2. False Analysis

This summer Norton reissued Alfred Leslie Rowse’s Appeasement, the ten thousandth or so study of how an attempt, a generation ago, to deal with an aggressive totalitarian movement by negotiation, compromise and conciliation not only failed to maintain peace but made general war inevitable. Not a single reviewer of Appeasement questioned this thesis as illustrated by the author from the case of Nazism and the Third Reich. Not a single reviewer, or the author, suggested there might be a fresher, and from a practical standpoint rather more relevant, illustration.

One might think the outward symbols too strikingly parallel to be ignored. In 1963 the Anglo-American leaders rush to the home base of Communism to sign the capitulatory papers, just as the Anglo-French leaders rushed to the home base of Nazism in 1938. (Moscow-Munich: a numerologist ought to enjoy the fact that they have the same initial and same number of letters.) In both cases the totalitarian chiefs dangle the same bait before the Westerners: peaceful coexistence in our time. Doesn’t it occur to any senator to ask himself: Why did our representatives go to Moscow to sign the test ban? Why didn’t their representatives come to London or Washington? Or why, at any rate, didn’t both sides meet halfway at Geneva? The diplomatic geography reveals, as it almost always does, the true balance of political forces; it shows who is pulling whom.

JB

About the Author

James Burnham

This summer Norton reissued Alfred Leslie Rowse’s Appeasement, the ten thousandth or so study of how an attempt, a generation ago, to deal with an aggressive totalitarian movement by negotiation, compromise and conciliation not only failed to maintain peace but made general war inevitable. Not a single reviewer of Appeasement questioned this thesis as illustrated by the author from the case of Nazism and the Third Reich. Not a single reviewer, or the author, suggested there might be a fresher, and from a practical standpoint rather more relevant, illustration.

One might think the outward symbols too strikingly parallel to be ignored. In 1963 the Anglo-American leaders rush to the home base of Communism to sign the capitulatory papers, just as the Anglo-French leaders rushed to the home base of Nazism in 1938. (Moscow-Munich: a numerologist ought to enjoy the fact that they have the same initial and same number of letters.) In both cases the totalitarian chiefs dangle the same bait before the Westerners: peaceful coexistence in our time. Doesn’t it occur to any senator to ask himself: Why did our representatives go to Moscow to sign the test ban? Why didn’t their representatives come to London or Washington? Or why, at any rate, didn’t both sides meet halfway at Geneva? The diplomatic geography reveals, as it almost always does, the true balance of political forces; it shows who is pulling whom.