FANFARE June 2014 | Page 8

R E V IE WS REVI EWS BOOKS A World to Gain By Thomas Toughill Clairview Books Revised edition (July 30, 2004) £15.50. T he general consensus is, of course, that American intervention in World War Two was inevitable. That the evil forces of Nazi Germany had to be taken down for the most egregious of crimes. Halting the murderers of Jews, ‘slanderers’, Christians, blacks, gays, the disabled (the list was endless), was a truly righteous action. But there is one man who claims that this is only partly true. And the evidence he offers is compelling. Thomas Toughill is a man who until now has remained a disinterested spectator ‘under the radar’ of public affairs and politics. But he has provided an interesting yet disturbing new outlook on the war against Nazi Germany. Born in Glasgow in 1943, Mr Toughill was educated at a local grammar school and completed his degree at the University of Glasgow where he read history, politics and German. After his degree he became a qualified teacher in history and German. Mr. FILMS That Awkward Moment (15) Treehouse Pictures Director: Tom Gormican Starring: Zac Efron, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller, Imogen Poots 8•FANFA R E JUNE 20 1 4 Toughill says: “Seeking to do something ‘different’, I joined the Royal Hong Kong Police where I was attached to Special Branch. There I served for a while in the VIP Protection Unit, where I looked after visiting dignitaries to Hong Kong.” During his time serving as an intelligence officer in Hong Kong he met and served as the bodyguard for Henry Kissinger, and the 37th President of the United States Richard Nixon. With his experience as an intelligence officer and through a keen interest in Nazi I t’s been a while since we’ve seen Zac Efron at the movies. And this time around, we see a lot of him. Without a shirt on. Having sex. Peeing horizontally over a toilet. He’s so charming, so goodlooking, that we can almost forget his fivemonth stint in rehab for cocaine addiction, a far cry from his golden boy status. When Mikey (Michael B. Jordan) gets dumped by his wife, his two best friends, Jason (Efron) and Daniel (Miles Teller), vow to stay single with him. This shouldn’t be difficult, but this being a romcom, they fall in love within the next 20 minutes. Daniel’s friends-with-benefits becomes something more, while Jason falls for the quirkiest blonde at the bar. I was sceptical as to whether Efron could do chemistry with quirky. In his last few Germany, Mr. Toughill seems to have uncovered a much more sinister aspect to American participation in the war. And suggests a real motive that seems to have escaped many historians, as he explains in his ground-breaking book. “I wrote ‘A World to Gain’ because I wanted to understand better the world into which I was born. I am one of Roosevelt’s children,” he explains. “That is to say that I was born into the world which Roosevelt created through this decisive intervention in the Second World War.” In his book he argues that Nazi Germany and the United States of America were on an inevitable collision course after Hitler’s rise to power. But, he suggests, the real bone of contention between the two nations was economic rivalry rather than ideological opposi ѥ