Their view: Appeasing aggressors not a solution

Political science Professor Marvin Folkertsma offered these words as part of a column for the Center for Vision & Values. It's a historical reminder for those willing to appease aggressors:

In September 1938 the British prime minister had a problem.

The Third Reich's psychopath-in-chief was scorching the airwaves in one of his trademark rants, this time about the supposed oppression of Germans living in Czechoslovakia. He threatened war unless Western nations caved to his demands, which was the last thing the British and the French wanted.

Thus, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French leader Edouard Daladier agreed to meet with Hitler and his ally, Benito Mussolini, in Munich on Sept. 29, 1938. The rest, as they say, is history.

But what a notorious hunk of history this was. On an earlier excursion to Germany, Chamberlain was greeted with flowers and gifts and a band playing "God Save the King," which seemed to justify his departing comment that his "objective is peace in Europe. I trust this trip is the way to that peace."

The result was a short-term peace in exchange for a German slice of Czechoslovakia, now virtually defenseless after being forced to relinquish the Sudetenland to the Reich at a meeting to which they were not even invited.

No matter; Chamberlain still returned to his homeland waving a piece of paper that fluttered in the wind while he declared that he had achieved "peace for our time" to relieved audiences in Britain.

This was Chamberlain's Munich Moment.

What transpired afterward has entered history books and international relations seminars on the object lessons of appeasing an aggressor. After promising not to demand any more territorial concessions, Hitler ordered his armies to absorb the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, after which the German Fuhrer made fresh demands for new territorial concessions in Europe, this time against Poland.

And this time German armies invaded their isolated victim, instigating declarations of war by Great Britain and France, which had learned their lessons from a year earlier.