Looking Back at Munich

...Or, as a German acquaintance told me in 1953, "Germany must free itself of anti-Semitism...

...Germany was ready for a change...

...When they are blocked from achieving it, whether by an oppressive social system or by their own sloth, they seek a substitute in oppressing their fellow humans...

...Unquestionably, it would have been more honorable had the West fought rather than surrendered, but it seems doubtful that such a course would have accomplished anything more than to discredit a policy of force as much as the attempt at compromise discredited "appeasement...

...Seeking to crush the anti-Semite will make anti-Semitism more virulent...

...Why, though, did France consistently choose a policy—in Germany, in Russia, even in Czechoslovakia—that was bound to generate maximal hostility in situations in which it could have afforded to be generous...

...At Munich, Hitler forced France to choose: should France's allies be used against Germany—or Germany against the Soviet Union...

...Even if France managed to dispatch an expeditionary force to aid them, through the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and Romania, it seems most unlikely that such a force would have arrived in time to be much use...

...But that is not a lesson we could generalize...

...It destroyed the one genuinely free, democratic state east of the Rhine and helped discredit democracy in that part of the world...

...That, unfortunately, is also the unlearned lesson of Munich...

...All the anti-Semites should be rounded up and shot...

...How is Evil conceivable as a positive force at all...

...In fact, anti-Semitism has been most virulent in oppressed and oppressive societies...

...336 • DISSENT...

...The centerpiece of that strategy is French policy toward Germany in the wake of its defeat...

...The new boundary in the south of Slovakia, where no boundary had existed for a thousand years, did incorporate nearly half a million ethnic Magyars in the republic, though that was far more the work of French military cartographers than of the Czechs...

...By surrendering Czechoslovakia to Hitler, the Western democracies brought on precisely what they feared...

...Less dramatically, though for me personally more painfully, similar reflections apply in Czechoslovakia...

...Specifically, we could argue, humans all seek a sense of their own worth...

...Evil must be crushed...

...There were, to be sure, residual sympathies for Czechoslovak democracy in the way...

...How does it come about...

...To a great many French, Hitler, however odious, came to appear as a more effective barrier against the Soviets than a democratic Czechoslovakia with its legal Communist party and its treaty with the Soviet Union...

...Unquestionably, the Munich agreement was one of the pivotal tragedies of our time...

...Within a year, the world was at war while the Munich agreement went down in history as proof positive of the futility of concessions and the virtues of uncompromising strength...

...Once again, while a policy of generosity might have helped build the preconditions of peace, the policy of strength sowed the seeds of future conflict...

...Anti-Semitism has no positive reality of its own...

...On an Augustinian reading, we would argue differently...

...But Evil is negation: How can it even SUMMER • 1989 • 335 Looking Back at Munich define itself...

...The SUMMER • 1989 • 333 Looldag Back at Munich pieces were all in place, set there by twenty years of French foreign policy...

...Its "lesson" has since been invoked to justify causes as diverse as the American intervention in Vietnam, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and opposition to arms control agreements...

...There are times to fight and times to make peace...

...In retrospect, Munich appears less a failure of appeasement than a failure of a particularly disgraceful bit of Realpolitik, the failure of a policy based on strength rather than generosity...

...Nor was the incorporation of Slovakia in the Czech cause in the latter half of the nineteenth century and in the Czechoslovak state in 1918 an act of aggrandisement as much as an act of generosity: After a millenium of Magyar rule, the Slovaks had little hope of revival without Czech help...

...We can likewise always convince ourselves that our opponents are pure Evil, but that makes it incomprehensible why so many people are willing to support them and, still worse, makes it impossible for us to find any strategy for dealing with our opponents other than seeking to crush them...

...The Good must oppose it relentlessly, uncompromisingly, never yielding an inch...

...With the revival of German strength, this inner contradiction proved fatal...

...Evil is not an autonomous reality: it is a corruption of the Good...

...For Evil is simply and purely evil, incapable of any goodness...

...Here a philosophical rather than an empirical analysis might prove most helpful—an analysis of the philosophical prism, of the philosophical assumptions about the nature of good and evil through which the French read the lessons of history...

...Reflections on the Munich Dictate routinely restrict themselves to a rather academic debate about the virtues of war and appeasement as instruments of foreign policy while the world continues to prepare new Munichs: situations in which evil can only be fought—and so triumphs, one way or another...

...Yet, here again, generosity toward the minorities — "appeasement," if you wish, bitterly criticized by Czech nationalists— strengthened the new republic...

...At the time, it did not seem to matter: The Czechs were in charge, enjoying full French support...

...While a policy of generosity would have at least opened a democratic, peaceful option for Germany, the policy of strength left it with defiance as the only option...

...Being is one, and it is good...

...Both the reality of the Great War— hostages shot, libraries burned, poison gas released in the trenches—and the rhetoric used to fight the war would certainly have helped convince the French and the Czechs that they were the forces of Good while Germany was simply Evil...

...So stated, the contrast might appear academic to the point of meaninglessness...

...The antiSemites must simply be crushed...

...Speaking in rather compressed philosophical shorthand, I would suggest that the conceptual prism that led the West from Versailles to Munich was essentially a Manichean one...

...Nor would it surprise me if, behind the Kremlin's secretive walls, Soviet strategists invoked that lesson to oppose a withdrawal from Afghanistan, Poland, or Hungary, gravely warning of "another Munich...

...There can be no resolution, beyond victory or defeats in a struggle without compromise and without quarter...

...There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the dispirited French draftees would have fought any more vigorously in 1938 than they did a year later...

...that's the way it is...

...French policy toward Germany and Russia assured France of two enemies, in place of an enemy and an ally...

...Unconvincing though this excuse was even at the time, the French could console themselves that they were not betraying the Czechs, only redrawing Czechoslovakia's boundaries along ethnic lines...

...When John Foster Dulles asserted that "neutrality is treason," he was speaking from a Manichean perspective—and Stalin's policies did much to make it persuasive...

...They seized no alien territory: The western boundaries of the restored Czech state were what they had been for centuries, at least since the 1350s...

...Interestingly enough, that strategy is marked not by a posture of appeasement but by its very opposite, a policy of uncompromising strength...

...In our time, we might very well label it the "Stalinist" rather than Manichean view of history—except that it was a view shared by some of Stalin's most vehement opponents...

...Unquestionably, the Franco-British attempt at last minute compromise was as contemptible as it was futile, but it seems highly doubtful that an uncompromising stance would have been any more effective...

...It seems far more likely that he would have done what he in fact did a year later—allied himself with Hitler to deflect him toward the west, perhaps finishing off Poland along the way...

...While in our fiery rhetoric the Manichean/ Stalinist perception of evil as a force to be crushed may be popular, in our daily practice it is even more problematic than in philosophy...

...To be sure, the Czechs were far more victims than villains...

...Altogether, the Czechs inherited rather than created their multinational state...

...It must be cured...

...They opted instead for a policy of uncompromising strength, designed to crush and humiliate their erstwhile opponent...

...Given a century of peace, Czechoslovakia might well have become another Switzerland, winning the allegiance of a heterogeneous population for a common ideal...

...And, again in fairness to the Czechs, the new republic offered its ethnic minorities far more freedom, justice, and opportunity than any of the neighboring states...

...We can always convince ourselves that we represent the Good, but that conviction blinds us and makes it impossible to correct our own flaws...

...Rather than make a mighty effort to encourage and support the new republican government that was struggling to transform Germany, they did everything to undercut it...

...For one, it is devilishly hard to identify any man or society as the Good, pure and simple...

...It is, however, far from clear that the outcome would have been significantly different had the allies rejected all compromise and opted for war...

...Fifty years ago Neville Chamberlain emerged from his airplane, gestured with his umbrella, and announced to his anxious countrymen that the abject surrender he had just signed in Munich would assure them what the Prayer Book pleads for, "peace in our time...

...The wishful "if only" scenario has traditionally been that German opposition, emboldened by a vigorous French and Czechoslovak attack, would have overthrown Hitler and saved the world the Second World War...

...Anti-Semites are evil, those who oppose anti-Semitism are good, and no compromise between them is permissible...

...When push comes to shove, such perception becomes fatal, leaving us with only the options of surrender or destruction...

...Here, too, the war and the defeat discredited the old regime...

...The Manichean perspective, however, is problematic even on a philosophical level...

...At that point, there was certainly significant room for "appeasement...

...Thus I would suggest that what is interesting is not what happened at Munich but rather what led to Munich, the entire Franco-British policy on the continent since the end of the war to end all wars...

...In polarized historical situations, a Manichean perspective can appear quite persuasive...

...Poland and Czechoslovakia were to play the role Russia once played, that of an ally in Germany's rear...

...Yet is the lesson of Munich really so simple, that appeasement is bad and uncompromising strength good...

...Mutatis mutandis, the same can be said of French policy toward its former ally, Russia...

...Its inept attempt at last-minute appeasement cost it much and won it nothing but contempt...

...Munich, I would suggest, demonstrated less the bankruptcy of appeasement than the utter self-destructive bankruptcy of the Manichean vision of the world...

...Evil, after all, is the will to destroy: It would self-destruct...

...Anti-Semitism is one of the clearest examples of pure evil I know, a will to destruction...

...It did not him Hitler's fury toward the east, only armed him with state-of-the-art weaponry for a war that effectively eliminated both France and the British Empire as world powers and drew Soviet might into the very heart of Europe...

...The real lesson of Munich is that the Manichean perception of reality makes it impossible for humans to recognize the needs of a given time and to respond appropriately...

...Given that conviction, any policy of generosity would have appeared as folly, weakness, and only a policy of strength as realistic...

...Centuries of Austrian rule, however, had encouraged the growth of a strong German minority within the traditional Czech lands...

...It is a vicious perversion of an impulse to good...

...Their surrender broke the back of German opposition to Hitler...

...Frustrated in its attempt at self-fulfillment, a part of the Good turns to destruction and so comes to function as Evil...

...In 1918, however, the French were in no mood for appeasement...

...For all their valor, the Czechs in all likelihood would have had their hands too full of their own hostile minorities to mount a vigorous attack on Germany for which they were neither armed nor prepared...

...We can conceive of Good as a positive force: Good is the affirmation of being...

...the others had simply to live with it...

...Philosophically, an Augustinian reading is rather more persuasive...

...To be sure, in the case of Russia it is far less clear that the country was capable of responding to a policy of generosity...

...It is the assumption that reality is ultimately not one but two, and that history is the story of a basic conflict of two opposed forces, Good and Evil, locked in an ongoing struggle...

...Nor does it seem likely that Stalin would have been willing to provide effective aid—how?—and to withdraw again when done...

...However, Czechoslovakia's failure to win the allegiance of its minorities offered an excuse...

...On such a reading, in any historical situation we are dealing with a conflict between Good and Evil, and any compromise between them is a victory for Evil...

...However, with Soviet Russia now perceived also as an enemy, they were called upon to play the traditional German role as well, that of a cordon sanitaire against possible Russian expansion...

...That was how the world in fact appeared to Lenin and, even more so, to his heir and successor, Stalin...

...France responded to the new situation with its system of alliances...

...Still, even here it is clear that the policy of strength, including an armed intervention in behalf of the most discredited, most corrupt remnants of the old regime—such as Admiral Kolchak in Siberia—helped mightily to rally the undecided to the Bolshevik cause...

...The major effect of his act was to give both umbrellas and peace a bad name for generations to come...

...Had the French followed the policy commended by Abraham Lincoln at the close of America's war between the states—"with malice toward none, with charity toward all" —as the Americans did after the Second World War, Germany might well have responded as it responded to the American strategy and become the democratic core of a Europe at peace...

...Russia, too, was ready for something new...

...The available evidence, however, makes a rather less sanguine scenario more likely...

...The shift in minority attitudes toward Czechoslovakia during the first ten peaceful years, before the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler put an end to it, does suggest as much...

...Certainly, France should have fought, whatever the consequences...

...It is incapable of compromising, only of taking advantage of any sign of weakness on the part of the Good...

...On a Manichean reading, we would have to say that some people simply are anti-Semites, just as others respect their fellow humans...

...Consider it, though, in a very ordinary practical application...

...The Lesson of Munich will have been learned only if we ever learn the importance of generosity in curing evil before it becomes so powerful and autonomous that the only option left is to fight it—or surrender to it...

...A policy of strength, not of generosity, prepared the way to the dead end of Munich...

...The agony of war and defeat had discredited the arrogant "Prussian" model of German national identity...

...By then, it was simply too late, whether for compromise or force...

...the policy of 334 • DISSENT Looking Back at snick strength, of Czech centralism, strongly encouraged by the French general staff, weakened the support of Czechoslovakia's non-Czech nationalities for the new state...