>>Why does Devlin think that everyone letting Earth get away with this
>>will _not_ cause a conflict? And why isn't he worried?
>
>He does think it will lead to conflict; his quote is a reference to
>the 20th-century British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who gave
>away about half of Europe to Hitler in the late thirties rather than
>fight the war everybody else in the world could already see was
>inevitable. Devlin is being snide, comparing the nations that didn't
>protest this "internal" move on the Corps' part to the countries that
>knuckled under to Hitler when he grabbed Austria and then had the gall
>to be surprised when he invaded Poland.

That's not entirely correct/ Yes Chamberlain was a pillock and the whle 'peace in our time' was dumb, but coldbloodedly, there were reasons to let Hitler expand into Czechoslovakia.
a) Britain and it's allies of the day had no ability to deploy forces to stop him... we declared war over Poland and look how many troops we sent there. Roughly none.
b) The British Army of the day was realistically no match for the Germans in number or quality. And the Royal Air Force was not yet the force that would later win the Battle of Britain. The year or so before the outbreak of the war and the months of Phony War were crucial to Britain being prepared to fight the war. Historical evidence suggests that the Germans considered themselves twice as capable as British soldiers on a one-to-one comparison, as opposed to ten times as capable as Russian of American troops! This would have been very different without the buid up time.

Obviously this has nothing to do with the thread though.

drakensisthered

So I simply said one of the great trite truths: "There is generally more than one side to a story." - Corwin, Roger Zelazny's 'Courts of Chaos'