Stephen Goode, writing in Insight magazine, examines the consequences of the Western democracies' collective failure in the 1930s to check the rise of aggressive, dictatorial regimes in Germany, Japan, and Italy. The folly of depending on disarmament is clear now, but blind leaders then were unable (or unwilling) to act, and millions died needlessly as a result. What is less known is the critical role of the 1930s peace movement in inhibiting action and encouraging the dictators. The parallels to today could not be more clear.
The great powers did more than merely fail to act. French, British and U.S. leaders often looked the other way, ignoring clear signs of the impending horror. They hoped, perhaps, that what was not seen and acknowledged would go away and not have to be dealt with even by force of character.
Or they were obsessed with an equally dangerous notion, a belief -- against all evidence and common sense -- that by disarmament and through frequent calls for world peace they could persuade the aggressive powers to forget their ambitions, sheathe their swords and make war no more. Instead those powers chose to rearm, grew militarily strong and answered every call for peace and disarmament with stunning acts of aggression that should have made their intentions clear to the world but didn't.
Why the failure to say "no"? Why the inability to act together for common defense? In part the war-weariness engendered by World War I was to blame. In part it was the the economic problems caused by the Great Depression. But a major player was the pacifist movement of the 1930s, and the havoc it created cannot be overestimated. Hitler, Mussolini and the military leaders of Japan took comfort in the pacifism of the Western nations and made cynical use of it to advance their own causes. Instead of bowing before the moral superiority the pacifists claimed for themselves, the aggressor nations interpreted pacifism as weakness and exploited it.
Posted by Alan at March 30, 2003 11:32 AM