Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 10 – It is time to
give Nevil Chamberlain a rest as the sole poster child for appeasement. Yes, he
appeased Hitler in a hopeless quest to avoid war. He even was honest enough to
say that was what he was doing. But when Hitler violated Munich and seized all
of Czechoslovakia, he offered security guarantees to other countries who felt
threatened.
Then, when the Nazi leader invaded
Poland, Chamberlain listened to those in his own party who demanded he stand up
to Hitler, brought Winston Churchill into his government, and declared war. And
in the months that followed, months that some called “the phony war” because
Hitler paused before moving West, the British prime minister promoted
rearmament.
As wrong as Chamberlain was to think
that he could win by appeasing a dictator like Hitler, he actually looks remarkably
statesmanlike in comparison with some contemporary heads of state. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and
seized Crimea, they refused to take action or even use those terms, even though
he now takes very public credit for what he did.
When they rushed to Minsk to reach
an agreement that Putin then ignored, they decided that the best course was to
go back to Minsk and sign another agreement, even though the Kremlin leader was
violating it before the ink was dry, allowing Putin’s forces to continue their
expansion into Ukraine.
And when Ukraine asked for weapons
to defend itself against Russian aggression, they worried more about not
offending Putin than about protecting a democratic country from an invader and
if yesterday’s reports are to be believed finally decided not to provide such
arms to allow Ukraine to defend not only itself but the principles on which the
West says it operates.
At every step of the way, these
Western leaders have argued that the situation now is different because “Putin
isn’t Hitler” as if that were the relevant standard and because Russia’s
possession of nuclear weapons means that they can’t stand up to him, thus
sending a dangerous message to Iran and others that if you have such weapons,
you can do what you like.
Moreover, they have assumed that
economic sanctions are an indication that they are in fact “standing up to
Putin,” even though it has long been established that the Kremlin leader doesn’t
care what happens to his own people and will only use their suffering to build
up his power by blaming everything on the West.
And Western leaders have comforted
themselves with the notion that the increasingly short attention spans of their
electorates will mean that no one will talk about Ukraine as soon as it
disappears from the news. At least, in the 1930s, what Chamberlain was doing is
because neither he nor anyone else could forget what had happened in the trenches
of World War I.
At the beginning of September 1939,
when Chamberlain still was trying to find a way out short of war, Churchill
famously complained that the Poles had been suffering and dying as a result of
Hitler’s aggression for three days. One
should ask oneself: how many months will the Ukrainians suffer until the West
acts as well as Chamberlain finally did on September 3rd?
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