It saw the possibility of European peace and prosperity arising out of Anglo-German cooperation. Appeasement was a passion which ignored the rules, for it sought to create new ones. Those who regarded that friendship as desirable, and were prepared to sacrifice common sense for the sake of their desire, were appeasers. They sought to ignore the lessons of the past. Those who regarded Anglo-German friendship as possible were optimists. In The Appeasers, Gilbert and Gott explain what motivated the appeasers of 1933. Chesterton makes that point repeatedly in a collection of his writings that I edited, Chesterton on War and Peace. The problem lay in the refusal of Germans to recognize their guilt no matter what the circumstances. No, whatever Keynes might say, Germany’s punishment was just. But in that case, why divide its forces, attacking in the east and in the west? That only made sense if Germany wanted a war, wanted to win that war, and wanted to use that win to enlarge its territory in both the east and the west. Germany could, of course, argue that it feared attack from the Russian army that was mobilizing to its east. It was planning to come to the aid of Belgium and Britain’s army was far too small to invade anyone. France wasn’t planning to invade Germany. There seems little doubt of the truth of that. When Germany had invaded Belgium and France, it began a war in which millions died. It’s easy to suspect that as an intellectual he disliked the treaty simply because the average Englishman thought it just. Keynes laid in his 1920 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Perhaps the best argument against appeasement was that it built on a foundation that J.
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