{"id":36743,"date":"2018-09-05T01:00:42","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T05:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36743"},"modified":"2018-08-15T18:44:03","modified_gmt":"2018-08-15T22:44:03","slug":"qotd-why-did-appeasing-the-fascist-dictators-seem-such-a-sensible-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/09\/05\/qotd-why-did-appeasing-the-fascist-dictators-seem-such-a-sensible-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Why did appeasing the Fascist dictators seem such a sensible policy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is a familiar student essay question, whether the revolution could have been averted, but for the world war and resultant loss of up to three million Russian lives. It seems more useful merely to suggest that, in the political and ideological climate of the early 20th century, the collectivist experiment was bound to be attempted somewhere, and Russia or China were obvious testbeds. The consequences for millions of Russian peasants, together with the ferocity of Soviet oppression, were successfully concealed from most western eyes for half a century. The 1789 French revolution killed only a few thousand aristocrats and transferred land to peasants, who thus became ardent upholders of property rights. The Russian version required liquidation of the entire governing class and transfer of land to collective ownership, an incomparably more radical proceeding. Douglas Smith\u2019s 2012 book Former People<\/em> gives a harrowing account of the fate of the Tsarist aristocracy.<\/p>\n

In the West, the gullibility of the Webbs, Bernard Shaw and the rest of the \u2018true believers\u2019 was fed by a desperation to suppose the Soviet example viable. \u2018Looking around us at our own hells,\u2019 wrote the historian Philip Toynbee, who became a communist at Cambridge, \u2018we had to invent an earthly paradise somewhere else\u2019. As late as 1945, the leftist publisher Victor Gollancz brought posterity\u2019s contempt upon himself by declining to publish Animal Farm<\/em>, George Orwell\u2019s great satire on Bolshevism.<\/p>\n

For a counter-revolutionary contemporary perspective, it is impossible to understand the 1930s appeasement of the dictators without grasping the traumatic impact of events in Russia on the propertied classes everywhere. The Winter Palace was stormed only 16 years before Hitler came to power. For at least two decades, Europe\u2019s \u2018haves\u2019 were far more frightened of Bolshevism than of fascism.<\/p>\n

The \u2018clubland hero\u2019 novels of John Buchan and Sapper offer embarrassing glimpses of the British bourgeois view of Lenin\u2019s people and their followers in the decades following the revolution. A belief took hold in polite circles that the bloodiest revolutionaries were not merely communists but also Jews, which meant they were doubly damned in St James\u2019s clubs.<\/p>\n

Max Hastings, “The centenary of the Russian revolution should be mourned, not celebrated”, The Spectator<\/em><\/a>, 2016-12-10.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is a familiar student essay question, whether the revolution could have been averted, but for the world war and resultant loss of up to three million Russian lives. It seems more useful merely to suggest that, in the political and ideological climate of the early 20th century, the collectivist experiment was bound to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,41],"tags":[304,780,457,354,506,433],"class_list":["post-36743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","tag-antisemitism","tag-communism","tag-fascism","tag-georgeorwell","tag-revolution","tag-sovietunion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9yD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36743"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44549,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36743\/revisions\/44549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}