Abraham Lincoln on human nature: "Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial...we shall have...weak and...strong, ...silly and...wise, ...bad and...good." Response to a Serenade, November 10, 1864.
History has proven Lincoln to be right and shown appeasers to be the weak, silly and/or bad masquerading as strong, wise and good.
Like that lady in Shakespeare's Hamlet, rookie United States Senator and current Democrat frontrunner Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. and his fellow leftists "doth protest too much, methinks."
Senator Obama raged against President George W. Bush for warning against appeasement, taking it very personally.
But President Bush did not specify any particular appeaser in his speech in Israel warning against the futility and foolishness of appeasement.
Team Obama immediately treated President Bush's speech as a personal attack on Obama. But the presidential hopeful who naively declared that he would talk to the rulers in Iran, Cuba and North Korea without preconditions, only highlighted his unfitness to be President of the United States of America.
Young, inexperienced Obama's unseemly eagerness to have such talks demonstrates not only that Obama preaches change and hope, but that he sometimes does so foolishly, by failing to distinguish good change from bad change and realistic hope from futile hope.
Presumably, Obama has studied world history.
Therefore, his apparent naivety is a mystery.
Does Obama really believe that he can convert dictators and terrorists by talking with them?
Does Obama have a messiah complex?
If Obama really was politically astute, he would have suggested that President Bush had been thinking of former President Jimmy Carter talking with Hamas when he recently visited the Middle East, despite Israeli opposition to such a talk, and not that President's Bush's wise remarks were aimed at him.
Reality: Obama is Chamberlainian, not Churchillian.
"For the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time....Go home and get a nice quiet sleep." Address by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, September 30, 1938, upon return to London after his Munich conference with Germany's Hitler, France's Daladier and Italy's Mussolini.
Of course, history showed not only that there was no honor in this appeasement, but that dawdling in dealing effectively with the danger posed by Hitler made the damage done by Hitler much worse than it would have been if he had been dealt with earlier instead of appeased.
Chamberlain did not bring true peace, Great Britain slept, Hitler continued to arm, and Hitler invaded Poland in less than a year, commencing the Second World War.
Winston Churchill foresaw disaster resulting from a policy of appeasement.
In While England Slept (1936), Churchill lamented his country losing its good sense and nerve: "I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on these break beneath your feet."
The man who eventually replaced Chamberlain and successfully rallied Great Britain appreciated the costs of both appeasement and war.
Churchill's simple and sound plan: "We will have no truce or parley with you [Hitler], or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst — and we will do our best." Speech, London County Council, July 14, 1941.
Churchill did not pretend that war would proceed according to plan: "No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it." The Second World War: Moral of the Work. Vol. II, Their Finest Hour (1949]). His attitude was simple: "In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Good Will." The Second World War: Moral of the Work. Vol. I, The Gathering Storm [1948]. He was realistic and resolved: "Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valor our only shield; we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible." Report on the War Situation, House of Commons, October 8, 1940. He had faith in the ability of the British people, once awakened, to persevere: "We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy." Speech to the Canadian Senate and House of Commons, December 30, 1941. And his tribute to those who fought for a just peace was both eloquent and emphatic: "'Not in vain' may be the pride of those who survived and the epitaph of those who fell." Speech, House of Commons, September 28, 1944.
President Bush did not match Churchill's eloquence, but he humbly accepted Churchill's wisdom and straightforwardly warned as a matter of principle against appeasement as a policy without mentioning persons.
Prime Minister Churchill understood the stakes and set the right goal: "Victory, at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival." First Statement as Prime Minister, House of Commons, May 13, 1940.
Israelis understood!
Prime Minister Churchill put sound principle above polls: "Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature." Report on the War Situation, House of Commons, September 30, 1941.
Prime Minister Churchill on duty: "The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world...we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty." Radio broadcast to America on receiving the honorary degree of doctor of laws from the University of Rochester, New York, June 16, 1941.
America's own Abraham Lincoln, as a plain-speaking presidential candidate, was of the same mind: "Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it." Address, Cooper Union, New York, February 27, 1860.
President Lincoln was reviled by his Democrat opponents during the Civil War, but never dissuaded, and thus reiterated in his last public address (April 11, 1865) that "[i]mportant principles must and may be inflexible."
Exactly!