Invoking Munich, 'Appeasement', And The 'Lessons Of History'

Thursday, 13 March 2025, 6:32 pm
Opinion: Keith Rankin

Former ambassador Phil Goff is the latest (so far) and (probably) the least of many 'statesmen' who have invoked Munich and the 'resolute' Winston Churchill (a backbench MP in 1938) in the cause of good-war mongering. (Refer Winston Peters sacks Phil Goff as UK High Commissioner RNZ 6 March 2025, and What Was Actually Wrong With What Phil Goff Said?, Giles Dexter, RNZ and Scoop, 7 March 2025.)

The Munich narrative is central to the 'Good War' morality trope, through which democracies (especially the United States) justified wars of aggression; what used to be called 'gunboat-diplomacy' in the British days of empire. It's the now-commonplace narrative that frames any putative war to be fought by a 'liberal democracy' against an 'autocracy' (ie fought by us against them) as a contest between Good and Evil; and if we don't "stand up to" Evil – anywhere and everywhere – then Evil goes on to 'win', and subsequently to dominate and exact tribute as a regional or global hegemon.

The corollary of the Munich narrative is that Good should never give up, even if Evil is winning on the battlefield; Good neither surrenders to Evil nor negotiates with Evil. Not 'at any cost'. The logical conclusion of this is that, if that's what it requires for Good to prevail, life on Planet Earth could be forfeit; better Dead than Red or Black. Earth's tombstone, left for a future intergalactic explorer to discover, might read: "At Least 'Atila the Hun' [substitute any Eurasian 'Devil'] Did Not Win". Peter Hitchen (see below, p.27) notes: "one day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us all [through our rulers' vanity]".

Phil Goff is an example of persons who know just enough fragments of popular history to think they can use a historical argument to substantiate their rhetoric. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, meaning that superficial knowledge may be more problematic than ignorance. On the Munich question, Phil Goff is in good company. Peter Hitchens, in The Phoney Victory (p8, p20), cites the former Prince of Wales (now King) as making the same mistaken views about World War Two and the Ukraine-Russia War, as moral crusades.

(Meanwhile, as well as trying to cut disability benefits as a result of boxing itself into a corner, Keir Starmer UK government – unlike the political leadership of Canada and the European Union – is doing everything it can to appease Donald Trump on international trade and other matters.)

For readers' interest, Stevan and Hugh Eldred-Grigg have written a New Zealand take on World War Two that does not follow the 'Good War' trope: Phoney Wars: New Zealand Society during the Second World War, Otago University Press 2017.

Were Neville Chamberlain's actions at the September 1938 Munich Conference wrong?

No, neither with foresight nor hindsight. If Britain and/or France had signed a pact with Czechoslovakia similar to the one they signed with Poland in 1939, they would have been committed to declaring at most a phoney war. Neither had the capacity to wage war on Germany nor to come to Czechoslovakia's aid. At best, British hostilities against Germany in 1938 would have been as ineffective as they were in Archangel, Russia, in 1918.

Popular sentiment was absent in 1938 in the United Kingdom towards war with Germany. That situation had changed by March 1939 after Germany fully annexed Bohemia and Moravia, the territories that make up twenty-first century Czechia. Due in part to changed popular sentiment, the British and French responded differently when Poland was similarly threatened in 1939. The western 'powers' declared war on Germany following the first attack on Poland, but did almost nothing to fight Germany or to protect Poland during what became known as the 'Phoney War'. (The phoney war ended with the German conquest of France in May 1940.)

The 1939 declaration of war was arguably more duplicitous than the 1938 declaration of peace. Poland's half-century-long tragedy – far worse than anyone today, except for a few professional and amateur historians, realise – began to unfold. (France briefly invaded Germany's Saarland in 1939, southeast of Luxembourg, before withdrawing. Nowhere near Poland.) The war in 1939 in Poland, remote to the United Kingdom, was far from 'phoney'.

Examples of invoking or evoking 'appeasement' and /or 'Munich' and/or Churchill on behalf of 'democracy':

Peter Hitchens gives these post-WW2 examples (pp.13-17):

· President Harry S Truman, in December 1950, re the continuation of the Korean War

· Anthony Eden, 1956, to justify the Suez War (which first brought Israel into an external war of aggression)

· President Lyndon Johnson in July 1965, justifying the escalation of the Vietnam War

· US Secretary of State George Shultz in February 1984, re conflict in Nicaragua

· US Deputy Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, in August 1989, before the US invasion of Panama

· George Bush (senior) in June 1990, re the first war against Iraq (noting that the initial response to the immanent invasion of Kuwait was not unlike Churchill's lesser-known response in 1938, to the German reoccupation of the Rhineland ["more talks"])

· Bill Clinton's 1999 comparison of Slobodan Milosevic to Hitler, in the context of the probable secession of Kosovo from Milosevic's Serbia

· UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, in 2003, justifying the second invasion of Iraq

· President Trump's aids in June 2017, referring to Barack Obama's Cuba initiative

Winston Churchill's worst Appeasement, and Atrocities

The worst act of appeasement that I can think of was Winston Churchill's kowtowing to Joseph Stain at Yalta (Crimea) in the second week of February 1945 (ref Hitchens p.6 and Wikipedia citing Leo McKinstry, "Attlee and Churchill: Allies in War, Adversaries in Peace", Atlantic Books, 2019, Ch 22). According to McKinstry "When Churchill arrived at Yalta on 4 February 1945, the first question that Stalin put to him was: 'Why haven't you bombed Dresden?'."

Ten days later, Churchill did indeed firebomb Dresden, immolating 25,000 people – mostly civilians and refugees. Stalin (metaphorically) said "jump", Churchill said "how high?". And Churchill delivered.

Dresden was far from Churchill's only actual or intended atrocity. Operation Gomorrah, on Hamburg at the end of July 1943, was a worse 24-hour atrocity than Dresden. The malevolent intent of that 'raid' lies in the biblical name given to the operation. While it was largely a test-run and forerunner for later bombings – including a forerunner of the firebombing of Tokyo exactly 80 years ago – it killed more than 35,000 mostly civilians "in their homes".

(As a single event the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9 March 1945 – Operation Meetinghouse – caused easily more deaths [100,000] than Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima [70,000] or Nagasaki [35,000]. In the mainstream media, I saw no 80th-anniversary commemoration stories of this 'worst-ever in the history of the world' attack on civilians. Now is a timely time for us to be reminded about this kind of aerial megadeath.)

The third Churchill atrocity to mention was the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people. Encyclopedia Britannica says that "the 1942 halt in rice imports to India did not cause the famine, and the 1943 crop yield was actually sufficient to feed the people of Bengal. It was ultimately special wartime factors that caused this difficult situation to become a disastrous famine. Fearing Japanese invasion, British authorities stockpiled food to feed defending troops, and they exported considerable quantities to British forces in the Middle East". Churchill's atrocities have been justified on the basis that the casualties were to them while saving some of our lives. But the people of Bengal were, at least notionally part of us, citizens and civilians of the British Empire.

In Wikipedia: "Madhusree Mukerjee makes a stark accusation: "The War Cabinet's shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour travelling to Ceylon, the Middle East, and Southern Africa – everywhere in the Indian Ocean but to India." Indeed, Bengal was required to export rice to Ceylon to support British naval operations there. Of Churchill's major atrocities, this was the only one to be mentioned in Netflix's recent over-the-top account Churchill at War.

The Netflix 'docuseries' does at least mention Churchill being sidelined by the Americans in late 1943 and 1944. Churchill was sidelined from the top table of war-command largely on the basis of his penchant for atrocities and his unwillingness to confront Germany head-on (an unwillingness that could have been interpreted as 'appeasement', and probably was understood as such by the Americans). Churchill indulged in a number of side-wars, including a successful invasion of Madagascar in 1942; an invasion that put paid forever to the 1940 German fantasy of resettling Eastern European Jews there.

The Americans took much longer than Churchill to become convinced about the merits of holocaust-scale bombing than did the British. It would seem that the British burning of Hamburg – which was bombed because it was there, easily accessible from Britain – left quite a bad taste upon some American commanders, and indeed upon President Roosevelt himself. (We note that the atrocious American incendiary bombings of Japan in March 1945 were undertaken after Harry Truman became Vice President, and in the context that Roosevelt was seriously ill, and died soon after the February Yalta 'Peace' Conference.)

Churchill's final atrocity to mention here never actually happened, except to create an environmental disaster on a Scottish Island (Gruinard, Britain's mysterious WW2 'island of death' Myles Burke, BBC, 22 April 2024). It partly explains some of Churchill's reticence towards the D-Day invasion of Occupied France. Churchill had another plan, which he seems to have kept secret from his Allies: biological warfare, Anthrax.

"The plan was to infect linseed cakes with Anthrax spores and drop them by plane into cattle pastures around Germany. … The proposed plan would have decimated Germany's meat supply, and triggered a nationwide anthrax contamination, resulting in an enormous [civilian] death toll. … The secret trials carried on until 1943, when the military deemed them a success, and scientists packed up and returned to Porton Down. As a result, five million linseed cakes laced with Anthrax were produced but the plan was ultimately abandoned as the Allies' Normandy invasion progressed, leading the cakes to be destroyed after the war." The test programme on Gruinard was cynically called 'Operation Vegetarian'. "Gruinard was not the only site where the UK conducted secret biological warfare tests, but it was the first. The consequences of what happened there stand as a grim testament to both the dangers of biological warfare and humanity's capacity for destruction."

Have Bill Clinton and subsequent US presidents drawn inspiration from Brezinski's 1997 essay as a clarion call for world domination?

Zbigniew Brezinski's call for US world hegemony seems not much different to what Richard Evans claims was Hitler's aim: "Hitler’s obvious drive for European and eventually world conquest." (Zbigniew Brzezinski, "A Geostrategy for Eurasia," Foreign Affairs, 76:5, September/October 1997; review of Peter Hitchens’s Eurosceptic take on the Second World War, by Richard J Evans, New Statesman, 26 Sep 2018.)

Evans' claim about Hitler is obvious hyperbole; Germany never could have had the capacity to "conquer" the world. (Think of the socio-geographic limits to the Roman Empire.) But the Nazi imperial vision for Germany was to create a mega-state in Central Eurasia that would have hegemony over the rest of the world. Is there any country in the twentieth or twenty-first century which has sought such 'unipolarity'; sought to be the world's one-and-only superpower, which expects other countries to say "how high?" whenever it says "jump"?

Perhaps there is? Did Brezinski – Henry Kissinger's 1970s' foreign policy rival – spell it out in 1997?

Finally

'Appeasement' is like 'Antisemitism'; the powers-that-be only have to say either word to silence commonsense debate about peace and war and genocide. As Hitchens points out (p.27): "We have mythologised the experience so completely that [politicians] only have to say the word 'appeasement' to silence opponents and bring legislators and journalists to their side, on any wild adventure." Phil Goff is a hapless victim of what Joseph Mali and Shlomo Sand have called "mythistory".

Wars since the 1930s are no more 'moral' than were wars before that time. (Indeed, if we wish to personalise it, WW2 at its core was a war between Hitler and Stalin; neither men are commonly described as 'moral'.) In fact, recent wars are less moral. WW2 became the first major war in which civilians were actively targeted as a predominant military gambit. This approach to war is now becoming entrenched, with drones replacing soldiers, and civilians evermore in the firing line.

We should not be coerced into supporting wars on the basis of narratives by powerful know-not-much persons or cliques dropping words like 'appeasement', 'Munich', 'Churchill' or 'Hitler'. Wars are very costly, but the costs are not usually paid – at least in the short term – by those elites who promote them from far away.

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

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Keith Rankin

Political Economist, Scoop Columnist

Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.

Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.

Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.

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