Munich 2025: Return of the “Guilty Men”

As Karl Marx famously wrote in 1852, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

There can be little doubt that the Munich peace conference in 1938 ended in tragedy — perhaps the greatest of all tragedies.  On 30 September that year, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy reached agreement in Munich to guarantee, as the British prime minister said, “peace in our time”.  Instead of peace, the world was at war within a year.

Neville Chamberlain was convinced that by giving part of Czechoslovakia — the Sudetenland — to Hitler, the German dictator would be satisfied, and would make no further territorial demands in Europe.  Chamberlain and the French leader, Édouard Daladier, felt no need to involve the government of Czechoslovakia in their decision.  Preventing another world war was so important that the Czechs and Slovaks could afford to pay a small price for it.

In the end, of course, everyone paid that price — not only Czechoslovakia, which quickly came under German rule, but eventually all of Europe as well.

The story is so well known as to hardly need re-telling.  And yet we witnessed in the last week the new American government, led by Elon Musk and Donald Trump, re-enacting key moments of the 1938 Munich disaster in, of all places, Munich.  And this time, Hegel and Marx notwithstanding, the result is anything but a farce.

The American defence secretary, former Fox News presenter Pete Hegseth, and Trump’s Vice President J.D. Vance, went to the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich to tell assembled world leaders that in order to assure peace in our time, the Ukrainians would need to give large chunks of their territory to the Russians.

In order to hurry that process along, President Trump would be meeting in Saudi Arabia with Russia’s Putin to work out the details.  The Ukrainians would be about as welcome in Riyadh later this year as the Czechoslovakians were in Munich in 1938.  And the result of any deal that would be struck by Trump and Putin would be the same as that of 1938: not “peace in our time” but the dismemberment of a sovereign, democratic nation — and a guarantee of further conflict.

Decades before he became the leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot co-authored a remarkable book, published in 1940 under the title “Guilty Men”.  It was a devastating polemic attacking those politicians whose short-sighted policies enabled Hitler to launch his blitzkrieg and to swiftly conquer most of Europe.  “Guilty Men” was so scandalous that distributors including W.H. Smith refused to handle it.  But it became a best-seller anyway, and was reprinted many times.

Just as Foot knew full well who the “guilty men” were who enabled Nazi Germany to unleash another world war, today we know who are the leaders in the West who are guilty of appeasing Putin.  It’s not only Trump, Musk, and Vance.  It’s all those politicians in Europe who are happy to betray Ukraine in exchange for an illusory peace with Russia.  Among them are the neo-Nazis of the “Alternative für Deutschland” which is expected to do very well in the upcoming German elections, Nigel Farage’s “Reform UK” which is also expected to do very well in upcoming local elections in Britain, and Marine Le Pen’s “Rassemblement national”.

They are the “Guilty Men” — and women — of our time, and they are all working flat out to ensure that aggression is rewarded, making another European war inevitable.  They must be stopped.