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
You can find all previous entries in this weekly
column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this
blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be
found HERE
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