Виновные люди: Политический памфлет 1940 года.

Short polemical book published in 1940the Colombian film

Guilty Men is a British polemical book written under the pseudonym "Cato" that was published in July 1940, after the failure of British forces to prevent the defeat and occupation of Norway and France by Nazi Germany. It attacked fifteen public figures for their failed policies towards Germany and for their failure to re equip the British armed forces. In denouncing appeasement, it defined the policy as the "deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler's blatant bullying". A classic denunciation of the former government's policy, it shaped popular and scholarly thinking for the next two decades.

Guilty Men was written by three journalists: Michael Foot (a future leader of the Labour Party), Frank Owen (a former Liberal MP), and Peter Howard (a Conservative). They believed that Britain had suffered a succession of bad leaders who, with junior ministers, advisers and officials, had conducted a disastrous foreign policy towards Germany and had failed to prepare the country for war. After Victor Gollancz, creator of the Left Book Club, had been persuaded to publish the book, the authors divided the 24 chapters among themselves and wrote it in four days, finishing on 5 June 1940. Gollancz asked for some of the rhetoric to be toned down, fearing the reaction it might provoke, but he rushed it into print in four weeks. It was under a pseudonym because the writers were employed by Lord Beaverbrook, who barred his journalists from writing for publications other than his own. Beaverbrook, who was active in the Conservative Party, was also a vocal supporter of appeasement, though he was not mentioned in the book. There was much speculation as to who Cato was. At one time Aneurin Bevan was named as its author. Randolph Churchill (Winston's son, also a Beaverbrook journalist) was also wrongly attributed as its author. In the meantime, the real authors had some fun reviewing their own work. Michael Foot wrote an article, "Who Is This Cato?" Beaverbrook was as much in the dark as anyone but joked that he "made do with the royalties from Guilty Men". The authors earned no money from the book as their literary agent Ralph Pinker, son of the much more successful James B. Pinker, absconded with the royalties. selling 200,000 copies in a few weeks. Guilty Men remains in circulation and was reprinted for its historical interest by Penguin Books to mark its sixtieth anniversary in 2000.

The book's arguments and conclusions have been questioned by politicians and historians. In 1945, Quintin Hogg, MP, wrote The Left Was Never Right, which was critical of Guilty Men and argued that "unpreparedness before the war was largely the consequence of the policies of the parties of the Left". In 1944, Geoffrey Mander had published We were not all wrong. The idea of appeasement as error and cowardice was challenged by historian A. J. P. Taylor in his book The Origins of the Second World War (1960), in which he argued that, in the circumstances, it might be seen as a rational policy.