CHINA’S warning against “appeasement” of Donald Trump by governments hoping to avoid tariffs is a chance to reflect on the often misused term.

Beijing spoke out after reports indicated the US, as part of its global rivalry with China, will offer third countries relief from the tariffs if they help isolate China economically by cutting trade with it themselves. This is of course not an offer to be spared Trump’s trade war, but a threat to join his side or become a target.

Appeasement, exemplified by surrender to Hitler’s demands at Munich, is trotted out in Britain every time the ruling class wants a war: hesitation to fight or bomb anyone under any circumstances is likened to failing to stand up to the Nazis.

What is usually brushed over are the class interests that shaped British appeasement policy in the 1930s. Powerful sections of the ruling class, extending into the royal family and much of the Conservative Party, politically sympathised with Hitler. At the very least, many believed Nazi Germany’s aggression could be directed eastward and perform the useful function in their eyes of crushing the menace of socialist revolution by destroying the Soviet Union.

Comparisons with the Nazis should be used sparingly, and the modern far right we see in office in the US or Italy, and contending for power in France and Germany, differs in many respects from 20th-century fascism. However, if there is one country tearing up international agreements and threatening global war, as Germany did in the 1930s, it is the United States.

Once again, elements of the British ruling class are all for it, as we see in the Tory press’s fawning over Trump and demands that we join his trade war on the Chinese. Labour is at least still evidently reluctant to do the latter.

Today’s appeasement is not a refusal to hurl Britain into a war against “enemy” states like Russia or China. It is surrendering to the bully in the White House and enrolling among the forces most likely to start World War III. 

Pope Francis will be missed

Pope Francis, the first leader of the Catholic Church from the global South, used his papacy to condemn the grotesque and worsening inequality that disfigures the world, as near-inconceivably vast fortunes are amassed by a handful of tycoons while poverty and hunger afflict billions.

His denunciation of Western financial institutions as imposing a “new colonialism” through forced austerity programmes on poorer countries aligned with much Marxist analysis, and if his savaging of the culture of destructive profiteering that dominates the West as “the dung of the devil” quoted fourth-century bishop Basil of Caesarea, the allusion to the arrogance and decadence of Rome before its fall held a message of its own.

Francis’s outspoken advocacy of refugees shamed the far-right politicians of the US, Italy, Hungary, Poland and other countries whose “faith” is just a stick to beat others. Most importantly of all, his daily phone calls to the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza were a refusal to accept the erasure of a people suffering siege and genocide at the hands of Israel and its allies the United States, Britain and the EU. 

The Catholic Church has not often been a friend to left and progressive forces, and is not one now. As an institution, it has been guilty of horrific crimes. Francis, though, raised his voice for peace, humanity and social justice at a time when not just conservative but liberal and social-democratic politicians have come to stand for their opposites. He will be missed.