As part of my Mystery Project, I’ve been soaking my mind in the Munich Conference of September 1938, the high noon of appeasement, when Hitler manipulated Britain and France into handing him Czechoslovakia in the name of “peace.”
A tremendous disaster. While I was meditating on it, I came across this resonant paragraph in Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century. Conquest is commenting on the really huge historical misjudgments, like Munich and Yalta.
“The defect was not, strictly speaking one of intellect or intelligence. Not even of judgment, in the abstract. It was, rather, one of imagination. [My italics.] There are minds of apparently high IQ, people of apparently great experience, who are unable to conceive of minds and men markedly different from themselves. Chamberlain and Roosevelt were not “stupid.” They simply lacked the scope to envisage alien minds as they really were. They were not, in a crucial sense, men of the world.”