Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberal Dose, August 15, 2025 “Neville Chamberlain and the Appeasing of Dictators”

A Liberal Dose

“Neville Chamberlain and the Appeasing of Dictators”

Troy D. Smith

I was only nine years old when my uncle Edgar passed away, but I remember that he hated Neville Chamberlain.

He talked with me often about history. I distinctly remember his explanation of the fall of the Roman Empire. He had all 25 volumes of the 1972 Marshall Cavendish Encyclopedia of WWII, which I read from cover to cover multiple times (and which now have a place of honor in my campus office).

Classical Rome was an interest of his -but WWII was personal. You see, my uncle Edgar (he married my mother’s sister) was a Czech Jew, and a Holocaust refugee. He was 23 years old when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia. He and two of his brothers escaped from the country -his older brother and him to Cuba, and from Cuba to the U.S. (at that time our country was not allowing Jewish refugees entry, and their ship from Cuba was one of the last we allowed in). His younger brother went to North Africa and joined the French Foreign Legion to fight Nazis. Almost all of their extended family were killed in the Holocaust. That younger brother’s wife survived Auschwitz -I remember seeing the numbers tattooed on her arm.

Starting in 1936, Hitler started occupying lands Hitler had lost in WWI, such as the Rhineland, and then strong-armed Austria into being annexed to Germany. Then, in 1938, he demanded that the Sudetenland -a region of Czechoslovakia where many Germans lived -be given to Germany. Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, met with Hitler -without inviting any Czech government officials -and basically gave the Fuhrer everything he wanted, receiving nothing in return except a promise from Hitler that he would now be satisfied and not try to take away anything else. Chamberlain and the Royal Family declared the agreement a guarantee of “peace in our time”, while some -including Chamberlain’s political rival Winston Churchill -said that appeasing a bully would do nothing but embolden them to take more. Czechs, meanwhile, felt -rightly -that they had been thrown under the bus. Sure enough, within six months Hitler had invaded and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and started rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps. Including my uncle’s family. Within six months after that Hitler invaded Poland, and WWII was officially underway.

In the almost nine decades since then, the name of Neville Chamberlain has been a code word for weakness, cowardice, and appeasement of dictators. To be compared to Chamberlain has been about as big an insult as any politician could suffer (other than being compared to Hitler).

This week, a lot of observers have been comparing Donald Trump to Neville Chamberlain. Trump, of course, promised to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict “on day one”, and has been angrily writing letters demanding to know why he hasn’t won a Nobel Peace Prize yet. In his recent meetings with Putin and Zelensky, he has blamed the war on Ukraine, saying that Zelensky is at fault for not simply giving Russia all the Ukrainian land they want, and that Zelensky has the power to “end this war right now.” Of course, the reality is that Russia has invaded a sovereign nation in an effort to take their land away (starting in 2014 with Crimea). PUTIN could end the war today, by simply going home. Blaming Ukraine would be like calling FDR selfish and irresponsible for sending thousands of his people to their deaths instead of simply handing Hawaii, and maybe California, over to the Japanese in 1941. It would be like saying a mugging victim is at fault for not handing their money over faster, and making them give the mugger more in compensation for their trouble. The fact is that Ukraine voluntarily gave up all their nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War, because the U.S. promised to protect them from Russia. But that happened more than two days ago, so Trump has no concept of it.

At least Neville Chamberlain -and the French who also abandoned Czechoslovakia, and who surrendered to the Germans in 1940 -did so because their countries had been devastated by world war only twenty years earlier and their people wanted to avoid any risk of suffering that again. Donald Trump is throwing Ukraine under the bus because… he wants Putin to like him. It is embarrassing how he fawns over the Russian dictator.

The whole situation tells us several things about Donald Trump. He thinks democracies are weak, but loves authoritarians -he wants to be like them, and he wants to be let into their club. He also views everything as transactional – he can not even conceive of a person, or a nation, doing something out of principles or ideals. He has on multiple occasions referred to U.S. military personnel, especially those who willingly gave their life for their country, as losers and suckers. “What’s in it for them?” he said. He cannot wrap his mind around the idea of standing up to a bully that is far stronger than you out of principle, or love of your country, instead of just giving them what they want. As he wants everyone to do with him.

It is a sad, sad turn of events when Americans chose such a morally weak, bootlicking sycophant to represent us on the world stage… and delude themselves into thinking he is “strong.” All bullies are ultimately weak little people who try to hide that weakness by picking on those smaller than them. Tossing them to bigger bullies so they will like you -that’s even weaker and more pathetic.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE