FROM THE ARCHIVES:The euphoria which greeted Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938 was not shared in this letter to the editor. – JOE JOYCE
Sir, – By this time the tumult and the shouting that welcomed Mr. Chamberlain’s coup d’etat have begun to die down and leave us to the cold light of reflection.
We are all, I believe, prepared to concede to Mr. Chamberlain such mercy clemency and justice as few statesmen show. It has occurred to me to wonder what will be the effect of this new statesmanship upon the minds and feelings of future generations. Do we realise we have made a pact with two nations in which civilisation is as dead as it was in Germany in the course of the thirty years’ war? Do we realise sufficiently the vulgarising, brutalising effect upon German youth of the Nazi system? Do we really regard with the horror of a would-be Christian people those ghastly pogroms that have whetted the sadistic appetite of Germany’s brown-shirted and black-shirted millions? A few days ago I was saying to myself these Germans will destroy themselves, or they will destroy Europe. I have all but come to the conviction that they will destroy Europe.
Will men continue to honour their word in private life when in matters of State they see treaty after treaty made to be broken? The insidious weapons of propaganda, which we used to describe in plain English as lying and hypocrisy, has become an accepted gospel to the whole world. The vulgar torrent of abuse which the German Chancellor heaped upon the Czech President has not awakened more antipathy or contempt than would be felt for the language of a drunken man. We have heard of Germans of impeccable honour and reputations driven to death by their own hand and we have come to relish such details as the stimulating figments of a cheap thriller or “penny dreadful.” Pastor Niemöller is now a faint memory, and the agonies of a hundred thousand Jews are the subject of common wit and vulgar lampoons.
Can we go any further in dulling our sensibility to honour and humanity? Yes – we can imitate them. And, perhaps when the Nazi gospel has reached as far as the Atlantic we shall do so.
I have looked in vain for years for some denunciation of such horrors from our statesmen, some repugnance to the authors of this frightfulness, as when Lloyd George endeared himself to our hearts by his blunt: “We’ll give them hell!” One wonders what would have been Hitler’s reply if the British Prime Minister had presented him with a demand that these horrors should cease. Can it be possible that instead he has assisted in presenting him with a new field for his devilish ingenuity? Somehow there comes to my mind at the moment the famous words uttered in the House by the elder Pitt with reference to the American colonies: “Were I an American,” he said, “I would never lay down my arms – never, never, never! – Yours, etc, “Junius”
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