--- Damon Agretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Disagree. The reason the Allies folded at Munich > IMHO was because they > looked at WWI and saw themselves as being TOO EAGER > to go to war. If you > recall everyone was mobilizing their armies and > marching towards the front, > with the words "home by Christmas" on their lips. In > the arena of European > politics, the Allies had to ask themselves: is a > 2nd, possibly catastrophic > war with Germany worth the Sudetenland and the > Czechs? Appeasing the > Germans pre-WWI had nothing to do with it, IMHO.
I don't think so. Have you read the Eyre Crow memorandum? I think it's probably the best outline of the Allied vision of international politics before WWI. Crowe comments on how consistently the British folded whenever the Germans challenged them - giving up colonial concessions in Africa, for example, over and over again, precisely because they _wanted_ to avoid war. The Germans were arguably eager for war, but I don't think that's a fair assessment of the British, French, or (maybe) Russians. At any rate, I don't quite see how we were disagreeing. My whole point was that the Allies thought they had been _insufficiently_ eager to appease the Germans before WWI, and that this was the cause of WWI. So they decided not to make the same mistake again, and chose to appease Germany before the Second World War. Now, they were operating under this misapprehension because the German War Guilt Office had carefully tricked everyone about the way the Germans were acting before the war. More on that in response to your second point below. > >Revelations from the German archives show that this > >was an entirely incorrect interpretation, btw. > > Certainly true. When the Germans marched into the > Ruhr and the Rhine river > valley, they had orders to turn tail and run at any > sign of a counter from > the West. The French certainly blinked in this > situation. > > Damon. Yes, this is true, but I think I must have been unclear. Everyone agrees that the French screwed up by not challenging the Germans over the Ruhr and Rhine. My point is that the French and British did _not_ cause _WWI_ by failing to conciliate the Germans before the war. The Germans were incredibly aggressive. Obviously this is debatable (I've spent the last four weeks debating it) but it seems to me that the clear preponderance of the evidence is that the Germans were basically looking for a war. They thought that their window of opportunity to dominate the continent was passing because of the rise of Russian power, and they decided to seize the chance when it arose. Dale Copeland's book on the topic makes the argument very well, I think. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. www.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l