"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." Winston Churchill
In Russia, the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew the Romanov dynasty and established a Provisional Government drawn from liberals (Constitutional Democrats), moderate socialists (Mensheviks), and the radical Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). The Bolsheviks, under Lenin, were initially a minority faction in the soviets. Their advantage was not electoral popularity but organization. Democratic centralism demanded iron discipline, creating a hierarchy capable of rapid, coordinated action. While the Provisional Government debated war policy and land reform, the Bolsheviks captured the soviets and built the Red Guard. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks initially governed in coalition with the Left SRs. Yet when the Constituent Assembly elections in November 1917 delivered a plurality to the SRs, the Bolsheviks dispersed the Assembly by force. During the Civil War, the Cheka arrested and executed Mensheviks, SRs, and anarchists. The Kronstadt rebellion of 1921—led by sailors who had been among the Bolsheviks’ most loyal supporters—was crushed by Trotsky’s Red Army. Stalin later completed the destruction of the revolutionary generation in the Great Purge of 1936–1938, executing Old Bolsheviks who had built the very state that condemned them.
Iran in 1979 followed a comparable trajectory through a radically different cultural context. The anti-Shah coalition was extraordinarily broad: secular liberals from the National Front, the communist Tudeh Party, the Marxist-Leninist Fedayeen, Islamist modernists, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s clerical network. The left provided critical labor strikes, street mobilization, and armed struggle. Many leftist women wore the chador in solidarity, believing the revolution would yield a pluralistic, post-monarchist republic. Khomeini’s faction, however, commanded a nationwide infrastructure of mosques and clerical hierarchies that no secular group could rival. After the Shah’s fall, a referendum established the Islamic Republic. The left initially hailed the new order as anti-imperialist. But Khomeini’s camp moved systematically. Restrictions on women intensified. Universities were purged in the “Cultural Revolution.” By 1983 the Tudeh Party was banned; its leaders were among thousands executed in the 1988 prison massacres. The very leftists who had fought the Shah ended up in Evin Prison, accused of waging war against God.
The Spanish Civil War illustrates how the pattern can operate even during an existential military struggle. In 1936, the Popular Front government united liberals, socialists, communists, and anarchists against the Nationalist insurgency. In Catalonia and Aragon, the anarchist CNT-FAI and the anti-Stalinist POUM controlled territory, implemented collectivization, and fielded independent militias. They represented a genuine dual power. The Soviet-backed Spanish Communist Party, however, viewed these allies as threats to Stalinist hegemony rather than to the Republic. Soviet advisors and NKVD operatives worked to consolidate communist control. During the Barcelona May Days of 1937, communist-led assault guards attacked POUM and anarchist positions. The POUM was outlawed; its leader Andreu Nin was abducted and murdered. George Orwell, who had fought with the POUM militia, fled across the French border to avoid arrest. The coalition against fascism had consumed its own radicals not for military failure, but for refusing to submit to a single authoritarian center.
The British experience between 1938 and 1940 shifts the arena from revolutionary civil war to international diplomacy, yet the underlying miscalculation remains strikingly similar. Neville Chamberlain, the Conservative Prime Minister, confronted an aggressively rearming Nazi Germany in a Britain still traumatized by the slaughter of the First World War. Determined to prevent another continental war, Chamberlain pursued a policy of appeasement. At Munich in September 1938, he and the French agreed to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for Hitler’s promise that it would be his final territorial demand. Chamberlain returned to London declaring he had secured “peace for our time.” Winston Churchill, then a backbench Conservative MP, had spent years warning that Hitler’s ambitions were insatiable and that German rearmament violated the Versailles Treaty. Churchill’s warnings were dismissed as warmongering by much of the political establishment. Six months after Munich, Hitler violated the agreement and occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Chamberlain’s government fell in May 1940 during the disastrous Norwegian campaign, and Churchill—long marginalized as an alarmist—was summoned to lead a nation now compelled to fight the very war appeasement had failed to prevent.
Several threads connect these disparate cases. In each instance, the non-authoritarian party—whether a Menshevik, a Spanish anarchist, an Iranian socialist, or a British Prime Minister—operated under the assumption that the authoritarian force could be satisfied or absorbed through accommodation. They mistook tactical patience for strategic moderation. Meanwhile, the authoritarian faction—Bolshevik, Khomeinist, Stalinist, Nazi—possessed superior organization, a disciplined hierarchy, and a ruthless clarity of purpose. They monopolized instruments of coercion early: the Cheka, the Revolutionary Guards, the NKVD-directed secret police, or the Wehrmacht. Most critically, they exploited the language of their respective movements—the revolution, the Republic, the nation—to delegitimize rivals as traitors, counter-revolutionaries, or warmongers, thereby jusifying the destruction of former allies or the dismissal of prescient critics.
The historical record does not suggest that all political compromise leads to catastrophe; it suggests rather that authoritarians who explicitly disavow democratic or diplomatic norms tend to exploit compromise as asymmetrical warfare. The Mensheviks trusted the Bolsheviks as fellow revolutionaries. The Iranian left trusted the Islamic Republic as an anti-imperialist project. Chamberlain trusted Hitler’s signature at Munich. In each case, the institution of trust was extended to an actor who viewed it not as a mutual obligation but as a temporary shield behind which to prepare the next advance.
History teaches no deterministic laws, but it does document recurring human errors. One of the most costly has been the failure to recognize that authoritarian movements, by their own stated doctrines and organizational logic, often aim not at coexistence but at the annihilation of the very space in which compromise is possible. The twentieth century preserves the minutes of that lesson in the minutes of the Petrograd Soviet, the cells of Evin Prison, the rubble of Barcelona, and the archives of a Munich agreement that bought not peace, but time for the aggressor.
On this day, September 11th 2025, President Trump drew attention to the origins of the Pentagon, noting that it had its groundbreaking on September 11, 1941, before it was scarred by flame and terror exactly sixty years later. He acknowledged the deep, lingering pain of the families affected by the attacks, honoring both the first responders who rushed into the burning buildings and the passengers who fought back. Trump emphasized that in the face of "pure evil," Americans defy fear and endure the flames, emerging from hardship stronger and prouder than ever.
Let us recall history and break the cycle towards totalitarianism.
“History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” – Mark Twain
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer
