Word: prewar
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...finance its military effort. In 1925 Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, returned the country to the gold standard, believing that such a step would help restore the British Empire to its former preeminence. But he made the mistake of setting the value of the pound at its prewar gold price, which did not take account of high wartime inflation. This was a major cause of the nationwide general strike that virtually immobilized the economy in 1926. Indeed some historians believe that Churchill's decision to return to the gold standard helped trigger the worldwide Great Depression...
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain emerged from the 1938 Munich Conference, having ceded a slice of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, and made his slogan "peace in our time" synonymous with disastrous appeasement. Chamberlain's policy was largely a reflection of the popular pacifist sentiment in prewar Britain. Only a hopeless alarmist would suggest that such calamitous history might be repeating itself today. But Western military experts and policymakers are undeniably concerned by an increasing reluctance by Europe's man-in-the-street to accept the necessity of self-defense...
Apart from the intermittent tension caused by Iranian bombing forays, the mood in Baghdad is little different from that of prewar days. "We are not afraid of the Iranians or anything they might do to us," said the owner of a small shop in the Baghdad souk, or marketplace. His remark reflects not so much bravado as the fact that there have been few Iranian bombing raids in which civilians have been hit. Even in the famed Shi'ite Muslim Al Kadhimain mosque, where posters of Ayatullah Khomeini once hung during religious festivals, there is little evidence of special...
Other factors were at work. When he got out of the Army, Reagan was dunned by the Internal Revenue Service for back taxes on his prewar movie salary; and though he never became a top star, by the late 1940s he was making enough money to find himself in the 91% income tax bracket...
That view sat well with Ryoichi Sasakawa, 81, famous in Japan as a philanthropist and longtime prewar supporter of conservative causes, an accused war criminal who spent three years in jail after World War II, and a multimillionaire whose fortune was made by, among other things, staging hydroplane races on which eager Japanese bettors could wager. Sasakawa disclosed that he had sponsored the salvage ship Teno and its team of divers at a cost of $13.6 million. The ingots and whatever else was found were his, said Sasakawa, who estimated that treasure worth no less than $36 billion was aboard...