In much of the recent commentary about the blatantly pro-Russian American position on talks to end the 3-year war in Ukraine, the favourite historical parallel has been to Munich 1938, when appeasement of Hitler by Britain and France effectively allowed a much less powerful country in Europe (democratic Czechoslovakia) to be sidelined from the negotiations about its own future and subsequently swallowed up by the dictatorship that was the Nazi Reich. Rightly or wrongly, 'Munich' has since become a byword for appeasement and betrayal. But actually a better analogy from the same period of history would be the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, not least because of the cynical way in which two large adversarial powers with utterly opposing ideologies (fascism and communism) shocked the world by suddenly cosying up in order to partition Poland between them by brute force. This act of premeditated state destruction was admittedly a secret memorandum within what purported to be a mutual non-aggression treaty, but Poland's removal was its real goal - and Stalin used the pact as cover to take over the vulnerable Baltic states as well. This bears a remarkably direct comparison with what Trump and Putin seem to be up to today, with Ukraine being sidelined from peace talks and at grave risk of becoming a US mineral colony on the one hand and, on the other, being denied the security safeguards to prevent Russia attacking it again - in short, a Ukraine with precious little if any national sovereignty at the end of it all. Whether Ukraine will yet take a meaningful part in its own future remains to be seen. One only hopes that the rest of Europe will step up to defend it, in every necessary way, as their rhetoric proclaims. In September 1939, when Stalin and Hitler simultaneously invaded Poland from east and west, Britain and France, bound by treaty to defend Poland's neutrality, did declare war on Germany a few days later - but they did not send troops (they were not ready to), indeed did not confront the Wehrmacht at all until it invaded France 8 months later. By then Poland had long been erased by its German and Russian occupiers.
If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again.
An Understanding History Podcast
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