The attitude of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and other British politicians toward Czechoslovakia in 1938 veered awfully close to the oxymoron, "We must destroy this country to save it."

So desperate were they to avoid war with Germany that they abandoned Czechoslovakia to a Nazi fate, as David Faber shows and the word, "appeasement," became a shibboleth wielded cavalierly today by American politicians and radio talk-show hosts ignorant of the "Munich Crisis" to warn us of everything from North Korea to socialized medicine.

There have been well over 200 books on the subject in English alone, and there is no reason you shouldn't pick this one out of the pack to inform yourself. It is well-written by a historian ("Speaking for England") and former member of Parliament, documented and detailed down to the ground.

Czechoslovakia was a country cobbled together from meetings held in Pittsburgh only 20 years earlier out of the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian empire. An amalgam of ethnic groups, its functioning democracy might have stumbled along indefinitely had it not been for another minority, the Sudeten Germans.

With the help of opportunist sympathizers in the Sudetenland, German Nazis told them how eager they should be to be part of Germany until even the least interested among them believed it.

The history of what has come to be called "Munich" is essentially the history of two things:

Chamberlain's continued willingness to be deceived by Hitler and because of that position, the rapid unraveling of Czechoslovakia.

The author makes abundantly clear that Hitler had absolutely no intention of ever coming to any agreement.

Faber also makes clear, correspondingly, the "breathtaking naïvete" of the British and French in dealing with Hitler. Among the few prominent men opposing appeasement were Anthony Eden, Chamberlain's foreign secretary, who had recently resigned over the issue, and, most famously, Winston Churchill.

The piece of paper that Chamberlain brought back to London from Munich Sept. 30, which he said offered "peace with honour" and "peace for our time," of course brought about neither. Hitler said it had "no further significance whatsoever."

The agreement allowed for the entry of German soldiers into the Sudetenland and its absorption into the Reich along with guarantees for the "new" Czechoslovakia.

In fact, within 2 1/2 months the various regions had been gobbled up by Germany. On Dec. 17, Hitler rode in triumph into Prague, sat at Czech President Eduard Benes' desk and drafted a proclamation declaring that Czechoslovakia, having "ceased to exist," was incorporated into the Reich.