Neville Chamberlain, Architect of Appeasement: Hitler's Dupe or Nemesis?

...Chamberlain's inner circle backed his ill-judged 'Z Plan' – a flight to Germany to make a face-to-face appeal to, of all things, Hitler's vanity ... 'The right course", the Prime Minister argued, 'was to open by an appeal to Herr Hitler on the grounds that he had a great chance of obtaining fame for himself by making peace in Europe ..." In truth, this was the kind of fame Chamberlain coveted for himself. 

The War of the World, Niall Ferguson, 2006.

It is a matter on which there is very general agreement that, in the period leading up to Britain's declaration of war on Nazi Germany, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain pursued a disastrous course. 

Chamberlain's catastrophic errors, so it is held, were threefold. 

First, he induced the Government of Czechoslovakia to cede the ethnically German Sudetenland to Hitler's Reich. By this action he claimed to have secured peace by appeasing Germany resentment of the harsh terms of the post-World War I Versailles Treaty. But as a consequence of this transfer of territory, Czechoslovakia sacrificed the border fortifications it had constructed in response to the rising threat of Nazi Germany. It could not, therefore, have surprised many that within six months, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and annexed much of that country's remaining territory.

Second, Chamberlain declined to create the million-man ground force that some, including Winston Churchill, deemed necessary to contain Germany. Instead, Chamberlain, who served as both Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, applied the bulk of Britain's defense expenditure to the Air Force and Navy. Thus:

In October 1936, ... Chamberlain had told the Cabinet, "Air power was the most formidable deterrent to war that could be devised".[5] ...The importance of the RAF to Chamberlain can be seen by noting that its budget rose from £16.78 million in 1933 to £105.702 million in 1939, surpassing the British Army's budget in 1937 and the Royal Navy's in 1938.[6] (Source).

Third, following Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain gave Poland an unconditional guarantee of British armed assistance should Hitler resort to force in pursuit of access to, and control of, the formerly German city of Danzig. Thus, when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain was morally committed to war with Germany on behalf of Poland, a country of essentially zero geopolitical significance to Britain, and to which Britain had no means of providing military aid. 

For these reasons, Chamberlain's diplomatic course has been widely viewed as not only foolish but catastrophic. Yet there is a striking contradiction between that judgement of Chamberlain's response to the rise of Nazi Germany, and the actual consequences of his actions. 

And yes, by enabling Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain's policy of appeasement substantially enhanced Germany's military might by providing access to Czechoslovakia's substantial inventory of armaments, including the Czechoslovakia-developed Panzerkampfwagen 38(t) tank, which was superior to tanks then in possession of the German army. Furthermore, occupation of Czechoslovakia gave Germany control of that country's substantial armaments industry.

However, a fact this critique fails to address is that, prior to the outbreak of World War II, there was not one, but two brutal expansionist tyrannies in Europe, both arming at breakneck speed. Of these, one was headed by the megalomaniac Adolph Hitler, the other by the cold-blooded mass murderer, Joseph Stalin, who was committed to the goal of world Communist revolution. Not only was Stalin  providing material aid to the ultimately triumphant Communist revolutionaries in China, he was also providing financial aid to Communists in Europe, including crypto-communist members of Britain's Labour Party, British trades union leaders, and Britain's Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. 

What then to do? Destroy German power through a preemptive war in a joint operation with France? But that would have left the way clear for Soviet expansion to the West? Or was it better to allow and even assist Germany in matching the Soviet military build-up, the latter achieved at the cost of millions of lives lost due to starvation as grain was exported to pay for strategically vital Western technology. Such imports included 16 oil refineries provided by America's Koch Industries; automotive production lines provided by Henry Ford, which were later converted to the production of tanks; hydro-electric turbines and generators supplied by General Electric; plus steel mills, tank designs and much else sold to the USSR by American, German and British companies.

Whatever may have been in Neville Chamberlain's mind when he sought to appease Hitler's appetite for territorial expansion, the consequences are indisputable. His actions facilitated Germany's breakneck rearmament, thereby creating a huge impediment to Soviet ambitions for territorial aggrandizement. 

That Chamberlain failed to anticipated this outcome seems hardly credible. There were abundant reasons to expect that, under Hitler's leadership, Germany would not merely block Soviet Westward expansion, but would invade the Soviet Union to fulfill Hitler's long-known objective of gaining living space (Lebensraum) for the German people in Eastern Europe. Confirming that this remained the plan, when Hitler's soon-to-be foreign Minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, visited England in 1937 and met with Winston Churchill at the German embassy, he showed Churchill a map indicating the swath of Russian territory Germany intended to seize. The vast extent of this planned land grab is evident from Churchill's reaction: "We don't like the Russians, but we don't hate them that much."

Thus, to Chamberlain, the alternative to confronting Hitler, would have been obvious: point Germany to the East and let the totalitarian bastards fight one another to exhaustion. Moreover, to assuage Hitler's fear of a two-front war, resist pressure for a build-up of British ground forces. As for Chamberlain's declaration of war on Germany, it was essentially meaningless, resulting, for more than a year, in nothing more than the deployment of heavy bombers to drop leaflets over Germany. 

But whatever its objective, Chamberlain's policy did much to facilitate war between the tyrannies Russia and Germany, tyrannies that threatened the Western world. Moreover, as that stupendous clash evolved, its outcome was materially influenced by Western intervention. At the outset, as German forces advanced deep into Russian territory, killing and capturing literally millions of Russian troops, both Britain and the United States shipped vast quantities of military equipment to the Russians. But then, as Russia turned the tide and advanced into Western Europe, the Anglo-American invasion force was there, in Berlin, to block Russia's further Westward advance. Four months later, reminding Stalin of what he was up against, the US exploded an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. 

Though despised by all and sundry, it may thus be said that Neville Chamberlain was, more than any other statesman, the architect of victory by the free nations of the West against the threat of totalitarian domination, Nazi or Soviet.

America: A Nation Living With Lies

 Yusef, commenting on an earlier post, pointed out that if reported US Covid-19 deaths relative to population were similar to the numbers reported for the rest of the world: 

"we would have 4% of the covid-related deaths. Instead we have 20%, or 5X what we "should" have"

But I see no reason to believe the US stats. 

The US has clearly superseded the Soviet Union as the world's biggest liar. 

The US doesn't merely lie about important things such as the reasons for "bombing the shit out of" this or that country (to use President Trump's idiom), but about almost everything. 

Like the dying Soviet Union, the US teaches lies in its schools and universities.

Indeed, lies are the only essential part of the US educational curriculum, hence America's continuing decline in the ratio of educational attainment per dollar expended, which must be about the lowest in the world. 

Americans, like the citizens of Russia in the days of the Soviet Union are living with lies. 

Lies about almost everything. From Black lives matter, meaning all white people are racists who deny that black lives matter, to a seemingly endless list of mind-numbing bullshit from micro-aggressions to triggering, pussy hats, cultural appropriation, and the demand for less whiteness, aka European cultural and racial genocide. 

Which means that Americans get more lies and sheer nonsense for their educational dollar than anyone else. As the inevitable result, Americans have the lowest rate of academic achievement per dollar invested than any other country in the world, although the Brits are right up there along with the people of Canada where, to quote a national newspaper headline, Universities have become cesspools of political correctness.

What to do?

Well obviously when you are in the throws of a Communist takeover your chances of doing anything to counter the menace other than hurt yourself are slight. But here's how to make a start in transforming "education" from a process of Communist indoctrination to a process of productive learning.

Enact legislation that:

Embodies in education the old English principle that "Sticks and stone may break my bones but words can never hurt me;"

Makes academic achievement the driving principle of education at all levels;

 Pays teachers according to student achievement, and pays the best teachers more than the top educational bureaucrats. 

 But nothing of the kind, obviously, will be done. 

We are all doomed.  Doomed to live under the increasingly tyrannical rule of fools and scoundrels.  

Related: 

Martin Sieff: California Collapsing

Philip Giraldi: The Decline of the West: American Education Surrenders to ‘Equity’

Reuters: White House working with Facebook and Twitter to tackle anti-vaxxers

New York Times: Don't go thinking things out for yourself: just believe what we tell ya

Mass Colored Immigration to England Ends in Violent Anti-White Racism

By M.A. Richardson

via: the Duran: 

Twenty-two police officers injured as Brixton party ends in violence

The US and Britain are at their most perilous point in one hundred years. Once stable democratic nation states made great through struggle and suffering to gain comparative freedom at huge sacrifice to their own population are throwing it all away. The speed and ferocity of the attack is frightening, but this has been building for years, spreading from the 60s onwards through the university teaching systems, unquestioned. It emerged into the public arena as political correctness as each generation of students became more radical. Then came the final push to silence opposition with wokism, virtue-signalling, identity politics, and now racial division, an aberration of democracy and freedom of speech.

The Trump presidency has been under a continual coup, even before taking office. Involvement from the top down of Obama and his administration and security services is an inconvenience for the Democrats, and many Republicans feel the same. What it does show, is that at this moment in the history of the United States, the deep state are above the law. We are waiting for Attorney General Barr to prove otherwise, but since he has already stated it is unlikely that Obama or Biden will be called to testify, he has issued a free pass, move along, nothing to see. All is swept aside on a media tide of attacks on democracy and the rule of law by the radical left, as BLM take control and politicians scamper down rabbit holes trying to avoid the buckshot. Those who control the media control the narrative, never more true than it is today, as truth becomes fiction and fiction fact.

Race: Why Liberal Globalists and Communist Revolutionaries Agree There Is No Such Thing

CanSpeccy, October 6, 2014: Liberals and other agents of the New World Order, like hard-line Communists, are revolutionaries who seek to establish a system of global governance. The difference between the two is that the globalization aimed at by liberals will subordinate all humanity to the moneyed elite, the bankers, the billionaires and the chiefs of the giant corporations, whereas the Communist revolution will serve the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which is to say the Nomenclatura for whom tyranny means thousands of comfy bureaucratic jobs with lots of power and privilege.

To both classes of revolutionary, the great obstacle to their dream is the nation state that declares the right of the people in any geographic area with the means to defend themselves to rule themselves as they see fit, which means maintaining control of the borders to prevent occupation of the territory by invaders or an uncontrolled flow of immigrants, and the preservation of the religious and cultural tradition of the people.

To the revolutionaries, there is a simple solution to the problem of the nation state and the desire of the vast majority of the people of the world to live among their own kind in accordance with their traditional manners, morals and forms of governance. It is to insist that there is no such thing as the nation, that all humanity is one race, and that it is simply bunk to claim that the English, say, have a privileged status in England, or that the Amerindians of Canada have legal and moral rights to control over their traditional lands and the freedom to live on those lands according to their own beliefs and traditions.

Liberals and Communists are thus in agreement on the need for universal genocide, which is to say the destruction of the nation state and its underlying human biological and cultural diversity. As a cover for this project, which is to be fulfilled through mass migrations, multi-culturalism and the suppression of the fertility of indigenous peoples, both liberals and Communists deny the reality of human racial diversity, for in the absence of such diversity, both the the nation state and the crime of genocide become meaningless concepts.

The war on the concept of race appears now to be heating up with the publication of multiple books on the subject the consequence of which is the creation of ever greater confusion and misunderstanding.

Among the more recent contributions to this great obfuscation is A Troublesome Inheritance, by Nicholas Wade. As a former deputy editor of Nature magazine and a one-time writer for Science magazine and the New York Times, Wade has pretty good credentials as an obfuscator of basic science for political purposes as anyone with long experience of those publications with which Wade has been associated would know, and obfuscation is what Wade provides in this book.

Race, Wade acknowledges, is real, but then proceeds to lay it down as a matter of fact that there are only five human races: black, white, red, and yellow, plus Australian aboriginal. Thus he either deliberately muddies the water or demonstrates that he doesn't know what he is talking about. Making it impossible to know whether Wade is merely confused or is acting as a globalist shill, he never defines the term "race," thus his more or less arbitrary five-fold division of mankind serves to reinforce the popular misconception that race is largely a matter of skin color, whereas in fact skin color is by no means definitive of race. For example, sub-Saharan Africans, Dravidians of the Indian sub-continent, the Australian aborigines, and some Amerindians are all more or less the same color, but they are by no means closely related. Conversely, there are thousands of white Africans (albinos) who are definitely not Caucasians.

Race is a matter of kinship. To define the term formally, a race is an interbreeding population (human, for the purpose of this discussion) more or less completely isolated genetically from other populations by barriers of geography, politics, class, caste, or religion.

Defined thus, we can see that the tribalized people of black Africa are far from being a homogeneous group, but rather, are among the most diverse people on earth and may encompass greater population-level genetic variation than all other human groups combined.

Thus, as Wade notes, since 1980, all Olympic 100 m finalists have been of West African origin. But that does not make all black people fast runners. An East African on the Barak Obama model will never outrun a Jesse Owens over 100 meters, although an African of the latter type will never outrun the fastest East African over ten thousand meters.

But it is not just black Africans who display great diversity. Traveling over any significant area of the populated world one sees regional differences in the physical traits of the indigenous peoples: scull shapes for example, brachycephalics predominantly in North West Spain versus dolicocephalics in Southern Spain, or hair and eye color, to take another example, from dark-haired, brown-eyed Celts over most of the Scottish Highlands, to blond, blue-eyed people of Viking descent in Caithness in the remote North East of Scotland, and other coastal areas of settlement of the British Isles.

So racial differences can be seen at multiple levels. Between a Chinese and and Englishman, or a Glaswegian and an Edinburghian, and indeed between any two places where migration has not obliterated the pattern of genetic variation established during many generations of past reproductive isolation during which genetic drift, selection and random mutation have wrought differences among gene pools.

What these differences really mean, no one knows. Certainly Wade's presumptions about racial differences in psychology and their impact on the historical development of the world seem speculative to the point of absurdity. Yet such differences may indeed be important. Sadly, the globalist revolutionaries are intent on creating a global melting pot that will make all indigenous peoples a disappearing minority in their own homelands and wipe out in a generation or two potentially important racial aggregations of genes created over 100,000 years of human evolution.

Related:

CanSpeccy:
Universal Genocide and the New World Order

CanSpeccy:
Why and How Western Elites Turned Against Their Own People

CanSpeccy:
In Praise of Diversity

Frans de Waal: An Ethologist's Confusion About Ethics — Part I

Ethology is the study of animal behavior. Franz de Waal is a distinguished ethologist and author of several best-selling accounts of primate behavior. As de Waal reports at length in the Atheist and the Bonobo, and other works, a key feature of the behavior of apes and to a greater or lesser degree other social animals, is sharing, helping, commiserating, comforting and demanding fairness. 

From this reality of animal social existence, de Waal concludes that morality is neither unique to humans nor dependent on religion, but is inherent in mammalian biology. Furthermore, he contends, that religion is, though difficult and perhaps impossible to eradicate, superfluous to the good society.

Thus, de Waal writes:

This brings me back to my bottom-up view of morality. The moral law is not imposed from above or derived from well-reasoned principles; rather it arises from ingrained values that have been there from the beginning of time.

In this, however, de Waal is sadly confused. The constructive, cooperative, fairness-demanding and mutually beneficial behavior of social animals is not evidence of morality, natural or otherwise. It is merely the rational, self-serving behavior of the small business owner who refrains from swindling his customers in the hope that they will return for more. It is the principle of you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. By helping one another, social animals achieve a level of well-being beyond that attainable were they to live independent, uncooperative lives.

Why?

In 2001, someone (nobody, including members of the 9/11 Commission, knows for sure who), knocked down New York's World Trade Center Towers One and Two with airliners. Later the same day, World Trade Center Tower Seven collapsed into its own footprint though not struck by an airliner — the only steel-frame high-rise (other than WTC 1 and 2) ever to do so except as the result of a controlled demolition. Very strange. But nobody to think about it: OK? Just blame it on the Muzzies.

Then the West embarked on a multi-trillion-dollar campaign (very profitable to some, e.g., the Bush-connected Carlyle Group: "we provide the gear to bomb places to Hell, then we get the contract to rebuild") to poke sticks into Muslim bees' nest in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria. At the same time the gates of Vienna, Paris, London, Berlin, and Miami were flung open to a flood of Muslims, many of whom are intent on the conquest of the West. This they say, is to be achieved by the womb not the sword, which shows the gentleness of Islam, which is so much admired by the Western Cuckservative who never tire of assuring us that Islam is "a religion of love." Still, as the Miami night club massacre among other recent events shows, a bit of sword-, or in this case gun-play, to clear some space in the decadent West is apparently* considered a good thing by some members of the Islamic settler advance party.

These developments raise the question, why is the Western elite conniving at the West's racial and cultural destruction? The answer, has two parts.

First, there are the liberal-lefties in government, including thousands upon thousands of them within the great bureaucracies, plus the Commies in academia who want to destroy Western capitalist civilization and impose the dictatorship of the proletariat. Under this hoped for Wesstern incarnation of the Soviet system, they see themselves as members of the privileged nomenclatura. They are the ones, they imagine, who will decide who goes to the gulag, and who is to be shot on the spot, Lenin's remedy for any opposition.

Lord  Kinnock of Bedwellty and wife. Unelected
former ruler of the European Union. Source.

Second, there is the Money Power, which through control of the media, Hollywood, FaceBook, etc., supports the lib-left effort to make political correctness the religion of the West. They do so in the knowledge that the loony PC multiculti agenda will destroy the sovereign, democratic nation state, and make way for global governance, i.e., government by:

(1) Trade deals negotiated by the largest capitalist entities (about 150 firms control most international business). These are the deals that Treason Party leaders including Obama, Cameron, Merkel, etc., are seeking to adopt right now, deals that transfer large powers from the nation state to international corporations; and

(2) International organizations such as the EU, WTO and the UN, which are easily manipulated by the money power by the usual mundane forms of bribery and corruption  (for example, wasn't UN Sec. Gen Kofi Annan on the take in the Iraq oil for food deal?).

———
* I say apparently, because there never seems to be a competent investigation following any incident of so-called Islamic terrorism, whether it be 9/11, the London Tube bombings, or the recent Paris nightclub shootings. So whether it's Muslims taking the initiative, or a revived Gladio, or similar organization, that should take the credit, is unclear.

Related: 

Edward Teague: Bush's Gang of Mad Bee Keepers

Jesus, Tolstoy, Gandhi and Guns

You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.

... do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
Matthew 5-7 (New International Version)

Leo Tolstoy held that government, of its nature, is always corrupt and oppressive, using its power to tax, conscript, fine or otherwise punish to impel citizens to participate in actions totally at odds with the principles of decency and honor that the state claims to uphold.

Tolstoy illustrated his argument by reference to the hypocrisy of the Russian state, headed by a supposedly Christian autocrat, deploying with the full support of the Christian Orthodox Church millions of men and untold wealth in the murderous pursuit of imperial aggrandizement.

But, Tolstoy argued, the evil of state tyranny can be defeated by the practical application of the Sermon on the Mount.

What importance, one might think, can one attach to such an incident as some dozens of crazy fellows, as people will call them, refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the government, refusing to pay taxes, to take part in law proceedings or in military service?
These people are punished and exiled to a distance, and life goes on in its old way. One might think there was no importance in such incidents; but yet, it is just those incidents, more than anything else, that will undermine the power of the state and prepare the way for the freedom of men. 

And the power of the Russian state was undermined, if due less to the passive resistance of Tolstoyans than to the onslaught of the German Army. But its collapse did not "prepare the way for the freedom of men," it led rather to an even more absolute autocracy, headed by men who despised Christianity, held Tolstoy's ideas in contempt and proceeded readily to the slaughter of tens of millions of their own citizens.

Which leads one to reflect on the  beliefs of Mohandas Gandhi, whose nationalist campaign of non-violent opposition to British Imperial rule in India was directly inspired by Tolstoy's understanding of of Christianity. Unlike Tolstoy's Russian followers, who had little impact on Russia's Tzarist regime and were mostly shot or imprisoned by the Soviet state, the efforts of Gandhi and his followers culminated in the attainment of Indian independence under a popularly elected goverment, which raises two questions:

What was the difference between British India and Tsarist Russia that accounted for the vastly different results achieved in the two countries by those committed to non-violent opposition to an oppressive state? And what moral and practical lessons should one draw from this difference in outcome?

One difference, it would seem, is that Christian principles are more likely to prevail if exercised against oppression by those who are at least nominally Christian and who, however degraded their Christianity, at least understand the point being made by their opponents. And indeed, during the interwar years, as the British establishment formed the intention to quit India, the British were remarkably susceptible to moral arguments against war and imperialism, desperate as all political parties were to avoid a repetition of the carnage of World War 1. In contrast, the Russian revolution was led by psychopaths with an utter loathing of the old Russian regime and a ruthless determination to stamp out any opposition to their will.

That circumstances alter cases, and that moral suasion does not trump all evil was firmly believed by Gandhi, who was by no means unconditionally committed to pacifism. During the Boer War, Gandhi served the British forces in the only capacity that an Indian in South Africa could, as a member of an ambulance unit.  And during the First World War Gandhi encouraged Indians to volunteer for military service, contending that by helping Britain, India would come to be seen as a powerful  independent nation and an ally of England's rather than a subordinate entity.

Confirming that his adherence to Tolstoy's Christian ideals was purely tactical, Gandhi wrote:

I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence... I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.

Which leaves one to wonder how Jesus and Tolstoy would have viewed the events of the Twentieth Century, for the correct understanding of the Sermon on the Mount is not altogether clear. To say "anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment" is by no means the same as saying "anyone who is angry with a Joseph Stalin, an Idi Amin or some other monster, will be subject to judgment."

To show forbearance and love to ones brothers and sisters, or to members of ones community or tribe, must often if not always be the best policy since the kindness and generosity will surely be remembered and at some time reciprocated. But forbearance and love of a homicidal psychopath intent on one's destruction seems not only different but, well, crazy.

Jesus it is true, went to his death deliberately, calmly and with forgiveness of those who had condemned him, which was entirely consistent with his teaching. Yet did he do so under a misapprehension? That is one interpretation of those heart-breaking words, cried in a loud voice in the agony of crucifixion: "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

As for Tolstoy, who served valiantly with the Russian army during the Crimean war, who loved hunting, and who was both irascible and impulsive, it is hard to believe that faced with the monstrosity of the Soviet tyranny and Lenin's ten thousand leather-jacketed Cheka intent on the extermination of all opposition he would not have contemplated resistance with an assault rifle.

To some, these speculations may seem sadly misguided, in which case I would be glad to know what they think.