Sept. 9, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

When history is the subject, one has a choice between the notoriously loopy pronouncement of Henry Ford upon it (History is bunk), or this more prolix sentiment from the pen of Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

If men could but learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light . . . experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.

My summer reading frenzy took me most recently to a book entitled Troublesome Young Men with the subtitle, “The Rebels Who Brought Churchill To Power And Helped Save England.” The author is Lynne Olson, a former White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun now living and working in Washington, D.C., where she churns out exquisitely researched and therefore informative volumes.

One immediately takes the “save England” part as referring to what seemed to some observers at the time would turn out to be Nazi hegemony. That is correct, of course. But before England could be saved from Hitler, it had to be saved from Neville Chamberlain.

And that is the story Olson tells.

“Munich,” the bowler, striped trousers and furled umbrella became the hated symbols of appeasement after Chamberlain and his Tory government sold out the Czechs of the Sudetenland in 1938 – an act the world came to see as having an infamy all its own.

Chamberlain was pledged at any cost to avoid war and thus went to great and ludicrous lengths to appease the unappeasable Hitler and to fool his own people and Parliament into believing he was doing a noble thing – both efforts ending in colossal failure.

The story is a chilling one in its own right, but, when Olson rolls out one by one the tactics Chamberlain employed in his epic snow job, it becomes frighteningly apparent that George W. Bush has used the same tactics to fool Americans into the war in Iraq – and to keep it going – as Chamberlain used to keep Britain out of a war it would eventually have to fight in order to survive.

Thus the issue is not war, but what kind of war and for what reason.

Against repeated warnings from such eminent members of Parliament as Winston Churchill, who were well informed as to the huge military build-up by Nazi Germany and Hitler’s intentions as spelled out in Mein Kampf, Chamberlain and his minions held England back from preparations for the war that was sure to come.

The government pressured a compliant press to keep the truth out of the papers. Vital facts about what was happening in Germany were deleted from reporters’ stories.
Chamberlain maintained tight control of the Tory Party whose members supported him blindly out of party loyalty and, in some cases, according to the canons of the old boy network of which so many in power at the time belonged through blood relations and old school ties.

The Tories gave Chamberlain broad and alarming powers that would have not made it past the confrontation at Runnymede, to wit: The right of Habeas corpus was repealed; the government was given the right to jail anyone who, in its opinion, was a danger to public safety, to prohibit and prevent demonstrations of any kind, to seize personal property without warrant. It was what one dissenting member of Parliament called “a dictatorship as all-embracing as the one against which England was supposedly fighting.”

The only sacrifices being made in England during the lead-up to World War II were by the already poor and disadvantaged while the lives of the rich, powerful and famous went on as if nothing were about to happen.

Virtually the same dynamics have been at work in America for the past six years as obtained in Great Britain from 1938 to Chamberlain’s unseating in May 1940, when the war he denied would come to England came. It was America’s war against Iraq that needed never to come. That war was begun deliberately, using the same domestic tactics to sell it as Chamberlain used to account for staying out of the war with Germany. The war in Iraq continues despite the clear call of a vast majority of Americans to end it.

Meanwhile, the Administration of George W. Bush from September 11, 2001, to date has operated on the intimidation of Congress, the press and dissenters; on the deliberate telling of lies; on the gathering to itself of extraordinary and anti-democratic powers out of which came the reprehensible horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the shame of outing a CIA agent and, in the end, a war that can only be lost along with a nation that America has victimized for no clear purpose other than to flex its muscle.

The Neville Chamberlain of the first decade of the 21st Century is George W. Bush. The former stayed out of a war he should have been in. The latter started an utterly unnecessary war in some ways as heinous as the one Hitler started with the rapes of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

This is history, and you can think of is as bunk or, in Coleridge’s image, as the lantern shining on the waves astern.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.