The Evil of Appeasement

Today, 6 August 2009, marks 64 years since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Unfortunately, the West has failed to learn the lessons of Hiroshima. Leftists everywhere use it to demonstrate the horrors of war, and talk about how great world peace would be - one of the school notices today was entitled "Pray for World Peace".

Indeed, as Ayn Rand points out, war is a terrible thing. It has taken the lives of many millions of people just over the last century, and left countless more in mourning. But what the leftists refuse to recognize is that the root of war lies in something worse than war: in statism and tyranny. When a government has declared war upon its own citizens, it is never long until the surrounding nations are next. This is the way a tyranny works: it constantly needs victims.

And this is exactly what happened in World War II. The Third Reich and Japanese Empire brought war to an unprecedented new scale throughout the world. Trying to turn a blind eye to the devastation, it took until a direct attack on American soil itself for the US to enter the war. Even then, it took the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to show the Japanese the evil of the philosophy that had grasped their nation.

What this represents, as well as military appeasement, is a far greater philosophical appeasement of tyranny; after all, military force is no use without proper philosophical backing; without the forces acting for good knowing that they're acting for good. Chamberlain's pragmatism is what allowed Hitler's Germany to take over so much of Europe so quickly. Because the ideals of the Western enlightenment were thrown into jeopardy after the First World War, for several years Germany and Japan were able to spread their Empires almost without interference, whereas before the British Empire would've intervened.

One of mankind's greatest follies is the persistent belief that evil is omnipotent; that humans are born sinners and man's natural state is that of a barbarian; that evil will always be here to stay. But evil runs at the sight of good -at forces who know that they are fighting for what's right.* Unfortunately, on August 6 1945, it took an atomic bomb to instill that message in the Japanese.

If anything, the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't a lesson about peace, they were a lesson about the evil of appeasement.
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*By this, I don't mean some fanatical suicide bomber. I mean a man who has genuine positive beliefs about his philosophy, not someone who kills out of fear from an eternal Hell or the frustration of emotions without a basis in reason.