Neville Chamberlain Quotes
My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time... Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.
In this case, the Speaker of the House attacked the President of his own party for being willing to conduct disarmament discussions with the Russians. He implied that the outcome could be the appeasement of the Russians just as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler in 1938 in Munich, giving the German Fuhrer the “green light” to take over Europe. The Conservative Caucus went even further and explicitly called it “appeasement”. Reagan however always talked about military strength and power, and provided plenty of money for the military and weapons a few of which were boondoggles but he was a very cautious American president in authorizing military force. And he not only was willing to discuss arms control and reductions and enter into treaties for disarmament, much to the distress of the hawks of his own party. Few American Presidents have so well balanced the use of diplomacy with the threat of military force as well as Reagan.
The “fool” was Neville Chamberlain, 1869-1940, the British Prime Minister who refused to stand up to Hitler and instead negotiated a peace pact, returned home declaring that he had preserved peace. (See {585941}.) Then Hitler invaded more of Europe and WWII was begun. Ford was a Hitler admirer and pro-German (Hitler supported him for the American Presidency--{586988}—and awarded him a medal) but he thought that England had bungled the negotiations by sending someone who was very weak. In this sense his views were the same as most who were anti-Hitler.
He was shot as a traitor when de Gaulle returned. See {587231} and {587230}.
Chamberlain’s policy was to appease Hitler and Germany to avoid war. Although he did not see Czechoslavkia as a critical British national interest and claimed he had secured peace {585941} , the reality was that he gave Germany room to start its aggression which would engulf all of Europe and much of the world. The British became the only bulwark against Hitler until the Russians stopped the Germans and America entered the war.
Prior to this the Japanese had not even considered what terms they might fight for if there were to be a peace negotiation. What the Japanese leadership apparently totally missed was the fact that President Roosevelt and all other American leaders throughout the war had promised that only unconditional surrender would be acceptable. This was reiterated in a Joint Declaration of the U. S. , China, and Great Britain. The Japanese thought this just propaganda and never took it seriously.
After the signing of the Munich Pact:
The elder Kennedy was an admirer of Hitler and Fascism and was convinced that democracy was finished in England. As the U. S. Ambassador to England, his views—see also {610124} and {610122}—destroyed his own political career in the United States, and he thereafter kept a low profile and maintained his political aspirations through his children.
Kennan was talking about the Russians, but the same principle seems to hold with any autocratic government and in some cases even democracies. However, the tradition of secret diplomacy with no transparency is established even in many democracies. Great Britain and France, for example conduct most of their diplomacy in secret as do less democratic governments and tyrannies. They expect us to keep negotiations confidential, which causes American diplomats to be torn between the American view of transparency and the tradition of confidentiality.
Arthur Neville Chamberlain FRS was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1937 to 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, conceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany. Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940.
