I was just watching a clip on Bill Nye taking to task prospective Trump science advisor William Harper on climate change denialism.
Harper tried to draw a comparison between the Paris Protocol and Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy (7:25).
To his credit, the CNN anchor pressed him for clarification rather than just let him jump on to the next talking point.
All that Harper could give by way of justification for the comparison was to say “it was a treaty that was not going to do any good” and that neither will the Paris Protocol.
That’s a pretty tenuous connection and, again, to the anchor’s credit, he says “I don’t know that references there ever serve us well.” I’d actually think that, if anything, it’s a reference that would go counter to climate denialism, in that both are policies that hinge on ignoring a looming global and domestic disaster for the sake of keeping business going as usual.
Anyway, I seem to recall that republicans made several references to Neville Chamberlain in the lead up to the Iraq war, and I think I may have heard it used more recently in anti-terrorist rhetoric (sorry, no cites). I don’t know if references to Chamberlain are any more common on the right than on the left, but the baffling use of it by Harper in a discussion on climate change and science funding made me wonder if this is part of Republican/right-wing short-hand rhetoric.
Has anyone else noticed this, or am I just seeing what I want to see?
Chamberlain is just short-hand since it’s a reference almost everyone knows. Similarly I’ve seen people on both the left and right use Quisling a lot recently as well.
<off-topic from the OP question about the right-wing, but …>
There’s reason to believe Neville Chamberlain did the correct thing at that time.
Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” speech was clearly wrong, but it’s doubtful that even he actually believed it – as soon as he got home, Parliament voted for big increases in military armaments & manpower.
Good thing they did, because the UK (and other Allies were seriously out-armed by Germany at that time. Germany nearly won the war in the first months; had the war started earlier, Germany would have had even more of an advantage. The year or so gained by that agreement may have been vital to allowing the UK to hold out against Hitler in the early part of the war.
I watched that segment on CNN, and when Harper started talking about Chamberlain appeasing the Nazis, I went into total WTF??? mode. Nothing he said made any sense, especially that reference. All he accomplished was to take time away from the valuable things the others had to say.
The view of those who know seems to be that Chamberlain was a decent man in an almost impossible situation. It is doubtful that any other leader (Churchill included) could have achieved a different outcome. As others have said, he did buy time, he never really believed war could be averted, he was aware of his limitations as a war leader and ultimately Churchill came to admire him.
Worth reading Churchill’s speech to the commons on the occasion of Chamberlain’s death. A little florid for modern tastes but but perfect for Churchill’s delivery.
True enough but he put himself in that position. For a number of years Chamberlain ignored the considerable evidence of the buildup to the coming war till it was too late.
To answer the OP.
Neville Chamberlain has come to be the poster child for those who seek treaties and words on paper from others they know will ignore them. Agreed is used by the right and not the left.
I tend to look for the larger viewpoint in such things as this.
In this case, the larger viewpoint is that there are valid and invalid ways to use similes when making an argument for or against something. The tactic of using a particular simile, owing to it’s intense emotional content, is a very old one. It is effective whenever the people employing it, are arguing against people who are not prepared for the tactic, and when the supporters of the people using it, have already adopted the idea that if they are upset, that the person making the argument has won.
It’s fair to say that the public in most countries were hardly hungry for war, and in the democracies it had been hard to persuade the public to vote for outright programmes of preparation for war (as Chamberlain’s predecessor admitted when he put forward a rearmament programme in 1936 having said nothing about such a proposal in the previous year’s general election). Chamberlain was vain enough to imagine he could strike a personal deal with Hitler and possibly believed the additional agreement at Munich was worth something; his French counterpart Daladier didn’t, and famously remarked, when he realised the crowds waiting to greet him on his return were there to cheer the agreement, “Les cons!” But we judge in the light of hindsight, which is always 20/20 vision. If you start from the proposition that everyone else in a negotiation is out to do you down and can’t be trusted to stick to an agreement, then you’re on the road to ruin anyway.
This thing about Chamberlain is a rather lazy way of not quite falling foul of Godwin’s Law, but it might as well be seen that way - but if one runs with it, it’s worth bearing in mind American conservatives weren’t exactly falling over themselves to stand up to Hitler until well past 1940…
Interesting. I’d never heard that take on it before. Thanks.
But how sad to become history’s short-hand reference for the errors of hesitation and naivety.
A little like how Benedict Arnold became reduced to “the traitor” for the sake of distilling history into a story of heroes and villains.
My vague impression is that it seems to be used on the Right as a tactict for shutting down people urging caution regarding military actions, but I can’t be sure it isn’t also used on the Left.
Worth noting that that eulogy came from a man defending the memory of a fellow Conservative Party member. Later, Churchill made these comments about Chamberlain in The Gathering Storm:
“Neville Chamberlain …was alert, businesslike, opinionated and self-confident in a very high degree. Unlike Baldwin, he conceived himself able to comprehend the whole field of Europe, and indeed the world. Instead of [Baldwin’s] vague but nonetheless deep-seated intuition, we now had a narrow, sharp-edged efficiency within the limits of the policy in which he believed. Both as Chancellor of the Exchequer and as Prime Minister he kept the tightest and most rigid control upon military expenditure. He was throughout this period the masterful opponent of all emergency measures… He had formed decided judgments about all the political figures of the day, both at home and abroad, and felt himself capable of dealing with them. His all pervading hope was to go down in history as the great Peacemaker, and for this he was prepared to strive continually (in) the teeth of facts and face great risks for himself and his country.”
The right wing is fond of citing Neville Chamberlain to show we should be tough on aggressors, as the Left emphasizes the example of America’s Vietnam involvement to discourage risky interventions. Both can be erroneously compared to much different situations.
Chamberlain as example of What Not To Do applies hindsight to the situation to make it a “he should have known” scenario, and being transposed to the present to becomes for many the presumption that in any agreement where “our side” agrees to restrain itself, we just know the other side will ignore it to their advantage. But do we?
That of course sets aside that the particulars of that historic event are not necessarily mapped to all other issues in which an agreement may be reached.
That it is used by the right rather than by the left IMO has to do with one of the two sides is generally likelier to see yielding, backing off or restraining yourself as being by definition a “defeat” or a “weakness” or an admission of being the one who’s wrong.
There is plenty of evidence that Chamberlain really did believe Hitler would be appeased and stop grabbing territory once all ethnic Germans were in the Reich, that there was no need to get Britain into another catastrophic war in Europe, and that only came to understand his error when it was too late to save Czechoslovakia. If the delay helped Britain rearm sufficiently, that was fortuitous but never his plan.
As to why today’s US right keeps warning against the appeasement of dictators, that started when they were beating the drums to go kick Saddam’s ass, no matter the mere facts, and we all know how well that turned out.
The right wing has a fetish about “acting tough.” It is their panacea, so Chamberlain is reviled because he didn’t “act tough” with Hitler and is used as an object lesson for any international situation.
Hey – we’re perfectly willing to appease dictators when they’re our dictators, like the Shah or Iran, or Batista in pre-Castro Cuba, or any number of South American dictators. It’s just when they stop dancing to the tune played by our 1% and start talking back that we need to “kick their ass”. Then we send in the troops and replace them with a new, more compliant dictator.
How many of you have seen the memorials to the lost of WW1 around the UK and France? Lest we forget, Chamberlain was representing the will of the people, a people who had lost men in unimaginable horror and numbers 20 years earlier.
When it came to it, of course, Chamberlain didn’t balk and it was he who declared war on Germany when no other options remained.