Appeasement - doublespeak for 'Caitiff'

Spot the difference between this image and the one below, apparently they are the same according to the BBC. Splendid then.

Remember the charming chaps featured in the image above? You know the ones who were within in an inch of being lynched by a mob before the valiant police stepped in and saved them from the people, who were there for entirely different reasons; to support the troops.

Before diving into the chronic-failure policy that is appeasement let me just display the spin put on this story by the BBC. The BBC called these protesters "anti-war protesters" even though nearly every other MSM outlet managed to label the protests accurately; namely as muslim protesters. Take a look here for example (even the Guardian managed to implore reason for once).

There is, and please read this very carefully any potential BBC staff, a profound difference between "anti-war" protesters and the despicable lot that managed to upset the town of Luton including its normal muslim population, who are very supportive of the armed forces in general. Akbar Dad Khan, a local community leader, said: "They are about 10 to 15 hotheads. The best thing to do is just to ignore them. I agree with Mr. Khan entirely though just to make issue completely crystal...

These are anti-war protesters:

Turns out though that the government has done a policy U-turn again, lo and behold! Police around the country have been told that they are to "take it easy on muslim extremists" lest they become more militant as a result. This defies all logic but so does New Labour. Remember in 2005 when Mr. Blair, then PM, called for an "overhaul of the criminal justice system to root out and prosecute extremists."

Tory MP David Davies said: "This sounds like abject surrender. Everyone should be equal in the eyes of the law". Quite.

What has history taught us about the policy of appeasement then? The most famous case can of course be ascribed to former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In 1938 the Nazis in the Sudetenland (formed under the Versailles Treaty) became really chafed and figured they would called for autonomy. However this could lead to war since the Germans might intervene and help them something which could not be tolerated by the British. So, things really got heated upon which Mr. Chamberlain hopped on a prop and flew to Berchtesgaden to negotiate directly with Hitler.

Hitler, as you know, was a bit strange and he wanted pretty much everything he could get his hands on. Whenever there was an objection he threatened war. In conjunction what happened was that the British and French told their ally, the Czechs, to give away huge chunks of its population and territory to the Germans (what the Czechs really should do as an honest retribution is to sign the Lisbon Treaty and then send a memorandum to Mr. Cameron reading "ha ha, up yours wanker") this all resulted in the Munich Agreement where effectively Czechoslovakia ceased to exist and was chopped up into four pieces and then handed to Germany, Hungary, Poland, and an independent Slovakia.

Smashing!

Well not really, in March 1939 Chamberlain assured the Poles that Britain would support them if their independence was threatened (remember how we said that Hitler was a rather quirky character). On 1 September Hitler invaded Poland and on 3 September Britain declared war on Germany. The rest is history as they say.

What we should take from this example is that appeasement is a crappy policy at best and downright perilous at worst. Why? Because the recipients of the appeasement think that they can do whatever they want as their adversary, clearly, does not have any balls.

Or why not take a more recent example of appeasement failure. Newt Gingrich said that he was wrong to put the racist label on Justice Sotomayer.

Aha? That is odd.

Justice Sotomayer ruled against white firemen in New Haven, Connetticut, who said city officials violated their rights when it threw out the results of a promotions test on which few minorities scored well. The minorities in question were African-Americans. To you or me that is blatant racism staring you right in the face, according to Sotomayer it is not. Anyhow the ruling has been overturned by the Supreme Court to which Justice Sotomayer is set to become a full time member of in the not to distant future. That does not bode well.