Our Monumental Crisis: Appeasement or Reconciliation?
This moment challenges us to tell our story truthfully and to strive to achieve our founding ideals.
by Shmuel Klatzkin
July 11, 2020, 12:10 AM
After a war, even one fought for the highest of principles, civilized people long to return to civilian life. Good people are repulsed by the waste and the horror of war. They yearn for the many blessings that only peace can contain. They naturally and properly want to put all war as far away as possible and devote all their efforts to increasing prosperity and comfort.
The violent indulgences of the monument topplers obscure the genuine historical issue on which we need to focus.
Good people therefore look for reconciliation. Winning a war is not the same as winning a peace. Great empires have failed because their conquered peoples had no reason to be loyal. Great rules like Cyrus of Persia or Alexander of Macedon actively reconciled themselves with those they had conquered, offering them important freedoms and autonomies.
But sometimes, reconciliation is not legitimate and brings little good. The usual symptom of this is when the “reconciling†is done at the expense of principle, or, even worse, when another, less powerful group of people is sacrificed as the cost of the victor’s attaining ease.
The years before the outbreak of World War II saw several examples of this kind of false reconciliation. Britain had shed rivers of blood and had nearly bankrupted its finances in order to stop German aggression in World War I. So when Hitler began to rattle his saber, Britain was leery of the expense of meeting military threat with military deterrence. Its leader, Neville Chamberlain, thought to establish reconciliation by forcing Czechoslovakia to cede its territory and eventually its whole independence of Germany.
In 1939, Chamberlain went further. Knowing full well the brutal treatment to which European Jews were exposed, and knowing full well Britain had accepted a mandate from the League of Nations to help develop a Jewish national home in what is now called Israel, Chamberlain instead changed British policy to allow only a small number of Jews to immigrate to the Holy Land and then to close off immigration entirely. The Colonial Secretary of the day later explained the reason why: the Arabs of the Middle East could ally themselves with Germany if they so chose, whereas the Jews were stuck with Britain, whatever policy it established.
In both of these cases, no reconciliation was established, and no war was avoided.
more
https://spectator.org/monuments-statues-appeasement-reconciliation-civil-rights/
