In the Fall of 1938, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich with his “piece of paper” outlining the agreement that ceeded to Hitler the “living room” in the Sudetenland he had demanded. Eighty one years later Donald Trump wrote a letter that warned the Turkish President that he, Trump, would be very unhappy if Turkey invaded Iraq to construct a “security buffer” against the Kurds.
Donald however has trumped Chamberlain by appeasing not one despotic war criminal but three; Assad of Syria, his puppet master in Moscow and Erdogan in Turkey.
In a speech explaining Appeasement Chamberlain said of the preparations that Britain was undergoing in expectation of war..
How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks herebecause of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war.
Today we have twitter rather than the wireless conveying leaders’ utterings.
Chamberlain had been 42 at the start of WWI and had been in charge of organising conscription. He knew the responsibility of sending men to their deaths in the trenches of France and Belgium and the experience weighed heavily on his thinking.
However much we may sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that. I am myself a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me; but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living; but war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake, and that the call to risk everything in their defence, when all the consequences are weighed, is irresistible.
Trump has at least 70 civilian deaths on his hands so far because he decided to pull out fewer US soldiers than that whose presence had prevented Erdogan’s war. He has a proud family history of avoiding military service. His excuse for sanctioning the Turkish invasion was that it would have happened anyway and he was fulfilling his promise to “bring the boys home” by redeploying 1000 from Syria and 1500 into Saudi Arabia.
Some historians have treated Chamberlain more kindly in recent years and there is quite a bit of evidence that Britain was not ready for an all-out war in 1938. Of the two fighter aircraft critical to the victory in the Battle of Britain, the Hurrican had started to be delivered in 1936 but it was to be a year after Munich, almost at the outbreak of WWII that the first Spitfires were delivered. However the stain on Britain’s reputation continues (this was written in 2016 in a piece about Brexit).
Chamberlain’s famous words about a “faraway country”(see footnote) will be all too familiar to many Czechs. The bitter taste of the Munich betrayal still lingers nearly 80 years after the First Republic was sacrificed on the altar of the British Prime Minister’s illusory promise of “peace in our time.”
As a teenager on August 21, 1968 I was in the front row of the crowd in the Royal Albert Hall to listen to hear the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich play Czech composer Antonin Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, accompanied by the Sovier State Symphony Orchestra for that night’s Promenade Concert. In a faraway country at a faraway time, you may not recognise that as the day the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the “Prague Spring”.
Rostropovich, somehow, saved the evening. His playing was so emotional, filled with such anger and sadness at what was happening in Prague - the city where he had met his wife - it felt more like an apology than a piece of music. He cried as he played, recalling later that he imagined people being killed through the tears. At the end, he held the score high in a gesture of solidarity.
I accompanied Mstislav with my tears. At Midnight on 30 April/ 1 May 2004 I stood on the banks of the Vltava in Prague celebrating with the Czech people as they symbolically rejoined the European family of nations on their accession to the EU, but did not forget to place a rose on the memorial to Jan Palach. Now the circle of history has revolved and Tory politicians are determined that central Europe will again become “far away countries of whose people we know nothing.”
It is totally understandable that for over 80 years some Czechs at least have seen Britain as bearing the mark of Cain for abandoning them in 1938 to eventually languish behind the Iron Curtain. Kurdistan is a far away country for the USA. How long will it bear the mark of Cain for the Kurdish people because of Trump’s actions?