No, 2022 isn’t 1938
Neville Chamberlain, the pre-World War II British leader commonly accused of failing to size up Nazism correctly, is back in the news. He’s been the subject of a Netflix movie and, while that film takes an unusually benign view of the much-maligned prime minister, his name is also being used to smear the current President of France Emmanuel Macron. Some commentators are frank enough to – inconsistently – combine both the current events and the Netflix show, telling us more than is good for them about how they learn their 'history’.
Somehow, Macron’s attempt to negotiate a balanced way out of the current war scare between the West and Russia over Ukraine is supposed to resemble Chamberlain’s “appeasement” of Nazi Germany. That accusation implies both moral and political failure because the consensus on the historical appeasement of Nazi Germany by, mostly, Great Britain is that it was a crime as well as a mistake. Selling out interwar Czechoslovakia to the Nazis was not only evil but also worse than useless. Instead of ending Germany’s drive to war, the sacrifice only emboldened and helped the Nazis.
To learn more about this topic through this link.