Winston Churchill is famed for his adamant and courageous opposition to appeasement. What is not as well known is that Churchill also praised appeasement in strong terms: “Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble, and might be the surest and perhaps the only way to world peace.”
One must, however, discern the difference between that and appeasement from weakness and fear, which, he declared, “is alike futile and fatal.”
The pride of tyrannies is legendary. They regularly require human sacrifice as evidence of their power.
Deep into his years-long and often lonely efforts to mobilize Parliament and the people to the stark urgency of confronting Hitler, Churchill began a new book project that would eventually fill four volumes and which he would title A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He made clear the large aim of the work to one of his literary assistants in the project:
In the main, the theme is emerging of the growth of freedom and law, of the rights of the individual, of the subordination of the State to the fundamental and moral conceptions of an ever-comprehending community. Of these ideas the English-speaking peoples were the authors, then the trustees, and must now become the armed champions. Thus I condemn tyranny in whatever guise and from whatever quarter it presents itself. All of this of course has current application.
The dovetailing between that project and his campaign to awaken Britain to rearm and confront Hitler was summarized by Churchill biographer and historian Martin Gilbert:
As Churchill saw it, parliamentary democracy and dictatorship not only stood at opposite poles but had no common ground. Democracy had to defend itself.
And so, when appeasement from weakness led to war, as Churchill knew it must, he could set the aims of the armed struggle in the clearest, broadest, and most morally persuasive terms. This is how Churchill put it in his first speech to the House of Commons after Hitler began the war:
This is no war for d...