Are we France?

"Moral paralysis" is a term ... that may be painfully relevant to our own times."

Thomas Sowell is one of my biggest influencers and heroes. If you only have time to follow a few columnists each week, follow him.

His latest is a history lesson, with a frightening exit question: Are we France? Are we morally paralyzed, perhaps fatally?:

... Back in the 1930s, the governments of the democratic countries knew what Hitler was doing -- and they knew that they had enough military superiority at that point to stop his military buildup in its tracks. But they did nothing to stop him.

Instead, they turned to what is still the magic mantra today -- "negotiations."

No leader of a democratic nation was ever more popular than British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain -- wildly cheered in the House of Commons by opposition parties as well as his own -- when he returned from negotiations in Munich in 1938, waving an agreement and declaring that it meant "peace in our time."

We know now how short that time was. Less than a year later, World War II began in Europe and spread across the planet, killing tens of millions of people and reducing many cities to rubble in Europe and Asia. ...

Read it all and make up your own mind.