The Illusion of Realism in Political Leadership

Welcome back to Origin Story and join us as we wrap up the story of appeasement. It’s 1938. After the Anschluss, Hitler makes his bid for the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and tests the moral and strategic arguments for appeasement to breaking point. While Chamberlain insists it would be madness to go to war over “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” opponents like Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee are equally convinced that selling out the Czechs will only encourage Hitler to go further.

Desperate diplomacy culminates in the Munich Agreement but Chamberlain’s “triumph” is short-lived as opposition mounts across the country. The German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 destroys appeasement as a mainstream proposition, leaving only an uneasy alliance of fascists and pacifists. When Stalin chooses Germany over Britain and France, war is inevitable.

We look at the people who still wanted to make a deal with Hitler even once the war had begun, the fall of Chamberlain and the revenge of Churchill. We debunk the revisionist case for appeasement, explore how the legacy of Munich has been used and abused to justify military intervention ever since, and ask whether history is repeating itself over Putin and Ukraine.

Why did Munich’s popularity collapse so quickly? How did Chamberlain misread Hitler’s intentions so badly? What motivated the die-hard appeasers, and the historians who defend the policy even now? Are the lessons of appeasement a double-edged sword? And which of Chamberlain’s foes had the best zingers?

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Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘A New Dawn’, The Times (1 October 1938)

• W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’ (1939)

• Frederick T. Birchall, ‘Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich’, New York Times (16 August 1936)

• Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to

War (2019)

• Cato (Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen), Guilty Men (1940)

• Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, Fascism: The Story of an Idea (2024)

• Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement (1966)

• Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9 (1980)

• Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage: A Story of the Past or the Future (1922)

• Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘How the appeasement of Hitler played into his hands’, New Statesman (2019)

• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)

• Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (2004)• James Levy, Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain 1936-1939 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)

• Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War (1998)

• Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930-1940 in Great Britain (1940)

• George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937-1939, edited by Peter Davison (1998)

• ‘Policy of His Majesty’s Government’, day three of House of Commons debate on Munich, Hansard (5 October 1938)

• Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005)

• Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (1937)

• Viscount Rothermere, Warnings and Predictions (1939)

• A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961)

• Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells and directed by William Cameron Menzies (1936)

• Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers (1971)

• Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (1958)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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