Alistaire Cooke, with his 95 years of experience in life, weighs in.
(I am assuming this is genuine, though I did get it from an email, so it's possible it's not. But from my study of history, the facts are right.)
PEACE FOR OUR TIME by Alistair Cooke, BBC Broadcaster (he is 95 years old).
(About the author: In 1936, the NBC network invited Alistair Cooke to do
a weekly broadcast of reflections on British life called London Letter.
Cooke then emigrated to the United States in 1937, and asked the BBC
to let him do the same thing in reverse. Eventually he succeeded, and
'Letter from America' is now the longest running radio broadcast in
human history. In the process it has won a faithful worldwide audience
of several million and many friends in high places. When Cooke was
awarded an honorary knighthood in 1973, the Queen is reputed to have
expressed bewildered admiration at his ability to sit down, week after
week, and communicate so directly with his audience.)
...I promised to lay off topic A - Iraq - until the Security Council
makes a judgment on the inspectors' report and I shall keep that
promise. But I must tell you that throughout the past fortnight I've
listened to everybody involved in or looking on to a monotonous din of
words, like a tide crashing and receding on a beach - making a great
noise and saying the same thing over and over. And this ordeal
triggered a nightmare - a day-mare, if you like. Through the ceaseless
tide I heard a voice, a very English voice of an old man - Prime
Minister Chamberlain saying: "I believe it is peace for our time" - a
sentence that prompted a huge cheer, first from a listening street crowd
and then from the House of Commons and next day from every newspaper in
the land.
There was a move to urge that Mr Chamberlain should receive the Nobel
Peace Prize. In Parliament there was one unfamiliar old grumbler to
growl out: "I believe we have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat."
He was, in view of the general sentiment, very properly booed down.
This scene concluded in the autumn of 1938 the British prime minister's
effectual signing away of most of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. The rest of
it, within months, Hitler walked in and conquered. "Oh dear," said Mr
Chamberlain, thunderstruck. "He has betrayed my trust."
During the last fortnight a simple but startling thought occurred to me
--every single official, diplomat, president, prime minister involved in
the Iraq debate was in 1938 a toddler, most of them unborn. So the
dreadful scene I've just drawn will not have been remembered by most
listeners.
Hitler had started betraying our trust not 12 years but only two years
before, when he broke the First World War peace treaty by occupying the
demilitarised zone of the Rhineland. Only half his troops carried one
reload of ammunition because Hitler knew that French morale was too low
to confront any war just then and 10 million of 11 million British
voters had signed a so-called peace ballot. It stated no conditions,
elaborated no terms, it simply counted the numbers of Britons who were
"for peace."
The slogan of this movement was "Against war and fascism" - chanted at
the time by every Labour man and Liberal and many moderate Conservatives
- a slogan that now sounds as imbecilic as "against hospitals and
disease." In blunter words a majority of Britons would do anything,
absolutely anything, to get rid of Hitler except fight him.
At that time the word pre-emptive had not been invented, though today
it's a catchword. After all the Rhineland was what it said it was -
part of Germany. So to march in and throw Hitler out would have been
pre-emptive -wouldn't it? Nobody did anything and Hitler looked forward
with confidence to gobbling up the rest of Western Europe country by
country - "course by course," as growler Churchill put it.
I bring up Munich and the mid-30s because I was fully grown, on the
verge of 30, and knew we were indeed living in the age of anxiety. And
so many of the arguments mounted against each other today, in the last
fortnight, are exactly what we heard in the House of Commons debates and
read in the French press.
The French especially urged, after every Hitler invasion, "negotiation,
negotiation." They negotiated so successfully as to have their whole
country defeated and occupied. But as one famous French leftist said:
"We did anyway manage to make them declare Paris an open city - no bombs
on us!"
In Britain the general response to every Hitler advance was disarmament
and collective security. Collective security meant to leave every
crisis to the League of Nations. It would put down aggressors, even
though, like the United Nations, it had no army, navy or air force.
The League of Nations had its chance to prove itself when Mussolini
invaded and conquered Ethiopia (Abyssinia). The League didn't have any
shot to fire. But still the cry was chanted in the House of Commons -
the League and collective security is the only true guarantee of peace.
But after the Rhineland the maverick Churchill decided there was no
collectivity in collective security and started a highly unpopular
campaign for rearmament by Britain, warning against the general belief
that Hitler had already built an enormous mechanised army and superior
air force.But he's not used them, he's not used them - people protested.
Still for two years before the outbreak of the Second War you could read
the debates in the House of Commons and now shiver at the famous Labour
men -Major Attlee was one of them - who voted against rearmament and
still went on pointing to the League of Nations as the saviour. |
