Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamherlin The Great Folly Of Appeasement SOME voices of appeasement at home and abroad have already been raised in response to Soviet Premier Nikita...
...Appeasement can probably best be defined as a one-sided retreat from an established legal, political or military position under force or the threat of force, to the detriment of a weaker ally...
...His appetite, as is usual in such cases, grew with the eating...
...And, if negotiation is to be worthy of the name, there must be an element of giveand-take, of mutual concessions, not a mere signing on the dotted line by one side...
...In our own time, Winston Churchill, writing in ripe postwar retrospect, offered this pungent judgment on the folly of practicing appeasement: "If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed...
...It is the surest road to war after dishonor has been incurred...
...There may even be a worse case...
...Judging from historical precedents, we can expect these voices to become louder and shriller as the Berlin crisis comes nearer...
...For appeasement is not a road to peace with honor...
...But in both cases the attempt to buy peace by sacrificing a weaker nation (Czechoslovakia at Munich, Poland at Yalta) ended in political and moral bankruptcy...
...Of one thing we may be sure: If appeasement is practiced on West Berlin the next insolent challenge from Khrushchev will not be slow in coming and will find us in a still worse position to meet it...
...The great fallacy of appeasement as a policy is its invariable and inevitable futility...
...But the negotiations must be free...
...An aggressor on the prowl is not satisfied or satiated by a concession, however far-reaching...
...But the historical evidence is overwhelming that peace cannot be bought in this way...
...Appeasement as a method of preserving or insuring peace was thoroughly discredited by the outcome of two international conferences: Munich in September 1938, and Yalta in February 1945...
...if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly...
...His instinct is always to demand more...
...That is not negotiation, but capitulation...
...The prospect of war is so terrible, especially given the destructive potential of modern weapons, that a plausible case could be made for accepting almost any single sacrifice, provided this would assure permanent peace...
...And Stalin did not for a moment cease waging his cold war against the West because of the concessions made at Yalta to his imperialist designs in Eastern Europe and the Far East...
...As far back in history as the eve of the Peloponnesian War, in the fifth century B.C., the Athenian leader Pericles rejected the idea that peace might be bought by a minor concession with the following arguments: "I hope none of you thinks we shall be going to war for a trifle Why, this trifle contains the whole seal and trial of your resolution...
...If you give way, you will instantly have to meet some greater demand, because you were frightened into obedience in the first case...
...The best time to have had it out with Stalin was at the end of the war, when the Soviet Union was bled white and the United States was at the peak of its military power...
...Less than a year after Neville Chamberlain brought "peace in our time" home from Munich, Great Britain and Germany were at war...
...Churchill's words were directed to the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s, but they apply with equal force to the tragic failure of the Western powers to face a showdown with Stalin and Khrushchev in the '40s and '50s...
...There must be no ticking of a time bomb in the form of an open or implied ultimatum...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamherlin The Great Folly Of Appeasement SOME voices of appeasement at home and abroad have already been raised in response to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's threatening growls about West Berlin and the accompanying sharp yelps and barks from East German Party chief Walter Ulbricht and his satellite regime...
...Appeasement will not be advocated under its proper name, of course...
...it will be dressed up under such respectable terms as "flexibility," "realism," "taking account of legitimate Soviet interests," etc...
...Both these meetings were hailed at the time as victories for peace and good sense...
...Thus, to reject appeasement is not to exclude negotiation as a means of settling or reducing international differences...
...And that is slavery...
...There must be no threat of dire consequences if the demands of one side are not unconditionally satisfied...
...The best time to have had a reckoning with Red China, and with the Soviet Union had it come to China's aid, was in 1950 when we still possessed overwhelming superiority in nuclear weapons...
...You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves...
...you may come to a moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival...
...while a firm refusal will make them understand that they must treat you more as equals For all claims from an equal, urged upon a neighbor as commands before any attempt at a legal settlement, whether these are large or small, have only one meaning...
Vol. 44 • August 1961 • No. 30
