Winston Churchill on Appeasement

In honor and in defense of the people of Ukraine

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).

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