Dishonorable folly

Fifty years ago, on Sept. 30, 1938, I was watching the new Walt Disney movie "Snow White" in a Prague cinema. I was 13 years old and reading the Czech subtitles, for I only knew a few words of English (wigwam, sheriff, center-forward, sex appeal . . .) When I walked out into the street, the newsboys were shouting the headline of the special editions: "They decided about us without us!"

Grown men were weeping in the streets.

But in the streets of London and Paris, the crowds were jubilant: war, they thought, had been averted. In Neville Cham-berlain's words, it was "Peace for our time."

What had been averted in Munich in 1938 was the last chance to crush Hitler and the Nazis at minimal cost. Instead, this culmi-nation of appeasement ushered in World War II with its 30 mil-lion dead.

They died to make the Western World free to repeat the same folly a second time. Once again the West is falling victim to the lie that free nations and slave states have common interests, to the lie that nothing is worse than war, to the lie that tyrants can be appeased, and to the lie that it is weapons that cause wars.

Once again the West's governments of weaklings, out to amass cheap votes, are retreating before a totalitarian power and making excuses for its savagery. You cannot compare the Soviets and the Nazis, say the Reagans and the Kennedys; but they never say why not. Have they slaughtered fewer millions? Have they enslaved fewer countries? Have they been more truthful?

Energy is a tiny, but important part of this picture. One quar-ter of America's energy sources lies outside the country, and much of that in the hands of medieval sheikdoms liable to be toppled by Muslim fanatics or Moscow-controlled "liberation" movements. While Hitler quietly built up a coal-to-gasoline industry that kept his war machine going, the Quislings, Lind-berghs and Joseph Kennedys assured the West of his good inten-tions. The wishful thinking fostered by them was destined to kill tens of thousands of British, and more than 5,000 American mer-chant seamen struggling to get gasoline and other fuels across the U-boat-infested Atlantic.

Today's Quislings and Lavals in the Institute of Policy Studies are successfully sabotaging domestic energy sources by their legalistic and environmentalist subsidiaries and by their powerful contacts in the media, while they preach that solar energy and chicken manure is America's energy salvation. Carter promised to use real energy sources "only as a last resort," and Reagan gingerly walks round an unsigned order on his desk to cut through the Seabrook sabotage. National security, like every-thing else to the proficient politician, is a handy buzzword for occasional use on TV.

The triumph of politics over reason was no different in 1938. FDR endorsed the appeasement process: he urged Hitler, Chamberlain and Daladier, by telegram four days before the event, to reach a settlement, and when Chamberlain accepted the invitation to Munich, he sent him a two-word telegram "Good man." And the ever-present stench of the intellectual "avant-garde" made itself felt after the agreement through the voice of Gertrude Stein, an American patroness of the "arts" in Paris, whose Jewishness did not prevent her from proposing the Nobel Peace Prize be awarded to Adolf Hitler.

In the sense that the 30 million dead of World War II were not prevented, the men who condemned the dishonorable folly of Munich spoke up in vain. Yet when that folly blew up in people's faces, they remembered who had opposed it and why. Without his history of "futile" opposition, Churchill could not have led his country in its finest hour.

It is a daunting task to stand up for the Western values built up and inherited over centuries, and to defend them against the great might of foreign savages and domestic idiots who are now deeply eroding them.

But we have no right to give up.