NYE 2010: Appeasement Politics and the Unlearned Lessons of History

Over the last week, as per the usual tradition, the news media are doing their reflective segments on the year during those days between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The personalities and pundits ask pensively what kind of a year we’ve had and what lies ahead.

The practice stretches back a long way. I have a copy of The Province newspaper published on December 31, 1937. New Year's Eve fell on a Friday that year and the newspaper cost 10 cents. The front page’s headline is “Britain and France Guardians Against Conflict”. Europe was on the brink of war, watching nervously the aggressive and unabashed expansion of fascist movements in Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan.

The article’s author, a one Pertinax, noted as a “Famous French Commentator on World Affairs” opens with the following musings on the now yellowed pages:

With the New Year’s almost here, let us pause for a moment for an accounting. In what condition do we find the world today? What progress toward peace or war has been made during the last twelve months?

One of the most outstanding tendencies we must note is the growing disregard for international law. All kinds of infringements of the code of nations have been committed in both Europe and Asia. In times past, such deeds would almost certainly have led to a general conflict. Today, however, there exists, nearly everywhere, a tacit determination to call by the name of peace what is, in fact, a state of war.

Pertinax goes on to comment on the Japanese soldiers who, that year, had “let loose in China” and deplores the weak reaction of China’s government which does not even “recall its ambassador from Tokio” (sic). Meanwhile, other governments of Europe “still pretend to co-operate with the Fascist government of Rome in a system of non-intervention”. Czechoslovakia’s government was on the defense, fortifying its border against the Germans. Italian troops were amassing in Libya. The Maginot Line on the French-German border was being reinforced and expanded to the English Channel and the article declares: “The Maginot system of fortifications stands as an impassable barrier”. The Rhineland had been re-militarized. Belgium, lying vulnerably between France and Germany, had declared neutrality.

The pieces were falling into place for what was emerging as an obviously violent impending power grab by Hitler and the Axis. But appeasement was the popular response among the politicians, not least of which was the British cabinet.

Back then, like now, “the majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point,” as George Orwell succinctly put it around the time of The Province article. Like the politicians calling the shots in 1937, the idea of a robust (armed) response to fascism made many ordinary and powerful people alike nervous and in their neurotic jitters, any collective foresight failed. Today, we look at the appeasement camp of the 1930s with disdain, but we still fail to recognize this camp in its modern-day reincarnation, in those on the far left and the far right who fancy themselves peace activists or isolationists respectively. Our modern anti-war movement is not one which, historical lessons and legacy in tow, seeks to prevent the violent aggression of fascists or confront the tyranny of despots. Instead, it actively embraces the despots, warmly engaging with them, and glossing over the torture, murder and other crimes of the governments like those of Iran’s and Cuba’s. Modern anti-war movements in the West are giddily self-congratulating their ability to make exotic friends and to be so darn open to different cultures to bother questioning too deeply where all those political prisoners are disappearing to. They think of themselves as tolerant and multicultural, fighting a noble battle against neo-colonialism. They look at the "evil" of "American imperialism" and everything else fades to an indiscernable foggy background.

Yet while the prominent ignorance of appeasing fascism is something we have still now as we did then, we also still have the dissenting voices who could read the writing on the wall. Many such voices are found right here in this magazine, stripping bare the intentions of Hitler’s successors: the terrorists of Hamas, the theocrats of Iran, the anti-semites of the Muslim Brotherhood, the death-cult of the Taliban, the madness of a well-armed lunatic in the form of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il, and al-Qaeda’s grandiose vision of a world caliphate.

And in 1937, a year before Neville Chamberlain would sign the Munich Agreement, an unknown writer in the same issue of The Province reviewed a new book entitled, “Must We Go To War?”, this way:

Frankly this title repelled me with its obvious appeal to sentimentalism which only lacked a sub-title for the “kiddies.” It represents the worst side of what Americans called the “peace movement” and helps in part to explain its ineffectiveness.

So in 2011, a year marked for me by the ever mainstreaming pacifism and cultural relativism among the elites of western democracies, let the warning voices grow louder and the modern dissenters among the sleeping masses spread the crack further, letting in the light, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen. By the close of 1937, “the pity is that the periodical wobbling of the British cabinet and the still unsettled political conditions in France give the Nazi and Fascist governments comfort and encouragement.” Our friend Pertinax concluded that, “in that chaotic manner, European peace survives. But nobody can feel sure that tomorrow it will not be destroyed.”

Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist