British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went to Munich on September 29, 1938 for a last-ditch peace conference with Adolf Hitler. The issue was Hitler’s demand for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia as the price for Germany not invading. With the Czech government refused admittance to the conference room within which its survival was being debated, British and French leaders signed away Czech sovereignty over the Sudetenland, a major part of its own territory. Hitler said that if he could get this agreement he would make no further territorial demands in Europe. The agreement signed, Chamberlain went home to the roar of the crowds and proclaimed ‘peace in our time.’ In total violation of the terms of the Munich agreement, six months later Hitler’s troops rolled into Prague and extinguished the rest of the Czech Republic. Six months after that, he invaded Poland, and WWII began.
On October 5, 1938 the British Parliament was asked to debate this motion: ‘That this House approves the policy of His Majesty’s Government by which war was averted in the recent crisis and supports their efforts to secure a lasting peace.’ Though he was a member of the Conservative (governing) Party, Winston Churchill spoke strongly against the motion. Here are two especially memorable excerpts:
I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat…The utmost my right Hon. Friend the Prime Minister has been able to secure by all his immense exertions…has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching the victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course…
The Prime Minister desires to see cordial relations between this country and Germany. There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations between the peoples…But there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutalty the threat of murderous force. That power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy.
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I wonder who will be the Churchill of our own US Republican Party? Who will call out appeasement in our own time? Who will speak in defense of that brave European country, Ukraine, already violated by years of aggressive war from Russia, at risk of being dismembered or even destroyed in the name of a spurious peace brokered by the United States government?
The memory of Munich 1938 and the lessons it teaches remains vivid in Europe. I wonder if it remains vivid in the United States?
Note on Churchill source: Winston Churchill, Into Battle (Cassell and Company, 1941).
From a Winston Churchill speech dated 19 May 1939:
Winston Churchill on Democracy & Tyranny: More 1939 quotes for today
There is the Nazi-Fascist ideology, and the Communist ideology. Britain and France are equally opposed to both. The Parliamentary States think that small peoples, acting within their rights, should not be trampled down by stronger ones. They think that civilisation implies, in any society, the freedom to criticize the government of the day; free speech; free press; free thought; free religious observance; no racial persecution; fair treatment of minorities; andcourts of law and justice which have an authority independent of the executive and untainted by party bias…They are well worth defending all over Europe as long it is possible to defend them.
From a Churchill speech on 8 August 1939, just on the brink of Hitler invading Poland and launching World War II:
One thing that has struck me as very strange, and that is the resurgence of the one-man power after all these centuries of experience and progress. It is curious how the English-speaking peoples have always had this horror of one-man power. They are quite ready to follow a leader for a time, as long as he is serviceable to them, but the idea of handing themselves over, lock, stock, and barrel, body and soul, to one man, and worshipping him as if he were an idol; that has always been odious to the whole theme and nature of our civilisation. The architects of the American Constitution were as careful as those who shaped the British Constitution, to guard against the whole life and fortunes, and all the laws and freedom of the nation, being placed in the hands of a tyrant. Checks and counter-checks in the body politic, large devolutions of State government, instruments and processes of free debate, frequent recurrence to first principles, the right of opposition to the most powerful governments, and above all ceaseless vigilance, have preserved, and will preserve, the broad characteristics of British and American institutions.
Churchill was saying that the Anglo-American democratic tradition is sturdy, and that its commitments deeply shape both how the citizens of these two countries rule themselves and also how they assess and relate to the governments of other countries. We have a natural revulsion against tyrants and bullies whether domestic or foreign.
Churchill argued repeatedly that the deep values-affinity between these two countries keeps us in natural and lasting friendship, not just in an alliance of expedience. He also said that this affinity was felt among all countries committed to these principles and steeped in these values. This is why it is so easy and natural for liberal democracies to find friends and engage in joint ventures of all kinds.
In the face of the Fascist threat, Churchill did not emphasize the many ways in which the democracies had failed to fulfill the full measure of these values. He wanted to emphasize the values themselves.
The question we face today is whether these values still hold.
