It was partly a provocation, of course. But I did have a more substantial reason: Chamberlain actually tried (more or less) to work within international law. At almost any other point in history, he would have been a superior statesman to any of his contemporary European peers. The fact that he lived at a point in history where he really didn't have any good options should not be held unduly against him.
For all my irritation that Obama isn't handing out torches and pitchforks to the "burn Wall Street and soak the rich" crowd, I have to note that in almost any other political environment, he would have been a very good president. He's reasonably careful, he has a reasonably diverse cabinet, even if it is slanted towards "centrists," he hasn't presided over the start of any new wars, which for an American president is a major accomplishment in and of itself, his administration does a lot of good things on civil liberties, he did get a stimulus and a health care bill passed and he has even shown a little actual spine vis-a-vis Israel.
He's no FDR, of course, but I'm not sure it's reasonable to hold this against him - it's not really his fault that he lives at a time where you have to not only be as good as FDR but actually quite a bit better to accomplish something worthwhile. (FDR came to power after the stock market crash and Hoover's disastrous policies had already accomplished a levelling of the national wealth comparable to that achieved by Lenin in Russia - even if Obama had the inclination to be the next FDR, the Masters of the Universe have not been so conveniently weakened this time.)
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
At one point, I was asked about my political heroes, and one of my answers was "Neville Chamberlain."
Now Commie Vietnam is a tourist Mecca for young USians - and remarkably, the Vietnamese don't seem to hold agent orange and cluster bombing against visiting Americans. How disorientating is that?
The entire Teabag movement should be offered a free holiday in Vietnam and asked to explain. Their explanation would probably be on the lines of "the commies realised that we were right all along".
So why did you kill them by the million?
"to teach them a lesson - it shows that bombing works as an education tool".
So is that why you learnt nothing and went and repeated the mistake in Iraq/Afghanistan?
"the Iraqi's/Afghanis will learn that we were right all along as well"
So if someone wants to teach you a lesson, the only way is to bomb you?
"we have nothing to learn from these terrorists and will just use bigger bombs if we have to"
The vacuous, self inoculating logic of those who believe they have a right to use violence to achieve their objectives...and that their greater access to weapons of mass destruction proves that they are right.
"God is might and might is right and we have might so we must be right" Index of Frank's Diaries
That fact that the theory failed does not show it was a bad one to try, other then from an omniscient point-of-view. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
Indeed you could even make the converse case: that the Nazi party rose to power because Versailles wasn't sufficiently draconian or enforced to keep people like the Nazis down.
I don't subscribe to either theory. WWI was an abomination against all peoples, and virtually all national elites were almost equally to blame. Putting the blame almost entirely on the losers certainly saved the ruling elites of the victors asses and set the scene for a rematch.
But Germany could also have responded positively to that defeat in WW1 - as it did after WW2 - admittedly largely because of a much more positive US input. And then saving the winning ruling elites asses didn't do the UK any favours whatsoever.
But the greater problem is class war and the industrialisation process which created such savage tensions. It seems that now - after 40 years of heeding those lessons we are back on the same old road of increased inequality and class war - leading almost inevitably the wars - now almost global in scope.
Why is it that the lessons of even a world war only seem to last for a generation or two? Index of Frank's Diaries
The initial nationalist impulse may have been triggered by Versailles, but without economic chaos - and class war, and funding by both German and US industrialists - the Nazis would have remained in the crank corner.
If anything, the Nazis were a creature of the Depression. If the US Depression hadn't kicked the legs out from under the German economy, it's unlikely they'd have been more significant than the Tea Baggers have been so far - if that.
