Munich Shouldn't Be Such a Dirty Word
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Washington Post
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Seventy years ago this month, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler once, twice and then a third time. On Sept. 30, 1938, they agreed that the German-speaking "Sudetenland" of Czechoslovakia should be ceded to Germany. Ever since, the name of this Munich agreement has been used as the ultimate political curse.
In truth, the story of the agreement is far from what is usually supposed. Over and again, "Munich" has been wilfully misunderstood and misinterpreted, with repeatedly disastrous consequences.
The Georgian crisis has just brought more cries of "appeasement" and "Munich." One writer in the Times of London described French President Nicolas Sarkozy as coming back from Moscow "waving a piece of paper and acclaiming peace in our time," the ill-fated words Chamberlain used on his return to London. Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan compared the Russian attack on Georgia to the 1938 "Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia." These are only the latest in a long line of mischievous claims that any compromise is "another Munich" -- and they run alongside a line of sorry military adventures for more than 50 years conditioned by the fear of emulating Chamberlain.
When Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal in 1956, one London politician after another recalled the 1930s. "It is exactly the same that we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war," said Labor Party leader Hugh Gaitskell. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who had resigned as foreign secretary in 1938 to protest appeasement even before Munich, was driven by the dread of being seen as another Chamberlain. Eden mounted a foolish military expedition that turned into a national humiliation and ended his career.
(Continued here.)
Washington Post
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Seventy years ago this month, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler once, twice and then a third time. On Sept. 30, 1938, they agreed that the German-speaking "Sudetenland" of Czechoslovakia should be ceded to Germany. Ever since, the name of this Munich agreement has been used as the ultimate political curse.
In truth, the story of the agreement is far from what is usually supposed. Over and again, "Munich" has been wilfully misunderstood and misinterpreted, with repeatedly disastrous consequences.
The Georgian crisis has just brought more cries of "appeasement" and "Munich." One writer in the Times of London described French President Nicolas Sarkozy as coming back from Moscow "waving a piece of paper and acclaiming peace in our time," the ill-fated words Chamberlain used on his return to London. Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan compared the Russian attack on Georgia to the 1938 "Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia." These are only the latest in a long line of mischievous claims that any compromise is "another Munich" -- and they run alongside a line of sorry military adventures for more than 50 years conditioned by the fear of emulating Chamberlain.
When Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal in 1956, one London politician after another recalled the 1930s. "It is exactly the same that we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war," said Labor Party leader Hugh Gaitskell. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who had resigned as foreign secretary in 1938 to protest appeasement even before Munich, was driven by the dread of being seen as another Chamberlain. Eden mounted a foolish military expedition that turned into a national humiliation and ended his career.
(Continued here.)
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