Appeasement — it won't work this time, either

By Tony Blankley
Jewish World Review

Last week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that those who don't take the radical Islamist terrorist threat as seriously as the Bush administration does suffer from a "moral and intellectual confusion." He compared them to the British appeasers of Hitler before WWII.

I did a left-wing radio call-in show after the speech in which the callers accused Rumsfeld of calling them pro-Nazi for opposing President Bush on the war. Of course Rumsfeld was suggesting no such thing. But it is worth reviewing the history and meaning of appeasement — both for those who hurl the charge and for those who are charged.

The use of the term appeasement to describe a nation's foreign policy first emerged in the 1930s in England to describe the Ramsey McDonald/Stanley Baldwin/Neville Chamberlain British governments' policy of avoiding military conflict with Hitler's Germany by yielding to his territorial demands.

But it is important to note that prior to then, the term was typically used as a positive description of individual action, such as in the phrase "appeasements of Divine displeasures," (Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonist, 1678.)

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