Two charges are regularly made against those who advocate the withdrawal of western armies from Iraq and Afghanistan. The first, that they are craven because they would “cut and run” is nothing more than the usual excess of testosterone displayed by those who think that any brawl they get into must end with the annihilation of their opponents. The second charge is that those who would withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan are appeasers following in the footsteps of Neville Chamberlain at Munich.
The second accusation is more serious because it raises the question of what we can learn from history to prepare us to deal with the dilemmas of the present.
The story of the appeasers of the 1930s teaches us complex lessons about the uses and misuses of history. The appeasers in Britain and France, like Chamberlain and (in a more complicated way) Edouard Daladier, were strong anti-Communists. While not pro-Hitler, they, and many of their backers, were not averse to the prospect of Nazi Germany marching east against Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The appeasers who sold out Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938 were mostly on the political right. But it was more complicated than that. Right across the political spectrum in Britain and France, there was an intense aversion to war, the lesson of the First World War and the mechanized slaughter of millions in the trenches in France. Communists and some others on the left held the powerful conviction that Hitler and the fascists had to be stopped, if necessary by force. (The Communists were to face their own moment of bitter anguish in August 1939 when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that opened the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The Communists, also schooled in the lessons of history, accepted Stalin’s line that the war between the western powers and Nazi Germany in September 1939 was an inter-imperialist war, like the First World War, and that, therefore, the working class should stay out of it.)
There is a further wrinkle and it is of considerable importance. Much of the line later adopted by the right-wing appeasers in the 1930s, especially in Britain, was originally developed by liberals in the period immediately following World War I. After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote a highly influential book titled The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In it, Keynes denounced the treaty for its ruinously harsh treatment of Germany and for its imposition of reparations on the Germans (on the specious grounds that they were uniquely responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914.) He argued that peace and prosperity would only return to Europe through the more generous treatment of the defeated enemy.
Adding to the case developed by Keynes was the work of the historians in the 1920s, in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere that concluded that Britain, France and Russia shared responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War. The consequence was the rise of the so-called “lost generation” in the post-war years, whose cultural icons, like Ernest Hemingway, no longer believed in glory, war, patriotism and all the other slogans that had led humankind into the terrible world war.
Liberals wanted a better deal for the Germans and for a while during the mid 1920s it looked like Germany could be brought back into a peaceful European system. Other political forces were on the rise, however. The fascists took power in Italy. In Germany, the small Nazi movement became adept at playing on the evils of the Treaty of Versailles, the war guilt clause, and the payment of reparations (ironically, Germany ended up paying almost no reparations). Hitler used the case the liberals had constructed about the mistreatment of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles to keep the western powers off balance during his crucial first years in power. Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to reoccupy the Rhineland militarily, he argued, it was German territory wasn’t it? Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to build an air force and a large navy like the other powers? Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to absorb Austria in the Anchluss of 1938? After all, the Austrians were German speakers and they wanted to join Germany.
And on it went. Hitler and the appeasers made use of arguments devised by liberals in the very different conditions of the early post-war period. Hitler did it to guilt the West into inaction against him. The appeasers did it to excuse their ambivalence about how to deal with the Nazis in the context of the threat of Bolshevism.
If appeasement in the 1930s was the product of complex narratives, the lessons right-wingers drew from appeasement were much simpler in the era following the Second World War. The Cold Warriors of the post-war world used Chamberlain and Munich as symbols of sell out. The lesson they insisted on was that if you want peace you must prepare for war. Only a strong, well-armed, nuclear West could face down the Soviets, they maintained. In Vietnam, all these arguments were used. If the United States did not “stay the course”, if it chose to “cut and run”, the dominoes would fall, and Communism would march on to victory in country after country. If we didn’t fight them in Asia, we would have to fight them on our own doorstep.
The supposed lessons of appeasement and Munich taught the Americans how to do exactly the wrong thing. By the time Lyndon Johnson geared up for a major American troop build up in Vietnam in 1964, the Communist world was already bitterly divided between its two giants, the Soviet Union and China. They hated each other so much that they fought border wars against each other. And North Vietnam was a Soviet ally, highly suspicious of China, and soon fought a border war against the Chinese. The theory, on which the Vietnam War was premised, that the West was up against a unified Communist menace, was a crock. But anyone who insisted on saying that was accused of being an appeaser, a Neville Chamberlain. With the victory of North Vietnam in 1975, the dominoes did not fall. Communism did not march to victory. Indeed, fourteen years later, the Soviet Empire fell flat on its face and Vietnam soon became a favourite place for the U.S. to invest capital.
Today, we are again the recipients of lessons supposedly drawn from the experience of appeasement and Munich.
The real lesson of Munich, if there was one, was that you had to stand up against the imminent threat of a rising imperial power that had made it plain that its goal was conquest in Europe and beyond. Furthermore, that imperial power was an industrial giant that had rearmed and had created the world’s most advanced air force and mechanized army. If the West didn’t rearm and didn’t stand up to Hitler, all of Europe would end up in Hitler’s hands (as for a while most of it did).
Today, the West is engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and there is the potential for war against Iran. Those who insist that the two wars that are underway must be fought to victory claim that anything less will enliven the world-wide forces of Islamic jihad to set out to undertake ever more deadly assaults against the West. And if we do not use force if necessary to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, then the Hitler-like president of that country will plot assaults against the West. If we do not stop them on the borders of Pakistan and in the Persian Gulf, the argument goes, we will face them on our own turf.
Really. Increasingly, the evidence reveals that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are radicalizing tens of thousands of young men in the Middle East and Central Asia to hate the West and to take up arms against Europeans and North Americans. In addition, the evidence shows that neither country is making progress toward peace, prosperity, human rights and democracy as a result of the presence of western armies. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are sinking into civil wars. In both cases, the presence of western armies is seen by much of the population of the two countries, as an alien invasion. The oldest instinct in the world, the desire of people to be free of foreign invaders, is at work in kindling the insurrections in both countries. And resentment against the western occupations and the death toll that goes with them is being fanned far and wide across large parts of the Islamic world.
Let’s remember a few salient facts. The United States spends as much on its military as almost all the other nations in the world combined. The West is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Israel has its own nuclear weapons, with an arsenal estimated to include two hundred nuclear missiles. The idea that the West and its close allies face the prospect of invasion and defeat at the hands of would-be Hitlers is preposterous. It is a Big Lie, a lie being used to silence people in the United States, Canada and Europe who are coming to the conclusion that these wars are doing nothing to increase our security, and everything to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people in the zones of conflict.
It’s time for some genuinely fresh thinking about the utility of empire and war. To do that thinking we need to rid ourselves of ludicrous historical distortions that can only get in the way.
The second accusation is more serious because it raises the question of what we can learn from history to prepare us to deal with the dilemmas of the present.
The story of the appeasers of the 1930s teaches us complex lessons about the uses and misuses of history. The appeasers in Britain and France, like Chamberlain and (in a more complicated way) Edouard Daladier, were strong anti-Communists. While not pro-Hitler, they, and many of their backers, were not averse to the prospect of Nazi Germany marching east against Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The appeasers who sold out Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938 were mostly on the political right. But it was more complicated than that. Right across the political spectrum in Britain and France, there was an intense aversion to war, the lesson of the First World War and the mechanized slaughter of millions in the trenches in France. Communists and some others on the left held the powerful conviction that Hitler and the fascists had to be stopped, if necessary by force. (The Communists were to face their own moment of bitter anguish in August 1939 when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that opened the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The Communists, also schooled in the lessons of history, accepted Stalin’s line that the war between the western powers and Nazi Germany in September 1939 was an inter-imperialist war, like the First World War, and that, therefore, the working class should stay out of it.)
There is a further wrinkle and it is of considerable importance. Much of the line later adopted by the right-wing appeasers in the 1930s, especially in Britain, was originally developed by liberals in the period immediately following World War I. After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote a highly influential book titled The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In it, Keynes denounced the treaty for its ruinously harsh treatment of Germany and for its imposition of reparations on the Germans (on the specious grounds that they were uniquely responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914.) He argued that peace and prosperity would only return to Europe through the more generous treatment of the defeated enemy.
Adding to the case developed by Keynes was the work of the historians in the 1920s, in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere that concluded that Britain, France and Russia shared responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War. The consequence was the rise of the so-called “lost generation” in the post-war years, whose cultural icons, like Ernest Hemingway, no longer believed in glory, war, patriotism and all the other slogans that had led humankind into the terrible world war.
Liberals wanted a better deal for the Germans and for a while during the mid 1920s it looked like Germany could be brought back into a peaceful European system. Other political forces were on the rise, however. The fascists took power in Italy. In Germany, the small Nazi movement became adept at playing on the evils of the Treaty of Versailles, the war guilt clause, and the payment of reparations (ironically, Germany ended up paying almost no reparations). Hitler used the case the liberals had constructed about the mistreatment of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles to keep the western powers off balance during his crucial first years in power. Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to reoccupy the Rhineland militarily, he argued, it was German territory wasn’t it? Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to build an air force and a large navy like the other powers? Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to absorb Austria in the Anchluss of 1938? After all, the Austrians were German speakers and they wanted to join Germany.
And on it went. Hitler and the appeasers made use of arguments devised by liberals in the very different conditions of the early post-war period. Hitler did it to guilt the West into inaction against him. The appeasers did it to excuse their ambivalence about how to deal with the Nazis in the context of the threat of Bolshevism.
If appeasement in the 1930s was the product of complex narratives, the lessons right-wingers drew from appeasement were much simpler in the era following the Second World War. The Cold Warriors of the post-war world used Chamberlain and Munich as symbols of sell out. The lesson they insisted on was that if you want peace you must prepare for war. Only a strong, well-armed, nuclear West could face down the Soviets, they maintained. In Vietnam, all these arguments were used. If the United States did not “stay the course”, if it chose to “cut and run”, the dominoes would fall, and Communism would march on to victory in country after country. If we didn’t fight them in Asia, we would have to fight them on our own doorstep.
The supposed lessons of appeasement and Munich taught the Americans how to do exactly the wrong thing. By the time Lyndon Johnson geared up for a major American troop build up in Vietnam in 1964, the Communist world was already bitterly divided between its two giants, the Soviet Union and China. They hated each other so much that they fought border wars against each other. And North Vietnam was a Soviet ally, highly suspicious of China, and soon fought a border war against the Chinese. The theory, on which the Vietnam War was premised, that the West was up against a unified Communist menace, was a crock. But anyone who insisted on saying that was accused of being an appeaser, a Neville Chamberlain. With the victory of North Vietnam in 1975, the dominoes did not fall. Communism did not march to victory. Indeed, fourteen years later, the Soviet Empire fell flat on its face and Vietnam soon became a favourite place for the U.S. to invest capital.
Today, we are again the recipients of lessons supposedly drawn from the experience of appeasement and Munich.
The real lesson of Munich, if there was one, was that you had to stand up against the imminent threat of a rising imperial power that had made it plain that its goal was conquest in Europe and beyond. Furthermore, that imperial power was an industrial giant that had rearmed and had created the world’s most advanced air force and mechanized army. If the West didn’t rearm and didn’t stand up to Hitler, all of Europe would end up in Hitler’s hands (as for a while most of it did).
Today, the West is engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and there is the potential for war against Iran. Those who insist that the two wars that are underway must be fought to victory claim that anything less will enliven the world-wide forces of Islamic jihad to set out to undertake ever more deadly assaults against the West. And if we do not use force if necessary to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, then the Hitler-like president of that country will plot assaults against the West. If we do not stop them on the borders of Pakistan and in the Persian Gulf, the argument goes, we will face them on our own turf.
Really. Increasingly, the evidence reveals that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are radicalizing tens of thousands of young men in the Middle East and Central Asia to hate the West and to take up arms against Europeans and North Americans. In addition, the evidence shows that neither country is making progress toward peace, prosperity, human rights and democracy as a result of the presence of western armies. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are sinking into civil wars. In both cases, the presence of western armies is seen by much of the population of the two countries, as an alien invasion. The oldest instinct in the world, the desire of people to be free of foreign invaders, is at work in kindling the insurrections in both countries. And resentment against the western occupations and the death toll that goes with them is being fanned far and wide across large parts of the Islamic world.
Let’s remember a few salient facts. The United States spends as much on its military as almost all the other nations in the world combined. The West is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Israel has its own nuclear weapons, with an arsenal estimated to include two hundred nuclear missiles. The idea that the West and its close allies face the prospect of invasion and defeat at the hands of would-be Hitlers is preposterous. It is a Big Lie, a lie being used to silence people in the United States, Canada and Europe who are coming to the conclusion that these wars are doing nothing to increase our security, and everything to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people in the zones of conflict.
It’s time for some genuinely fresh thinking about the utility of empire and war. To do that thinking we need to rid ourselves of ludicrous historical distortions that can only get in the way.
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