Andrew Sullivan: “The definition of appeasement, according to Dictionary.com, is ‘to bring to a state of peace, quiet, ease, calm, or contentment; pacify; soothe: i.e. to appease an angry king’ and to ‘yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of justice or other principles.’”
“That’s where we are aren’t we? We are appeasing an angry king. And the usual result of appeasement is that the angry king banks every concession and, empowered and emboldened by his success, gets more aggressive and more power hungry. Far from restraining him, appeasement gives him time to amass strength, until there’s no restraining him at all. By the time it’s absolutely clear that he is a tyrant, it’s too late. That’s the core narrative of every Shakespeare play that charts a historical bid for absolute power. And every one of those plays is a tragedy.”
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