On appeasement

    He was a good man, a humane man. He had seen what war was. He had seen the casualties from gas, the long lists of the dead and missing. He had seen the flower of manhood—a generation of his countrymen—cut down and heard the cries of the widows and the bereaved, as the extent of the war’s disaster exceeded the wildest initial estimates. So when the opportunity to avoid another war—too terrible to contemplate—presented itself, he embraced it regardless the cost, thinking that his most honorable course was to spare his nation the horrors of war. He was doing his duty, the best he knew how to do for his country.
    But history has savaged the reputation of Neville Chamberlain. Whatever the virtues of his humane domestic policy, his quiet rearmament of Great Britain, or his overall skill and good sense in navigating the political seas of his time, his premiership has become characterized entirely by his policy of appeasement towards Hitler, at Munich in 1938, as a way to prevent or avoid war in Europe. Judged by even the most liberal standards, the “peace for our time” that he announced upon his return from Munich was shockingly short—merely 11 months for the United Kingdom, even less for the luckless Czechs. See here the prize he brought home from Munich, in exchange for the Sudetenland, to which Chamberlain had no rights at all: document.
    Chamberlain was greatly praised by most of his countrymen at the time, blinded perhaps by desire for peace and fear of war. Were they grasping at straws? Was the cold calculation of Europe’s true situation too bitter to be contemplated? True prophets are without honor in their own country, at least until the catastrophe has actually fallen. Whatever the case, Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler illustrates, in terms that seem impossible to miss, that appeasement never works, because the kind of person who demands to be appeased will always demand more. Such was the case for Chamberlain, who decided upon a policy of appeasement despite the abundance of historical examples advising against it. So it is today.
    With that, Chamberlain’s record and reputation have been consigned to a kind of political-historical hell, based entirely on that one mistaken policy in dealing with Hitler at Munich, unjust as that may be. Nevertheless, a more generous historical appraisal in the future seems as unlikely for Chamberlain as for Pontius Pilate.
    Let him who has ears, hear.