“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.”

― Winston Churchill, to Neville Chamberlain.

 

What if President Trump’s team really does have the goods to prove a massive voter fraud on the part of the Democrats? Then what should we do? How far should we be willing to go? Should we let ourselves be cowed by the threat of leftist violence in the streets — by the prospect of 2020’s riots multiplied by 10 or 20? To answer that, let’s stop and consider history.

I’m not usually someone to talk about “appeasement.” That’s typically the card played by some armchair strategist neoconservative. He whips it out when he’s trying to gin up a useless, stupid war with Iraq/Libya/Syria/the magical land of Equestria. He’ll wield the threat that some seedy, impoverished dictator 4,000 miles away is a threat to “American freedom.”

Such people like to pretend that in every potential foreign conflict, we face another Hitler. And all who oppose the use of force get cast in the role of arch-appeaser Neville Chamberlain. It’s as if we’re forever stuck in the autumn of 1938, with Hitler demanding pieces of Czechoslovakia from its sworn military allies, Britain and France.

It’s Always Either Fall 1938 or Summer 1914

In a piece of bitter irony, the actual appeasers who enabled Hitler’s rearmament and bloodless conquest of his neighbors themselves had got stuck in a moment of history. Having witnessed the great powers sleepwalk into the futile First World War, they seemed forever haunted by August 1914. So they sought peace at any price — and thereby guaranteed that Adolph Hitler, not they, would choose the time of the inevitable clash between him and the democracies.

But sometimes a threat really is a present danger. And I don’t want to blindly react against the neocons the same way they did against the appeasers. That would make me one of those generals always fighting the last battle, not the present one.

If indeed a wide conspiracy of Democrat politicians and electoral officials accomplished vote fraud on the massive scale alleged by Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Rudolph Giuliani, that fact alone should sober us. It ought to appall us, of course. To fill us with righteous outrage, and patriotic resolve. But will it?

Civil Peace at Any Price

I’m not certain. I think some Republicans eager to silence the president’s team want to just shove Trump aside, and restore the GOP to its recent historic role as designated loser. As long as they control the party’s mechanisms, cash its checks, and keep out “dangerous” populists like Donald Trump, they’re happy. They want to be the first-string players on the Washington Generals, whose job it is to go out there and lose gracefully to the Harlem Globetrotters.

On one occasion when the Generals got out of hand and actually won, the whole crowed booed and jeered them. They almost needed security to escort them out of the building. In other words, it was a lot like the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. The “fundamental transformation” of America which Barack Obama had promised hit a speed bump. So his backers threw a tantrum that lasted four long years.

And they did more than that. They massively abused their power to cripple and sabotage the presidency itself. The brilliant political scientist Angelo Codavilla is worth reading here. He writes that Trump’s win threatened to derail America morphing into a permanent oligarchy. And the oligarchs wouldn’t put up with that, which is why they mobilized the Deep State to destroy him and his team, by any means necessary.

What Will They Do to Us?

And now we see how far they proved themselves willing to go. Do we really want to find out how much further they’ll dare to take things? People unafraid to annul the last presidential election, if they really tried to steal this one, are coldly and deadly serious about holding onto power. They’re willing to imprison innocent men like General Mike Flynn, and Kyle Rittenhouse, and David Daleiden. To persecute innocent citizens like Brett Kavanaugh, Nicholas Sandmann, and Mark Judge. To close all our churches, open our borders, create new farcical states, and pack the Supreme Court with flunkies. What will they do to us and our cities if we try to resist them now?

I think a lot of Republicans consider this, and cower. In their heart of hearts they know that U.S. elites, allied with foreign billionaires and social engineers eager to start the Great Reset, will literally stop at nothing. And that frightens them, as it should.

Feeding Our Allies to the Crocodiles

But what divides a courageous man from a coward isn’t the absence of fear, when the situation merits it. It’s how he responds to fear. Does he blindly choose surrender over a struggle? Does he trade all his liberty for a little short-term safety? More to the point, does he throw to the crocodiles the allies who have already fought for him, in the hope he’ll be eaten last?

That’s what we’d be doing to Donald Trump and his team, if we silenced legitimate questions about the conduct of this past election. And it’s what Great Britain convinced its ally France to do to the people of Czechoslovakia, when it cut the shameful Munich deal with Hitler.

The Real Tragedy of Munich

I’m finishing a powerful work of historical scholarship on just how foolish that surrender really was. The Bell of Treason, by P.E. Caquet, is gripping but painful reading. It tells the story of the Munich deal from a viewpoint we rarely hear it: that of the Czechs. Instead of focusing on the fears of the French or the British, it shows us the steely resolve, and tragic patriotic fervor, of the liberty-loving Czechs. They could never believe that their allies would throw them under the bus. Nor did the German generals who plotted to overthrow Hitler rather than start a war they couldn’t win.

And that’s the point: The Germans were far too weak to win a war in 1938. They had fewer tanks than France, and most of them were inferior. They were incapable of blowing up Allied tanks, but vulnerable to their shells. The Luftwaffe at the time was more hype than reality. The U-boats that would later devastate British shipping still hadn’t been built.

Meanwhile the Czech military was almost half as strong as Germany’s. It had solid, realistic plans for resisting until the French could bail it out. English and French appeasers warned against massive German bombing of their cities — which wouldn’t even be possible for two more years. Powerful Czech fortresses guarded its mountainous borders. Poland was still unconquered, and posed a threat to the German rear. The Soviet Union hadn’t yet switched to ally itself with Hitler, and might have intervened.

Letting Your Enemy Set the Schedule

In every way, the prospects of a war against Nazi Germany were better in 1938 than they’d prove in 1940, when Germany finally chose the moment to blitzkrieg its way into France. The much stronger Panzers that would roll then into Paris were made … in factories taken over from the Czechs, after Hitler’s bloodless conquest.

With all this in mind, I’d like my fellow patriots to consider: If this vote fraud was real, and leading Democrats are really so disdainful of democracy, is the time for taking extraordinary means to stop them now? Or once they fully control the U.S. military, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the IRS and the Secret Service? Once the last flickers of free speech have flickered out on social media, and the last cable network switched sides, as Fox News just did? Once courts have essentially nullified the Second Amendment, and millions of our timid neighbors have dutifully turned in their guns? Once ANTIFA expands into every American city?

Just read this catalog of tyrannical, punitive measures prominent Trump opponents have called for even before the election has been settled.

Appeasement doesn’t prevent a war. It just postpones it. Abandoning your allies and champions is a great way to ensure that you’ll fight alone.

Do we really want to end up beleaguered and isolated, under illegitimate rulers, hoping that we get lucky when the time comes for our Dunkirk? Consider the words of Alexander Solzhenitysn:

Remember Solzhenitsyn’s warning. Tyranny must be resisted before it’s too late.

Otherwise we deserve what we get. pic.twitter.com/3TWdmM19El

— Echo Chamber (@echo_chamberz) November 15, 2020

And what do we do if God forbid we learn that the voter fraud was all too real, but can’t prove it in time to stop a gang of thieves from constitutionally taking power? I really don’t have answer to this last one. I hope Donald Trump does. 

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”