Lots of intelligent people have an uncharitable view of George W. Bush, for all sorts of intelligent reasons. The Atlantic's Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writing for the Washington Post, shows the kind of noxious numbskullery that only an intelligent, well-informed person is capable of. His article bears the title "'Munich' shouldn't be a dirty word."
"Munich" here refers to Neville Chamberlain's famous capitulation to Adolf Hitler 1938. Chamberlain agreed to give Hitler a pass for the German occupation of the "Sudeten Land," in Czechoslovakia, in return for a promise from the Fuehrer that he wouldn't eat anyone else. That is what has since been branded "appeasement." Chamberlain landed in London and declared to reporters that he had achieved "peace in our time."
Wheatcroft writes about what he sees as the frequent misuse of the "rhetoric of Munich" by a range of leaders, including British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, President Eisenhower, and of course, George W. Wheatcroft complains that every time a President or PM wants to use military action, he always claims that to do otherwise would be another Munich. But often the cause is unjust, and the leader is not prepared to back up his rhetoric. Fair enough. Unfortunately, Wheatcroft has the bad judgment to tell us what he thinks about the real Munich event.
Quite apart from their unhappy consequences, all these invocations of Munich begin by rewriting history. Chamberlain was a democratic leader who knew that most of his people understandably did not want to go to war in 1938, only 20 years after another terrible war in which about three-quarters of a million British men had been killed.
Besides which, Chamberlain was far from alone in thinking that he was addressing a real grievance… While it's lamentably true that German resentment at "the slave treaty of Versailles" following World War I helped bring Hitler to power, there is another inconvenient truth: Between the wars, British and American liberals almost universally believed that the post-1918 settlement had been unjust. H.N. Brailsford, the leading leftist English commentator on foreign affairs, had written in 1920 that, of all the Versailles treaty's redrawing of borders, "the worst offence was the subjection of over three million Germans to Czech rule." Experience seemed to show that nationalism was the great force of the age and that it needed to be assuaged -- or appeased, a word first used, it should be remembered, by those who advocated doing so.
Now this is rather breathtaking. It is certainly true that Chamberlain was a democratic leader, and that the British people didn't want to go to war. Neither did the Americans. Chamberlain's naïve belief that he could negotiate with Hitler helped to make sure that neither peoples would have any choice. Moreover, the foolish tardiness in preparing for war in both England and America resulted in terrible costs and near disaster. Besides, who started that "terrible war" in which so many Brits were killed? Let me give you a clue: it was the Germans.
So it's rather remarkable that Wheatcroft mentions, almost in praise, those "British and American liberals" who thought that Germany was the victim. It is certainly true that a lot of Germans living in the Sudetenland didn't want to be part of Czechoslovakia, nor did the Germans living in Germany want to let go of that territory. But when you start a war of aggression against nearly everybody, and lose, it usually costs you some of what you want.
Wheatcroft obviously thinks that Chamberlain and all those North Atlantic liberals had it right: Hitler needed to be appeased. Strange that that didn't work out.
It's easy to see why Wheatcroft likes Neville Chamberlain. He is Neville Chamberlain. There is a certain strain of liberal (not the whole part, or even the larger part, to be sure) that blames people who resist tyranny for all the horrors inflicted by the tyrants. Chamberlain was not, I'm sure, fond of Hitler. But he hated Churchill. I would not suggest that George W. Bush bears a comparison with Winston Churchill. But Wheatcroft seems determined to make Bush look like Churchill. Conservatives have their own Wheatcrofts to be sure. Pat Buchanan comes to mind. Conservatives should have nothing to do with them. Liberals who do not share Wheatcroft's views would do well to recognize that they have a snake in their midst.
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