Five best books about appeasement

Bruce Bawer is the author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books on appeasement.

One title on the list:

Guilty Men
by "Cato"

This brief, impassioned j'accuse, written under the pseudonym Cato by British journalists Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen, was churned out and published at lightning speed in July 1940, a month after the British escape at Dunkirk from the German army advancing through France. It was a fateful moment, as Foot recalled in a 1988 preface, when the "shameful" era of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's feckless leadership had ended and "English people could look into each other's eyes with recovered pride and courage." To read "Guilty Men" now is to feel Englishmen's shock at the might of the Nazi war machine and to share the authors' rage at the obtuseness of the appeasers (Chamberlain and 14 others are listed) who sweet-talked Hitler in Munich, agreeing in 1938 to let him annex part of Czechoslovakia, and mocked Winston Churchill for assailing conciliation and urging rearmament. This urgent piece of journalism made appeasement and Chamberlain's infamous claim, upon returning from Munich, of having secured "peace in our time" synonymous with naïveté and cowardice.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue