Notes from an Essay on Neville Chamberlain
by George Creel
Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of England from 1937 to 1940, is frequently mentioned in newspaper editorials. The editor describes the moment in which Mr. Chamberlain, in 1938, held up a meaningless treaty with Hitler and declared there would be peace in our time. The editor then compares that moment of grand misguidance to some random gaffe made by a nameless candidate for public office. Maybe the candidate said we should hold talks with Iran, and the wise, history-laden editor reminds us that our candidate is leading us down Chamberlain’s path to inevitable disaster. What the editor forgets is that when Mr. Chamberlain said there’d be peace in our time, everybody cheered . . .
Workmanlike maintaining of his father’s failing plantation
Born into the family business of politics
Eternally devoted to peace
Could you do any better? How would you be able to tell the fanatical warmonger from the baby who needs his bottle?
Even if we saw our mistakes coming, I doubt we’d be able to stop them. There are very few serious things a man can stop. We’re all cowards in the end and I’d like to see you do better, you pack of fucking pansies.
Even when he was kicked out in favor of the lunatic alcoholic who’d been right all along, dying six months later, he was loved.
Winston Churchill’s words at Chamberlain’s funeral:
“It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world
to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be
deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were those hopes in which he
was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was
that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and
benevolent instincts of the human heart -- the love of peace, the toil for
peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and
certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.”
May we all be so loved once dead and betrayed.