NATO models Syria plot after Hitler’s rape of Czechoslovakia
In the annals of international criminal aggression, the destabilization, dismemberment, and ultimate annihilation of independent Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 by Hitler’s Nazi regime has come to occupy a place of particular infamy.
The eagerness of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier, at the infamous Munich conference of September 1938 with Hitler and Mussolini, to sacrifice the national existence of Czechoslovakia in the service of their policy of appeasing and supporting Hitler’s eastward expansion is widely regarded as the event which placed Europe on track for the outbreak of World War II slightly less than a year later.
It has been less widely noted that the 2011-2012 destabilization of Syria by NATO and the reactionary Persian Gulf monarchies has been closely following the script of Hitler’s onslaught against Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1938.
Hitler was hostile to Czechoslovakia because it possessed a highly effective army of 30 modern divisions, a formidable system of border forts, was allied to France in the framework of the Little Entente, and also had a mutual defense treaty with the Soviet Union. After Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and his absorption of Austria through the Anschluss of March 1938, he quickly turned his attention to smashing Czechoslovakia. William L. Shirer’s 1960 study The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is readily available in libraries and will be cited to establish some important facts.