If history were about repeats, which it is not, not exactly, but still, today’s America would best be seen in light of what happened in 1930s Germany, when Hitler came to power and ultimately ignored his appeasers to invade Poland on Sept. 1, 1939 and launch World War 2.
It followed the disastrous Munich Conference of Sept. 1938, when famously British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain offered Hitler the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia, without consulting with the Czechs, in exchange for “peace,” and came home to England to declare that he had achieved “peace in our time.”
Hitler had no intention of sticking to the terms of that agreement, and less than a year later, as his buildup for war continued, his regime triggered the so-called Gleiwitz Incident on the night of Aug. 31, 1939, when German SS troops, disguised as Polish stormed a radio station on the German-Polish border.
It was used as the pretext for the German blitzkrieg invasion of Poland the next day, marking the actual start of World War 2, as Britain and France had a formal treaty with Poland. A lot followed that, of course, including the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 which led to the formal declaration of war by the U.S. that Hitler used as a pretext to declare war on the U.S. four days later.
Four years later, by 1945, there were an estimated 70 to 85 million total fatalities, with civilian deaths numbering around 50 to 55 million and military deaths ranging from 21 to 25 million, including deaths from combat, massacres, genocide (like the Holocaust), starvation, and disease, making it the deadliest conflict in human history.
. A rare but fascinating short volume written in 1961 by British Elizabethan historian, essayist, poet and scholar A. L. Rowse, entitled “All Souls and Appeasement,” was based a lot on his diaries while a junior fellow at the All Souls college at Oxford in the 1930s.
All Souls gathered the best and brightest of the English elites from newspaper owners to members of Parliament that engaged in many heated discussions and debates among themselves through the 1930s, and noted most by Rowse was the consistent and forceful arguments of the appeasers to Hitler, including Chamberlain, that dominated the college throughout the decade leading up the war.
Rowse was a member of the leftist Labor Party then, and the likes of the then-still-discredited Winston Churchill (his “Wilderness Years” due to his failed Gallipoli campaign in World War I, his switching parties in the 1920s and support for the abidated Edward VIII in the mid-1930s, and more) on the right were nonetheless strongly opposed to the British establishment appeasement policy toward Hitler.
That appeasement policy was due to “the mistake of Versailles” (the treaty at the end of World War I that, in particular, punished Germany) about which many English elites, in the spirit of one Barrington-Ward, held “deepest convictions.” Their “conclusions drawn was that nothing that Hitler did, however immoral, was to be resisted,” Rowse wrote.
Rowse concluded that these appeasers’ “conventional British way of looking at things was simply not equal to the times, and it caught these men out badly…Not one of these men in high place in those years ever so much as read (Hitler’s) “Mein Kampf” or would listen to anyone who had. They really did not know what they were dealing with.”
Rowse added, “They would not listen to warnings, because they did not wish to hear…This, and the essential pettiness of the National Government, all flocking together to keep Labour out, was deeply corrupting both to them and the nation. It meant they failed to see what was true until it was too late, when it was simply a question of survival. What I had under observation, then, in all those years was a class in decadence.”
The U.S. elites of today, respecting Trump, are parroting the British appeasers of the 1930s. Bezos, Cook, Musk, Thiel and Zuckerberg of today, much less the entire leadership of the Republican Party, are repeating the error of appeasing evil. So will this now lead to World War 3?