Here’s a gem by Canadian editorial cartoonist Michael de Adder. I’m posting it here, because a lot of my American friends might otherwise not see it:
And now, for those who need some context, a quick history lesson. This may be unnecessary to a lot of readers, but I get a lot of blank stares when I made historical references, even if they were only from the previous century, so here’s the context you need to “get” the comic above:
- Neville Chamberlain was the British Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940.
- His name is practically synonymous with appeasement, a very polite term used in foreign policy for “Give the bully what he wants, and he’ll go away. Trust me, bro, it’ll totally work.”
- At the end of World War I, Europe got a lot of new countries with the re-drawing of a lot of borders:
- One of these new countries was Czechoslovakia (which has since split into Czechia and Slovakia), which was made by gluing together the regions formerly known as Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia.
- As a result, 3 million Germans suddenly became Czech, living in a region called “The Sudetenland,” named after the mountain range there.
- In 1933, failed artist Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. and denounced the Treaty of Versailles, the end-of-WWI agreement that Germany had to accept responsibility for the war, pay war reparations to the Allies, reduce its military, and give up its colonies and a portion of its European territory from before the war. He was all about MAGA, when it meant “Make Allemagne Great Again” (Allemagne is the French name for Germany).
- In 1938, as part of German MAGA, Hitler annexed Austria in an event called the Anschluss Österreichs (or Anschluss for short) as part of a plan to create larger German-speaking nation (remember, the Austrians also speak German). The Sudetenland, with those millions of displaced Germans, was in neighboring Czechoslovakia, and he the Czechs to hand it over.
- Edvard Beneš, then Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, said that giving the Sudetenland to the Germans would effectively hand the Czech defenses over to them as well, leaving the country defenseless.
- Chamberlain, on the other hand, thought that giving Hitler what he wanted would appease his expansionist urges. He flew to Munich twice, and on the second trip and signed the Munich Agreement, giving Germany the Sudetenland in exchange not taking any more European territory. Hitler said he had “No more territorial demands to make in Europe,” and Chamberlain hailed the agreement as “Peace for our time.”Here’s an old newsreel announcing Chamberlain’s “success”:
- In March 1939, a mere six months later, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Which leads to the invasion of Poland. Then Denmark. Then Norway. Then Luxembourg. Then Netherlands. Then Belgium. Then half of France, with asome surrender monkeys forming a government of collaborators in the city of Vichy, which is where we got the term “Vichy Republic,” and later “Vichy Replublican.”
Want to know more? Watch this: