Before there were plastic bags, my grandmother lined her kitchen trashcan with yesterday’s newspaper. Most news that attracts our attention can safely still be put to rest there after a day or some slightly extended decent interval.
Our myopic narcissism tends to magnify what history will in time ignore. Our birth and death notices may mean the world to those who love us but for most of us, including most kings and presidents, the reports of our deeds and our individual comings and goings pass largely unnoticed.
That said, some of what we see in print or on the nightly news will become an enduring part of our collective story. One way to recognize what will become history is to know what has become history.
The annual Munich Security Conference met last week. The conference first convened in 1963 as a forum for NATO member nations to discuss economic and political issues, as well as the procession of crises that roiled the Cold War world. When the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the roster of attendees and the scope of those issues expanded.
This year’s meeting focused on Russia’s threatened invasion of Ukraine, which regained its independence in 1991 after being ruled by Russia’s tsars and then by the communist Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s current president-autocrat, having massed nearly 200,000 soldiers on Ukraine’s borders, continues to simultaneously dangle peace and make impossible political demands. The United States, in concert with its “allies and partners,” has vowed to meet any Russian invasion of Ukraine with “crushing” economic sanctions.
Putin has periodically used threats and military force to reassert Russian control over former Soviet territories. He’s commonly launched these acts of aggression under the pretext of defending persecuted ethnic Russian minorities in those newly independent countries.
In 2014, the Russian army occupied Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and aided ethnic Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Those separatists, armed and supported by Russia, have resumed shelling Ukrainian territory controlled by the Ukrainian government, in violation of a 2015 ceasefire. Putin today recognized two separatist regions as independent states and ordered Russian troops to protect them and their ethnic Russian citizens.
How many American voters can find Ukraine on a map? What’s a tsar? What were the Cold War and the Iron Curtain? What was the Soviet Union, and why did it go away?
The heart of representative government is our power to choose our leaders. But in order to choose wisely, to frame appropriate questions, to intelligently support or challenge our government’s policies and actions, it’s essential that we exercise informed, sound judgment.
Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933. He immediately set out to recover German territory lost in World War I and incorporate German-speaking peoples in a new German empire. By 1938, he’d reestablished control over German territory bordering France and orchestrated a campaign of political intrigue and assassination that ended with pro-Nazi Austrians inviting the German army and Hitler into Austria, which then became part of Greater Germany.
Britain and France objected but did nothing.
In September 1938, Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland region. After another charade of political agitation and alleged persecution of ethnic Germans, Hitler threatened war if Germany wasn’t allowed to occupy the Sudetenland. While Czechoslovakia’s diplomats waited in a nearby hotel, the leaders of Britain, France and Italy met with Hitler in Munich and agreed to give him the Sudetenland in exchange for his assurance of peace.
The Czechs were willing to fight but knew they couldn’t defeat Hitler alone.
Britain’s Prime Minister Chamberlain famously proclaimed the Munich agreement had secured “peace for our time” and “peace with honor.”
Winston Churchill disagreed. He saw the danger of appeasement, that giving in to Hitler would only lead to more demands and wasn’t the way to prevent war. “You were given the choice between war and dishonor,” he replied. “You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”
With each act of appeasement, Hitler grew bolder.
Six months later, March 1939, German soldiers occupied all of Czechoslovakia.
Six months after that on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. German intelligence agents had staged “false flag” raids where the casualties presented as evidence of Polish aggression were murdered concentration camp prisoners dressed in German and Polish uniforms. Hitler declared he had “no other choice than to meet force with force.”
Britain and France honored their treaty commitments and declared war on Germany. World War II had begun. Appeasement had postponed a war but encouraged a catastrophe.
As this year’s security conference delegates grappled with the crisis in Ukraine, they couldn’t have missed the irony that they were meeting in Munich. Munich remains a synonym for shameful appeasement, a model of how not to deal with tyrants.
I’ve never gone off to war, but I can’t help wondering whether one day we’ll regret not having sent more soldiers sooner when Putin, like Hitler, would have been easier to stop.
And when a spotlighted student protester described supporters of American “involvement” in supplying Ukraine with weapons as “largely uninformed,” I wondered whether he was including what they, and maybe he, don’t know about Munich.
That particular ignorance regarding Munich and appeasement is the product of carelessness, apathy and the passing of time. We didn’t set out to render our children uninformed and defenseless against the tyrants of their century.
In contrast, states are passing laws that prohibit teaching the unflattering history of race in America. That deliberate negligence will leave our children just as uninformed and defenseless. If slavery made Jefferson “tremble” at the prospect of God’s wrath on America’s future generations, it can’t be unpatriotic to be honest about slavery’s evil.
I’m not talking about racial guilt trips for 10-year-olds. We don’t have to tear down the White House, but we do have to admit that slaves built it.
How are our children to learn from the past if we don’t teach them the past?
The truth is often unpleasant.
But it’s always necessary.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
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