Dishonoring a Cinder?

 The decision of the Taiwanese opposition leader to meet with China's Xi Jinping yesterday met with foreseeable blowback from the current Taiwanese government—who quickly (if obliquely) portrayed their conversation as appeasement. 

"[H]istory tells us that compromising with authoritarian regimes only comes at the cost of sovereignty and democracy, and will not bring freedom or peace," Taiwan's president reportedly said after the meeting, while pressing for more defense spending. 

Indeed, this is the oft-cited "Lesson of Munich." As Arthur Koestler summarizes it in his book The Trail of the Dinosaur: 

It is the lesson "that an aggressive, expansive power with a messianic belief in its mission will expand as long as a power-vacuum exists; that improvement of social conditions, however desirable in itself, is no deterrent and no protection against attack; that the price of survival is the sacrifice of a distressing part of the national income for defence over a distressingly long period; and that appeasement, however seductive and plausible its arguments sound, is not a substitute for military strength but a direct invitation to war[.]"

This was the lesson to which the Taiwanese president appeals today—and why he is proposing a special defense budget to expand Taiwan's military capabilities. 

But the lesson of Munich—no matter how valid in itself—is not the only lesson of history (as Koestler also recognized). Indeed, one important thing changed in the world in the decades after Munich: the invention of nuclear weapons. 

Taiwan confronts not just a bullying, hulking superpower that has declared its ambitions to eventually assert control over the island's autonomous government—but one that happens to possess weapons powerful enough to end humanity. 

Bertrand Russell, in his 1963 book Unarmed Victory, addressed himself directly to those who cite the Lesson of Munich as a closing argument for Cold War defense spending, without any reference to the subsequent development of the A-bomb. 

Of one of them, Russell wrote: "He pointed out that he, at least, had learned from Munich that appeasement resulted only in a delayed but, because delayed, more virulent struggle." 

To which Russell replies: "It escaped him, and doubtless many of his listeners, that he had not learned the lesson now essential to have in one's mind, that war, which would inevitably escalate into nuclear war and global nuclear war, must be avoided." 

As the poet Christopher Logue once asked—in a piece from the same era responding to those who cried "better dead than red," "death before dishonour," and the like: "who wants to dishonour or govern a cinder?"

He adds: 

in the oncoming megaton bombardments

all you stand for will be gone

like an arrow into hell. 

[...] they said [...] recommending the death of the country 

in the name of the country: We shall bomb, 

if bomb we must [...]

How vile they are who wish to live here

minus democracy. 

Not speaking of those who wish to die here. 

I, as much as anyone, want to see Taiwan remain the free liberal democracy it is. I would hate to see it go the way of Hong Kong—swallowed up in the "monstering horror" (as E.E. Cummings called it) of a quasi-Stalinist super-state. 

At the same time, I cannot despise Taiwanese politicians who see no future or chance of prevailing in an armed conflict with a nuclear power; those who say that democracy is no good to anyone if no one is alive to see it;

Who say—with Logue—that it is no good preserving the "honour" or freedom of a "cinder." 

The question, of course, comes down to which course of action is actually more likely to hasten war. 

Would passing a special military budget act as a deterrent—raising the costs of an anticipated war for Beijing and prompting them to back down? 

Or would it goad them to act now, before Taiwan has a chance to put this law into effect and defend itself? 

Perhaps the Taiwanese opposition meeting with Beijing and mouthing a few platitudes about a shared vision for "eventual" reunification does more to lower the temperature and prevent war than sabre-rattling. 

People are not wrong to cite the lesson of Munich and warn against the dangers of appeasement—whether in Ukraine or in Taiwan. It remains a valid truth. 

But it must be weighed perpetually against the alternative lesson: the one Russell and Logue have in mind. Let us call it: the lesson of Hiroshima. 

It is the lesson that no one can win—no civilization or democracy worth the name can survive—an outright nuclear war. 

In such a scenario, as John Kenneth Galbraith once put it, "the ashes of capitalism will be indistinguishable by even the most perceptive surviving ideologue from the ashes of Communism."

It is the lesson that no one can honor or dishonor "a cinder." 

In the tug of war between these two valid principles—these two valid lessons of history, Munich and Hiroshima—it is not obvious that one always prevails. 

What we have here is something more like a perpetual dilemma—as Koestler argued. A "Scylla and Charybdis," as he put it— with no obviously preferable choice between the two. 

Koestler put his hope not in the ultimate victory of one side or the other in this stalemate—but in a kind of "mutation" in human concerns and ideologies that would render the whole question obsolete. 

Perhaps that mutation is arriving imminently today—with the rise of super-powerful AI, which may well render all our arguments about borders and ideologies of lingering Great Power conflicts increasingly irrelevant.