September 30, 2007
Munich and History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 PM EST The homepage of the website notes that this is the anniversary of the 1938 Munich Agreement, where Great Britain and France betrayed the people of Czechoslovakia and spawned a very durable analogy. At the time, Neville Chamberlain triumphantly remarked that “my good friends, for the second time in our history a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” Churchill memorably as well as prophetically demurred, his most durable, prophetic and pithy phrase being that “you were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.” Churchill being Churchill, there are a pretty fair number of memorable remarks to choose from: “You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude,” which was eerily prophetic, but there was also “we have sustained a defeat without a war,” which has the savage compression more often found in a politican’s mouth when Thucydides has composed the phrase at leisure, and then put it there. There is also “do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.” There was such a recovery, Churchill incarnated it, and for a generation Munich was the epitome of a particular form of moral cowardice, stupidity, and self-deception. After an analogy to Munich was blamed for getting the United States into the Vietnam War, pejorative references to Munich fell into disrepute among some liberals, while on the political right attempts to rehabilitate Chamberlain saw the suggestion that the canny old fellow had wisely delayed war until the Spitfires were ready, etc. I find this remarkably unpersuasive, for reasons discussed on this blog in August of 2006, here and here, but it is worth noting that Munich remains not only the analogy many people love to hate, but the catastrophic misjudgement some people still long to exonerate. (For example, as recently as 2006 a historian published a defense of Chamberlain’s policy at Munich titled Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain, 1936-1939.) Pondering this on the anniversary of the Munich Agreement, I think the simple power of the Munich analogy provokes most of the venom directed against not only the analogy, but against the conventional assessment of the agreement itself. What are taken to be the horrible and by implication avoidable consequences of the Munich Agreement, widely believed to include a significant portion of the scores of millions of dead of the Second World War, still make the strongest argument we know for the possible virtues of preemptive war. People who detest the notion of preventive war, often for excellent reasons, are tempted to go that one last, mad step, and suggest that there has never, ever been a case for such a policy. I think it was Robert Heinlein, born a century ago this year, who once remarked that the difference between a man and a cat is that while neither will sit on a hot stove twice, a cat will never again sit on a cold stove either. Thinking over the historiography of the Munich Agreement, that thought suddenly seems unfair to the cat.
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