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PEACE FOR OUR TIME

by Alistair Cooke, BBC Broadcaster (he is ~95 years old)

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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.

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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."

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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 preemptive 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 preemptive - 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.

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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!"

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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.

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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. Now, this

memory of mine may be totally irrelevant to the present crisis. It

haunts me. I have to say I have written elsewhere with much

conviction that most historical analogies are false because, however

strikingly similar a new situation may be to an old one, there's usually

one element that is different and it turns out to be the crucial one.

It may well be so here.

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All I know is that all the voices of the 30s are echoing through 2003

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"We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night

to visit violence on those who would harm us." George Orwell