No, it was a polite attempt to tell you that maybe you might not want to debate this issue further with somebody who is actually quite highly qualified in this area Moreover, to tell you that maybe you might not want to debate this issue further with somebody who is actually quite highly qualified in this area. As you say you also have a Masters in an area of history, that's a different matter, but I didn't know that and I had no desire to risk humiliating somebody. For all I knew I could be debating with a teenager who has read one book in their life.
First, it wasn't polite-telling someone they should to to university to get an M.A. as you did, is condescending.
Second, moreover, it was an appeal to authority since you were claiming that since you had an M.A. that should end the discussion.
[ And you know this as a fact?]
No, I just believe it as a qualified historian who has studied this issue in a fair amount of detail.
So, it isn't a fact, just an opinion.
[ Chamberlain was not appeasing Hitler to buy time to rearm, there isn't a shred of actual evidence to support that thesis.]
Which again, just demonstrates you haven't studied this. If you want to see some of the evidence, read Keith Feiling's The Life of Neville Chamberlain, or Dutton's Neville Chamberlain, or MacLeod's Neville Chambelain or A.J.P. Taylor's .The Origin of the Second World War, or Gaines Post's Dilemmas of Appeasement: British Deterrence and Defence, 1934-1937.
And they say that Chamberlain was appeasing to buy time for England to rearm?
You just admitted there wasn't any actual evidence for that.
MacLeod's, in my view, is the most persuasive and accessible, and I agree very strongly with this statement from it as being the guiding principle behind Munich: We should have fought Germany much earlier before their rearmament programme had got under way, or else that we should have avoided fighting them until much later when the full flood of our own rearmament programme had reduced the ratios of German superiority. Strategically 1938 was about two years too late and 1939 was about two years too soon.
And that says nothing about Chamberlains own motives for appeasement.
Moreover, it is also only an assumption that war would have been fought had Munich not occurred.
The Germans might have backed down, fearing the combined arms of England, France and the Czech's.
The German General Staff was very wary of fighting another war with the Allies but each concession emboldened Hitler.
Now, what you are looking at is a single positive aspect of Munich, the fact that the English had an extra year to rearm, a very myopic view at best.
If I wanted to be condescending, you'd be left in no doubt about it. I have attempted to be polite to you, but the simple fact is, I don't think you've studied this in any type of detail. You are repeating claims first made in the 1940s that are long since discredited. You do not seem to have been aware of any of the major players except Chamberlain and Churchill. You talk about Chamberlain having some sort of focus on the League of Nations, when, in fact, he did not - simply because by the time he was Prime Minister, the League was no longer relevant (if it had been - if Germany had still been a member - I'm sure Chamberlain would have tried to use it, but it wasn't, and he didn't) - and in fact, it was Churchill who wanted the League to be involved - albeit, a much more interventionist League.
So, it isn't a fact, just an opinion.
Yes - but so are the ideas that you are presenting about Chamberlain. The opinions of people like Michael Foot, a socialist who would later be the Opposition Leader in Parliament against Margaret Thatcher, and so somebody who you can not really regard as likely to treat any conservative politician like Chamberlain in a good light, and Frank Owen - a failed Liberal Member of Parliament, who cowrote Guilty Men in 1940, the work that has coloured most later perception of Chamberlain. It was a political hit piece by his left wing opponents. And you are repeating their case (Note - it is true that they also had a Conservative journalist as their third co-author, Peter Howard, but he repudiated their case in Innocent Men only a year later. Others who attacked Chamberlain in their writings were Geoffrey Mander - a Liberal MP - who was again, attacking a political opponent when he wrote We Were Not All Wrong and Aneurin Bevan, a Labor MP (later Deputy Leader of the Labor Party, in fact) in Why Not Trust the Tories?
In other words, the case you are supporting is a case that was developed by the left wing of British politics in the early 1940s and has little to do with any type of fact, but was purely politically motivated. It is very much like taking seriously a book by Hilary Clinton blaming President George W. Bush, for 9/11. The sources political bias is obvious (Foot, Owen, and Bevan, even tried to conceal their identities by writing under pseudonyms) and their case was a political case not a factual one.
And they say that Chamberlain was appeasing to buy time for England to rearm?
Yes, they do.
You just admitted there wasn't any actual evidence for that.
No, I did not admit that at all. What I said was that it can't be proven as a fact. Very little about the motivations of politicians ever can be.
But there is considerable evidence for the position. Dutton and Post, in particular, base their position on Chamberlain papers and the Cabinet papers which show the course of discussion. Feiling didn't have access to the papers - it's not clear if MacLeod did (he shouldn't have, they were still classified at the time he was writing, so he never said he did, but a lot of what he says does seem to suggest he'd seen at least some of them).
And that says nothing about Chamberlains own motives for appeasement.
No, but as Chamberlain had been supporting rearmament since at least 1935 (possibly 1934) including delivering two rearmament budgets as Chancellor of the Exchequer and constantly knew both the current capabilities of the British forces, and knew when new capabilities would be acquired, any conclusion other than the one that he was trying to get Britain to a stage where it was capable of fighting a war is very hard to substantiate.
Moreover, it is also only an assumption that war would have been fought had Munich not occurred.
Yes, but it's an assumption that is generally accepted. War might not have come instantly but Hitler wanted his Reich.
The Germans might have backed down, fearing the combined arms of England, France and the Czech's.
Unlikely, but not impossible.
The German General Staff was very wary of fighting another war with the Allies but each concession emboldened Hitler.
If the German General Staff had been in charge, war wouldn't have come in 1939 either. It was Hitler who wanted war above all others.
Now, what you are looking at is a single positive aspect of Munich, the fact that the English had an extra year to rearm, a very myopic view at best.
No, actually, that's not all I'm looking at. It's just all I have bothered to discuss here.