This photo will forever remain etched in the history of European shame. This is when Britain and France got together to appease Hitler, basically capitulating to his demands over annexing the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Up to 150,000 Czechs were displaced as a result and the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said about the agreement:
“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is, that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
The agreement was called the Treaty of Munich because Chamberlain and the French radical-socialist President even went to Munich to sign the agreement with Hitler: back then a city bastion for the Nazi Party in Germany. The masochistic humiliation couldn’t have been greater if they tried. The treaty was signed on the 30th of September 1938 and Hitler went on to invade Poland on September 1st, 1939, not even one year after the Munich Agreement was signed.
Today, Europe makes the same mistake again, blatantly and very willingly. France and Germany want Ukraine to capitulate to Russia and negotiate an exit from the war by basically acknowledging that Russia has won and it should be allowed to keep some if not all the land that it has annexed. Like Chamberlain and Daladier, Macron and Scholz want to give up the international rules-based order to a belligerent nation-state that has challenged this order successfully militarily within the European borders and by doing so, threatening directly and indirectly European security and political stability. This is a capitulation to an authoritarian and fascist regime in Europe at Europe’s expense all over again.
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