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Churchill At Munich

Churchill At Munich

“Sometimes it is necessary to change the truth in order to remember it.”
– Santayana

A Brief History Lesson

A Brief History Lesson

“Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”
– George Orwell

The chief cause of World War II can be attributed to the deficiency of spine and resolve among the democracies during the 1930s. From 1933 onward, the dictator of Germany, Adolf Hitler, pursued a policy of rearmament, shameless revenge and naked aggression. He sought revenge for Germany’s defeat in World War I, as well as for the punitive measures enacted by the Treaty of Versailles. He committed aggression by occupying the Rhineland, annexing Austria, and reducing Czechoslovakia to a vassal state of the Third Reich. Time and again the democracies quaked and cowered. Their only response was appeasement. They thereby effectively surrendered to Hitler. All of the Nazi victories were bloodless.

Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister of Britain in the pivotal year of 1938. Chamberlain will forever remain infamous as the appeaser who sold out Czechoslovakia at the Munich Conference in September of that year. He believed that by sacrificing the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia, he could permanently mollify Hitler and thus preserve peace in Europe. The precise opposite proved to be the case. Hitler’s appetite for conquest only grew, and soon resulted in Germany’s invasion of Poland . . . and the outbreak of World War II.

Throughout the 1930s the chief British voice warning against the menace of Nazi Germany was that of Winston Churchill. For much of that decade, Churchill stood nearly alone as he documented Germany’s growing military might, identified the peril of Hitler’s predations, and insisted on the need for Britain to massively rearm. His prophecies and counsel were consistently ignored. Churchill was mocked and derided. He became an outcast of his own party.

It was only in May of 1940, as German armies were sweeping across France, that Chamberlain was forced to resign. The king appointed Churchill as Prime Minister. It was at this precise point in his long career that Churchill made his greatest contribution to the preservation of freedom and the history of mankind. Although Britain now stood on its own against the seemingly invincible might of Nazi Germany, Churchill resisted all pressure to negotiate with Hitler.

As a consequence, Britain kept alight the flame of resistance until events (chief among them Hitler’s decision to invade Russia, and America’s entry after Pearl Harbor) helped turn the tide. Britain could not have won the war alone, but what Churchill did in 1940 was ensure that liberal civilization would not lose the war to Nazi barbarism.

The Author

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A former journalist and magazine editor, Michael Carin is the author of several novels including Five Hundred Keys and Churchill At Munich (winner of the Whistler Independent Book Award for fiction). His non-fiction response to the Holocaust, The Future Jew, won him wide recognition as a provocative secular humanist. Mr. Carin’s regard for the values enshrined in the American constitution obliged him to write Guilty Men, an indictment of those responsible for enabling the election of a Manhattan mountebank to the presidency of the United States. His book, The Kremlin Papers, traces Russian influence over that American president from the perspective of his Kremlin overseers. Mr. Carin’s satirical novel, The Anti-Trump, lampoons the mountebank’s 2016 presidential campaign. Most recently, in the novel Edisson and Jeremiah (winner of the Guernica Prize), Mr. Carin posits the story of history’s most controversial magic show – while laying bare the pathological duality of American culture.

Michael Carin can be reached at: michaelcarin@hotmail.com

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