A Conversation for Ask h2g2

Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 101

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

>> We've all heard of the Berlin-Baghdad railway.

>>I haven't.

Consider yourself Hedgiecated smiley - smiley:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Railway

Lawrence of Arabia (whose Guide Entry I really *must* get around to) kept blowing up sections of it. There you go - it's famous enough to have been in a fillum.

An obvious but important point is that Britain was not in WWI because of an imminent threat of invasion.


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 102

Secretly Not Here Any More

"That's a fair old simplification of our european relations of course."

Oh, without a doubt. Of course there's the whole alliance system, the economic competition with Germany and the last bits of land grabbing in Africa to take into account too.

But even in bizarre circumstance that we'd have written off the economic and prestige costs of not fighting (either) war, then we'd have been forced to get involved lest an expansive hostile power put us under the threat of eventual invasion.


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 103

tucuxii

I did hear a theory that many pre-war Conservatives were almost as fearful of winning a war against the Nazis as losing to them as they realised that a "peoples war" would lead to the creation of a more just society at the expense of their class - "the idle rich" - as happened after 1945.
This was on the basis that the failure of post first world war governments to create the "land fit for heroes" veterans of that war had brought the country close to revolution and by the 1930's Labour had a realistic chance of being elected as a radical post war government.
This certainly seems to have been part of the thinking of the arch appeaser Lord Halifax


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 104

McKay The Disorganised

I don't know where you oheard that theory Tucuxii but I wouldn't take any history lessons from them.

Or political ones.

It's so full of crap I don't know where to start.

smiley - cider


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 105

Secretly Not Here Any More

Yeah, doesn't seem like a particularly good theory - and I've read a lot of Marxist history.


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 106

Researcher5

One thought is that WW1 and WW2 were essentially the same conflict flaring up twice, like the tips of two volcanoes in the same chain and that in turn that conflict - the 'chain' - can be traced back to the Franco Prussian War and the humiliation felt by the French. The Guns of August by Barbra Tuchman is good on this, on German militarism in the 1880's and 1890's and also on the long laid traps that the politicians found themselves in after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. For those politicians caught up in between the two volcanoes, we can see clearly now how tightly wound the 20's and 30's were, but they did not have that perspective and because Winston was proved absolutely right about the horrors of Nazism the appeasers are utterly and totally discredited. It seems to me that the "role" of the historian is to try and understand the "why?" - why did people make the decisions they did? what information was at their disposal? what lens did they bring to interpreting that information? What were the competing forces that shaped their decisions? what things did they control and what things were out of their control?


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 107

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

>>One thought is that WW1 and WW2 were essentially the same conflict flaring up twice

Hobsbawm says similar...except with the twist that they were a series of interlocking conflicts viewed differently by the various participants. Plus they started slightly before WWI and continued long after WWII.


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 108

Alfster

I think Jews preffered WW1 than WW2.


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 109

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

Oh, not all of them. There were also pogroms in various places during WWI.

I recently mentioned on another thread...my street is named after an incident just after WWI when the British refused permission for Jewish refugees fleeing to Palestine to dock in Istanbul. They were left to the mercy of the Russian submarines that we knew to be sinking all passing shipping.


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 110

Alfster

Well, that's what you get from killing Jesus...smiley - erm


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 111

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

And elsewhere I've also mentioned the vetoed plan for a Mosquito raid on Auschwitz to breach the fences and destroy the ovens. It had been coordinated with Jewish resistance groups (there had already been breakouts).

Scribbled in the margins o the plan was 'They go themselves into it.'

In France, most of the rounding up of the Jews was carried out quite willingly not by the Germans but by the French. Is there perhaps the possibility that similar might have occurred in Britain? Or were we squeaky clean on anti-semitism?

The only occupied countries to have emerged unsullied by anti-semitic collaboration are Denmark and Bulgaria.


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 112

Alfster

Anti-Semitism was rife everywhere. Due to the Catholic Church having so much power everywhere?


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 113

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

Oh, it's unreasonable to blame Catholics. Protestants and Atheists could match them.

Some of it was business related. For example the English pogrom of 1190 was essentially a hostile takeover in the banking sector.


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 114

tucuxii

Thanks for you in depth analysis, I think there may be a element of truth in the theory if one looks at in the context of the 1930's. There was a whole class of extremely privileged people who no longer exist, prior to the post war Labour government, who had a lot to lose.
Many of them feared social change which had begun in the aftermath of the First World War had fascist sympathies - of course this may appear absurd if you look at it through modern eyes but the past is another country


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 115

Orcus

>For example the English pogrom of 1190 was essentially a hostile takeover in the banking sector.<

Gotta love humanity sometimes. Barred from doing *any* other job, they then get persecuted for doing the only thing they are allowed to do smiley - rolleyes


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 116

tucuxii

There is certain bitter irony that usuary was regarded as a mortal sin in the 12th Century and that much of the debt that was so violently cancelled was to fund Richard he first genocidal campaigns against Muslims in the "Holy Land" as paret of crusade that included the persecution of Jews in Germany, France and Hungary


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 117

tucuxii

Bulgaria wes not occupied it was part of the Axis but took little part in the war other than occupying Macedonia after the defeat of Yugoslavia and Greece. It is true that Bulgaria resisted German pressure to deport Bulgarian Jews, however they did deport the Macedonian Jews to Auschwitz


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 118

Orcus

I do wonder where the Richard the 1st mythos comes from.

He was basically French and lived in France when we wasn't off warring (which was most of the time). His only real interest in his British territories was that it gave him a royal title and so allowed him to be of equal(ish) standing with other leaders of the 3rd Crusade (and in other matters of foreign affairs).
He barely set foot here during his lifetime and was a vicious genocidal maniac (although this is slightly unfair - who wasn't back then?).

Yet here he seems to be famous for being a 'good and kindly' king and we have a statue of him outside parliament.

Maybe it's because his brother was so bad and he got associated with the Robin Hood mythos too.

Seems he gets treated differently to Chamberlain in reputation terms at least.


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 119

tucuxii

Perhaps Richard's absentee status allowed people to have a romanticized view of the brute


Neville Chamberlain - the abominable appeaser?

Post 120

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

That I didn't know, tuc.

I know slightly more about the Danish example - I did some reading following a visit to the excellent Museum of the Wartime Resistance in Copenhagen. http://www.natmus.dk/sw4604.asp

Amongst many little anecdotes that I liked was that when the Gestapo went to the town halls and asked for lists of all the Jews, the mayors said:

'How would we know? We never thought to ask.'

Another thing I didn't know...I visit the anarcho-hippy hangout of Christiania, for nefarious reasons of my own. It's a former naval base which, as I already knew, had been squatted since the 1960s (and the police kept out since by force of half bricks).

What I didn't know is that a fair section of the Christianshavn district kept the Nazis out entirely, my much the same means. (as did parts of Leipzig A3059255)

Incidentally, 'Forbrydelsen' fans may have recognised a wartime resistance reference in the first episode of Series 2. The body was found in Memorial Park. The connection is deliberate.


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