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Appeasement Back in Style 08/06 11:27 AM I have often wondered what it would have been like to live through the Thirties. How would I have reacted to the annual Nuremberg Party rallies, the rants against the Jews, and Hitler’s foreign adventures which the democracies did nothing to oppose, the occupation of the Rhineland and Austria, Nazi support for Franco in the Spanish civil war, and the rest of it. Appeasement was then considered wise, and has only become a dirty word with hindsight. One of my heroes is Robert Byron, so passionate an anti-Nazi that in his passport he described his occupation as “warmonger.” He was to be killed in 1941. My own father, a man of literary and artistic sensitivities, wrote a letter in 1938 to the New Statesman, that perennially weak-kneed leftist publication, to denounce pacifism and appeasement, and to insist on re-arming. Doing other research, I came across this letter quite by chance, and I hope I would have been so minded at that time. column