mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (11/02/84)
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"He who is ignorant of History is doomed to repeat it."
-approximate quote of Santanyana
The history of the 1930's clearly illustrates the dangers of
appeasement. We ought not to think, though, that history becan with
the Treaty of Versailles. There are other lessons to be learned.
Just as appeasement encouraged the aggressor and led to WWII, jingoism
and unwillingness to compromise differences brought us WWI. Both
extremes are to be avoided. Being labeled a "liberal" is not an
indication that one is an appeaser (after all, it was those "liberals"
who saw enough of a threat in the Soviet Union to begin the cold war),
and Mondale is no Chamberlain. I hope that Reagan is no Bethemann,
and will not involve us in a war not in our own interests, but in
those of a desperate "ally" and made possible by the granting of some
ill-considered "blank check". Remember that the German political
establishment did not want war in 1914, but unwisely gave
unconditional assurances to an Austrian state which was probably
doomed anyway, and certainly desperate. History is not an Aesop's
fable with a single moral; it holds many lessons and illustrative
examples.
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The whole article from which this is extracted is well worth pondering;
but there are other lessons to be learned both from Versailles and
from the inter-war period (only 20 years, which we tend to forget).
Versailles led directly to WWII, partly because of the insistence of
the victors (except Wilson of the USA) that the losers were to have no
dignity and were to pay for the whole affair (it was called "reparations").
When you treat an "enemy" as if he is not human, he will not easily
become your friend. After WWII, the victorious allies did not make that
mistake, and (West) Germany and Japan became members of a group of
closely linked countries.
The mistake many of our net-writers (and Reaganites) make is to act as
if our adversaries were evil, rather than being people whose interests
conflict with ours. Certainly there are evil people over there, just
as there are evil people here. But the conflict is not about evil. It
is about interests. They are in the main just as reasonable as we are,
and they deserve to be treated so. The "evil" in Reagan is that he has
allowed it to become respectable to treat those with different interests
as pariahs, not to be spoken with, and certainly not to be honoured
with serious negotiations that might perhaps resolve conflicts of interest.
It as also not as clear-cut as Rubin puts it that appeasement led to
WWII. The well-known moment of appeasement was when Chamberlain went
to Munich and helped Hitler carve up Czechoslovakia. But had he stood
firm then, it is possible that the relative imbalance of forces would
have been worse than it was a year later, and that we would now be
looking across the Atlantic at a Nazi Europe. The real moment of
appeasement was when Hitler's first territorial grab was not opposed
at a time when he might have been toppled by the least opposition
(the re-militarization of the Saarland(?) in violation of the Versailles
Treaty, which wasn't actually a territorial grab but had a similar effect).
Then there was implicit appeasement in the failure of Britain and France
to maintain their armed forces properly until too late. To a large
extent this was done to avoid annoying Hitler (in Britain, at least),
as well as because Baldwin and Chamberlain believed in the power of
rational discussion. The lesson seems to be that appeasement itself
is not wrong, but appeasement at the wrong time is wrong. For our time,
the lesson perhaps is that we should always be able to ensure we can
hurt them worse than they can tolerate if they try to play nasty, but at
the same time to talk and to see in what way we can both find other
ways to resolve our real differences. We don't need enough weapons
to destroy the USSR utterly, let alone many times over. But we do
need enough to be sure they won't want them used -- ever.
--
Martin Taylor
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