Yes, Peace For our Time

The Jipshow with Mr. Menger

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Yes, Peace For our Time

Defending Neville Chamberlain and Confronting the "Appeasement" Narrative

Mr. Menger

Mar 19, 2024

Transcript

Time Stamps:

Opening (0:00)
Unfairly Remembered as a Silly Old Chap (1:30)
Why the “Appeasement” Narrative Distorts Our Judgment (6:10)

Winston Churchill once said of him, he had a choice between war and dishonor, and he chose dishonor.

I refer of course to Britain's most unpopular Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

Unfairly Remembered as a Silly Old Chap

Graeme Donald sheds light on the Munich Agreement in his book Loose Cannons.

Neville Chamberlan (I869-1940) is unfairly remembered as a silly old chap bamboozled by Hitler over the Munich Agreement, by which Germany and Britan agreed to sort out any further dispute by diplomatic means rather than conflict.
After the conference, Chamberlain's plane landed at Heston Aerodome on 30 September 1938, and it was here that he held aloft the infamous "piece of paper" and spoke to the assembled crowd of "peace with honour" and "peace for our time."
He later repeated these comments outside the Prime Minister's residence at Number 10, Downing Street. Although the PM spoke of peace for our time, it was misreported by the British Press and the BBC through confusion with "Give us peace in our time, O Lord," a popular line from the Book of Common Prayer.

At Chamberlain's next formal address to Parliament following the Munich Agreement, he had this to say:

l am told that the policy which I have tried to describe is inconsistent with the continuance, and much more inconsistent with the acceleration of our present programme of arms. I am asked how I can reconcile an appeal to the country to support the continuance of this programme with the words which I used when I came back from Munich the other day and spoke of my belief that we might have peace in our time. I hope honourable Members will not be disposed to read into words used in a moment of some emotion, after a long and exhausting day, after I had driven through miles of excited, enthusiastic, cheering people - I hope they will not read into those words more than they were intended to convey.

And yet, it is with thanks to that policy that England was bought time needed to build its defense to face Nazi Germany.

Why the “Appeasement” Narrative Distorts Our Judgment

In 2021, Janan Ganesh wrote an article entitled The right must stop treating ‘appeasement’ as the root of all evil for the Irish Times.

Time and again, the hawkish “Chamberlain and Churchill” framing oversimplifies the conflict of the day, and drives political leaders astray with its false sense of conviction.

A quirk of the Anglo-American right is its obsession with one historical event as the key to all others. Munich has come to stand for the folly of compromise and the wisdom of toughness, almost always and everywhere....
[T]he cry of appeasement will keep bouncing presidents into bad decisions until we learn not to grade their every foreign doing on a spectrum of Chamberlain to Churchill…
...A misreading of one historic event has distorted so much subsequent statecraft. It has encouraged the idea that, in foreign relations, a sort of blanket pugnacity gets results in the end. When it fails, the problem is held to be insufficient will: that Iraq wasn’t invaded earlier and with more troops, that America only gave it the 20 years in Afghanistan, that Iran hasn’t been made to taste the reality of US power yet.