It’s all so tedious. World War II – and the run-up to it – is now the only historical analogy people are capable of citing. This is akin to Adolf Hitler being the only true villain in history. It’s so lazy and ignorant.
What makes it worse is that people who ought to know better, use it where it is completely inappropriate. It’s like a magic incantation that eliminates the need for actual argument using facts and logic.
I’m a subscriber to First Things, and enjoy reading it. I didn’t know much about George Weigel, but am rapidly souring on him. He seems to be highly respected, wrote well-received books, but his latest column is deeply embarrassing. It’s so bad that I have no interest in reading his other work.
In it, Weigel tries to make a comparison between the Munich Agreement in 1938 and the current situation in Ukraine. It is a ludicrous comparison.
The background to Munich bears some discussion. One of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” was national self-determination. This foolish ideal posited that it was possible and desirable to divide up all of Europe into clearly-delineated demographically homogenous ethno-states. It was not.
Nevertheless, the Austria-Hungry was broken up and the result was – and continues to be – a disaster. For the purposes of this discussion, we will confine ourselves to two aspect of this: the strategic nightmare and ethnic conflict.
Without the Dual Monarchy, there was no counterweight to a unified Germany in southeastern Europe. To be sure, Austria-Hungary was past its prime, but retaining it as a tariff union and military alliance with common foreign policy was a strategic necessity. Instead a patchwork of micro-states, often mutually hostile, offered an open invitation to German revanchism. This predictably happened when Hitler took power.
To try to mitigate this, France signed an alliance with Czechoslovakia, the strongest kitten in the litter. Built around the ancient kingdom of Bohemia, Czechoslovakia was the home of one of Austria-Hungary’s major industrial centers, and the Skoda works and attended shops were some of the largest and most advanced armaments manufacturers in Europe.
Having no illusions about their safety, the Czechs also fortified their rugged frontier, and built up a first-class, well-equipped albeit small army. The quality of armaments was impressive, and Czechoslovakia boasted some of the most modern an effective small arms in the world, even exporting them to China.
But it was not ethnically homogenous. Centuries of Imperial Austrian control resulted in large German-language minorities win the region, particularly along the frontier. This provided the spark for the resulting confrontation in 1938.
Hitler argued that the Germans in Czechoslovakia had the same right to self-determination as everyone else, and to that end first demanded special language and cultural rights and later outright annexation to Germany. Austria had already fallen to German ambition in a bloodless occupation, and while it was fashionable to play up opposition to it, there were absolutely Austrians who preferred to be united with a German super-state rather than be a powerless rump of the old Empire.
Hitler used the time-tested tactic of alternating conciliatory and inflammatory language, going so far as to order full mobilization in the fall of 1938. By treaty, France would have to go war with Germany and Britain would be obligated to join in. War seemed certain.
However, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain loathed the idea of war, and hit upon the idea of a last-minute Great Power conference to head off the conflict. Only Britain, France, Germany and Italy were invited; the Czechs and Soviets (who backed the Czechs) were excluded.
Tensions continued to flare, but on Sept. 30, 1938, and agreement was struck that gave Germany the disputed territories in order to avoid war. This was the zenith of appeasement. Abandoned by their allies, the Czechs agreed.
It was a strategic disaster.
Having witnessed the cowardly fecklessness of the Western powers, Josef Stalin determined to end the hostility with Nazi Germany, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was since the following August.
Hitler did not honor the agreement, and in March, 1939, invaded the rump state in a bloodless occupation. In addition to new territory, Germany gained the Skoda works, the fruit of their production and precious stocks of tanks, small arms and artillery. While much is made of Germany’s efforts to circumvent disarmament treaties, the fact was that to the end of the war, Germany was desperate for weapons. The occupation of Czechoslovakia seriously boosted the Reich’s marking capacity.
The tragedy is that if the West had held firm, Germany would have been screwed. The Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were much weaker in 1938, and as noted, gained a great deal of power by the weapons they gained. But in 1938, those weapons would be used against them, and would have been based in a mountainous fortified zone held by determined troops.
Germany would have had scant resources to defend the Rhine, and the Soviets stood prepared to assist the Czechs with supplies and especially aircraft. The Soviets had done this twice already, sending “volunteers” to both Spain and Nationalist China. Soviet bombers based in Bohemia could strike all over Germany, while British aircraft did so from France.
What is more, the year was already advanced, and Germany would have been in the position of trying to launch a winter campaign through rugged terrain while enduring a blockade on every side. It was a recipe for disaster.
The German military knew all of this, and put together a plan to remove Hitler from power before the war could start. The coup was put on hold pending the outcome of the Munich Conference, and when Hitler emerged triumphant, the plot was abandoned and the Wehrmacht’s resistance to Hitler was greatly weakened.
None of this history is an any way similar to what is happening in Ukraine, which is locked in a bloody attritional war with Russia without any clear path to victory. What Weigel is arguing against is a negotiated peace, which is a very odd position for someone who identifies as a conscientious Catholic to take. Pope Francis was wrong on many things, but he was right to try to end the slaughter, which is not about democracy or morality, but a border dispute in a region where boundaries have always been penciled in.
The cure of our age is that while religious belief is fading, people increasingly couch policy decisions in moral language, rendering compromise impossible. The best outcome in Ukraine would be a cease-fire followed by a comprehensive settlement to resolve lingering problems from the end of the Soviet Union. This would includes the Kaliningrad enclave and the micro-state of Transnistria.
Once upon a time, policy could have been handled rationally and pragmatically, but we now live in a world where doing something because “it is the right thing to do” justifies tens of thousands of dead with no possibility of achieving the desired end state, which is often completely vague. It is as if the two-decade folly of Afghanistan never happened.
It is because of this need that I will out poor thinking whenever I find it, regardless of whether we are ideologically on the same side.
Chateau Lloyd 
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