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Date Posted: 22:49:06 12/03/02 Tue
Author: Tentative
Subject: What if appeasement was right?

I'm probably going to get slaughtered for this, but have we any evidence that appeasement failed? Appeasement had been EXCELLENT at keeping the peace in Europe 1933-1938. yes, I know that this was at a cost, but Chamberlain's hope was that Hitler's ambitions were limited and that, eventually, they could/would be satisfied. What about an argument which suggests that Chamberlain just did not persevere with the policy long enough? What if he had allowed Hitler just one more acquisition?
1. It was not Hitler who declared war on Britain. Britain declared war on Hitler when he marched into Poland. So, in a sense, Hitler did not overturn appeasement - Chamberlain did when he gave a pledge to Poland.
2. Where could Hitler have gone after Poland? There WERE Germans in Poland. The principle of self-determination provided that they had a right to be in a Greater Germnay. Britain and France had accepted this argument over Austria and Czechoslovakia - what made Poland/Danzig different? And if they had allowed it, where would there have been left for Hitler to make a claim to? Perhaps Poland would have been the last acquisition?
3. If Hitler had gone anywhere after Poland, it would probably have been Communist Russia. One of Chamberlain's sub-objectives was that Hitlerite Germany would become a buffer/stumbling block to Communist expansion. And would it have been so very terrible if Germany and Russia HAD clashed? I know it's on the edge of acceptability to suggest this, but the world has just come out of half a century of nuclear Cold War stand-off precisely because Chamberlain committed Britain to help Russia wreck Germany. A strong Germany might well have averted the Cold War?
4. And, yes, I know that Germany was the most dreadful fascist, racist dictatorship. But that's another point, really. Britain didn't go to war in 1939 to destroy German fascism - Britain went to war to defend Poland, because Chamberlain had given up the policy of appeasement. It is arguable that the REAL excesses of German fascism only occurred AFTER 1939, under the immense psychological pressure of war - a war britain had declared on Germany. And could Germany have remained nasty for long? - The forces of liberalism would not have been repressable for ever. And just think, we accept (even trade with and welcome) MANY nasty regimes today without going to war with them; we just put pressure on them to ackowledge human rights issues. Who is to say that this would not have worked with Germany, eventually.

With hindsight, after those long war years, and knowing about Auschwitz and Belsen, writers like Churchill looked back and it seemed obvious to them that appeasement was wrong. But we have the benefit of longer hindsight, and it is worth wondering whether going to war in 1939 was the solution Churchill thought it to be.

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