On October 5, 1938, Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons and said,
“We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat … you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but can be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude … we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road … we have passed an awful milestone in our history when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting”. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
Churchill’s remarks addressed the Munich Agreement, signed in the early hours of Sept. 30, 1938, by Edouard Daladier, premier of France, Benito Mussolini, Duce of the Italians, Adolph Hitler, chancellor/Fuhrer of Germany, and Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of England.
It is not the exact purpose here to find a perfect analogy between this greatest example of a sell-out and what the United States did to the Kurds and is doing to them right now.
Too many comparisons have been made to Munich over the decades, some somewhat valid, some a stretch. None is as remarkable a case of cowardice and calumny as Munich.
Yet this current his comparison is valid in moral and limited political terms if not in geopolitical terms – unless the next decade fulfills Turkish President Erdogan’s nuclear weapons aspiration.
For now, the damage is significant, the sell-out of an ever aspiring democratic people is replete once more and the United States stinks from the kind of odor that wafted over London and Paris late in 1938.
The 1938 sellout of Czechoslovakia has its origins in the same place, among the same few men who bequeathed the chaos we have seen in our lifetimes in the Balkans, Ukraine/eastern Europe and for decades but especially right now in the Middle East.
They were President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Premier Georges Clemenceau and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuel Orlando – the victors in WWI (also including Japan but not Russia,where civil war raged between ascendant “Red” Bolsheviks and combined ‘White” forces of Tsarist loyalists and the nascent democracy overthrown by the Bolsheviks in November 1917).
The place was Paris. The dates were January 18, 1919, to Jan. 20, 1920. The event was the Paris Peace Conference. The purpose was to draft a universal treaty to finalize the Nov. 11, 1918, Armistice with a permanent peace between the Allied victors, the U.S., Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan — largely excluded from the conference by its allies — and the defeated Entente Powers, the German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires.
Russia was present to observe through its “White” representatives but without a say in the proceedings even though France, England, and the United States had large forces fighting with them against the Bolsheviks (with Churchill leading proponent of British intervention.)
The allies would not deal with the Bolsheviks, who had ended Russia’s part in the war by making a separate peace with Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. They trade Russian Poland, large chunks of Ukraine and Belarus, the Baltic territories and ultimately Finald to get out of the war and turn their attention to securing power.
That gave Germany a free hand on the trench-lined Western Front where a final massive German offensive in spring 1918 almost brought victory for the Kaiser (who, deposed at war’s end, lived out his life in Holland where he died in 1940). The allies thus had no good feelings for the Reds even had they not hated their ideology, which they did.
But what did the powers do in Paris, their work translated into the Treaty of Versailles that would ignite German resentment and lead to Adolph Hitler’s rise?
Well first, only two of the powers really held sway.
Wilson was principally interested in his 14 points, focused as they were on self-determination of peoples and nations and on his plan for a League of Nations. He had some but not very great interest or focus on the rest and became tired of the squabbling over territory and borders.
The Japanese were marginal and marginalized, losing their principal proposal for a declaration of universal racial equity – a rejection that fueled Japanese resentment and separateness, setting Japan on a path that pit its colonial ambitions against the Pacific empires of Britain, France, and the United States, leading inexorably to Pearl Harbor.
The Italians, who came late to the war after weighing advantages between joining the Allies or the Entente, were mainly interested in nitpicking and flicking; acquiring Trieste, the Tivoli up to the Brenner Pass and other bits and pieces of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires.
That left it to Lloyd George and Clemenceau to carve up very large pieces of the world. They proceeded to do so by shaping British and French spheres of power that set multiple national and ethnic scores while imbuing new ones and aggravating many others. That was not their interest or care. Colonial power and expansion were.
Week after week, sometimes more than once in a week, the Big Four as they were called –but more and more the Big Two with Orlando absent and Wilson distracted and returned home after six months to campaign for his League — they entertained delegations from every corner of Europe and the Middle East.
They met with Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Jews (armed with the bothersome Balfour Declaration), Ukrainians, Poles, Balts, and, yes – yes they met with representatives of the Kurds.
The latter came asking not for land – as President Trump put it so relentlessly stupidly recently — the Kurds came asking not for land but for a land – a Kurdish homeland.
Scattered as they were across parts and provinces of the Ottoman Empire, they nonetheless constituted a separate people with their own language, a modern flexible Islam, and culture that made and makes education a central value of their society.
They left Paris with a vague promise that the conference and ultimate the treaty would identify a Kurdish state from the lands in which they were spread in their diaspora.
But in the Treaty of Lausanne, the last of four key sub-treaties that emerged after the main Versailles Treaty, the Kurds discovered their putative homeland had been dispersed in several new nation-states created by Lloyd George and Clemenceau based substantially on the outline of the secret 1916 Anglo-French Sykes-Picot in which the British Foreign and Colonial Offices and the Quai D’Orsay whacked up the Ottoman Emire.
In the main Treaty of Versailles, Britain got a mandate in Palestine, a subject state in the Trans-Jordan and control over the amalgamation of the three eastern-most Ottman provinces, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra into a monstrosity they named Iraq.
France created two new client states, Syria and Lebanon. British control of Egypt, which though it had remained ostensibly an Ottoman suzerainty had been and remained firmly under British control as it had been since the building of the Suez Canal. Unsurprisingly the Sykes-Picot Treaty was negotiated in Cairo.
Persia was left swaying in the battle between the emerging Soviet Union and the West, pressed by British influence from the east on the subcontinent and to the west in Arabia. Ultimately it would become a British vassal, a controlling role assumed during and after WWII by the United States as British power faded (all that oil you know).
Then the Treaty of Lausanne settled boundaries and scores between Greece and Turkey and drew the borders of the new Republic of Turkey.
By 1924, the Kurds thus found themselves spread across northern Syria, a bit of Lebanon, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and — especially — Anatolia, the large, principal landmass of the new Turkey where the Kurds found themselves the largest minority.
Today they constitue 25 percent of the population of Anatolia living now for more than 100 years with knowledge of how the Turks’ murdered 1.5 million Armenians — an example of what Turks and Turkey could do to a minority.
All that upheaval, like that in the Balkans where Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 over stupid and petty claims between Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and the Turks– with meddling by Hungary — preceded the explosion of WWI triggered by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie on June 28, 1914.
By Aug. 1 that year, Europe was fully engaged in and engulfed in the world war the Treaty of Versailles ended even as it engendered the next.
But even now, the Balkans seethe. When have they not? The Balkan wars of the 1990s, showed once more the ongoing, petty, stupid, historic resentments and hatreds remain. In more than 100 years no one has been able to dampen or empty the Balkan powder keg. Occasionally its fuse is snipped until another is inserted and it all goes boom. Make no mistake, it’s the Balkans where, especially with Russian meddling, it is as likely as ever again to go boom.
Then there was/is middle Europe, where Lloyd George and Clemenceau granted some national petitions, rearranged borders, invented new borders and boundaries as they settled scores between nationalities. They favored some, disfavored others and sowed the seeds for further misunderstanding, hate, confusion, chaos and, ultimately, WWII.
Czechoslovakia, for example, was born not in Prague but in Pittsburgh. There during 1919 a conference of Czech and Slovak immigrants expats and exiles put aside their historic animosity and suspicion and agreed to declare a new nation-state.
It won approval from the Paris conference masters with boundaries that made three million Germans citizens of Czechoslovak. This created the eventual NAZI claim to the Sudetendland resolved so temporarily in Munich a short 19 years later.
When Hiteler absored the Sudetenland into Germany he famously declared it was his last territorial demand in Europe. Six months later in March 1939 the German Army marched into what was left of Czechoslovakia, severed Slovakia into a new clerical puppet state. The German renamed the rump Czech lands the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and, with Poland and Hungary taking bites as well, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.
But it turned out Hitler had yet one more territorial demand, access through the Polish corridor, a geographic fact created by the revival of free Poland in the Versailles Treaty (we all know I hope that Poland had been divided by Russia, Austria and Prussia in 1798, a bit of chicanery that put what the Germans call Danzig and the Poles call Gdansk, inside Prussia.)
Denied further appeasement by England and France Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and the rest –the rest is called WWII.
The end of that war resulted in Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, new boundaries for Poland, Ukraine/Soviet Union, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Greece, Turkey, new hatreds, re-ignition of old hatreds across the Balkans, the division of Palestine creating a new cauldron of endless hostility. But the replacement of colonial power in the Mideast by fractious nation-states inevitably became overtaken by sectarian and tribal hatreds long suppressed by Anglo/French colonial power.
Overall then loomed the United States of America, the one power to emerge from the second war stronger than before with a new commitment: A commitment to avoid Wilsonian indifference, Republican isolationism and American avoidance of international responsibility to impose a pax Americana to prevent a third global war.
Today under this misbegotten administration the United States has abandoned 70 years of policy and power, leaving a void to be filled by the kind of hatred, suspicions, national jealousies and international deviances that caused two world wars and lurk ever and always across Europe and the Middle East.
And the Kurds? They remain a people without a land spread out across four nation-states, one of which was and remains determined to destroy them.
History is a puzzle in which nations’ leaders must know how the pieces fit.
Peeling the Onion 