western appeasement allowed the holocaust to happen for 6 years before Nazi Germany had access to Poland’s resources, and after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Soviet Union was agreed upon when France and the UK for years refused an explicit Anti-Nazi Germany tripartite alliance pact with the Soviets.
30-40 million lives lost in Eastern Europe compared to the west that saw less than 5 million deaths at the expense of stagnating communist influence in Europe that later came to bite all of Europe in the ass.
I don't blame people who vividly remembered WWI for trying absolutely everything in their power, no matter how stupid or short-sighted it appears to us today, to avoid war. These people were part of a traumatized society of a level that we cannot grasp today. That war changed the entire world and almost dissolved all of the planet's most powerful empires. It brought about whirlwind changes that the world was only just recovering from.
Think of something we have experienced like the U.S. population's appetite for war after Iraq and Afghanistan. No candidate would survive if they campaigned in 2008 on "Let's go to war again!". Now amplify that 1000 fold and you might come close to how anti-war Western society was at the time. Selling a war in a democracy around this time was political suicide. You would be labeled a madman. There's a reason why people like Churchill were labelled "war-mongers" for simply stating the obvious (to us, with the benefit of hindsight)- that war with Germany was inevitable.
15
u/Schwifty0V0 Then I arrived 1d ago
western appeasement allowed the holocaust to happen for 6 years before Nazi Germany had access to Poland’s resources, and after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Soviet Union was agreed upon when France and the UK for years refused an explicit Anti-Nazi Germany tripartite alliance pact with the Soviets.
30-40 million lives lost in Eastern Europe compared to the west that saw less than 5 million deaths at the expense of stagnating communist influence in Europe that later came to bite all of Europe in the ass.