Appeasement.

Again.

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

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The word “appeasement” is doing the rounds again. Out of curiosity, I searched the news for references and found heaps, including to the title of a book I hadn’t seen. UK historian Tim Bouverie’s Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War appeared in 2019 [1]; feeling a bit out of date, I got it and read it over the weekend. By birth, Bouverie is remarkably well-connected at high but generally unseen levels of British society so he was able to get access to piles of personal correspondence. In fact, the first person he thanks for opening their private papers was HM the Queen, followed by a long list of dukes, viscounts, countesses, duchesses, knights and even a few commoners. As they say, always choose your parents carefully. He did: “His paternal grandfather was Jacob Pleydell-Bouverie, 8th Earl of Radnor, and his maternal grandfather was Ian Gilmour, Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar” (Wikipedia).

In politics, appeasement is defined as the policy of yielding to the demands of an aggressive power with the goal of moderating its conduct. These days, it refers to the policy of successive British governments between 1935-39, especially the last pre-war prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. As we know, it failed spectacularly and is now seen as shameful, or worse. As history, Bouverie’s book is different in that he focuses on what rarely got above a mish-mash of late imperial arrogance, prejudice, personal bickering, hatreds and jealousies as the world drifted into catastrophe. After a while, it gets a bit tiresome and the book is probably a bit too detailed for most readers. However, if anybody needs more evidence, he shows very well how, behind the pomp and splendour with which our pollies like to drape themselves, they’re functioning little better than children squabbling in the schoolyard. In Narcisso-Fascism, my theme is that they are actually functioning at the same biologically-determined level as dogs in the street.

Bouverie shows how a number of social and political pressures led Britain and France to give in to Hitler time and time again. First was the almost universal sense in both countries that the Great War had been a catastrophe beyond measure and they could never allow themselves to go to war again. Pacifism and isolationism were very strong, including in the US which did not want any further part of Europe’s cyclical madnesses. No politician could ignore this opinion and many, including Chamberlain, firmly believed they would pay any price to avoid war. Chamberlain himself was almost delusionally convinced that he could bring Europe to its senses and avoid another explosion.

Second was the fact that both countries were still broke from the last war. Their economies were a mess but they had no clear idea what was wrong or how to get out of the Depression. At that stage, Keynes was still a voice in the wilderness. As it happened, the Nazis chanced upon the correct program to lift their economy out of the doldrums, a massive rearmament program financed by debt, so they got a head start on the sluggish democracies. Third, and as a direct result of austerity programs, even as late as early 1939, neither Britain nor France believed their militaries were in any shape to fight a major war. When Germany breached the Versailles Treaty and began rearming, they wandered helplessly in circles and let one opportunity after another slip through their fingers. France in particular was paralysed by ceaseless political instability which made it almost impossible to make major decisions such as rearming.

Finally, in both countries, a significant proportion of the political class were strongly in favour of the right wing policies the Germans were implementing. They saw Germany dragging itself upright after its defeat and believed that by following similar, nationalist policies, their countries could do the same. Granted, some people were shocked by Germany’s racist policies but it has to be remembered, which most people don’t want to do, that the upper classes right across Europe were, by our standards, intensely racist. The British and French empires were built on racism so German antisemitism didn’t bother them much. Beating people up in the streets or wrecking their shops was crude but, well, they’re Germans.

Two more points, which I think are important, don’t get much space in the book. First is that practically none of the Western political class had read Mein Kampf. Since 1925, Hitler had made his goal absolutely crystal clear: We Germans don’t have enough space and resources to achieve our destiny as a great nation; as great nations, Britain and France have their overseas empires which feed their economies; there’s no room overseas for another European empire; we are entitled to an empire too; we therefore look to the vast empty spaces to our east and there we will build a great empire to last a thousand years. Hitler left no doubt at all: in the process, the Slavic natives would be thinned out and reduced to the level of peons. Greater Germany would then expand to fill the newly emptied spaces:

To-day there are eighty million Germans in Europe. And our foreign policy will be recognized as rightly conducted only when, after barely a hundred years, there will be 250 million Germans living on this Continent, not packed together as the coolies in the factories of another Continent but as tillers of the soil and workers whose labour will be a mutual assurance for their existence [2, p415].

It seems the few Western politicians who had read it did didn’t believe him. They thought he was just spouting, as politicians do.

The second omission is, to my mind, much more significant in that Bouverie tends to gloss over the reflexive racism of the upper classes. Part of that racism was a simmering contempt for Russia but they saw Bolshevism as political poison. Racism was fine but socialism was the work of the devil since, if socialists began stirring up the natives with talk of liberation and equality, they knew exactly what would happen to their empires. It’s not stated but Britain (population 40million) lived in mortal fear of losing its vast possessions in the Subcontinent (population 400million) and Africa (uncounted). That was another reason to avoid getting sucked into a European war, especially as the Japanese were doing in China what Britain and France had long done overseas, and were already casting sideway glances at the British and French colonies in South-East Asia. The Western elite’s hatred of Bolshevism and of Russians was so intense that they couldn’t bring themselves to deal with the USSR sensibly until, with his Non-Aggression Pact of August, 1939, Hitler beat them to it. By then it was too late, the troop trains were already moving.

What they needed, of course, was what they later were pushed into, a formal alliance with Satan’s earthly consul, Uncle Joe Stalin. With France and Britain to the west allied with the USSR to the east, the Fascist states would have been boxed in yet, at the critical times such an alliance could have prevented war, nothing happened. We will never know how much of their endless shilly-shallying was due to their complete indifference to the idea that Germany would invade and subjugate the Slavic nations. Why would they lose sleep over the fate of a few hundred million Slavs when, in their colonies, they were doing the same and often worse themselves? They were incapable of coming to grips with the idea that Russians could be victims, too. However, that supposes they took Mein Kampf seriously enough to read it, which most hadn’t and the rest dismissed it as ranting.

As history, this is all very interesting but so what? I think the lesson is quite clear. When Hitler issued orders, he expected everybody to shuffle into line. He believed that Germany should be dominant (Deutschland über alles), that all ethnic Germans should be brought back into the Reich, and that the nation was under attack from within by inferior human beings who had to be eliminated. Hitler had no respect for foreigners or anybody who didn’t jump when he ordered, and calmly lied when he felt it was necessary for the good of the nation. In the Nazis, Britain and France (who each considered themselves the highest form of humanity and thus entitled to their overseas empires) were dealing with an aggressive clique who firmly believed they were the highest form of humanity and were therefore entitled to an empire of their own. That the lands the Germans coveted were already occupied meant nothing to Whitehall and the Élysée. As with the British in India and the French in Algeria, the locals were second rate at best and could only be improved by contact with the imperialists. That meant that when Germany first broke the Versailles Treaty, they twittered and fussed but did nothing.

The only way to deal with aggressive expansionism is to form an unyielding wall around the aggressor and say No. No way. What you don’t do, as every parent knows, is say:

No, you can’t have A. Oh well, if you insist, but that’s all. What? You want B as well. No, certainly not. Well, if you’re going to make a fuss you can have it but no more, do you hear? No, you can’t have C. Now calm down, just a little bit…

Follow the rules. Set limits and stick to them. That is the inviolable rule of modifying behaviour. However, there was another agenda which is hardly mentioned in Bouverie’s Appeasement. If, in 1936, when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, the French and British had stuck to the rules set out in the Versailles Treaty and forced Hitler to retreat, they knew exactly what would happen. The Nazi government would fall, Hitler wouldn’t escape the second time, and the Bolsheviks would take over. For the imperialists, that was the stuff of nightmares. Communists in control from the borders of France to the Pacific, their empires under threat, their own working classes emboldened and ready to rise again … They all knew this and for them it was a no-brainer. With the choice limited to Hitler or the Reds, they sat on their hands until it was too late. In this line, Bouverie mentions something that I didn’t know: that at the time of the Munich conference, September 1939, the generals were ready to depose Hitler. All they needed was some indication of determination from the Western democracies and they would move. Instead, they got Chamberlain and Daladier. The only way to deal with rule-breakers is a very firm No. Which brings us to today.

Today, we have one nation that thinks it is a superior nation, divinely appointed to be the leader/ policeman of the world. When it gives orders, everybody else must shuffle into line. It is led by a person who lies so freely that he can’t even remember what he said ten minutes ago; who believes the nation is under threat from within by inferior human beings who have to be eliminated (“expel 11million illegal immigrants”); who covets lands occupied by foreigners (Panama, Greenland, Gaza and Canada); who believes they should simply hand over their territory when he says so and doesn’t exclude using military force. Rules are dumped when it suits him, alliances made and broken on a whim, aggression justified (Gaza, Ukraine), government paralysed and mobilised as a vehicle of personal aggrandisement and wealth, on and on. Meantime, nobody in the ruling clique utters so much as a squeak against these patently illegal and immoral plans. The Dear Leader lives in an echo chamber populated by halfwits, crooks, sycophants and adventurers who are incapable of learning that the leader couldn’t give a shit about them except that they do what he wants.

The principle is: Do not appease. Immoral and illegal behaviour cannot be controlled by yielding. Every concession is taken as a sign of weakness and a signal to the aggressors to demand more. The only way for the world to deal with the chaos blowing out of the White House is to form a united front and tell the US to go to hell, that they’re no longer necessary, if they ever were. By refusing to give in to ridiculous demands, China is following the correct path. It may be a bit of a bumpy ride for a while but no worse than we’ve endured for my lifetime. Then when the US has totally isolated itself; when nobody is buying their products or, crucially, their debt; when the greatly expanded BRICS coalition sets up their own financial system and dumps the dollar; when 11 million manual workers have been expelled and entire industries have ground to a halt; when the bumbling RFK Jr has finally collapsed their third rate health system and epidemics are raging; when the universities are forced to close or the students and their teachers are on strike; when their flimsy social services have been defunded in favour of the rich and the poor are hungry and dying of preventable diseases; when their prison system overflows or collapses in riots, then we’ll see whose nation is indispensable. The lesson from history is absolutely crystal clear: appeasement does not work, so don’t give in to the temptation.

There’s something else to consider, and that’s Trump’s declining mental state. The evidence that he is dementing grows by the day. His behaviour at the Pope’s funeral was gross: his blue suit, chewing gum, playing with his phone, nodding off, all of this is typical, as is his brain-dead tweet of himself as Pope, then his futile defence. His interview with Time magazine on April 25^th was a giveaway: rambling, disjointed, off topic, vengeful and just plain stupid. His pointless threats against Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, are typical of the loss of social awareness that comes from frontal atrophy. He loses the thread of sentences, stumbles over familiar words and can’t remember what he said yesterday. The absurd beat-up over reopening Alcatraz prison, brilliantly exploded by Rep. Jared Moskowitz, is textbook stuff (definitely watch Mr Moskowitz from 7.20, he got it right).

The point here is that Trump is not Hitler. Hitler was 35 years younger when he was appointed Chancellor; he was much smarter than Trump ever was, very much better connected to the public who were soon united behind him, and surrounded by people who had a single vision (well, except for Göring who was partial to a bit on the side). Trump is dementing but nobody in the echo chamber wants to be the first to say so for fear of being thrown out with the garbage. They’re only in it for themselves, not the country. When, as will certainly happen, Trump can’t get what he wants by his bizarre “tariffs” and his endless threats and demands, he will lose it (i.e. probably slip into a confused paranoid state, although it will be hard to tell). He will lose it because that’s what dementing people do when things get too much.

Are things getting too much for him? They certainly are but don’t listen to his excuses, watch what he does. Straight after he unleashed chaos on the international markets with his tariffs, he spent the weekend golfing because it was too much. On his plate, he has the troubles of Ukraine, Gaza, his tariffs, trade war with China, a collapsing economy, friction with practically every country in the world, the impending budget and debt ceiling, immigrants, DOGE, health, fights with universities … You name it, he’s got it. He’s got it because he started it. Nobody can cope with that, least of all a dementing old psychopath. He’ll fall apart, that’s for sure. Then it will be time for the 25^th Amendment (presidential disability) but who in the echo chamber has the courage to be first to say it? I’ll say it for them: Donald J Trump is dementing. He needs to be removed before he wrecks the show entirely.

Just as Hitler’s grand vision for the Germanic peoples brought down on their heads the greatest catastrophe in their glittering history, so Trump is driving headlong at the cliff edge but without a clue what he is doing. All he knew was that he wanted power, a narcisso-fascist. Appeasement never works, not with children, and not with the elderly demented.

References:

1. Bouverie T (2019). Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War. London: Vintage.

2. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition: Henley in Arden: Coda Books.

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