On Feb 24, 2012, at 8:59 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> Well, and then, wasn't the west ok with it so long as german guns
> were aimed east?
Ah, but, in 1938 Hitler's guns were aimed *south*, at Austria and Czechoslovakia, and that was a lesser evil than the overthrow (even by the military!) of the Nazi regime. In 1939 they were indeed aimed east, *at Poland*, and for the "west" that was the casus belli.
>
> 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
>