samedi 22 mars 2008

Défense et illustration de Chamberlain

Néville Chamberlain, un homme maltraité par l'histoire.

Le site anglais vigoureusement eurosceptique Eureferendum est le reflet de ce que les insulaires offrent de mieux quand ils réfléchissent, même de mauvaise foi. Ils ont mis en ligne un intéressant post qui prend la défense de Neville Chamberlain, injustement invoqué, par la grâce des accords de Munich en 1938, quand il s'agit de dénoncer un gouvernement qui accepte des conditions léonines au détriment de ses principes et de ses intérêts à long terme.

Pourtant, les historiens savent très bien que Chamberlain n'avait pas d'alternative. Le Royaume-Uni n'était pas en conditions de se défendre encore moins d'attaquer l'Allemagne. C'est sous son autorité que le pays a lancé un programme de réarmement, freiné par deux facteurs négatifs, les syndicats et l'archaïsme de l'industrie.

Mais l'Angleterre de 1939 n'était pas celle de 1914. La déclaration de guerre à la suite des garanties offertes à la Pologne, encouragée en sous-main par le très belliciste F. D. Roosevelt, était prématurée. La France et le Royaume-Uni ne faisaient pas le poids face à la puissante industrie allemande. Il en est résulté la catastrophe de 1940. En dépit des rodomontades du pathétique Churchill, l'Angleterre aurait été obligée, tout comme Chamberlain l'avait prévu, de demander la paix à l'Allemagne en 1941 faute de pouvoir payer les importations indispensables à la poursuite de son effort de guerre. C'est l'entrée en guerre subreptice des Etats-Unis au printemps 1941 qui a sauvé la donné à Churchill. Le prix à payer par le royaume fut lourd : la perte définitive de sa capacité à décider de son avenir.

Voilà pourquoi le accusations portées par les eurosceptiques contre leur gouvernement à la suite de l'adoption du traité simplifié de Lisbonne sont impertinentes. Leur pays n'a plus de souveraineté à défendre depuis que Chamberlain n'est plus premier ministre. Churchill a fait de leur pays un protectorat virtuel des Etats-Unis.




Wouldn't be nice… if journalists wrote about what they knew? Well, all right, I can hear the objection to that. If they did that, the newspapers and magazines would be very thin, indeed.

So, here is another idea: how about them writing either about things they knew or about things they are prepared to find out about? That would add a page or two.

Today’s example is Andrew Gimson of the Daily Telegraph. Writing about Gordon Brown’s admittedly rather stupid comments about not letting the people of Czechoslovakia (no longer in existence) down by not “supporting” the Constitutional Reform Lisbon Treaty, Mr Gimson immediately reaches for the Chamberlain comparison, as, apparently some MPs did.

Frankly, I am sick of having Neville Chamberlain paraded as the ultimate in treacherous wickedness. What did the man do? He was, in domestic matters, rather a good politician but without, perhaps, the imagination required to deal with the likes of Chancellor Hitler or French Prime Minister Daladier.

However, he was not, unlike Stalin, really taken in by Hitler, as witnessed by the fact that rearmament was started under him, with some difficulty because of the constant opposition from the Labour Party and the trade unions, something that everyone forgot during the infamous “guilty men” electoral campaign of 1945.

In 1938, as Chamberlain knew, Britain was not ready for war (it is questionable how ready she was in 1940 but, at least, the time gained had been spent on rearmament and improvements, especially in the RAF). The Empire and Dominions would not support Britain as the leaders made it clear to the Prime Minister. It was not just the Establishment that was against the war, as Mr Gimson so foolishly asserts, but most of the population.

Precisely why was Chamberlain supposed to risk British lives in the services and in the cities, as it was believed by all that London and other cities would be rubble within days of a declaration of war, for a country that was far away and of which people did know little? Come to think of it, how much does Mr Gimson know about Eastern Europe now?

As it happens, even President Beneš did not think the country was worth fighting for as he never gave the order for the military to resist the German invasion of Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia was not that small a country, as it happens.

Its army was the third largest in Europe, after the French and the German ones. The mobilization of September 1938 produced an army of just half a million fewer than the German one, mobilized in August of that year. There was a well-developed military base.

One reason why Hitler wanted the Sudetenland was for the military armaments manufacture. Those Czech tanks were used a year later in the invasion of Poland and in 1941 in the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Imagine how different the history of the twentieth century might have been if the military and political leadership of Czechoslovakia had made a different decision in September 1938.

Nous invitons nos visiteurs à décourvir l'œuvre d'un des plus grands historiens anglais du XXe siècle : Corelli-Barnett.


Correlli-Barnett, un historien que les francophones se doivent de lire pour mieux comprendre l'Angleterre.

Collapse of British Power
Correlli Barnett
Methuen, 672 p., ISBN-10: 0413275809.

et aussi :

The Audit of War

The Lost Victory:
British Dreams, British Realities, 1945-1950



The Pride and the Fall: The Dream and Illusion of Britain As a Great Nation

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