Appeasement Makers

[Said1]

Kind of historyish.

Appeasement markers


Sat. 18 Feb 2006
The Washington Times

Commentary

By Victor Davis Hanson

It is easy to damn the 1930s appeasers of Adolf Hitler -- such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in England and Edouard Daladier in France -- given what the Nazis ultimately did when unleashed.

But history demands not merely recognizing the truth post facto but trying to reconstruct the rationale of something that in hindsight seems inexplicable.

Appeasement in the 1930s was popular with the European public for various reasons. All are instructive in our hesitation about stopping a nuclear Iran, or about defending the right of Western newspapers to print what they wish -- or about fighting radical Islamism in general.

First, Europe was nearly destroyed in the Great War, a mere 20 years earlier. No responsible postwar leader wished to risk a second Continental bloodbath.

Unfortunately, Hitler understood that all too well. In a game of diplomatic chicken, he figured many responsible democratic statesmen had more to lose than he did, as the weaker and once-beaten enemy.

British intellectuals, like European Union idealists today, wrote books and treatises on the obsolescence of war. Conflicts were supposedly caused only by rapacious arms merchants and profiteers at home, not by antidemocratic dictators who saw forbearance as weakness. Winston Churchill was a voice in the wilderness -- and demonized as a warmonger and worse.

Today, the 50-year Cold War is over, and Europe is at last free of burdensome military expenditure and the threat of global annihilation. Like Osama bin Laden, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad senses a certain weariness in much of the West as it counts on perpetual peace.

He assumes most sober Westerners will do almost anything to avoid military confrontation to stop a potential threat -- even though, unlike Hitler, Mr. Ahmadinejad not only promises to liquidate the Jews but reveals his method in advance by seeking nuclear weapons.

Some naive conservatives in prewar Europe thought the German and Italian fascists would prove a valuable bulwark against communism and could be politically finessed. So, too, it has been at times with Islamic fascism. Arming the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia was once seen as an inspired way of thwarting Soviet communist imperialism.

At the time of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's homicidal fatwa against Salman Rushdie, religious conservative commentators from Patrick Buchanan to New York's John Cardinal O'Connor attacked Mr. Rushdie, rather than defend the Western right of free expression. Apparently, they felt such Islamic threats to supposed blasphemers might have positive repercussions in discouraging left-wing anti-Christian attacks.

In the 1930s, the doctrine of appeasement fobbed off responsibility of confronting fascism onto the League of Nations. Both France and England were quiet about the 1936 Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the German militarization of the Rhineland. They counted on multilateral action of the League, which issued plenty of edicts but marshaled few troops.

Continued