Please read this important article just posted on Stan Goodenough's Website, Jerusalem Watchman. Here is an excerpt:
"Winston Churchill was vehemently opposed to Hitler’s taking possession of “the mountain defense line which marks the ancient boundaries of Bohemia and was specially preserved to the Czechoslovak state as a safeguard of its national existence.”
On learning of the fait accompli, Churchill first wept, then rounded on cabinet members and furiously denounced Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s actions as “sordid, subhuman and suicidal.” It was, he thundered, “the grossest act of bullying treachery” that amounted to not only the sacrifice of England’s honor but the resulting “sacrifice of lives—our people’s lives.”
Forty-eight hours after hosting Chamberlain in his lair, the Nazi leader ordered his storm troopers into the surrendered land. Czechoslovakia lay ripe for the picking. Within months, the fuehrer would swallow it whole.
Instead of securing “peace for our time” (Chamberlain’s ostentatious assertion upon returning from Munich), the sacrifice of the Sudetenland toppled the world into war. With Prague in his pocket, Hitler could threaten, and invade, Poland.
England added shame to shame as Chamberlain fished around desperately for an excuse, any excuse, to not honor Britain’s treaty to come to Poland’s aid.
As he dilly-dallied, two million German troops smashed into the country, the Luftwaffe poured its bombs onto Warsaw, and panzer tanks sliced up the Polish countryside. Tens of thousands were slaughtered in the blitzkrieg.
Trying to convey his feelings of devastation and embarrassment to Polish Ambassador Edward Raczynski, a helpless Churchill (he was not yet prime minister) falteringly voiced his hope “that Britain will keep…will keep its…”
Voice breaking, he began to cry.
...Churchill knew how wrong it was to push Czechoslovakia into paying the price for England’s peace.
Pressuring another people to surrender their land to a mutual enemy for promises of peace was indefensibly immoral then. It is indefensibly immoral now…
1 comment:
Many believe the opposite of war is peace; in most cases, however, the opposite of war is slavery.
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