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History Shows that the Peacemongers Are Warmongers — Part Two

It used to be notorious that peace movements paved the way for World War 2. Since then, “peace movements” and “peace groups” and “peace” NGOs have worked to verbally chloroform the educated public into forgetting what used to be common knowledge among informed people in the USA and Europe.

“Peace people” in the United States often worked to have the supposedly anti-war play of Jean Giraudoux, Tiger at the Gates, staged at venues where young minds, high schools students, would see it and be impressed with the need for peace. Yes, peace is needed. I would certainly not quarrel with that. But Jean Giraudoux was a playwright who joined the French cabinet and worked to support Hitler’s political and territorial demands. And thereby softened France for the German invasion.

Giraudoux’s play, called in French La Guerre de Troie n’ aura pas lieu, was meant to facilitate peace with Hitler. Things did not quite work out that way, although you can’t say that Giraudoux did not try. Other works of his tried to persuade the French public to try to understand the delicate feelings of the Teutons, just as nowadays Gideon Levy and some of our home-grown artistes, Amos Oz, and others try to understand the delicate feelings of murderous Arab terrorists. Significantly, Giraudoux served as  Commissar [commissaire-general] of Information in the French cabinet in the crucial period between the invasion of Poland, September 1939, and the invasion of France in 1940). During WW2 and the German Nazi occupation of France, his friend, Jean Jardin, served the Vichy regime as Pierre Laval’s office director. Laval, originally a socialist, was the Vichy prime minister who, along with Marshal Petain, collaborated with the Germans to send French Jews to the death  camps in Poland. Giraudoux, the artist, also had some choice views on Jews. He said that he was “fully in agreement with Hitler when he states that a policy only reaches its highest form when it is racial.”

Giraudoux wanted to pave the road to peace — with Hitler. You can say that he was not only a diplomat and artist, but a genuine peacemonger, and much of his career was devoted to peacemongering. But what  was most decisive in pre-World War 2 peacemongering-as-warmongering was the Munich Pact of 1938. Giraudoux and other peacemongering wordsmiths in France, Britain and elsewhere paved the road to Munich. Hitler, Chamberlain and French prime minister Daladier agreed at Munich (October 1938) that Czechoslovakia must hand over to Nazi Germany a certain territory, the Sudetenland — for the sake of peace and self-determination. The Sudetenland was a relatively mountainous area surrounding the rump of Czechoslovakia in the west, and bordering on southern Poland. This concession of Czechoslovak territory led to World War 2 since it granted Germany strategic advantages over the rump of Czechoslovakia and over Poland, which were conquered in 1939. Likewise, a  low mountain ridge runs through the Judea-Samaria area from south to north, including Hebron, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and so on. This ridge gives those who attack Israel from the east a strategic advantage. Is that why so many EU politicians and functionaries are eager to have Israel surrender Judea and Samaria to an Arab state to be called “Palestine”?

More information, more details and more sources on peacemongering as warmongering are found at the link here. The argument is much more developed as well.

About the Author
Elliott A. Green is a writer, researcher, and translator living in Jerusalem. He has published in Nativ, Midstream, the Jerusalem Post, and other publications.