Peace for our time?

75 years ago this week, the Munich Agreement was signed by Neville Chamberlain, consigning Czechoslovakia to Nazi domination.  Whether or not his actions made sense at the time, the gift of 20-20 hindsight suggests that it was most likely a mistake, we will never know what would have transpired, had Britain and France stood up to Hitler then.

By coincidence, I am reading "Berlin Diary" by William L. Shirer, an American journalist who broadcast from Berlin and around Europe between 1934 and 1941 - seven years that saw Hitler's power grow and Europe slide inexorably into war.  It gives a fascinating insight into what happened and how ordinary people came to believe in Hitler's twisted view of the world.  Shirer risked arrest, expulsion and possibly worse to bring his view of the Third Reich to the outside world.  He also shares his views on how America's then powerful Isolationist Lobby risked playing right into Hitler's hands.

I have long been fascinated by history, particularly military history for a long time.  Not for any ghoulish reasons, it is not a morbid fascination.  Reading Shirer's book has possibly helped me come to realise why I am so fascinated.  

As a scientist at heart (and in my head!) boundary conditions, that critical zone between yes and no, where many of the most fascinating things in science happen - the event horizon of a black hole for one, have always intrigued me greatly.  They occur on a human scale too - I feel that I have spent most of my adult life enmeshed in the grey area that is the boundary between depressed and not depressed.

That period in the late 1930's that Shirer wrote so eloquently and perceptively about was also a boundary - between war and not war.  What tipped the world over the edge?  What drives ordinary people to do the heroic or the horrific?  These are the human boundary conditions that can make history such a compelling subject.

I have heard war described as "the continuation of politics by other means" (von Clausewitz originally, I think) - it seems to me that really, war is the failure of politics.  The failure to steer us away from, or the crazed urge of some leaders to steer us towards, that most bloody boundary condition between not war and war.