September 29, 2008
PJB: An Amicus Brief for Neville
By Patrick J. Buchanan
On Sept. 30, 1938, 70 years ago, Neville Chamberlain visited Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich, got his signature on a three-sentence declaration and flew home to Heston Aerodrome.
“I’ve got it,” he shouted to Lord Halifax. “Here is a paper which bears his name.” At the request of George VI, Chamberlain was driven to Buckingham Palace, where he joined the king on the balcony to take the cheers of the throngs below. An unprecedented honor.
Then it was on to 10 Downing Street, where, to choruses of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” Chamberlain declared: “This is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”
This was Munich, the summit of infamy, endlessly invoked as the textbook example of how craven appeasement leads to desperate war.
That is the great myth. And like all myths, there is truth to it.
Chamberlain had indeed signed away the Czech-ruled Sudetenland to Germany, rather than risk a new war like the one of 1914-1918 that had taken the lives of 700,000 British and 1.3 million Frenchmen.
Modernity spits on the name of Neville Chamberlain. Yet, consider the situation confronting the British prime minister that September.
The seeds of Munich had been planted at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, in the treaties of Versailles, St. Germain and Trianon.
Though Germany agreed to an armistice based on Wilson’s 14 Points and principle of self-determination, millions of Germans had been consigned to alien rule. Some 3.25 million Bohemian Germans (Sudetenlanders) were handed over to Prague, as were 2.5 million Slovaks, 800,000 Hungarians, 500,000 Ukrainians and 150,000 Poles.
Germans will be “second class” citizens, President Masaryk told his parliament. Not a single German was in the National Assembly that drew up the constitution. Repeated protests by the German minority to the League of Nations were made — to no avail.
Lloyd George said the Czechs had lied to him at Paris when they had promised to model Czechoslovakia on the Swiss Confederation, with autonomy for ethnic minorities.
By the 1930s, most British and the Tory government believed an injustice had been done to the Sudeten Germans that must be rectified by diplomacy if a new war was to be averted.
After the Saar voted 90 to 10 to rejoin the Reich, and Austria had been annexed, the Sudeten Germans began to agitate for secession and annexation by Germany. And as Chamberlain wrote his sister, he “didn’t care two hoots whether the Sudetens were in the Reich or out of it.” The issue was not worth a European or world war.
As Britain had no alliance with Prague nor any vital interest in East-Central Europe, where no British Army had ever fought before, what was Chamberlain even doing in Munich?
He feared that if war broke out between Czechs and Germans, and Prague invoked its French alliance, a Franco-German war might follow, dragging Britain in as it had in 1914.
Three times that September, Chamberlain flew to Germany to negotiate the peaceful transfer of the provinces of Czechoslovakia where Germans were in the clear majority. After his second trip, to Bad Godesberg, where Hitler had threatened to march, Chamberlain had ordered mobilization of the fleet.
Hitler had backed down and urged Chamberlain to continue his pursuit of a negotiated settlement, which was finalized at Munich.
Why did Chamberlain not tell Prague to defy Hitler and commit Britain to fight for a Czech Sudetenland?
Because Britain was utterly unprepared for war. The Brits had not a single division in France, no Spitfires, no draft and no allies save France. Britain’s World War I allies were gone. Italy was with Hitler. Japan was now hostile. Russia was lost to Bolshevism. Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa were unwilling to fight, if the issue was keeping Germans under Czech rule.
And the Americans had gone home. Indeed, FDR had warned, “Those who count on the assured aid of the United States in case of a war in Europe are totally mistaken.” Roosevelt’s aides informed Paris that, if war broke out, America, under the neutrality acts, would not even deliver the planes France had already purchased.
Why should Britain declare a war it could not win for a cause — Czech control of 3.5 million Germans — in which it did not believe, a war certain to bring death to millions and the ruin of Britain?
We Americans did not go to war for the Czechs in 1938, or the Poles in 1939, or the French in 1940, or the Hungarians in 1956. Last month, Russia marched into Abkhazia and South Ossetia — the Sudeten lands of Georgia. Did we declare war?
If the Russian majorities in east Ukraine or Crimea demand the right to secede and return to Mother Russia, will we go to war to keep these millions of Russians under Ukrainian rule?
If not, upon what ground do we stand to condemn Chamberlain?
Chamberlain’s failure was that he trusted Hitler at Munich, as his great rival Winston Churchill would trust Joseph Stalin at Moscow, Tehran and Yalta.
Tags: Adolph Hitler, Germany, Russia
Email Post
Print Post
Vote Average: 4.8 Stars!
Loading ...![Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War](http://patbuchananbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/bk-pjb-chuw165.jpg "Churchill_Hitler_the_Unnecessary_War\")
The Constitution demanded that the states had a right to secede. What did Lincoln do? He decided to defy the Constitution and hold the union together for the benefit of the “corporate industrial north. “ He chose war and to slaughter his own agrarian countrymen with total disregard to the Constitution! Everyone knows it was a shame! That is why the war has been revised to have been about “slavery”. It was not. Despite how atrocious we all know that slavery is. It is horrible for the master and the slave, but the south would have abolished slavery on its own as the world demanded, as the world was freeing black slaves, it would have had to, and there was a movement amongst blacks to go back to Africa or migrate elsewhere, - but, regardless, it was not the cause of the war!
The cause of the war was to not let the southerners to secede! Does anyone believe in freedom of any people? No. And if Americans in their own history would not let their own people secede why would they let anyone else?
Americans really do not realize that the dream of America died long ago.
Time for something new.
Thats a good argument to stay out of this malarkey that is Georgia, and all the rest of the former Soviet border issues. We should be friends with Putin & Co. and not be busting their chops!
The Neocons want to make Georgia part of NATO, what a crock! The Neocon cabal, more dangerous to the USA than the big ‘bad’ Russian bear.
Mr. Buchanan is one of the few columnists I’ve read who regularly demonstrates that he has learned from history. I wish our politicians could do the same.
Alfred WIck
Bad argument, Patrick. Anyone who read a little bit of history of Eurrope knows that the Sudetendeutsche were not “handed” to Prague; they just happened to live on the lands of the historical Bohemian kingdom, and that the centralized administration of the new Czechoslovak republic, was in part forced by the attitudes of the Germans who always felt themselves to be “Herrenvolk” (master nation) to the Czechs. With the Slovaks, the situation was a bit different in that the pro-Czech intelligentsia (led by Stefanik) was soon politically isolated by the rightist Catholic party.
Even if Chamberlain was not bound to the CSR by a direct treaty, the Brits were obligated by their commitments to France, in the same way the Czechs were obligated to fight for Britain (by the terms of the Little Entente) if France honoured obligations to her ally. But Chamberlain/Halifax prefered to destroy Czechoslovakia, pretending they knew nothing about the land of the good king Wenceslas.. So the badge of shame sticks. If in Munich Daladier off course played the bigger villain, destroying France’s Eastern Alliance and handing Prague and Bucharest to Hitler. But Chamberlain’s act remains the epitomy of shortsighted stupidity and naivete.
The Abkhazia /S.Ossetia parallel is lame. These lands were never really part of Georgia: the Ossetians (Alans) settling in after the medieval Georgian kingdom of Tamar crumbled into several successor states. The Abkhaz were never “united” with the “Kartli” core of Georgia until Stalin made it so in 1931. Unlike Czechoslovakia in 1938, post-Soviet Georgia was never able to assert its rule in those regions. The claim, being weak to begin with, was effectively destroyed by the successive Tbilisi regimes after 1991.
Another great article by Mr. Buchanan. Neo-cons are immune to reason and learned nothing from history. Perhaps the current fiscal crisis has a silver lining; it may, because of our growing deficit, prevent this country from rushing into another ill-conceived war.
While not exactly on point, I agree with Larson.
Your tax money is used for- Zionist (neocon)
control. Armies of cops,F.B.I.etc. to keep you
under control should you rebel. Illegal immigration.
A mediocre education system (government propaganda). Now the bailout of the wealthy should leave no doubt in your mind this is a
SHAM DEMOCRACY.
Versalle treaty which was the result of Wilson’s cowboy politics was a disaster that pushed Germany to nazism. The moral is: winners should treat losers fairly and gracefully. After WWII, the allies treated Germany and Japan fairly, and the result is very good now. Of course, it was done because those countries were cultivated as allies against the Soviet Union and not because of altruistic values, but it was done anyway and the result was good. On the other hand, Russia was treated like a poor stepchild after the end of Cold War, and look at what is going on now. Same for Israel vs. Palestinians after 1967. If Israel continues its hawkish attitudes, it is a failed enterprise. I am afraid it is already over; just hope there will be no mass murder or nuclear war for all sides. Finland and Switzerland, on the other hand, are much more reasonable and safer as a result. When Finland was attacked in 1940, they put up a really good fight (my grandma’s brother died in that war). But after WWII they were consistently top trading partner with the Soviet Union and now they have good relations with Russia. The Baltic states essentially folded to Stalin like cowards, but now they are very hawkish in NATO. So it is the corageous guy who trades and a weak one who. Just be pragmatic, have good relations with everyone. Trade is better than war. If we traded with Cuba and Iran, both would be more open and prosperous today — it’s so obvious.
GOTCHA as Safire would say. Churchill trusted Stalin about as much as you trust Obama. It was a dying FDR who trusted Uncle Joe @ Yalta, Tehran etc.
Can’t believe you endorse Sarah airhead. Religion does funny things to people. I’m alluding to the religion of politics. To me it’s incredible that as sharp a mind as yours can be dulled into political compliance so easily
Solo3 - you act as if it was divine right for the UK to enforce Czech and Franco sovereignty over land that didn’t even belong to them.
France occupied German-speaking territories that Bismarck fought for and won back. It’s the same thing in Kosovo. Why would Moslem Kosovar Albanians want to be ruled from Orthodox Belgrade? They don’t. They want to be w/their cousins who have the same culture and customs across the “border” in Albania.
Ethnic groups want their autonomy and there is nothing wrong with that. The Angloid-Franco imperialist hegomony menace that psychotically created the multi-ethnic states we see in Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Polynesia today are the real crooks. They are the ones who raped the 3rd world like vicious thugs for their own benefit.
Germany just wanted to be “part of the club” and France and Britain treated them like dogshit - the resulting 2 world wars did nothing but destroy Europe and allow America and Russia to become the dominant powers.
See what war does?
Mr. Buchanan,
You state that: “If the Russian majorities in east Ukraine or Crimea demand the right to secede and return to Mother Russia, will we go to war to keep these millions of Russians under Ukrainian rule?”
Where did you get your statistics from? You’re completely wrong and appear to seriously misunderstand the situation in Ukraine. Aside from the Crimean Autonomous Republic in Ukraine, where Russians have a clear majority, there is absolutely no other region in Ukraine, east or west, that has anything even remotely close to a Russian majority. Aside from Crimea, what other part of Ukraine would ever “demand the right to secede and return to Mother Russia”? Face the facts - it’s not going to happen no matter how badly Russia’s politicians wish it to happen.
http://www.ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/general/nationality/
And Ukraine’s military is far superior to Georgia’s in sophistication and especially in size, so don’t think that you’ll see a repeat of the Russian-Georgian conflict in which Russia was the clear winner. Such an outcome will never occur in Ukraine and Ukraine’s territorial integrity will continue to remain intact. Please get your facts straight before speaking on Ukraine.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gg.html#Military
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/up.html#Military
alf1052 is wrong about Roosevelt trusting Stalin. If you look carefully at Roosevelt, it emerges that he had little animosity to communism, even under Stalin. At one point, Roosevelt asked Stalin if he would at least stage fake elections in Poland, and Stalin refused. Very well, then, said Roosevelt, who probably looked down upon the Poles and cared nothing for their liberty, save that a lot of Chicago Poles voted Democratic and needed to be appropriately lied to. Roosevelt’s cabinet was lousy with communists, and his Vice President Henry Wallace, whom he forced on his party, is now known to have been a willing Soviet agent. Roosevelt was as close to a communist as you can be and still get elected president. The myth of FDR should be a prime ideological target for any conservative or libertarian writer who wishes to make a difference. One could say the same of Lincoln, except the slavery issue tends to dominate everything else in that people tend to think any tyranny was justified if it was necessary to bring down slavery. Some will similarly argue that Soviet tyranny was justified to bring down Hitler and Fascism, but here we have more ammunition to fight with, since the Soviets could have opposed Hitler without also murdering a tenth of their people. And of course, without the Soviet Union there would have been no other communist states, some of which turned out to be genocidal, such as Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, while others were merely brutal and murderous, such as East Germany, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.
Gertrude Stein’s Complex Worldview
Nobel Peace Prize for Hitler?
From Michael Santomauro
http://www.TADP.org
Scholars of the life of Gertrude Stein were recently startled to learn that in 1938 the prominent Jewish-American writer had spearheaded a campaign urging the Nobel committee to award its Peace Prize to Adolf Hitler. This was disclosed by Gustav Hendrikksen, a former member of the Nobel committee and now professor emeritus of Bible studies at Sweden’s Uppsala University, in Nativ, a political magazine published in Israel. (Reports about this appeared in the New York Jewish community weekly Forward, Feb. 2, June 14, and Oct. 25, 1996.)
Hendrikksen, an avowed friend of Israel who is now in his late 80s, recalled that the Nobel committee rejected Stein’s proposal “politely but firmly, citing among their reasons the attitude of the Nazi regime toward the Jews.”
In the decades before her death in 1946, Stein was a widely acclaimed literary icon. As monarch of the “lost generation” of American expatriates in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, she cultivated and influenced such literary figures as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as such artists as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Her Paris home was a mecca for writers and artists. Stein’s own “modernist” novels, memoirs, lectures and plays — once celebrated as stylishly avant garde — have not aged well. Today she is remembered almost as much for who she was as for what she wrote.
Born in Pennsylvania of a wealthy German-Jewish family, she was raised in the United States, and attended Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins universities. But it was during her years of expatriate living in France that she made her lasting mark.
‘Hitler Ought to Have the Peace Prize’
Stein’s seemingly paradoxical views about Hitler and fascism have never been a secret. As early as 1934, she told a reporter that Hitler should be awarded the Nobel peace prize. “I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace … By suppressing Jews … he was ending struggle in Germany” (New York Times Magazine, May 6, 1934).
As astonishing at it may seem today, in 1938 many credited Hitler for his numerous efforts to secure lasting peace in Europe on the basis of equal rights of nations. After assuming power in 1933, he succeeded in quickly establishing friendly relations with Poland, Italy, Hungary and several other European nations. Among his numerous initiatives to lessen tensions in Europe, the German leader offered detailed proposals for mutual reductions of armaments by the major powers.
In a 1940 essay, Stein wrote positively of the appointment of “collaborationist” Henri Philippe Petain as France’s Chief of State, comparing him to George Washington. As late as 1941, she was urging the Atlantic Monthly to publish speeches by Marshal Petain, which she had translated into English. In spite of her background, Stein continued to live and write in France during the years of German occupation (1940-1944).
She also maintained a friendship with Bernard Fay, who headed France’s national library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, during the Petain era. According to a new biography of Stein, Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family, by Linda Wagner-Martin, Fay and Stein often discussed “the Führer’s qualities of greatness” in the years before the outbreak of war in 1939. Even after the war, when he was convicted as a collaborationist, Stein and her close companion Alice Toklas remained good friends with Fay and lobbied to free him from prison.
Conflicted Sense of Jewishness
Like many of this century’s Jewish American intellectuals, Stein’s relationship to her own Jewishness was complex and conflicted. She was sensitive to anti-Jewish sentiment, and sometimes expressed criticism of Hitler. In 1936 she wrote: “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody now-a-days is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Trotzky …”
Estranged from the organized Jewish community, in part because of her eccentricity and lesbianism, she nevertheless retained an acute and proud sense of her Jewishness. According to Wagner-Martin, Stein once said, “all men of genius had Jewish blood,” and even developed a theory that Abraham Lincoln was part Jewish.
During the first decade of this century, Stein became enamored of Austrian-Jewish psychologist and philosopher Otto Weininger, whose major work, Geschlecht und Charakter (”Sex and Character”), had tremendous influence on European thinking. Following its first publication in 1903, the book was quickly translated into various languages, and went through 30 editions. Weininger contrasted the masculine “Being” of Aryanism and Christianity with the feminine “non-Being” of Judaism. Jesus was the only Jew to overcome Judaism, he argued. Zionism, in Weininger’s view, is the negation of Judaism, because it seeks to ennoble what cannot be ennobled. Whereas Judaism stands for the world dispersion of Jews, Zionism strives for their ingathering.
It´s outrageous to read what Jewish4PJB say: “…The allies treated Germany and Japan fairly…”
Germany was teared apart. About 14 million were expelled from treir motherlad. This land was delivered to their ennemies. Three million germans were killed after the end of the war for the “fairy allies”.
Places like Bad Nenndorf were worse than any concentration camp. The London Cave…a nighmare
It´s necessary to lie; to hide many facts because we destroyed ourselves, not ideas.
Who headed this horrible butchery against us? That´s the problem for History.