Appeasement Defined

From William Manchester's The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill; Alone: 1932-1940:

Appease vt Pacify, conciliate: esp: to buy off (an aggressor) by concessions usu. at the sacrifice of principles -- appeasable adj --appeasement n -- appeaser n

So defined, the word implies a slur, but Eden had used it in its original meaning -- to bring to peace, pacify, quiet, or settle. In that sense it has been in the language for five centuries and appears in Chaucer, Spenser, and Samuel Johnson. Churchill had employed it after the general strike of 1926 in describing his approach to the negotiation of a settlement between miners and the owners of coalfields. As an aspersion, however, it had been introduced in the House of Lords on November 5, 1929. The speaker had been the dying Lord Birkenhead, F.E. Smith. Condemning Britain's conciliatory tactics towards advocates of Indian independence, F.E. called them "appeasers of Gandhi." Eventually, Telford Taylor notes, "the word became a symbol of weak and myopic yielding when resistance would be bolder and, in the long run, safer."

Churchill used it as a stigma in 1933, when the coalition's determination to meet the German dictator's demands became clear to him. Appropriately, the first cabinet minister to rebuke Churchill outside the House for his attack on MacDonald was the man who would become known to history as the archpriest of appeasement. Speaking to his Birmingham constituency on March 24, Neville Chamberlain deplored Churchill's abuse of his talent "to throw suspicion and doubts in the minds of other Governments who have not expressed such feeling." He declared it England's duty to make "every effort," exert "every influence," and act as mediators" to preserve the peace by reconciling estranged countries.

Tony Blankley:

...This evolving mental path to appeasement mirrors in uncanny detail a similar path taken by the British government to Hitler in the 1930s.

Contrary to popular history, the British government was under little illusion concerning Hitler's nature and objectives in the early 1930s.

Those illusions only emerged as mental rationalizations later in the 1930's.

In April 1933, just three months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the British government presciently assessed the man and his plans. The outgoing British ambassador to Germany, Sir Horace Rumbold, who had been closely observing Hitler for years, reported back to London in a special dispatch to the prime minister on April 26, 1933. He warned his government to take "Mein Kampf" seriously.

He assessed that Hitler would resort to periodic peaceful claims "to induce a sense of security abroad." But that he planned to expand into Russia and "would not abandon the cardinal points of his program," but would seek to "lull adversaries into such a state of coma that they will allow themselves to be engaged one by one." The ambassador was sure that "a deliberate policy is now being pursued, whose aim was to prepare Germany militarily before her adversaries could interfere." He also warned that Hitler personally believed in his violent anti-Semitism and that it was central to his government policy. Back in London, Major General A.C. Temperley briefed the prime minister on the Rumbold dispatch that if Britain did not stop Hitler right away, the alternative was "to allow things to drift for another five years, by which time ... war seems inevitable." In the event, general war in Europe came in six years, not five.

But because the British people, still under the sway of their memory of WWI, were against military action, and because the politicians wanted to spend precious tax revenues on domestic programs, they walked away from their own good judgment.

...Ambassador Phipps first states the obvious: To wit, if Hitler is as the government believes him to be, logic requires a preventive war. But they don't want to do that, so he hopes Hitler isn't as they know him to be, and they seek a diplomatic agreement, which even Phipps recognized was unlikely to be honored...

re :But because the British people, still under the sway of their memory of WWI, were against military action, and because the politicians wanted to spend precious tax revenues on domestic programs, they walked away from their own good judgment.

Its nice to meet someone else with a understand and interest in this area, but there was a lot more to it than stated here.

Yes the horrors of the First World War were still very fresh in both populations’ minds.

But there were other less known factors.

Many people in Great Britain at the time including many leading statesmen thought the treaty of Versailles was unfair to Germany. So they did not take a stand when Germany decided to tear it up. Part of this was they could not see a real objection to why the Germanic people could not unite under one German nation. This included the Rhineland, Austria and finally the Sudetenland.

It was when Germany annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia, after encouraging the Slovaks under Tiso to breakaway that they really woke up to the dangers of Hitler and Nazism, for the first time he brought a non-Germanic population under his control. This was the reason why France and Great Britain created a treaty with Poland, and tried to create a treaty with the Soviet Union, too late.

The problem was pre Czech occupation; many in very important positions still viewed Stalin’s Russia as the main threat to Europe, and that Hitler a committed anti Bolshevik as an important bulwark.

In the British establishment it was viewed as the height of folly to go to war with Hitler. They saw a rerun of the First World War, which would; who ever won would lead to more Bolshevik revolutions in Europe. In fact what was feared did come to pass war with Hitler led to the Communist occupation of Eastern Europe for over 40 years

There was a real scare of the Red Menace at the time.

Just as the Right Wing German establishment thought they could use Hitler to contain and deal with the Red Menace , so did the Establishments in Great Britain and France.

Only a few dissenters such as Winston Churchill saw this as folly.

Also at this time Britain was experiencing unrest in her empire Palestine, nationalist movement in Egypt and India, a growing Japanese menace.

They reasoned a European war would lead to diversion of military resources needed to safe guard the Empire.

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