We seem to be having a situation here in our beautiful, wise democracy, our most marvelous, shared homeland, against which we have faithfully leaned all these years in the assumption that the US Constitution and the good intentions of our elected leaders would protect and foster The People’s peace, order, and prosperity. This assumption seems to be in question. There is more than unease in the land…alarm, other, stronger emotions I won’t go into here. You know what they say about “assume.”
A very dear acquaintance of mine is two-thirds the way through William Manchester’s three-volume biography of Winston Churchill and has been reading passages to me about the beginning of World War II. I can’t help but notice that our present situation has some interesting parallels to that key moment in history. I thought I would devote this space to a small recap, in case you haven’t been keeping up. It concerns how, if we trust people (like der Führer) who routinely lie and break promises, it can lead to predictable (yet somehow still surprising-to-some) rotten consequences. You know what they say about history repeating itself if you don’t pay attention to past mistakes. Here is a rundown of a certain pivotal moment from 1938:
On September 29, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain,”a businessman who respected success…and was accustomed to the friendship of other good fellows who met on the level and parted on the square,” was already in Munich preparing to sign the (now infamous) Munich Agreement, which gave the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to the Germans. “Appeasement” initially was not the dirty word it has become. After England’s having endured the agonies of WWI, Chamberlain aimed to keep England out of another war at almost any cost, so appeasing Hitler—by giving him what he asked—was his disastrous policy. Chamberlain admired Germany, detested the communist Russians, and had a low view of the American bumpkins across the ocean. He dreamed of cooperation and friendship between England and Germany and clung to this idea,”oblivious to the fact that nearly everyone who had tried to bargain with this extraordinary man had been murdered, sent to a concentration camp, or hounded into exile.” [Italics mine.]
On the same day Chamberlain was with Hitler in Munich, Churchill and his group of about a dozen political heavyweights were meeting back in London trying to get signatures on an urgent telegram addressed to Chamberlain advising him not to sign the agreement. They did not trust the insatiable Hitler to keep his word. Since Hitler had broken every promise he had made, the group was strongly against appeasing him in this way, and believed the only path to avoid war was to stand up to him and say “No, you cannot have Czechoslovakia.”
History has proved Churchill’s group to be right, that Hitler would never be satisfied and could never be trusted, but at the time theirs was a minority opinion. The Four Powers (England, France, Germany, and Italy) went ahead and signed the agreement to carve up Czechoslovakia, and when Chamberlain returned to London from Munich after gullibly throwing Czechoslovakia to the wolves, much of the English public was ecstatic that he had avoided another war. Of course, Churchill and others of like mind were almost certain that the opposite had happened: By complying in advance, Chamberlain had opened the door wide to Hitler. Within days, German troops occupied the Sudetenland and indeed, a mere six months later Hitler reneged on his promise in Munich and took over the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Churchill ended up not sending the telegram to Chamberlain because several of the group, fearful of Chamberlain’s retaliation, declined to sign it. After the meeting, one by one they drifted off, leaving Churchill in his chair, defeated and with tears in his eyes. He said to his friend, Violet Bonham Carter, who’d stayed with him there, “What are they made of? The day is not far off when it won’t be signatures we’ll have to give, but lives—the lives of millions. Can we survive? Do we deserve to do so when there’s no courage anywhere?”
Meanwhile, back in Munich, Chamberlain “weakly suggested” that two Czechs who were in the city as observers attached to the British delegation should attend the discussion, but the Führer had said,“Nein!” Hitler led his guests into a private office to determine the future of Czechoslovakia in a conference from which that nation’s elected leaders had been excluded, with the tacit understanding that the delegation from Prague would be informed of the Chamberlain-Daladier-Hitler-Mussolini decisions later. We now know this was the moment that determined the world’s eventual collapse into the Second World War. Really.
