitioned, its people enslaved and its capital reduced to rubble. A bitter anniversary for Poland, therefore. And an uncomfortable one for one of the leaders of the former Allied powers descending on Gdansk for the anniversary, because, of course, Poland was attacked from the east as well as the west; Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia agreed to divide the...

[Historian Andrew Roberts' latest book, Masters and Commanders, was published in the U.K. in September. His previous books include Napoleon and Wellington, Hitler and Churchill, and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.]

At 04.45am on Friday 1 September, German forces activated Plan White, which had been formulated that June by the German Army High Command, the Oberkommando des Heeres. On either side of a relatively weak and stationary centre, two powerful wings of the Wehrmacht would envelop Poland, crush its armed forces and capture Warsaw. Army Group North, under Colonel-General Fedor von Bock, would smash through the Polish Corridor, take Danzig (modern-day Gdansk), unite with the German 3rd Army in East Prussia, and move swiftly to attack the Polish capital from the north. Meanwhile, an even stronger Army Group South, under Colonel-General Gerd von Rundstedt, would...