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To: royalcello
"Nothing you cut and paste will change my view of Wilson, the worst of all American presidents, because he was openly dedicated to bringing down the old European monarchical order which I love. I will never forgive him for that alone."

Wilson was a bad President with many sins, but he was far better than you give him credit, warts and all.

Per your specific complaint about Wilson bringing down Monarchies, you must ignore that Wilson saw and agreed to the new monarchies in Serbia, Montenegro, and elsewhere that were established at the end of the Great War.

Per your complaint that he didn't seek peace to the same extent as Austria's Emperor Karl, you lionize Karl for making the tiniest of peace overtures (he sent his brother in law on a single peace-making attempt) while ignoring that President Wilson called upon Allied and Central Powers to declare "peace without victory" prior to the U.S. entry into that war, further ignored Wilson's January 1918 peace initiative, disregarded Wilson's historic 14 Point peace plan that historians universally applaud today, and appeared to have missed not only his massive popularity in post-war Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and Britain, but also his Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 (when European Emporer Karl didn't even get a nomination from his own kind).

OK, so you despise President Wilson and the forced end of the German monarchy (Austria's Emperor voluntarily ended his own monarchy). Fine. Wilson, warts and all, still stands head and shoulders above *all* of the monarchs of Austria and Germany.

217 posted on 04/19/2005 9:28:40 PM PDT by Southack (Media Bias means that Castro won't be punished for Cuban war crimes against Black Angolans in Africa)
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To: Southack
Wilson saw and agreed to the new monarchies in Serbia, Montenegro, and elsewhere that were established at the end of the Great War.

Montenegro? You got that backwards. The Montenegrin monarchy disappeared as a result of WWI. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was not really a "new monarchy" but rather an extension of Serbia which was allowed to grab territory that had belonged to Austria-Hungary, as well as the formerly independent Kingdom of Montenegro.

Thanks in part to Wilson's inconsistently applied and hypocritical concept of "self-determination," seven new republics were created out of what had been monarchical territory: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. (And Hungary remained a monarchy in name only, with Karl betrayed and excluded by the "Regent" Horthy.) The inherent instability of some of these new artificial states, with their large discontented German majorities, would be a major catalyst for World War II.

Wilson's purported desire for peace was dishonest; he consistently backed the Allies behind the facade of neutrality. As far back as 1915, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned because he could see that the Wilson administration was bent on war. Wilson's double standards led him to condemn German attacks on "neutral" ships while ignoring the British naval blockade of Germany which was a violation of international law and deliberately designed to starve the German population. Doesn't sound like the actions of a great humanitarian to me. Read Thomas Woods's Politically Incorrect Guide to U.S. History, whose excellent chapter on World War I devastates Wilson and his unjustified intervention from a traditional American conservative point of view, without the author being a monarchist.

223 posted on 04/20/2005 6:49:36 AM PDT by royalcello
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