[Rhodes22-list] PEACE FOR OUR TIME

[brad haslett]

PEACE FOR OUR TIME 

by Alistair Cooke, BBC Broadcaster (he is ~95 years
old)

About the author: In 1936, the NBC network invited
Alistair Cooke to do a weekly broadcast of reflections
on British life called London Letter. Cooke then
emigrated to the United States in 1937, and asked the
BBC to let him do the same thing in reverse.
Eventually he succeeded, and 'Letter from America' is
now the longest running radio broadcast in human
history. 
In the process it has won a faithful worldwide
audience of several million and many friends in high
places. When Cooke was awarded an honorary knighthood 
in 1973, the Queen is reputed to have expressed
bewildered admiration at his ability to sit down, week
after week, and communicate so directly with his
audience.
http://www.wbur.org/inside/personality/detail6870.asp


...I promised to lay off topic A - Iraq - until the
Security Council makes a judgment on the inspectors'
report and I shall keep that promise.

But I must tell you that throughout the past fortnight
I've listened to everybody involved in or looking on
to a monotonous din of words, like a tide crashing and
receding on a beach - making a great noise and saying 
the same thing over and over. And this ordeal
triggered a nightmare - a day-mare, if you like.

Through the ceaseless tide I heard a voice, a very
English voice of an old man - Prime Minister
Chamberlain saying: "I believe it is peace for our
time" - a sentence that prompted a huge cheer, first
from a listening street crowd and then from the House
of Commons and next day from every newspaper in the
land. 

There was a move to urge that Mr Chamberlain should
receive the Nobel Peace Prize. 

In Parliament there was one unfamiliar old grumbler to
growl out: "I believe we have suffered a total and
unmitigated defeat." He was, in view of the
general sentiment, very properly booed down.

This scene concluded in the autumn of 1938 the British
prime minister's effectual signing away of most of
Czechoslovakia to Hitler.  The rest of it,
within months, Hitler walked in and conquered.  "Oh
dear," said Mr Chamberlain, thunderstruck. "He has
betrayed my trust."

During the last fortnight a simple but startling
thought occurred to me --every single official,
diplomat, president, prime minister involved 
in the Iraq debate was in 1938 a toddler, most of them
unborn. So the dreadful scene I've just drawn will not
have been remembered by most listeners.

Hitler had started betraying our trust not 12 years
but only two years before, when he broke the First
World War peace treaty by occupying the demilitarised
zone of the Rhineland.  Only half his troops carried
one reload of ammunition because Hitler knew that
French morale was too low to confront any war just
then and 10 million  of 11 million British voters 
had signed a so-called peace ballot. It stated no
conditions, elaborated no terms, it simply counted the
numbers of Britons who were "for peace".

The slogan of this movement was "Against war and
fascism" - chanted at the time by every Labour man and
Liberal and many moderate Conservatives - a
slogan that now sounds as imbecilic as "against
hospitals and disease". In blunter words a majority of
Britons would do anything, absolutely anything,
to get rid of Hitler except fight him.

At that time the word pre-emptive had not been
invented, though today it's a catchword. After all the
Rhineland was what it said it was - part of
Germany. So to march in and throw Hitler out would
have been pre-emptive - wouldn't it? 

Nobody did anything and Hitler looked forward with
confidence to gobbling up the rest of Western Europe
country by country - "course by course", as growler
Churchill put it.

I bring up Munich and the mid-30s because I was fully
grown, on the verge of 30, and knew we were indeed
living in the age of anxiety. And so many of the
arguments mounted against each other today, in the
last fortnight, are exactly what we heard in the House
of Commons debates and read in the French press. 

The French especially urged, after every Hitler
invasion, "negotiation, negotiation". They negotiated
so successfully as to have their whole country
defeated and occupied. But as one famous French
leftist said: "We did anyway manage to make them
declare Paris an open city - no bombs on us!"

In Britain the general response to every Hitler
advance was disarmament and collective security.
Collective security meant to leave every crisis to 
the League of Nations. It would put down aggressors,
even though, like theUnited Nations, it had no army,
navy or air force.

The League of Nations had its chance to prove itself
when Mussolini invaded and conquered Ethiopia
(Abyssinia). The League didn't have any shot to 
fire. But still the cry was chanted in the House of
Commons - the League and collective security is the
only true guarantee of peace.

But after the Rhineland the maverick Churchill decided
there was no collectivity in collective security and
started a highly unpopular campaign for rearmament by
Britain, warning against the general belief that 
Hitler had already built an enormous mechanised army
and superior air force.

But he's not used them, he's not used them - people
protested.

Still for two years before the outbreak of the Second
War you could read the debates in the House of Commons
and now shiver at the famous Labour men -Major Attlee
was one of them - who voted against rearmament and
still went on pointing to the League of Nations as the
saviour.

Now, this memory of mine may be totally irrelevant to
the present crisis. It haunts me. 

I have to say I have written elsewhere with much
conviction that most historical analogies are false
because, however strikingly similar a new situation
may be to an old one, there's usually one element that
is different and it turns out to be the crucial one.
It may well be so here.

All I know is that all the voices of the 30s are
echoing through 
2003...



__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/