Appeasement Revisited

Pic courtesy Cagle.com

Any student of history, gentle reader, will recall an incident in 1938, when a national leader returned to his country after signing a peace deal with an authoritarian european leader.

He was very pleased with himself, and waved the written agreement around, proclaiming "Peace in our time!"

This was after that authoritarian leader had taken over vast swathes of territory from a neighbouring european country with military force.

Move forward to February 2022, when another authoritarian leader invaded a neighbouring european country, after annexing large swathes of its territory in 2016.

Another recently elected national leader has now intervened, he claims, to make peace. He is prepared to allow the aggressor nation to retain control of the territory it has taken by force, and is sidelining in negotiations the leader of the country invaded. 

When challenged by the media as to the morality of this process, he blamed a previous administration for the situation.

Consider, gentle reader, an alternative history which could have followed from the 1938 situation.

Consider, if Churchill, when he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, had blamed Neville Chamberlain for the situation, an turned a blind eye to the aggression that followed, and the consequences.

That is precisely what Trump has done. He has blamed Biden for the situation, and ignored Russian aggression.

Far-fetched?

I'm not sure.

Putin is driven by his obsession with recreating an Imperial Russia, just as Hitler was seeking a one thousand year Reich.

Putin, apparently was traumatised by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, just as Hitler was by Germany's defeat in 1918.

Both Hitler (as a soldier) and Putin (as a KGB agent) were proudly working for their respective countries when their governments fell. Both were/are fervent nationalists.

The parallels are stark...