Quote:
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last."
Seriously, I've never seen so much historical revisionist hogwash like I sometimes encounter on this forum.
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No, no no no no !!!!
You disappoint me. I expected better from posters such as you. Read the post more carefully.
There IS an arguement to answer. Not a palatable one, certainly not the only one, and arguably not the right one ……but an arguement nevertheless.
My argument is that setting aside any altruistic motives that Britain and Churchill MAY have had for the good of mankind living together ( and I happen to believe that the Anglo-Saxon nation states, in their imperfect way, were among the first to start thinking in these terms ), the course that Churchill took was not necessarily the most appropriate or sensible in a world where politics was still almost exclusively cynical advancement of self interest.
For the record I was borne in 1947 into the shadow of WW2 . I am only one generation away from people who experienced it, including my father and mother who actively participated in it. I grew up in the certain knowledge that Britain, through Churchill, had rendered the World a supreme and apparently selfless act by continuing the fight against a brutal and ruthless regime . I am immensely proud of that and I hold no truck with the totally discredited approach we call appeasement ….. something which has immediate resonance in our current world of international terrorism.
The argument has nothing to do with appeasement anymore than Germany suing for peace in 1918 was an example of appeasement. This is the way European politics had done business for centuries. From a position of power you waged war and from a position of relative weakness you sued for peace. The Great War had begun the reappraisal of that process, particularly in countries such as Britain, France and America but it had not as yet taken root universally.
The Munich agreement was one of the most misguided and disgraceful appeasement sell louts in history. Add to that the failure to oppose the (illegal) remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 and we can all see the folly of appeasement..
The point is that by June 1940
the appeasement horse had already bolted. Churchill had regrettably arrived too late . By the summer of 1940 Britain was on the wrong end of a war that was effectively lost and with no real prospect of resistance or allies.
With HINDSIGHT we know that Hitler was not particularly serious about invading Britain and with HINDSIGHT we know he attacked Russia in 1941. In 1940 this was far from obvious.
The “we shall fight them on the beaches “ bluff of 1940 was a magnificent ”go for broke gamble” that spectacularly and implausibly paid off - much to the applause and gratitude of Europe and the World , but in the real political world of 1940 what odds would you have given it in June 1940
So if you’d been Churchill you too would have fought on ? If Hilter had had the strategic sense to invade Britain in 1941 ( as most people considered he would ) and not been arrogantly mesmerised by thoughts of destroying the ”ideologically decadent Soviet sub-humans” you could well have had a prostrate demilitarised and ethnically cleansed Britain of no use to anyone.