The Dirty A-word: Appeasement
Peter Neville says that Bush and Blair failed to draw the proper lessons from Munich 1938 when they raised the spectre of Chamberlain and appeasement to justify their war against Saddam.
On September 30th, 1938, Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement that gave Germany the Czech Sudetenland. The next morning he also persuaded Adolf Hitler to sign the Anglo-German Declaration (now on view in the Imperial War Museum) that supposedly demonstrated the determination of the British and German peoples ‘never to go to war with one another again’. The British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, writing to congratulate Chamberlain, said that ‘Millions of mothers will be blessing your name tonight for having saved their sons from the horrors of war. Oceans of ink will flow hereafter in criticism.’
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