Neville Chamberlain could have walked on water! Having betrayed the only democracy in eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain returned to England as the man who had saved the peace. “No conqueror returning from Victory on the battlefield,” effused The Times, “has come adorned with nobler laurels.”
As he emerged from his plane on Sept. 30, 1938, Chamberlain stopped and announced to delirious crowds that the resolution of the Czechoslovak problem was only a “prelude to a larger settlement in which all of Europe may find peace.” He then waved the famous piece of paper and declared that he had signed an agreement with Hitler stating “the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”
Amidst laud renditions of “For he is a jolly good fellow,” he was whisked to Buckingham Palace so that the monarch could express personally his “most heartfelt congratulations” on the success of his negotiations with Hitler. At the Palace’s main balcony, the king and queen presented the prime minister to a roaring crowd as he basked in the adulation of the masses in the centre of a sphere illuminated by a giant searchlight. Festivities continued late into the night at 10 Downing St. Responding to the chants of the crowd, he appeared at an open window and declared that it was “Peace in our time.”
In a little over two years after the tumultuous reception accorded to Chamberlain, his funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on Nov. 14, 1940. The congregants sat in frigid cold as the windows had been shattered by incendiary bombs rained down by the Luftwaffe. The Blitz was turning London into an inferno.
Ever magnanimous, Winston Churchill, the new prime minster, who had foretold everything, delivered one of the most poignant funeral orations in history by praising his predecessor for his sincere quest for peace.
But how was it possible that in so short a time since Chamberlain’s triumphal return from Germany, Britain found herself in the shadow of scaffolds, alone and friendless, facing the relentless Nazi juggernaut?
It happened because the appeasers imagined that they could work with a criminal regime to maintain the peace. It happened because they abandoned their friends preferring instead to work with genocidal dictators. It happened because they dismissed the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich as inconsequential in the greater scheme of their grand agenda. It happened because they remained silent and ignored, as William Manchester wrote in his biography of Churchill, The Last Lion, the Nazis’ “frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder against the new barbarism.”
It happened because they and the governing elites in both France and England refused to heed Churchill’s warning that “Virtuous motives, trammeled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness. A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war. The cheers of the weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to count. Doom marches on.”
And, indeed, “doom marched on” as more than 60 million souls followed Chamberlain into the grave.
It is perilous to propound any direct contemporary lessons from the events preceding World War II, not least because it is difficult to extrapolate from the past into the future where different circumstances prevail. But to the extent that there are historical patterns concerning the consequences of appeasing genocidal tyrants, in the misplaced hope that such propitiation would moderate their behaviour, there are lessons to be learned.
In that context, Chamberlain’s policies illuminate the inherent risks in negotiating in good faith with those who are congenitally incapable of reciprocating in kind. While Chamberlain’s approach to dealing with the Nazis produced a global conflagration, the current appeasement of Iran will most certainly engender a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region of the world.
The consequences are incalculable.