We in Britain have lived in peace, safety and wealth for the past 80 years because of a huge act of appeasement and betrayal by our mighty, brave, patriotic and warlike leader, Sir Winston Churchill. His friend and ally, the much-admired President Franklin Roosevelt, joined in.
At the Soviet seaside town of Yalta, in the Crimea, in February 1945, these men handed the heart of Europe to Josef Stalin, the Soviet tyrant and mass-murderer.
In return, they believed (correctly) that the lands to the west of the line drawn across the continent at Yalta would be free. They knew beyond doubt that the great and famous cities of Prague, Warsaw and Budapest would sink into a twilight of secret police terror and communist misery.
And they did it for you and me. They did not think the peoples of Western Europe or the USA wanted yet another bloody war, another ten years of rationing, death and danger.
In their hearts, they knew this meant leaving the states they had betrayed to their fate. Moscow could and did send its tanks trundling into Prague and Budapest to extinguish any outbreaks of liberty, and we would do nothing.
Please tell me if you would have preferred the colossal European war, which was the other choice. Of course you wouldn’t. I mention this because I am often told that peace now between the West and Russia would be ‘appeasement’ and it would be so wrong that war would be better. Are you sure?
Neville Chamberlain’s earlier betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938 is always dragged out of its glass case at such moments. This isn’t the place to discuss it, but the view of political and media ‘experts’, who get their history out of GCSE picture books isn’t worth much. Such people have never been east of Ipswich and don’t know whether Vienna is west of Prague or the other way round. I do.
From left to right, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta conference in 1945
Neville Chamberlain waves from an open-top car, shortly after arriving in Munich for a meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1938. His betrayal of Czechoslovakia is always dragged out of its glass case at such moments, writes Peter Hitchens
I’ve made the journey between them (and plenty of others in the same part of the world, which is why I laugh at their ludicrous beliefs about foreign policy). I’ll only say that if we had gone to war with Hitler in 1938, as everyone now claims to think we should have done, we would have done so with hardly any Spitfires (the first production Spitfire came off the assembly line in the spring of 1938).
We are even more naked now. The Navy that saved us at Dunkirk has been reduced to a malfunctioning flotilla. Much of it can barely put to sea. We spend more on Housing Benefit than we do on the RAF. Our boasted nuclear missiles plop lifeless into the sea when we try to fire them. Our Army is a shrivelled remnant.
So it is lucky for us that Vladimir Putin is not in fact a modern Hitler. Mr Putin’s drunken, press-ganged slob armies cannot even capture Kharkhov, 20 miles from Russia’s border. Perhaps this explains the ceaseless bombast of our senior spooks and treacle-voiced retired generals, thundering on about how ‘we’ must fight for Ukraine. By ‘we’ they mean Ukrainians, not them. Do these heroes in safety, far from any front line, do this precisely because they know the truth?
For the truth is that this a brainless, avoidable conflict. I’ve explained here before how various American idiots and fantasists strove for years to make a war in this region, and eventually succeeded.
President Trump’s recent big-power bullying of his own peaceable neighbours has perhaps made the President more sympathetic to similar Russian behaviour
They did so because the Russian regime they faced was even stupider than them. It became so nasty and foolish that it was successfully provoked into an illegal invasion. And now what? Here’s another big war started by the USA, which it looks as if the USA cannot be bothered to finish.
In Vietnam, and then in Iraq and Syria, the USA has spent billions on dimwit wars, and then pulled out leaving others to mop up the mess. President Trump’s recent big-power bullying of his own peaceable neighbours has perhaps made the President more sympathetic to similar Russian behaviour. No wonder.
The USA would never have put up with a hostile military alliance on its borders. Mr Trump’s main interest has now shifted to China, and Washington’s war party is looking the same way. Those in Europe who have spent the past few years posing as military musclemen – while relying on the Pentagon to supply the actual muscle – must now show how committed they really are to pushing NATO ever eastwards. What is it all for, exactly? Beats me.
Look, the only power worth having, in life or in foreign affairs, is the power to stop others from pushing you around. Lots of countries, several of them our allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are appalling torture-chamber tyrannies which murder their people. I have visited nearly 60 countries in my life and I disapprove of the way they order their nations. But it is none of my business, just as it is none of theirs how we govern ourselves.
In the end, the job of our statesmen is not to pose as saviours of the planet, but to keep their own people in liberty under the law, with peace, order and prosperity. If peace is to come in Ukraine, then it will now involve appeasement, because there is no other realistic way to end it.
You may not like that, but do you honestly prefer unending war which might one day stretch into our territory? The greatest appeaser in our history, Winston Churchill, understood this. Why can’t our modern leaders, who ceaselessly claim to admire him?