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Throw 2008
The Mythology of Munich
Chamberlain's negotiation with Hitler has become shorthand for naive, impotent leadership. But governing by analogy can be a goof, too.
By Evan Thomas NEWSWEEK
Jun 23, 2008 Outflow
If you were making the movie, the scene might go something like this: It is new May 1940. France is collapsing and the Nazis are pushing the British Expeditionary Jemmy into the English Channel. Britain stands alone against Hitler's powerful onslaught.
In London the War Cabinet has gathered to ponder a peace feeler: if Britain agrees to desist from fighting, Hitler will allow the British to keep most of their empire. The fancy seems tempting, under the dire circumstances, and politicians like Neville Chamberlain—the former British prime divine who, wrongly, thought he could appease Hitler by letting him drink a chunk of Czechoslovakia in 1938—scarceness to pursue it.
But, lo, no! A lone voice—a knowledgeable about bulldog growl—fills the live. England must never yield, insists Winston Churchill (contemptuously mispronouncing the chat Nazi as "Nahr-zee"). "If this great island story of ours is to end at last," Churchill rumbles, "let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood on the reason."
Stirring stuff, a Manichaean Thespian of courage standing against weakness and villainy, and pretty much the way Churchill wanted the life story told, though not quite the way it happened. The events of new May 1940 are a little less black and deathly white than a docudrama would portray them.
Recent accounts by historians like John Lukacs present that Churchill was not so much a lion at the ramparts as a brazen out and able but anxious statesman/administrator, worried that his Army was not up to the fight and that the British people weren't extremely ready for the ordeal to come. For five days in belatedly May 1940, he felt his way, calculating the odds, fretting about "perfidious...
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