Neville Chamberlain Was Right (Essays in Leftism)

Seventy-five years ago, on Sept. 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, handing portions of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler's Germany. Chamberlain returned to Britain to popular acclaim, declaring that he had secured "peace for our time." Today the prime minister is generally portrayed as a foolish man who was wrong to try to "appease" Hitler—a cautionary tale for any leader silly enough to prefer negotiation to confrontation.

But among historians, that view changed in the late 1950s, when the British government began making Chamberlain-era records available to researchers. "The result of this was the discovery of all sorts of factors that narrowed the options of the British government in general and narrowed the options of Neville Chamberlain in particular," explains David Dutton, a British historian who wrote a recent biography of the prime minister. "The evidence was so overwhelming," he says, that many historians came to believe that Chamberlain "couldn't do anything other than what he did" at Munich. Over time, Dutton says, "the weight of the historiography began to shift to a much more sympathetic appreciation" of Chamberlain.

Your post much appreciate and there is so much information that it deserves careful analysis and I will not try to do that here. What does happen on this bastion of democratic discussion FR, is that one comment may lead to yet more research.

I could scarcely let go the comment by x because it rang a distant bell- or many bells. This is to digress, but I hope there may be some patience out there. In 1911 Britain possibly was the richest nation in the world along with the United States.

As American, Jack London found, when he visited 1908 East-end of London, the poor were utterly destitute. London was angered at the extremes of wealth and poverty. Reformer Lloyd George, the Liberal Prime Minister brought in old age pensions and work injury compensation in 1911.

I am informed that in the first three months of WW1, one department of the War Office spent a huge amount of money. It was as much spent by Lloyd George's new plan over three years. The gold sovereign was called in and a paper pound was exchanged for it. This plus a shilling piece. I believe Britain paid out huge amounts of gold. Destination possibly much at Fort Knox

In 1931 the new unemployment benefits bought in with the urging of the Labour Party were cut. A bit of a ramble on my part, but to try to put one in Chamberlain's shoes, the country was virtually broke.

My own opinion is that he would have gone alone with the expected collaboration of his good friend Ted Kennedy with the Nazi regime, just like old Joe. McCain may talk, but, again, my opinion is that he’s been owned outright by the NVA/Democrat Party since Hanoi. We may very well have seen pictures of him visiting “friends” in Germany, as in Egypt recently, and him offering to send weapons to the SS.

—Churchill was an outcast in the Conservative Party at that time.—

The origins of his outcast state within the Tories had nothing to do with Hitler, however, and stretched back all the way to the 1900s.

As for bulwarks, Churchill also initially thought the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was justified, somewhat, due to the Soviet menace next door.

You are likely to find this link to Robert Mundell’s Nobel lecture interesting.
. . . World War I made gold unstable. The instability began when deficit spending pushed the European belligerents off the gold standard, and gold came to the United States, where the newly-created Federal Reserve System monetized it, doubling the dollar price level and halving the real value of gold. The instability continued when, after the war, the Federal Reserve engineered a dramatic deflation in the recession of 1920-21, bringing the dollar (and gold) price level 60 percent of the way back toward the prewar equilibrium, a level at which the Federal Reserve kept it until 1929 . . .
IIRC my takeaway from reading that lecture was that, weird as it would have sounded to everyone at the time, the US would have been ahead of the game to have preemptively forgiven all the debt, and returned all the gold, which the US had acquired from Europe during WWI. The cost of not doing that was the Great Depression. And part of the cost of the Depression was WWII.

But of course the US was not then comfortable and secure in its status as the economic powerhouse of the world. Its citizenry would have been incapable of accepting any such responsibility.

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