On Feb 24, 2012, at 3:17 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> Capitalists were under a serious
> threat from communist movements far more powerful than today's
> protest, and yet they pursued the policy of appeasement to avoid the
> war at any cost.
Appeasement (which was accompanied by all-out rearmament) was meant to postpone the war, not avoid it. The war would have been instantly avoided had Chamberlain stood by the Czechs, because Hitler would have been overthrown (by the Wehrmacht High Command, in the "Oster Conspiracy") if he ordered an attack on Czechoslovakia, and equally if he discredited himself by backing down. The rational basis for the appeasement policy, as for the later unconditional surrender policy and genocidal saturation bombings, was exactly the fear of "communist movements" (an euphemism for the German proletariat) that necessitated the preservation of the Hitler regime until it could be replaced by Allied Occupation.
Shane Mage "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64