372 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographyOBAMA THE APPEASER: FOR ONCE, BUSH WAS RIGHT
In late May, President George Bush gave an address to the Israeli Knesset on the occasion of the
60th anniversary of Israel’s independence. We must leave aside the appalling historical mockery of
Bush appearing in that place, given that his grandfather Prescott Bush had been one of the principal
backers and financiers of the Nazi party and must thus be counted as one of the indispensable
supporters of Hitler’s seizure of power in January 1933. Those who wish to dig deeper into this
background are invited to consult my book, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992),
where the full story of Prescott Bush’s support for National Socialism is detailed. In the course of
his Knesset address, Bush remarked:
Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some
ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this
foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator
declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We
have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been
repeatedly discredited by history. (Applause.)
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/05/20080515-1.html)
Obama’ handlers, eager to pick a fight with Bush, chose to interpret this remark as aimed
specifically against them — hardly a clever move given the obvious liabilities of a young whelp of a
senator who notoriously would not know the difference between a rocket propelled grenade and a
bong. Even picking a quarrel with Bush was something that Obama had to do in a cowardly and
tentative way, initiating the polemics with a carefully worded written statement which accused Bush
of launching a “false attack” on the Perfect Master. In the course of several polemical exchanges
with Senator McCain, Obama prevaricated, muddied the waters, and shifted his own position
several times on this issue.
Apart from these verbal pyrotechnics, it must be recognized that Bush for once was quite
correct, although for reasons which he himself could never have fathomed. The foreign policy
which Brzezinski and Obama intend to carry out in regard to countries like Syria and Iran is indeed
a carbon copy of the so-called appeasement policy followed by British Prime Minister Sir Neville
Chamberlain, most notably at the Munich conference of September 1938, where much of
Czechoslovakia was awarded to Hitler without any direct consultation of the government in Prague.
THE BRITISH APPEASEMENT POLICY
MEANT ACTIVE SUPPORT FOR HITLER
In order to get to the heart of the matter we need to get rid of the term appeasement which is a
very weak euphemism invented by British historians to put their own countries leaders in a
somewhat better light. The essence of what is called appeasement was a policy of active support for
Hitler and the national Socialist regime on the part of the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments of
Britain during the 1930s. This support was comprehensive, and included financial assistance to the
Nazis by the Bank of England under Lord Montague Norman, the Anglo German naval agreement
of 1935, which scrapped the arms limitations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles and
gave German rearmament the official British stamp of approval, plus British approval of the
remilitarization of the Rhineland, support for the unification of Germany with Austria, active
support for Hitler’s grab of Czechoslovakia, and a de facto hands-off policy when it came to Nazi
aggression against Poland. The only condition suggested by the British for all this support was this