Appeasement

Why is everyone so hard on appeasement?  It was totally a good idea, if you realize that nobody had any ideas about Hitler's real intentions of taking over the known world.  The imperative, the absolute necessity of preventing another war like the Great one was, in the thirties, vastly more important than, say, the long-term military defenses of Czechoslovakia.  Germany had (deservedly) already gotten a pretty raw deal with respect to the Treaty of Versailles, and Chamberlain probably felt, just as Hitler did, that Germany was taking back what was rightfully hers.  The idea that appeasement was spineless corresponds exactly to the puerile notion that a powerful, masculine approach to foreign policy is one that involves the deaths of millions.  It wasn't like there never was a war; when things got out of hand, England responded.  I don't fault them for waiting.