The Myth of Appeasement

A mistake at best, a shameful episode at worst

Letters from Vienna #139

The Myth of Appeasement

A friend, a law professor at a perfectly respectable university, once insisted I meet for a coffee to discuss “conspiracy theories” I was sharing on Social Media. He’d found them irritating and not a little irksome and obviously felt I needed “a good talking to”; it was time to cease and desist from insinuating my vaguely disquieting “subversive and noisy nonsense”.

Much to my surprise the conversation grew quite heated, which drew considerable attention from neighbouring tables. What, if I were to be believed, which was unlikely, had happened to the original planes that had taken off on 9/11? Had they simply vanished into thin air? No, I replied:  according to Rebekah Roth, and she had witnesses to back her up, they’d landed at military bases where the passengers had all been killed. The friend looked at me with disbelief and not a little contempt; this was a “fairy tale” he clearly refused to give the slightest credence to. Where was the evidence? Clearly, there was none!

I was dumbfounded when he stated: Yes, he had indeed watched “Loose Change” but didn’t believe that the government (for whom he happened to work) could be capable of such heinous crimes. For me the matter was quite simple and perfectly obvious: two planes couldn’t possibly destroy five buildings while the speed with which the Twin Towers had fallen was “free fall”, which meant that controlled demolition, something that Thermate particles found in dust later confirmed, was involved. Apart from which: there was no satisfactory explanation for why World Trade 7 was “pulled”. What had happened? Was not the absence of any serious, independent, scientific investigation proof perfect that foul play was involved?

We couldn’t reach a satisfactory conclusion and found ourselves in stalemate. Facts, reason and common sense had no power over a man who was intelligent, well-educated but whose entire being was invested in entitled, somewhat snobbish, bourgeoise conformity. He’d rather die than accept that a state could possibly be at fault. It would call his entire comfortable, privileged, eminently respectable life into question.

This desperate, almost despairing, need to conform not only dominates the “professional classes” but also those who “rebel the way one rebels” (Heidegger). Thus, it hardly surprises that so many recently celebrated Karl Marx’s birthday. Few seem to suspect that Marx (a relative of the Rothschilds who was in the pay of the British government) was in fact a Deep State actor. 

Yet common sense, and not merely a minimum of philosophic reflection, dictates that an abstraction named “capitalism” doesn’t actually exist. This abstraction merely distracts from very real culprits much as the “war on terror”, another abstraction, draws attention away from those truly guilty of 9/11.

“Marx’s economic views” Eustace Mullins writes “were entirely compatible with the views of the banking establishment in the City of London and particularly the House of Rothschild. It is no accident that Karl Marx is buried, not in Moscow, but in London, nor is it an accident that the triumph and bloodbath of the Bolsheviks in Russia gave the Rothschilds and their associates one billion dollars in cash which the luckless Czar had deposited in their European and New York banks. Few people know that Marx had close relations with the British aristocracy, through his marriage to Jenny von Westphalen.”[1]

Similarly, the concept I was brought up with and with which I was indoctrinated, namely “appeasement”, needs to be called into question.

“Nostra maxima culpa,’ ‘our gravest fault’: so reads the chapter title of one of many books, all alike, devoted by British historians to that disturbing season of their history known as ‘appeasement’” Guido Giacomo Preparata writes. “‘Culpa’: ‘fault,’ ‘error,’ ‘regrettable mistake’ – for having tried to appease a regime, Hitler’s, that would not and could not be pacified by any amount of goodwill, however profligate. A mistake at best, a shameful episode at worst – but a misjudgment in any case.”

“According to this myth, because her elite unexpectedly found itself deeply torn over foreign policy into several antagonistic currents, Britain well-meaning but short-sighted was incapable of reading Nazism’s mind and ended up as a result bearing some of the guilt for the ensuing disasters. On the surface of Britain’s political landscape, it is real factions that we’re made to see, headed by real leaders, fighting with vehemence over a range of vital points. Profiting from such political discordance, so goes the apologue, Hitler gave full rein to his mad ambition.”

“The truth is different. The British establishment was a monolithic structure: the dissension among the stewards, if any, was over policy, never over principles and goals, which were the same for them all. The British were never torn by disagreement as to what ought to be done with Hitler. That much was obvious: destroy him in time and raze Germany to the ground – imperial logic demanded it. Rather, the point was a pragmatic one: how could the Nazis be most suitably bamboozled into stepping, anew, into a pitfall on two fronts? The answer: by dancing with them. And dance the British would, twirling round the diplomatic ballroom of the 1930s, always leading, and drawing patterns as they spun that followed in fact a predictable trajectory.”[2]

“British policy…was to create the ‘Hitler Project,’” F. William Engdahl relates “knowing fully what its ultimate geopolitical and military direction would be. As Colonel David Stirling, the founder of Britain’s elite Special Air Services, related in a private discussion almost half a century later, ‘The greatest mistake we British did was to think we could play the German Empire against the Russian Empire, and have them bleed one another to death.’”[3]

Webster Tarpley adds a twist to the tale: “On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush – then director of the German Steel Trust’s Union Banking Corporation – initiated an alert to the absent Averell Harriman about a problem, which had developed in the Flick partnership. Bush sent Harriman a clipping from the New York Times of that day, which reported that the Polish government was fighting back against American and German stockholders who controlled Poland’s largest industrial unit, the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company....”

“The Times article continued: “The company has long been accused of mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities. Warrants were issued in December for several directors accused of tax evasions. They were German citizens and they fled. Poles replaced them. Herr Flick, regarding this as an attempt to make the company’s board entirely Polish, retaliated by restricting credits until the new Polish directors were unable to pay the workmen regularly.”

“The Times noted that the company’s mines and mills “employ 25,000 men and account for 45 percent of Poland’s total steel output and 12 percent of her coal production. Friedrich Flick, a leading German steel industrialist, owns two-thirds of the company’s stock and interests in the United States own the remainder.”

“In view of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was being exported to Hitler Germany under depression conditions, the Polish government thought that Prescott Bush, Harriman and their Nazi partners should at least pay full taxes on their Polish holdings. The U.S. and Nazi owners responded with a lockout. The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a cable from their European representative: “Have undertaken new steps London Berlin ... please establish friendly relations with Polish Ambassador [in Washington].”

“A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker announced an agreement had been made “in Berlin” to sell an 8,000 block of their shares in Consolidated Silesian Steel. But the dispute with Poland did not deter the Bush family from continuing its partnership with Flick.”

“Nazi tanks and bombs “settled” this dispute in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland, beginning World War II. Flick, Harriman, Walker and Bush had equipped the Nazi army, with materials essentially stolen from Poland.”[4]

The myth of appeasement is important because it has been used again and again to justify imperial wars of aggression, against the people of Vietnam in the 1960s, against Iraq in the 1990s and against Russia now. Anything, it seems, is preferable to “appeasement”. Yet, upon closer examination: this whole notion is an illusion. Appeasement has always been a lie and should be exposed as such.

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[1] p.175-176, The World Order, Eustace Mullins

[2] p.229 Conjuring Hitler. How Britain And America Made The Third Reich, Guido Giacomo Preparata

[3] p.82 A Century of War, F. William Engdahl

[4] p.34 George Bush The Unauthorized Biography, Webster Tarpley