Posted on 09/30/2013 9:02:59 AM PDT by the scotsman
'Seventy-five years after the Munich Agreement signed with Hitler, the name of Neville Chamberlain, British prime minister at the time, is still synonymous with weakness and appeasement. Is this fair, asks historian Robert Self.'
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
It's Churchill's fault? Insanity.
Now I'm going to go out on a limb and read more into this opinion piece *and* this statement in particular.
It's the Republicans, and those like Ted Cruz in particular, who are making Obama and Kerry look weak. We just don't know & understand all the variables he has to consider when he bows and ass kisses despotic murders. That his appeasement of animals like the Iranian rulers is really a calculated decision that is being slandered by conservatives for political gain.
Anyone else agree?
Yep, BBC. It's fair.
And your lame attempts at history revision will not help the weak, appeasing, African communist p.o.s. Ubama.
No sale, BBC.
A laughable piece of apologia for the appeasement lobby. Are you sure that this wasn’t written by Pat Buchanan?
The most ridiculous aspect of the current Neville Chamberlain analogies is the inflating of Iran into a latter day Nazi Germany when a closer analogy from that day would be Mussolini’s Italy if not Antonescu’s Romania.
You are spot on
Show me any modern appeaser who can measure up to any of those qualities.
well we can give him that
Churchill didn’t think Neville Chamberlain was the problem. He thought that the unreadiness foisted on Britain by Stanley Baldwin was the problem.
Chamberlain certainly made mistakes, but the Munich agreement was in fact a peace treaty that made peace, at the cost of Czech defenses. Hitler went beyond the agreement and took over the rest of Czechoslovakia (except for bits handed to Poland and Hungary), but that wasn’t Chamberlain’s fault.
It should be noted that German war production was vastly over estimated, as Germany intended, with conventional intelligence reporting that, for example, tank production was as high as 1400 tanks a month, which led to an understandable caution. Only after the war started were some German tanks captured, and from analysis of their serial numbers a better estimate was derived: No more than 275 a month. That is a big difference.
There is a nice article in Wikipedia on “The German Tank Problem”.
Were it not for Florida going for George W. Bush in 2000 by an extremely narrow margin, a decision supported by a Supreme Court majority, Al Gore would have been President on September 11, 2011. Other than some token strikes to save face, Gore's response would have been the same as those we have seen from Carter, Clinton, and Obama.
One should note that after Munich, one Joseph Stalin made yet another agreement with Hitler, so the wells of supidity of European Diplomacy with Hitler were not dry after Hitler betrayed Chamberlain.
Politically Roosevelt tried to take credit for Munich, but that was too much of a stretch for even the US laptod press of the day.
The point is NOT UP FOR ARGUMENT... neville was an appeaser and an idiot. This article comes from organized criminals that are still actively screwing America and the World with their globull warming con so........
I don’t need to read anything from wiki. I have Churchill’s works AND I have Life magazines (bound) from the period 1933 until 1953.
Winston was certainly no fan of Chamberlain. He did not suffer fools lightly. Nor did he solely blame Baldwin.
He would be perfectly acceptable in today’s society of same-sex marriage.
Chamberlain and Obama should never be compared to each other.
The former, though perhaps naive, loved his country.
A weak and terrible leader?
Oh, no. He was great and astute. A magnificent leader. He just got taken to the cleaners by a megalomaniacal liar.
Good thing our leader is strong and wonderful. Better that there aren’t any modern Hitlers he may have to confront.
“You could hold his [Neville Chamberlain] head in the toilet [and] he’d still give you half of Europe” -George Costanza
Churchill’s observations on Baldwin are spot-on. After all, it was Stanley Baldwin who famously observed “the bomber will always get through,” but did less than any other pre-war British Prime Minister to prepare his nation’s defenses. As another poster observed, development of the Spitfire and Hurricane (along with radar) came on Chamberlain’s watch and (in a sense) the Brits were playing catch-up.
At the operational level, Baldwin’s feckless defense policies are one reason Bomber Command was totally unprepared for World War II and suffered staggering losses in its early, daylight raids. Of course, we weren’t much better in the run-up to the war; as I recall, the B-17 bomber program survived in Congress by a single vote, and our budget for tank development in 1941 was just under $90,000.
The Conservative Chamberlain wanted to redirect Hitler to the east where the two evil empires would destroy each other. He correctly reasoned that another general war, even a victorious war, would be the ruination of his nation. Events proved him correct in that observation. The problem with Chamberlain’s strategy was that he didn’t follow it through to the end, but reversed himself the next spring, unilaterally guaranteeing any nation from Poland to Istanbul. That let Stalin off the hook.
I don’t think Churchill went into detail on the German Tank Problem, or on ULTRA, but had good reasons for not doing so.
I figure Chamberlain was an honorable man, who was conned by a dishonorable man.
Stalin was a dishonorable man who was conned by another dishonorable man. Soviet Union paid for that with 14.5 million military casualties and about 35 million civilian casualties. Soviets lost in WWII over 1 million second lieutenants.
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