The Munich Pact- This Day in History

This Day in History- The Munich Pact

Eric W. Francke
On this Day, Sept. 30, 1938, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, French Premier Edouard Daladier, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sign the Munich Pact, which handed Czechoslovakia over to Nazi Germany on the presumption that Hitler would not act aggressively towards any other countries. It was less than a year later that Hitler attacked Poland and began his blitzkrieg on Europe, pushing the entire world into war.

Chamberlain would declare that the meeting had achieved "peace in our time" and in his diaries noted that he thought Hitler was trustworthy and "a man of his word".

The Munich Pact is probably the most famous example of the failure of "appeasement" when it comes to despots and evil dictators. By "bribing" such characters in order to try to contain them, it only emboldens them to further aggression. Hitler, no doubt, was laughing all the way to the Reichstag when he realized that his saber-rattling actually caused the allies to hand over whole countries to him without firing a shot.

In our day, we made a similar mistake by giving large sums of money and nuclear technology to North Korea, on the terms that they wouldn't develop a nuclear weapons program (they did covertly anyways, and now have nukes that can reach our coast) or paying off the Palestinian Liberation Authority figuring they would leave Israel alone (Big nope to that one too).

If one wanted to apply this to our daily lives, one might look at this in terms of dealing with the proverbial "bully". If you give them what they want, they will only come back wanting more, and be more insistent on getting it.

Looking at a more metaphorical application, there is a lesson here in how to behave when faced with a moral choice. Sin is a dictator, and a ruthless taskmaster. We are sometimes faced with a moral choice, one which we clearly see the right and the wrong, but the prevailing pressure is to do what is wrong. In those cases, we sometimes look for a "compromise" or appeasement of sin. We say to ourselves, "everyone else is doing something REALLY bad, and I'm not going with that, but if I only lower my morals a little, then I will be able to get along with everyone. " Perhaps everyone is getting drunk, and you appease the pressure by having just a couple of beers. Or perhaps friends are unfairly picking on a kid, and although you don't pick on the individual, you consent by laughing at the jokes, and not sticking up for the victim.

The bottom line is- Moral and Ethical evil should never be appeased, or allowed to thrive by our silence. That which is wrong must be actively opposed in order to keep it from growing.

Had the allies present at the Munich Pact drawn the "line in the sand" in 1938, they might have ended WWII before it began. In our own lives, we will find that we can prevent great moral conflicts down the road by holding the line in regard to what is right and wrong now, rather than feeding and appeasing that which is ethically questionable for the sake of expediency.