The events that followed the appeasement of Germany in the 1930s were so horrific that appeasement has become an unequivocal pejorative — evoking an unholy combination of blind obliviousness and cowardly acquiescence.
So it's always jarring to see how blithely the word was used before the onslaught of World War II.
In 1937, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was boasting about the “far-reaching plans” he had in mind “for the appeasement of Europe and Asia,” and a year later he was calling for “a general appeasement” of Adolf Hitler on “this Czechoslovakian question.” Even after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and then Poland, some British officials were still advising, in the words of one, “a little more appeasement.”
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