By this time tomorrow, my country
could be a very different place. I’m going to remain cautiously optimistic
until the polls close, and then let reality do its dirty work.
Looking around today’s world, it’s
hard not to think about the 1930’s – thuggish little men winning power by
appealing to the crowd’s baser instincts, promising simple solutions to complex
problems and blaming everything on dehumanized scapegoats. It’s happening
everywhere, and I can’t help noticing no one invokes Godwin’s Law anymore. Just
as it’s impossible not to notice the historical parallels, it is important not
to forget the historical lessons. One of
these must surely be not to overlook the spineless little men who enable the
thuggish little men.
Into this breach steps David Faber
with his book Munich 1938, which will tell you everything you wanted to
know about how Britain and France stabbed Czechoslovakia in the back and
gift-wrapped the corpse for Hitler. I maintain it’s an important book, because
if fighting a resurgent fascism is a complex issue, this will tell you most
certainly how not to do it.
Don’t be Neville Chamberlain for a
start.
If anything, Munich shows
that Chamberlain’s reputation as one of history’s biggest douche-bags is
well-deserved, and probably generous. Reading this, many other descriptors will
come to mind: Coward. Toady. Fool. Dim-wit. Weakling. Traitor. Adjectives may
include gutless, naïve, dishonourable, spineless, authoritarian, shameless, and
anti-Semitic. Yet these will only tell part of the story; the image of a
fraidy-cat Chamberlain caving to Hitler is not just not new but something of a
cliché. It’s not really accurate. It would appear more accurate to say that
Chamberlain was, on the contrary, a strong-willed, determined, consistent,
almost ruthless fighter for the fascist cause. Whether it was pushing the
League of Nations to recognize the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, or pushing
the English football team to give nazi salutes[i]
in Berlin, or censoring anti-nazi news reports, or ignoring anti-Hitler
dissidents in Germany, or ruthlessly pressuring Austria and Czechoslovakia to
give into Hitler’s every demand, Neville Chamberlain bent over backwards to
accommodate fascism at every turn. He was the best friend Hitler and Mussolini
could have had.
After 437 exhausting pages of
diplomatic minutiae, the dates and times of conferences and speeches to the
House, meeting minutes, telegraphs, letters, newspaper headlines and memoires,
backed up by sixty-six pages of notes, it’s difficult to know where to
begin. One gets a picture of a very
stoic and strong man, who above all, wanted to work with Hitler. Not with
France or Czechoslovakia, not with the anti-nazi elements within Germany, not
with the US, nor with any democratic or freedom loving force, but with Hitler.
We don’t get a picture of a coward who caved to Hitler, but a staunch advocate
for Hitler’s interests. Not a fascist himself, as such, but one of those
innumerable upper-class twerps so rife in the era, who thought fascism could be
useful in preserving order. It’s grotesque.
It’s not just the appeasement, but
the apparent anxiousness to accommodate that is just so sickening. The infamous
quotation “I go the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon
when he had given his word.” must surely rank as one of the most laughable by
any politician in history. Chamberlain was apparently in awe of Hitler,
impressed, mesmerized and dominated by the Bohemian Corporal. He comes across
as nothing so much as eager -to-please. Chamberlain swallowed German propaganda
hook-line-and-sinker. He ignored
critics. He attacked domestic opponents more than foreign dictators. While
willing to take Hitler on faith, he doubted people like the Czech foreign
minister Jan Masaryk, who had the nerve to request a loan from Britain to deal
with his country’s dismemberment. “It’s impossible to accept every statement
made by Mr. Masaryk,” said the man who felt Hitler could be trusted.
His toadies in Parliament are no
better: Sir John Simon apparently thought the Czechs ought to have been
grateful for being sold down the river:
It was not the case that Czechoslovakia had any legitimate
grievance against us. . .
on the contrary,the position was that a world war had
been averted and thereby Czechoslovakia had been saved.
These shitheads were utterly shameless. When the Mayor of
London, Harry Twyford, started a fund to help Czech refugees, Chamberlain said
he was “rather afraid that the opening of a Fund might have a bad effect on
public opinion in Germany.” (italics mine). That’s right folks, mustn’t offend
the Germans.
This was the
guy responsible for dealing with Hitler.
It’s
not just Chamberlain that comes off badly. The French had a defense treaty with
Czechoslovakia, which, when push-came-to shove, they simply ignored. We’ve got
guys like Sir. John Simon above. There’s Nancy Astor, who claimed all the Czech
refugees were just Communists anyway and should be sent to Russia (Astor really
was a character. She was so utterly wrong about everything; she’d be a
laughable caricature if she didn’t sound like every FOX News commentator ever).
We’ve got Sir John Neville Henderson, British ambassador to Germany, who
prevented a formal warning being given to Germany. We’ve got Lord Beaverbrook,
a shameless pro-nazi. We’ve got Sir. Robert Vansittart, undersecretary of the
Foreign Office, who bent over backwards to accommodate the Sudetenland Germans.
We’ve got the captain of the English football team. The entire British
establishment (with a few honourable exceptions) come across as a parade of
dolts, doing every possible thing wrong.
One episode
in particular stands out for me. It’s complicated, so pay attention.
On
September 5, 1938, one of Chamberlain’s advisors, Sir. Horace Wilson, was
visited by Thomas Kordt, counsellor at the German embassy. Kordt apparently
told Henderson that there was a significant Opposition group within Germany,
that there was
sufficient opposition to Hitler’s
plans within the German Foreign Ministry and among
senior generals, that ‘all was
required of Britain and France was to remain firm and not
give ground before
the fury of Hitler’s diatribes’.
While all this nonsense was going on
in Britain, things were afoot in Germany as well. No one (besides hard-core nazis) was happy with Hitler’s
plans for Czechoslovakia, and more than a few generals believed Germany wasn’t
ready. General Beck wrote:
I
feel it my duty to urgently ask that the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces
call off his preparations for war, and abandon the inention of solving the
Czech question by force until the military situation is fundamentally changed.
For the present I consider it hopeless.
General Wilhelm Adam worried that
Germany would be vulnerable to French attack if Czechoslovakia was invaded.
“With the bulk of the army concentrated against Czechoslovakia, he would have
only five active divisions at his disposal, and would be quickly overrun by the
French.”
Taken together, what does this mean?
Consider:
1) German foreign ministers assure
British authorities that Hitler’s full of shit.
2)
German generals think the French can take them out.
That is to say, there is evidence
that the British and French were stronger than they thought, the Germans
weaker, and that if stood firm, the Germans might have caved to them.
What do we get instead? According to Faber:
“[Kordt’s] suggestion was so out of
step with British policy at the time, no further action was
taken or advice
sought”.
In other words, nothing was done.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Now,
it’s possible that nothing would have come of it anyway – the aggravating part
is that no one even tried to do anything with it. Chamberlain and his gang
seemed to want Hitler to have his way. It is tantalizing in the extreme
to wonder what would have happened if someone else had been in charge at that time.
It has been said that Britain wasn’t
ready for war in 1938. But, as we see here, neither was Germany. In 1938,
Germany did not have Czechoslovakia’s splendid factories at its disposal. The
Czechs were ready and willing to fight. The Germans would have had to contend
with the French before even starting on Poland. Who knows how things might have
gone?
Of course, a lot of this actually depends
on French as well as British willingness to go to war. The French could have
overwelmed the Germans if they had been ready and willing to do so.
But they weren’t. They’d already had one nasty war, they were in no mood for
another thankyou very much.
There’s the rub. While the lesson of
this whole episode might seem to be “never ever give in to fascism”, the
implication seems to be that readiness for war is a necessary precondition for
standing up to fascism. I confess, I am disturbed by this possibility. Appeasement
at Munich was a huge justification for subsequent military adventures, from Vietnam
to Iraq. I have to ask the horrible question: what if the war-mongers were
correct?
Before
you start screaming and yelling, do remember that this is not my conclusion –
only a thought, a what-if. I don’t think it’s ever wrong to ask a question. To this
one, I might respond that every situation is different, and must be looked at on
its own realities. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Libya, Syria are not
just recreations of Czechoslovakia, they are their own places with their own
histories and their own politics and their own needs which are unique in
history, and cannot be treated the same.
I might also throw in that our own
condemnation of Chamberlain comes from hindsight, from knowing what it was impossible
to have known back then. That most people’s experience of war had been the First
World War, which had just happened, and was an absolutely unjust
meat-grinder of a war. People could be forgiven if they were in no hurry to
repeat it. And how were they to know that the Germans, who’d suffered just as badly,
actually wanted to do it all over again? They wanted to avoid war - was it
wrong to try?
No. I’d argue it wasn’t wrong to try
for peace – it was wrong to trust Hitler. Chamberlain was not wrong to seek
peace. He was wrong to cow-tow to Hitler, wrong to recognize Italian Abyssinia,
wrong to make decisions on another country’s behalf. He didn’t have to be so
sensitive to German public opinion. He could have considered Kordt’s advice. He
didn’t have to go to war – he just needed to be ready to.
To take the analogy into the school
yard, the solution to bullying isn’t to punch everyone you see. But stand firm
when they come after you. The jellyfish approach never works, and neither does
befriending the bully.
The a lesson for today in there somewhere.
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