It's years later that France and GB were accused of appeasement towards Hitler. At the time, the population was supportive. WW1 had killed over 1.5mil soldiers for each countries. The wave of pacifism that followed was the largest in the history of both countries. Every family had lost a son, a brother or a father. Those who didn't die returned as so war wounded they were unable to work. Two of my great grand fathers who fought in WW1alongside many used to call Petain the butcher of Verdun (later history made him a hero and he is still remembered like this today despite his war crimes during Vichy). They were so traumatised about the treatment of troops with no breaksfor many years, the deserters that got caught and shot, they both left the army after VE day. My entire family became pacifist from then on. The horrors of WW1 as captured by French cinema is a testament to what really happened and why Chamberlain and Daladier came back to the cheer of the population that war had been adverted. In early 1938, France had mobilised fearing war. What was diplomacy is now called appeasement by the armchair critics who have no clue about history. The re-armament of Germany was seen as a bonus by French and British political rulers as there was zero appetite to re-arm at home despite the danger of communism that many feared at the time. Sadly today many are ready to propagandise European history to justify the goals. It is now almost impossible to read anything mainstream that hasn't been re-written. Soon, there will be no real people to tell us as times were.
Yes. How soon we forget. How soon we believe what we are told to believe about history.
My family were also British pacifists. My grandmother and her fiancé were arrested. She was given the choice to go to work in an arms factory or spend the war in prison.
Russia will try to slow the tide in Europe, but to no avail. Hence, Putin's talks about Europe trying to provoke Russia into using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the recent change in Russian nuclear weapon doctrine. The Americans will NOT stop the Europeans from destroying themselves, as the wealth and talents in Europe will run to the US. The US does not sell much into Europe, and Airbus is the largest competitor to Boeing. India, Iran, and Brazil do not have much skin in the game. The KSA will lose some valuable customers, but there are other customers. China wants Europe as a market but China needs Russia for survival. When facing a binary choice, there is no room for ambiguity. Israel will be happy to see wars elsewhere to distract the world from its ethnic cleansing in Gaza and soon the West Bank. That leaves only the European people to fend for themselves against their ruling elites. The refugees from the Middle East and Africa can be recruited to become part of the government's suppression tools or become comrades of the native Europeans.
The Americans learned long ago that separating from Europe's suicidal warmongering was their best available option. Their elite political and money classes have tried ever since to reverse that policy as part of building their own Empire (perhaps), and with some success regarding the policy and many consequent failures regarding that policies effects on other power centers.
Trump is just the beginning of the counter-swing, with various elite factions having already changed sides and some apparently undecided. As noted elsewhere, revolutions don't arise from the peasantry but from rival factions of the elite.
At present the European elite are more unified than the US elite, but they're unfortunately unified on a suicidal policy set.
May I share with you something I picked up years ago in A.J.P. Taylor’s “Origins of the Second World War?” I would like to adapt some of his insights about the 1930s regarding the contemporary use of the word “appeasement."
“Appeasement” is a good word. It has great rhetorical value. It’s powerful in the hands of Ukraine war supporters: after all, who wants to be called an “appeaser?”
Trouble is, Taylor would probably say that “appeasement” means the opposite today than its meaning in the 1930s.
I’m running on memory here, so I could get things wrong, but the disconnect on meaning goes like this:
1. In the 1930s, appeasement was the default position of foreign policy elites; today the word is used to describe the outlook of foreign policy fringe critics. (To measure appeasement as the consensus view among policy elites, I believe Taylor would say that the Munich Agreement met with the editorial approval of virtually all major British newspapers.)
2. In the 1930s, appeasement was the anti-Russian position; today it’s used to describe someone with a pro-Russian position. (Many foreign policy elites in the 1930s favored a strong Germany to act as a bulwark against Bolshevism spilling into Western Europe.)
3. In the 1930s, appeasement was based on an ethical foundation, whereas today the word means the position of someone described as a craven Putin puppet. (Appeasement’s ethical foundation was “self-determination,” a Wilsonian war aim. In the post-Versailles period, if some European nationalities were to be accorded self-determination, then that same aspiration cannot simultaneously be denied Germany with regard to the Sudeten question.)
Now words take on different meanings in different historical periods, but on these three counts it would seem that “appeasement” has opposite applications between its original usage and the situation today.
You liked my comment here about the differing meanings of "appeasement." You inspired me to do an essay on it, "What Does 'Appeasement' Mean?" It's on The American Thinker website on May 8. Here's the link. Thanks again.
Very good points. So-called appeasement was a rational strategy and attempt at correcting some of the dangerous excesses of Versailles before they blew up into another world war. Then, at the end, it was a necessary holding pattern to buy time for the massive military buildup underway for a war that had become inevitable.
Honestly we are led by utter morons now. They have no understanding of how to advance the self interest of the nations they allegedly represent.
Globalists do not desire to recognize nations as distinct cultural identities.
The EU is the WEF's global fascism alpha test. It's not quite failing, but if the EU can be lured to the cliff's edge, perhaps a collective shove will "Epstein" it.
Churchill was scurrilously dishonest to imply by his weaponisation of the phrase “appeasement” that he could have done anything different. To attack Germany any earlier, without first buying time for rearmament, would have been national suicide. Even in the event it was a very close run thing and in effect “Imperial suicide”.
Sorry to distract, your point is about the present of course, not the past.
Not to defend Hitler but the USSR was planning to attack Germany. Germany wasn't planning to attack Britain, but just like Russia today they would have been exceedingly foolish not to plan for being attacked by Britain. WW3 looks more like WW2 than some may appreciate. Including a kind of prequel civil war being used by the major powers as a proving ground for new weapons and tactics.
None of the leaders of the war (Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, or Stalin) were saints or heroes. They were all warmongers trading the death and mutilation and ruination of millions of other people in return for wealth and power.
Excellent historical perspective which is so lacking in modern media and politics. I can't help thinking that the existential nature of this conflict for Russia could drive further ¨opportunism¨ - not that Putin wants to take further territory (my guess). But the gutless cowards of European leadership are provoking to such an extent that he (or a more hardline successor) might just calculate - let us not give them time to rearm and become a serious military threat. They can be dealt with now while they are on the back foot. In this way the warmongering rhetoric of Starmer, Macron, Ursula et al could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ian I strongly agree that Russia is in this war reluctantly, and sought, and would have preferred, almost any other outcome. As you say they have no appetite to ingest this rust belt, which is also a criminal hinterland with intractable centuries-old problems. The territorial claims I see in terms of “well if you force us to go to war we may as well get something of enduring value out of it”. I’m not sure the Russians who have given up their sons would tolerate anything less.
Framing any negotiated end to the war in Ukraine as “appeasement” deliberately distorts history to justify a war we never intended to fight ourselves. Unlike Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Russia poses no existential threat to Western Europe; let alone Britain.
The truth is, we're not confronting a rising totalitarian empire. We're fueling a conflict on the edge of Europe to appease hawks in Brussels and London, not to protect core national interests.
If we were serious about peace, we’d stop hiding behind historical myths and start dealing with the world as it is, not as our ideologues wish it to be.
Nice pushback on the war mongers, Ian. If you follow the logic of the ‘Munich betrayal/appeasement’ framing, then no state would ever negotiate with any other state, over any issue, ever. Instead of the 30 years war ending with the Peace of Westphalia, it would still be going on! It would be nice to think of these vile war mongers as clowns, but unfortunately they are much more sinister than that - they employ the magic word ‘appeasement’ because it is the word that just keeps on giving. Small point……you managed to speak of the events of 2014 without mentioning the Maidan Putsch. Not that it’s especially relevant to the essence of your article. 👍
The underlying issue is simple, the entirety of "The West" primarily Europe but only marginally less so the US, are failed states. Decades of financialization and the resultant hollowing out of their economies have produced husks. In the US hosts of purple haired dykes with faces full of fishing tackle selling blue checkmarks on Twitter/X is an unsustainable business model for a country. A model where $3 trillion of growth is produced by $5 trillion increase in debt must fail.
Fixing this is, I believe what Trumps flailing is about. Europe with even deeper systemic problems is not even trying.
I cannot recall a time and I've read a lot of history, when the cesspit of politics has resulted in such dense filth rising to the top as Europe today. Their stupidity is stunning.
They need the war. Their one hope is a an external enemy to, however briefly, unite people and act as a scapegoat for the civilizational collapse to come.
Putin, I think, see's this, maybe 10 years too late but he finally understands that the only result will be one dictated by him, not negotiated with them.
The "dense filth rising to the top" is a collective west problem. It can't be by accident that the stupidest we can hope to rule us are in place and we voted for them.
I believe the EU leaders want a poor, dependent Europe to fulfill the WEF's goal of a Europe United under one authoritarian government. The US is abetting them. IMO, the number of retired and active duty US Generals that aren't globalists is small, I can only think of one that I am sure of and one that I hope is not. They aren't stupid enough to admit to the American public what they are, but we can read what they publish and what they say in public.
The western oligarchy, fronted by its political puppets and minstrel media, is clearly engaged in a long tern exercice of gaslighting and manipulating its people in order to have them self-sacrifice in a horrible world war.
That's all that is going on with this "appeasement" narrative. Its one more chapter in a long stream of gaslighting and manipulation.
But its for the western audience.
The vast majority of people around the globe see this for what it is. Because more of them have at one time or another been the victims, or attempted victims, of western imperialism and the gaslighting act that goes with it.
To acknowledge that Britain's military wasn't in a strong position enough position to fight a war and that the British economy was in a poor state, just doesn't sit comfortably into the rhetoric of WW2 appeasement being a mistake. It was a necessity. Great article. Thanks Ian.
I agree with your analysis of the period from the 1930s to date. We seldom come across folk logical and wise but I think you tick most of the boxes. What a mess the UK is in. The decks need clearing of all the flotsam and jetsam. We are witnessing a Middle East Genocide as Israel rampages with impunity across the borders of of several Countries. Their mission to totally eradicate all opposition to their biblical fantasies. There is sparse condemnation from the majority of cross party MPs who appear to be frightened of drowning in a sea of Pro-Zionist support. Both the Church of England and the Catholic Hierarchy remain silent and we have a Monarch who this week who congratulated the Israeli Premier on the 77th Anniversary of the State of Israel which was seized by terrorists armed by the UK. If we put aside the 100 years of misery the innocent Indigenous Palestinian population have suffered and list the crimes committed since 1967 alone they make horrendous reading. The Israeli bleating's about the October 1200 deaths is not significant bearing in mind that Israel has slaughtered 6'500 Indigenous Palestinians since 2008 alone. The occupation of the West Bank is breaking International Law yet European MPs remain silent. All are tainted with Colonialism stamped through their limbs like a stick of Blackpool Rock. We need to be a Secular State. We need an Indigenous Right's Bill giving priority to historically recorded populations in all countries including the UK. If the Palestinians were rare birds or animals we would fight tooth and nail to protect them. But no, they are regarded of being of no value to us and we are allowing their annihilation. We are involved in Extra Judicial Killing and have conspired to finance and arm Military Coups against elected leaders in many countries. We should be trading with Russia not constantly trying undermine their economies. Many farmers who have left the UK to settle in Russia have found the circumstances most amenable and visitors return full of praise for their reception by all levels of society. A sea change in attitudes is necessary before the advent of BRICS or we will be left high and dry. We need open debates with freedom of speech. A fat chance.
It's years later that France and GB were accused of appeasement towards Hitler. At the time, the population was supportive. WW1 had killed over 1.5mil soldiers for each countries. The wave of pacifism that followed was the largest in the history of both countries. Every family had lost a son, a brother or a father. Those who didn't die returned as so war wounded they were unable to work. Two of my great grand fathers who fought in WW1alongside many used to call Petain the butcher of Verdun (later history made him a hero and he is still remembered like this today despite his war crimes during Vichy). They were so traumatised about the treatment of troops with no breaksfor many years, the deserters that got caught and shot, they both left the army after VE day. My entire family became pacifist from then on. The horrors of WW1 as captured by French cinema is a testament to what really happened and why Chamberlain and Daladier came back to the cheer of the population that war had been adverted. In early 1938, France had mobilised fearing war. What was diplomacy is now called appeasement by the armchair critics who have no clue about history. The re-armament of Germany was seen as a bonus by French and British political rulers as there was zero appetite to re-arm at home despite the danger of communism that many feared at the time. Sadly today many are ready to propagandise European history to justify the goals. It is now almost impossible to read anything mainstream that hasn't been re-written. Soon, there will be no real people to tell us as times were.
Yes. How soon we forget. How soon we believe what we are told to believe about history.
My family were also British pacifists. My grandmother and her fiancé were arrested. She was given the choice to go to work in an arms factory or spend the war in prison.
Russia will try to slow the tide in Europe, but to no avail. Hence, Putin's talks about Europe trying to provoke Russia into using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the recent change in Russian nuclear weapon doctrine. The Americans will NOT stop the Europeans from destroying themselves, as the wealth and talents in Europe will run to the US. The US does not sell much into Europe, and Airbus is the largest competitor to Boeing. India, Iran, and Brazil do not have much skin in the game. The KSA will lose some valuable customers, but there are other customers. China wants Europe as a market but China needs Russia for survival. When facing a binary choice, there is no room for ambiguity. Israel will be happy to see wars elsewhere to distract the world from its ethnic cleansing in Gaza and soon the West Bank. That leaves only the European people to fend for themselves against their ruling elites. The refugees from the Middle East and Africa can be recruited to become part of the government's suppression tools or become comrades of the native Europeans.
The Americans learned long ago that separating from Europe's suicidal warmongering was their best available option. Their elite political and money classes have tried ever since to reverse that policy as part of building their own Empire (perhaps), and with some success regarding the policy and many consequent failures regarding that policies effects on other power centers.
Trump is just the beginning of the counter-swing, with various elite factions having already changed sides and some apparently undecided. As noted elsewhere, revolutions don't arise from the peasantry but from rival factions of the elite.
At present the European elite are more unified than the US elite, but they're unfortunately unified on a suicidal policy set.
Nice piece, Ian.
May I share with you something I picked up years ago in A.J.P. Taylor’s “Origins of the Second World War?” I would like to adapt some of his insights about the 1930s regarding the contemporary use of the word “appeasement."
“Appeasement” is a good word. It has great rhetorical value. It’s powerful in the hands of Ukraine war supporters: after all, who wants to be called an “appeaser?”
Trouble is, Taylor would probably say that “appeasement” means the opposite today than its meaning in the 1930s.
I’m running on memory here, so I could get things wrong, but the disconnect on meaning goes like this:
1. In the 1930s, appeasement was the default position of foreign policy elites; today the word is used to describe the outlook of foreign policy fringe critics. (To measure appeasement as the consensus view among policy elites, I believe Taylor would say that the Munich Agreement met with the editorial approval of virtually all major British newspapers.)
2. In the 1930s, appeasement was the anti-Russian position; today it’s used to describe someone with a pro-Russian position. (Many foreign policy elites in the 1930s favored a strong Germany to act as a bulwark against Bolshevism spilling into Western Europe.)
3. In the 1930s, appeasement was based on an ethical foundation, whereas today the word means the position of someone described as a craven Putin puppet. (Appeasement’s ethical foundation was “self-determination,” a Wilsonian war aim. In the post-Versailles period, if some European nationalities were to be accorded self-determination, then that same aspiration cannot simultaneously be denied Germany with regard to the Sudeten question.)
Now words take on different meanings in different historical periods, but on these three counts it would seem that “appeasement” has opposite applications between its original usage and the situation today.
J.
Genuinely interesting insights, thank you.
Ian,
You liked my comment here about the differing meanings of "appeasement." You inspired me to do an essay on it, "What Does 'Appeasement' Mean?" It's on The American Thinker website on May 8. Here's the link. Thanks again.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/what_does_appeasement_mean.html
Thanks James - I'll take a look.
Very good points. So-called appeasement was a rational strategy and attempt at correcting some of the dangerous excesses of Versailles before they blew up into another world war. Then, at the end, it was a necessary holding pattern to buy time for the massive military buildup underway for a war that had become inevitable.
Honestly we are led by utter morons now. They have no understanding of how to advance the self interest of the nations they allegedly represent.
Globalists do not desire to recognize nations as distinct cultural identities.
The EU is the WEF's global fascism alpha test. It's not quite failing, but if the EU can be lured to the cliff's edge, perhaps a collective shove will "Epstein" it.
Churchill was scurrilously dishonest to imply by his weaponisation of the phrase “appeasement” that he could have done anything different. To attack Germany any earlier, without first buying time for rearmament, would have been national suicide. Even in the event it was a very close run thing and in effect “Imperial suicide”.
Sorry to distract, your point is about the present of course, not the past.
Not to defend Hitler but the USSR was planning to attack Germany. Germany wasn't planning to attack Britain, but just like Russia today they would have been exceedingly foolish not to plan for being attacked by Britain. WW3 looks more like WW2 than some may appreciate. Including a kind of prequel civil war being used by the major powers as a proving ground for new weapons and tactics.
None of the leaders of the war (Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, or Stalin) were saints or heroes. They were all warmongers trading the death and mutilation and ruination of millions of other people in return for wealth and power.
Excellent historical perspective which is so lacking in modern media and politics. I can't help thinking that the existential nature of this conflict for Russia could drive further ¨opportunism¨ - not that Putin wants to take further territory (my guess). But the gutless cowards of European leadership are provoking to such an extent that he (or a more hardline successor) might just calculate - let us not give them time to rearm and become a serious military threat. They can be dealt with now while they are on the back foot. In this way the warmongering rhetoric of Starmer, Macron, Ursula et al could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thank you
Ian I strongly agree that Russia is in this war reluctantly, and sought, and would have preferred, almost any other outcome. As you say they have no appetite to ingest this rust belt, which is also a criminal hinterland with intractable centuries-old problems. The territorial claims I see in terms of “well if you force us to go to war we may as well get something of enduring value out of it”. I’m not sure the Russians who have given up their sons would tolerate anything less.
Framing any negotiated end to the war in Ukraine as “appeasement” deliberately distorts history to justify a war we never intended to fight ourselves. Unlike Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Russia poses no existential threat to Western Europe; let alone Britain.
The truth is, we're not confronting a rising totalitarian empire. We're fueling a conflict on the edge of Europe to appease hawks in Brussels and London, not to protect core national interests.
If we were serious about peace, we’d stop hiding behind historical myths and start dealing with the world as it is, not as our ideologues wish it to be.
Nice pushback on the war mongers, Ian. If you follow the logic of the ‘Munich betrayal/appeasement’ framing, then no state would ever negotiate with any other state, over any issue, ever. Instead of the 30 years war ending with the Peace of Westphalia, it would still be going on! It would be nice to think of these vile war mongers as clowns, but unfortunately they are much more sinister than that - they employ the magic word ‘appeasement’ because it is the word that just keeps on giving. Small point……you managed to speak of the events of 2014 without mentioning the Maidan Putsch. Not that it’s especially relevant to the essence of your article. 👍
The underlying issue is simple, the entirety of "The West" primarily Europe but only marginally less so the US, are failed states. Decades of financialization and the resultant hollowing out of their economies have produced husks. In the US hosts of purple haired dykes with faces full of fishing tackle selling blue checkmarks on Twitter/X is an unsustainable business model for a country. A model where $3 trillion of growth is produced by $5 trillion increase in debt must fail.
Fixing this is, I believe what Trumps flailing is about. Europe with even deeper systemic problems is not even trying.
I cannot recall a time and I've read a lot of history, when the cesspit of politics has resulted in such dense filth rising to the top as Europe today. Their stupidity is stunning.
They need the war. Their one hope is a an external enemy to, however briefly, unite people and act as a scapegoat for the civilizational collapse to come.
Putin, I think, see's this, maybe 10 years too late but he finally understands that the only result will be one dictated by him, not negotiated with them.
The "dense filth rising to the top" is a collective west problem. It can't be by accident that the stupidest we can hope to rule us are in place and we voted for them.
I believe the EU leaders want a poor, dependent Europe to fulfill the WEF's goal of a Europe United under one authoritarian government. The US is abetting them. IMO, the number of retired and active duty US Generals that aren't globalists is small, I can only think of one that I am sure of and one that I hope is not. They aren't stupid enough to admit to the American public what they are, but we can read what they publish and what they say in public.
NATO is the military wing of the WEF.
The western oligarchy, fronted by its political puppets and minstrel media, is clearly engaged in a long tern exercice of gaslighting and manipulating its people in order to have them self-sacrifice in a horrible world war.
That's all that is going on with this "appeasement" narrative. Its one more chapter in a long stream of gaslighting and manipulation.
But its for the western audience.
The vast majority of people around the globe see this for what it is. Because more of them have at one time or another been the victims, or attempted victims, of western imperialism and the gaslighting act that goes with it.
To acknowledge that Britain's military wasn't in a strong position enough position to fight a war and that the British economy was in a poor state, just doesn't sit comfortably into the rhetoric of WW2 appeasement being a mistake. It was a necessity. Great article. Thanks Ian.
I agree with your analysis of the period from the 1930s to date. We seldom come across folk logical and wise but I think you tick most of the boxes. What a mess the UK is in. The decks need clearing of all the flotsam and jetsam. We are witnessing a Middle East Genocide as Israel rampages with impunity across the borders of of several Countries. Their mission to totally eradicate all opposition to their biblical fantasies. There is sparse condemnation from the majority of cross party MPs who appear to be frightened of drowning in a sea of Pro-Zionist support. Both the Church of England and the Catholic Hierarchy remain silent and we have a Monarch who this week who congratulated the Israeli Premier on the 77th Anniversary of the State of Israel which was seized by terrorists armed by the UK. If we put aside the 100 years of misery the innocent Indigenous Palestinian population have suffered and list the crimes committed since 1967 alone they make horrendous reading. The Israeli bleating's about the October 1200 deaths is not significant bearing in mind that Israel has slaughtered 6'500 Indigenous Palestinians since 2008 alone. The occupation of the West Bank is breaking International Law yet European MPs remain silent. All are tainted with Colonialism stamped through their limbs like a stick of Blackpool Rock. We need to be a Secular State. We need an Indigenous Right's Bill giving priority to historically recorded populations in all countries including the UK. If the Palestinians were rare birds or animals we would fight tooth and nail to protect them. But no, they are regarded of being of no value to us and we are allowing their annihilation. We are involved in Extra Judicial Killing and have conspired to finance and arm Military Coups against elected leaders in many countries. We should be trading with Russia not constantly trying undermine their economies. Many farmers who have left the UK to settle in Russia have found the circumstances most amenable and visitors return full of praise for their reception by all levels of society. A sea change in attitudes is necessary before the advent of BRICS or we will be left high and dry. We need open debates with freedom of speech. A fat chance.