> >I don't know that "the world" tried to defuse fascism in the 20s and 30s.
>
> Well, Chamberlain and Daladier declared war on it in September
> 1939--late I agree, but better late than never. Don't they get
> brownie points for being willing to take on the beast, given that
> everybody else waited for the beast to come after them?
>
http://www.igc.apc.org/MonthlyReview/collusn.htm
In Our Time
THE CHAMBERLAIN-HITLER COLLUSION
by Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel
When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from his Munich
meetings with Adolf Hitler in September 1938, he proclaimed that he held in
his hands a document guaranteeing "peace in our time." In the decades since,
Chamberlain's folly has become the occasion for a commonplace historical
lesson: that when the "good" innocently accept the assurances of the "evil,"
the result is catastrophic. Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel challenge
the familiar understanding of Munich as the product of a naive "appeasement"
of Nazi appetites. They argue that it was the culmination of cynical
collaboration between the Tory government and the Nazis in the 1930s. Based
upon a careful reading of official and unofficial correspondence, conference
notes, cabinet minutes, and diaries, In Our Time documents the steps taken
under diplomatic cover by the West to strike a bargain with Hitler based
upon shared anti-Soviet premises. Munich, write the authors, "formalized
what had been an informal understanding between Britain and Germany to that
point, with France, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and reluctance,
concurring: Germany could do as it wished in central and eastern Europe and
the democracies were not to intervene, particularly should Germany carry its
warfare to the Soviet Union." Gripping, direct, and detailed, In Our Time
overturns the conventional wisdom about World War II, its roots, and its
lessons. With profound implications for understanding international
relations in the Cold War and after, it sheds new light on a signal event of
the twentieth century.
About the authors
CLEMENT LEIBOVITZ, a native of Egypt and graduate from Haifa Technion
Institute of Technology, Israel, now lives in Canada. He spent eight years
researching the events leading to World War II. A retired professor in
computer services at the University of Alberta and a founder of Jews for
Peace in the Middle East, an Edmonton organization, he is currently writing
on socialist philosophy.
ALVIN FINKEL is professor of history at Athabasca University in Alberta, an
open-learning institute. He is the author of Business and Social Reform in
the Thirties (1979) and The Social Credit Phenomenon in Alberta (1989), and
co-author of the two-volume History of the Canadian Peoples (1993, 1997).
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS is a regular columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair.
He is the author of several books including The Missionary Position: Mother
Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995).