Australia "start a movement". That has to be a joke.

My sympathies to Peter Bowden.

You missed the WWII as example. One can only imagine the world we were to inherit had Neville Chamberlain continued with his appeasement policies; wiser heads prevailed thankfully.

Don’t know what drives the hypocrisy of the band of leftists to which Bowden hitches his cart to, but their combined fetish for appeasement and camping out with the enemy, has driven the world closer to all out war than would confronting the evils in the world, which can only be defeated with war, as history proves.

The United Nations with a strong Army?

Spare me!

I always wondered if WW2 would have happened if the Allies didn't stick their beaks into Europe's affairs !

Indyvidual- WWII was a poker game and some cleared the table. Mistakes were made. And you're right, key decisions by particular people were the fulcrum around which the events turned. I have to ask, who was the person or group that replaced Chamberlain with Churchill. It may not be obvious

Peter has done a reasonable job of documenting some of the UN’s many failings as a peacekeeper in recent years.

But his diagnosis of the causes seems to me incomplete and naïve. Yes, the veto rights of the major powers have made it harder for the Security Council to act, but do we seriously think that Putin would have been deterred from invading Ukraine by a Security Council resolution? Or that countries with no stake in the conflict would, or should, send soldiers to die in defence of Ukrainians (or Sudanese, or the Rohingya?). Peter’s solution to the problems of the many documented crimes committed by UN personnel seems to be sending more people from different countries. That’s going to do nothing to address the underlying causes of these barbarities. And the idea that APEC and ASEAN will join forces with Five Eyes and ANZUS at Australia's behest in pursuit of a shared vision of global harmony is laughable.

The last thing we should be doing is “strengthening” UN peacekeeping, or anything else the UN does, until it cleans up its act. UN interference makes things worse at least as often as it makes them better. Its involvement in the Palestine-Israel situation has been overwhelmingly counterproductive for decades, and its recent antics have shredded what little credibility it had left as an independent and impartial organisation pursuing peace in accordance with its charter obligations.

Canem Malem
Chamberlain lost the Prime Ministership because his leadership in the first few months of the war was so incompetent that neither the opposition nor his own party would support him to lead a government of national unity, which even he accepted was necessary to pursue to war effectively. He was replaced by Churchill in May 1940 – thank God!

He was replaced by Churchill in May 1940 – thank God!
Rhian,
Did you think about this before blurting it out ?

Indyvidual

Yes I did think about it. Every credible war historian I know thinks that Churchill made a better wartime leader than Chamberlain, and almost every European I know is glad that Hitler was defeated in WW2.

There are some people who think the Munich agreement was a good idea at the time, and that Chamberlain was unfairly maligned for his policy of appeasement before the war. But once Britain declared war – under Chamberlain’s leadership – it needed someone competent to conduct it. Churchill had his faults, and maybe someone else would have been a better leader, but Chamberlain was not that person.

But once Britain declared war
Rhian,
i wasn't around then to speak from personal experience but I can't shake the feeling that that was the start of WW2 not the invasion of Poland !
Going by what we've seen since Japan appears to be the only eventual winner. Germany has gone totally stupid as has just about all the western World.
And, America ? Well, there's really nothing left to say at this stage. After January 20 will show what they're at. MAGA should be MAG because I can't see the term "Again" as valid !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain

Going back to the source documentation to determine the facts.

Are the views of the historians more a matter of 20/20 hindsight?

It seems that Churchill and Chamberlain had a relationship similar to Beasley and Rudd in the ALP. Chamberlain early had an excellent reputation of getting things done. Chamberlain seemingly had issues trusting his critical foreign minister Eden and seems to have been hedging his bets with Churchill.

In a sense perhaps none of the players were bad, but perhaps a better overview and understanding of the motivations of the players would have produced a different result.

Some of the players like Disraeli weren't even in the room at the time, but strangely still managed to influence the outcome.

A thinking politician is branded a dictator & parasitic politicians call themselves leaders !

Sending Aussie kids off to enforce some fake peace that the bureaucrats in the UN had cobbled together. What could go wrong?

UN peacekeepers are always a failure. Always. They are never in sufficient numbers to deter a determined foe and never motivated enough to do so even if they had the numbers and support. Which they don't. We need look no further than southern Lebanon where the UN got an agreement from the reluctant Israelis for peace in return for promises that the UN would send forces into Lebanon to stop Hezbullah from reoccupying the region and remilitarising it.

But that force was simply ignored by Hezbullah who slowly re-established their forces and bases in the region supposedly protected by the UN while the UN looked on passively.

But there is no way Aussie kids should be sent to defend absurd 'peace' agreements made by people who don't actually have a stake in the outcome.

"I always wondered if WW2 would have happened if the Allies didn't stick their beaks into Europe's affairs !"

Yeah, what were France, Britain and Poland doing sticking the noses into European affairs!!

As to Churchill, remember that he was appointed following the German invasion of the Low Countries and the subsequent or simultaneous advance through the Ardennes. It had already been decided that Chamberlain couldn't continue as PM but it was no certainty that Churchill would be his successor. It was the events of 10 May that changed all that and subsequently saved the Europe from Nazi domination.

As to Chamberlain and Munich, I urge you to read Churchill's speech to the Commons following Chamberlain's death. Its one of the great speeches of the 20th century and points out that Chamberlain wasn't wrong to make the Munich agreement but was deceived by unimagined evil that was Nazi Germany.

Following the German annexation of the rump Czechoslovakia, even Chamberlain realised that appeasement was no longer feasible, so there was no chance of him continuing that policy into late 1939.

The problem was that Hitler had come to believe by then that the allies would not fight under any circumstances. He went into Poland believing that the Britain/France would kick up a stink but not lift a finger. There is a famous scene between Hitler and Ribbentrop on 3 September when the declaration of war happened, where Hitler looks to Ribbentrop and asks "What do we do now?" He simply wasn't expecting that the allies would move to support Poland and had no plans about what to do when they did.

Indyvidual
WW2 began when Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. But Britain was not at war with Germany at this point. It had entered a mutual self-defence pact with Poland earlier that year. When Germany invaded Poland, Britain issued an ultimatum that unless Germany withdrew from Poland, Britain would be at war with Germany. When Germany failed to respond by the deadline of 11am on 3 September, Britain declared war on Germany.

Canem Malem
For many years the mainstream historical view was that Chamberlain made a grave error in his policy of appeasement and signing the Munich Agreement because it turned a blind eye to German aggression and led Hitler to think that Britain and France would not fight against further territorial expansion. More recently, as I noted above, there have been revisionists who question this line. There are as I understand it three main revisionist arguments (not necessarily incompatible):

• It was likely Hitler would continue his aggression, but appeasement was worth a try because if Hitler kept his word a major war would be averted.
• Chamberlain knew that war was inevitable, but Britain was hopelessly unprepared, and he hoped to buy time to build up Britain’s military capabilities.
• Chamberlain was not such a bad war leader, and many of the things credited to Churchill, such as the RAF’s performance during the Battle of Britain, were in fact due to Chamberlain’s planning and preparation.

Even if any or all of these are true, I don’t think Chamberlain would have been as effective a war leader as Churchill, whose personality was as important as his policies in unifying and leading Britain at an incredibly difficult time.

The “person or persons” who replaced Chamberlain were Chamberlain himself and the British Parliament, as the website you link to makes clear. There may be some longer-term trends in political thought and practice that influenced how the actors behaved, but to blame Chamberlain’s replacement by Churchill in 1940 on Disraeli (who died in 1881) seems rather a long bow.

"• It was likely Hitler would continue his aggression, but appeasement was worth a try because if Hitler kept his word a major war would be averted."

While many, including Churchill, thought that Hitler would continue his expansionism, that was not the majority view. Remember that, up to that time, Hitler had done nothing more than seek to reunite Germans with the motherland. The prevailing view at the time was that Germany had been no more responsible for WW1 than any other power and had therefore been unfairly treated by the Versailles Treaty. Hitler seeking to undo that was considered reasonable. It was only after German took the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 that people came to the view that his expansionism knew no bounds and had to be opposed.

"• Chamberlain knew that war was inevitable, but Britain was hopelessly unprepared, and he hoped to buy time to build up Britain’s military capabilities."

Nup. Right up to March 1939, Chamberlain thought he'd save Europe from war. While some rearmament was taking place, that didn't really kick in until mid 1939. While it was true that Britain was ill-prepared for war in September 1938, that was also true of Germany. Indeed German generals had already agreed among themselves that, if Britain/France decided to fight over Czechoslovakia, they'd over-throw the Nazis because they knew they had no chance of victory.

"• Chamberlain was not such a bad war leader, and many of the things credited to Churchill, such as the RAF’s performance during the Battle of Britain, were in fact due to Chamberlain’s planning and preparation."

Again, very little rearmament was done until mid-1939. Britain wasn't really in very much better shape in 1940 than they'd been in 1938. Indeed, following the defeat of France, there was a strong view among the British leadership that they should seek peace terms. It was Churchill's force of character that caused them to remain in the fight.

Mhaze

I actually agree with you. I was summarising some of the arguments I have heard trying to paint Chamberlain in a favourable light, rather that endorsing them. My main point is that, even if Chamberlain’s actions were reasonable or justified, Churchill was a much better war leader.

Thanks for your points mhaze.

According to the Wikipedia Article - Chamberlain, against his better judgement, gave a speech on the Munich Agreement that echoed Disraeli. History proves that his instinctive ambivalence was correct.

Churchill seems to play to the crowd a lot more than Chamberlain, but that doesn't mean that he cared less.

I was a bit suspect at Churchill courting heir apparent Eden, seemingly he was forming a coalition against Chamberlain.

But I like Churchill in his own way.

Chamberlain has a string of accomplishments, workplace safety, coal mines, one week paid holidays- that still hold today and he was a conservative (I couldn't work out on my brief check if he was a wet or a dry but suspect that he was less liberal than Churchill).

Chamberlain started building bombers and upgrading the radar network a year before September 1939.

Of course Marxist's and others hate anybody that don't instinctively run tackle Hitler, because he is their arch enemy, in spite of being allies.

11am on 3 September, Britain declared war on Germany.
Rhian,
That was the exact start of WW2. Luckily, we now have several conservative leaders who resist such provocation !