"James P. Hogan - The Proteus Operation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

that, even at the end of lifetimes usually judged far more successful. That was adequate
compensation in itself. He had a comfortable home and a devoted family. There were some stock-
raising ventures that he wanted to experiment with. His History of the English-Speaking Peoples,
begun ten years ago now, awaited completion. And there would always be plenty of painting..

No. It was no good.

He thrust out his lower lip and shook his head. There could be no disguising the sadness
and bitterness. It wasn't so much any sense of personal injustice that dismayed him -- anyone



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choosing a politician's life should be prepared for the risks, after all -- but the prospect of
watching the institutions of freedom and democracy, which he had devoted his life's work to
defending Passionately, debasing and prostrating themselves before tyranny, brutality, and every
other antithesis of decency and civilization. The consequence of giving the world such a precedent
to learn from could only be a calamity.

But why was it happening? Nobody could be as blind as some people were pretending to be.
The only explanation could be that they didn't want to see.

That was what was disturbing him more: his suspicions about the motives of some sectors of
the influential social and political circles from which he had been ostracized. The West had been
too eager to pour loans into bankrupt Germany. Too many occasions when firmness might have put an
end to Hitler had been allowed to slip by on flimsy pretexts. Too much Nazi propaganda circulated
too freely in too much of the English and French press. Too many apologists for Nazism were at
work among the West's trend-setters and opinion-molders.

The rich and the privileged, he concluded, saw a resurrected and rearmed Germany, Nazified
or not, as a shield against Russia. They would preserve themselves and their lineages by erecting
a barrier that would prevent Communism from expanding farther westward.

That was something that Churchill would never be a party to. There could be no
justification for protecting oneself from a thief by hiring a murderer. Heaven alone knew
Churchill was no friend of Bolshevism, and he was not about to start unsaying any of the things
now that he had been saying all his life; but the response to one odious ideology couldn't be to
inflict a second upon the world. No end could be justified by setting loose the Gestapo, the SS,
and the rest of the hideous apparatus of the totalitarian Nazi state upon the hapless, helpless,
long-suffering peoples of Europe.

The tinkling of the telephone on the desk interrupted his ruminations. He picked up the
receiver, took his cigar from his mouth, and rasped, "Yes?"

"Mrs. Sandys is calling from London," the voice of his secretary informed him from the
room downstairs that she used as an office. She was referring to Churchill's eldest daughter,
Diana. "She insists on speaking to you, I'm afraid."