There seems to be something close to complete misunderstanding on all sides, including yours, concerning Neville Chamberlain and Hitler.
This entire business of Bush's utterly ignorant remarks and many nearly as ignorant responses to them is sad for what it reveals about current general understanding of so colossal and not very distant an event as the First World War.
Chamberlain was a thoroughly decent and intelligent man, one who well knew the horrors of the First World War with foul trenches and muddy piles of corpses and plagues of rats and hovering clouds of poison gas - about 20 million dead souls in all.
Britain had given some of her best young men, the class of people who would never be caught volunteering and dying in America's modern colonial wars, the "Senator's son," the poets, and others. It was a monumental tragedy that achieved little but setting the stage for the Second World War.
Chamberlain did everything he could to avoid a repeat of that pointless mass slaughter, tirelessly and franticly trying, but once he was convinced that Hitler was madly determined on war, he stopped his efforts and bravely prepared for war.
The first important preparations for fighting Hitler were not taken by "showboat" Churchill, but by Chamberlain, and his efforts were based on knowledge, not bluster.
No intelligent person with a knowledge of history can ever fault people who engage and talk to their opponents. It is always and everywhere the first and proper thing to do.
The extended circumstances of Chamberlain’s allowing Hitler the takeover of places like the Sudetenland were based on the fact that these places were peopled by populations mainly German in origin – Hitler used this, as we know in hindsight, as a rationalization to get things rolling. It was also based on an understanding of how harsh in economic and other terms the Versailles Treaty had been on Germany, being itself a partial explanation for the rise of Hitler.
The term “appeasement” was not a proper name for what occurred, it was a campaign slogan used by a belligerent Churchill that, in many ways, parallels John Kennedy’s (false) claim in 1960 that Eisenhower had allowed a “missile gap” vis-à-vis the Russians to occur.
It is easy to be an admirer of Churchill, eloquent, personally brave, and always ready to act in one way or another, but we forget at our peril that Churchill made many bad calls in his career, many, costly in lives and fortunes. He was not uniquely gifted in his prescience, and the British people dumped him after the war.
The decent Chamberlain lives on in history as a kind of cartoon character, a parody of what he really was, the historical embodiment of a cheap campaign slogan.
As for the historical figure Bush most resembles, it really is none of these. He is a kind of watered-down, less intelligent version of Hitler, if he is anything more than an empty-shirt. Even that is a somewhat false analogy, because the genuine arbiter of American policy for the last eight years has been Dick Cheney, Bush being a bumbling, shallow, ignorant “front man,” the first known symbolic president, if you will.
As for Cheney, he is a genuinely vicious, ruthless man, he and Rumsfeld having many genuine parallels to Hitler.
