Body Politic

The Mythology of Munich

by Larry Beinhart and photographs by Dion Ogust, August 25, 2008

It was George Bush who raised the specter of Munich and appeasement. He raised it in reference to Iran and Palestine. He used it as a slur against Barack Obama because Obama said he would talk to such people.

Then McCain picked it up. He said, “Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain. I think Barack Obama needs to explain why he wants to sit down and talk with a man [Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] who is the head of a government that is a state sponsor of terror, that is responsible for the killing of brave young Americans, that wants to wipe Israel off the map and denies the Holocaust.”

What actually happened at Munich back in 1938?

The western end of Czechoslovakia was called the Sudentland. A large part of the population was ethnically German, and was campaigning to be an autonomous region. Hitler demanded they be united with the Fatherland, and then made it clear he would go to war to make it happen.

England and France didn’t want to go to war. They convened a conference with Germany and Italy and cut a deal that allowed Hitler to occupy the territory he was claiming, in return for a promise to go no further. Six months later, the eastern part of the country, Slovakia, seceded and became a pro-Nazi state. The next day, Hitler invaded from the west and took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. Poland was next.

There is no parallel between talking to Iran and allowing Hitler to occupy part of Czechoslovakia on his way to taking over the whole of it. Iran has not expressed any territorial ambitions. Nor does it have the means to carry them out. It has expressed a belief that Israel should not exist as a state. It certainly does not have the ability to do much about it. Should it acquire nuclear weapons, the best it could hope for against Israel, which already has them and a far better ability to deliver them (and against the US, which will continue to support
Israel), would be detente, with neither country able to dare attack the other.