“The Czechs,” murmured Chamberlain. He had lit a cigar and pushed back his chair. “We have rather forgotten about the Czechs.” — “Munich,” by Robert Harris
In Robert Harris’s meticulously researched novel about 1938, the leaders of four nations — Germany, Italy, France, Britain — settled the fate of a fifth, Czechoslovakia. “Realism” dictated its dismemberment.
A Czech official: “The Germans will be able to cut our country in half within a day.” British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s aide: “I am not responsible for the realities of geography. ... Ninety percent of your country will remain intact and you will not be invaded.”
Last week in Munich, a city closer to Ukraine than Washington is to Atlanta, Vice President JD Vance told Europeans that the principal security threat they face is insufficient free speech, exemplified particularly by the refusal of other German political parties to govern in coalition with Alternative for Germany, a fascist-adjacent party sympathetic to Ukraine’s would-be executioner, Vladimir Putin.
.... Hours before Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement, an aide told him (per Harris) that Hitler “plans a war of conquest to gain living space for the German people.” Hitler had said so. Chamberlain: “You need to learn a few lessons in political reality.” Realities such as the reluctance of democratic publics to face unpleasant realities. Particularly for the benefit of (as Chamberlain had described the Czechs) people in “a far away country,” “of whom we know nothing.” We know Putin’s thinking about who should be Russians, and what Russia should be. He has told us.
Trump says he does not care “much about anything” other than “peace.” “Peace for our time,” Chamberlain said triumphantly when he landed in London from Munich. Peace lasted 336 days, until Sept. 1, 1939, the first of the European war’s 2,077 days. (Please read it all)
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