Appeasement
Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill en de weg naar oorlog
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- $10.900
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- $10.900
Descripción editorial
In Appeasement neemt de jonge, baanbrekende historicus Tim Bouverie ons mee naar de jaren dertig van de vorige eeuw. Hij schildert een onvergetelijk portret van de Britse ministers, aristocraten en amateurdiplomaten die lange tijd angstvallig de confrontatie met Hitler-Duitsland uit de weg gingen en wier acties en passiviteit Europa noodlottig zouden worden. Het boek bestrijkt de periode vanaf Hitlers machtsovername in 1933 tot aan de evacuatie van het Britse leger op de stranden van Duinkerken in mei 1940. Behalve een onthullende geschiedenis is Appeasement een tijdloze les over de noodzaak om op te treden tegen agressie en autoritarisme – en de rampspoed die volgt als we dat nalaten.
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In this meticulous work, British journalist Bouverie provides a blow-by-blow recounting of Britain's accommodation to Nazi Germany's rearmament, beginning with the obvious observation that "the desire to avoid a second world war was perhaps the most understandable and universal wish in human history." He convincingly argues that the failure of strong, consistent diplomatic efforts greatly contributed to the century's great conflagration. Many British establishment figures of the time come in for fair and sometimes harsh criticism as Bouverie charts the descent toward war. Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Foreign Secretary John Simon, and, of course, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, architect of the 1938 Munich agreement that caved to Hitler's expansionism because it promised "peace for our time," receive deserved criticism. So do the many upper-class, right-leaning "amateur diplomats" who tried to build relations with Hitler. According to Bouverie, they wanted to believe that Hitler's objectives were modest and feared that rearmament was unaffordable and would escalate tensions. Bouverie manages to convey how outside the mainstream Churchill's anti-Hitler views were for much of the mid-1930s, and how dimly his WWI record was viewed by his foes in the Conservative Party. His reconstruction is both clear-eyed and well-paced. This intelligent study of British prewar diplomacy will keep readers rapt.
