Iran's regime likes to deny the Holocaust for political reasons. Their ploy with the British sailors played true to form: tell the world about the generous and beneficent Iranian government, how well it treats those it captures although their country has been so unfairly vilified by "The West". The lesson is that Iran's government cares nothing for the reality of the situation, only for the propaganda opportunities of parading trite images before the world media.

Hitler's Germany understood this practice well. Neville Chamberlain and his ilk were easily deceived because they wanted the propaganda to be true. There is a lesson of history to be learned. Propagandists require willing participants, willing shills and foils for their trite images to succeed.

The war journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote of her experiences upon entering Dachau shortly after Germany's surrender. Her experiences of the aftermath of Hitler's Germany as exemplified by the piles of dead and the ghosts of the living were real beyond anyone's imagination. Her cynical optimism for the future of the human species was forever quenched. She wrote a novel shortly thereafter, Point of No Return. The chief protagonist, a U.S. Army enlisted man, at the end of the story, the war over, intentionally drives his jeep into a small group of innocent German citizens, killing three. There is no moral of the story other than no German in peace is worth living after what they each had allowed their country in war to become.

It is only a novel. But her frame of mind was clear.

She never forgave the Germans, despite several visits well after the war had ended. She never saw hope for their recovery from the twin sins of obedience to authority or the cruel authority of rule. She forever after believed that the Germans by nationality, all of them, were beyond redemption. They were forever damned.

Is today's Iran the same as Nazi Germany, history again preparing to repeat itself? Is every Iranian as guilty by name and deed as their worst propagandist? Is every Iranian an obedient son or daughter or a cruel practitioner of the lie and the equivalent of a hobnailed boot? Is there any hope for the citizens of a country that would allow their leader to deny the Holocaust? At what point, if ever, is the Point of No Return?

And for England, too: where is the Point of No Return?