Five best books on appeasement

Bruce Bawer is the author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books about appeasement.

One title on the list:

The Tyranny of Guilt
by Pascal Bruckner

It's clear why democracies appeased Hitler and Stalin—they preferred making concessions to waging war. But why do current European leaders kowtow to tinhorn tyrants abroad and to the bullies who run European Muslim communities, none of whom wield the kind of power that those dictators did? In this eloquent book—virtually every line of which is an aphorism worth quoting—French intellectual Pascal Bruckner finds the answer to today's appeasement largely in yesterday's: remorse over Europe's failure to prevent world war, the Shoah and the Gulag (not to mention remorse over colonialism) has led Europeans to view their civilization as intrinsically destructive and thus not worth defending. But by choosing guilt over responsibility, Bruckner argues, they're only repeating past errors. The lesson of the 20th century, he says, isn't that peace is worth any price; it's that "democracies have to be powerfully armed in order not to be defeated by the forces of tyranny."

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue