Posted on 07/08/2003 11:49:18 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
When the 20th century began, Europe ruled most of the world.
The British Empire covered a fourth of the earth's surface, the Russian Empire a sixth. The French Empire spread from North Africa to Indochina, Germany's from Africa to Samoa.
The century saw the death of them all, and Europe's retreat into its own small continent. What happened? According to historian Jacques Barzun, "The blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction" was World War I.
Nine million of the best and bravest of the young of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy and the United States perished. By war's end, four empires had vanished.
In the Allied victory, U.S. intervention was decisive. In 1917, German divisions had helped Austria knock Italy out at Caporetto. In early 1918, Germany had forced Lenin's Bolsheviks to surrender and give up Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine.
In March of 1918, Quartermaster Gen. Ludendorff launched a final offensive that brought the German army back to the Marne, almost to within sight of Paris. Only the arrival of 2 million American troops prevented an Allied defeat.
Schoolchildren are today indoctrinated in the myth that World War I was fought to save mankind from Prussian militarism, that its moral hero was Wilson, that he was tragically thwarted in his desire to bring America into the League of Nations by the bitter spite of evil and conservative men, led by Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge. Had Wilson succeeded, we are taught, all the horrors of World War II might have been averted.
There is another side to this story. It is called the truth. And in Thomas Fleming's "The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I," it is movingly and powerfully told. What is that truth?
World War I was an unnecessary war for America. Britain, France, Italy and Japan did not fight to "make the world safe for democracy," but to crush Germany, loot her colonies, and disarm, bankrupt and dismember her so she never rose again. It was an imperial war from start to finish.
Any who believe in Allied nobility should reread Fleming's account of the "starvation blockade." After Germany laid down her arms, British warships kept food out of her ports and prevented German fishermen from even going out into the Baltic. British-French war aims were not worth the life of a single American doughboy.
Fleming has a novelist's eye for the anecdote that brings home the larger truth. He harbors a burning contempt for propaganda lies and armchair generals who revel in reputations for bloody butchery, and a deep admiration for courageous soldiers like Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton, and the U.S. officers who did their duty and led their Marines and soldiers out into no-man's land and near-certain death.
Any American who thinks John Ashcroft is a threat to civil liberties should read this account of what happened to the men who spoke out against Wilson's war. Hundreds went to prison for violating his Espionage and Sedition acts. Others faced vigilante justice.
Fleming writes of how Wilson's incompetent administrators sent American boys to die, untrained, poorly led and with inferior weapons. Teddy Roosevelt's son Quentin went up in a cast-off French plane to face veteran German pilots who machine-gunned him to death.
Among Fleming's more moving chapters is "The Women of No-Man's-Land" – about the "25,000 skirted Yanks" who "made it over there." Shirley Millard was a New York girl who left her fiance in training, studied a handbook on nursing while crossing the Atlantic and was soon in a hospital near Soissons, under nightly attack.
She watched another nurse to learn how to use a needle to give wounded soldiers morphine. When the next barracks took a direct hit from German planes, she went out in a "blood-red dawn" to see trees "blossomed horribly with fragments of human bodies."
Shirley ended the war in the "salle de mort," the dying room. On Nov. 10, 1918, Sgt. Charlie Whiting, whom she had nursed for days, died. The next day, when nurses rushed in to tell her they had champagne to celebrate the armistice, she told them to get out.
Why did America plunge into a war in 1917 in which 5 million had already died, in which no vital interest was at risk? Wilson wanted a seat at the peace table, where he believed his nobility and superior intellect, and American idealism, could triumph over Old World duplicity, greed and hatred, and usher in a new world order of peace and justice.
It was the utopian dream of a vain, obdurate, willful man. For it, 116,000 Americans died, and the world got Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and World War II.
In his willingness to take on the idols of yesterday in books such as "The Illusion of Victory" and "The New Dealers' War," Fleming is a rarity, a historian unintimidated by the most savagely defended myths of the 20th century.
And what would keep Imperial Germany from becoming as bad as what followed?
Hell, Kaiser Billy and his generals set out to CREATE much of what followed.
Do you really think that the tenets of National Socialism and the concept of lebensraum just came from nowehere, with no cultural roots, and took over Germany?
As well as independence for Arabia, which is still, 80 years later, unfit for self-government.
Imperial Germany CREATED the Soviet Union. And Nazi Germany was not much of a deviation from Imperial Germany--it was a matter of quantity instead of quality.
Also, as I specifically pointed out, the worst of the colonial powers was on the Allied side!
Belgium was only on the Allied side because Kaiser Billy's boys invaded them.
Oops, more examples of Imperial Germany being a rogue state.
Whoa!
OK, now you're castigating everyone else for not foretelling the rise of Nazi Germany, but Kaiser Billy et al get a pass on starting the most totalitarian regime in history?
OK, you've officially lost the argument.
At the Berliner Kongress in 1878, Bosnia was given to Austria-Hungaria for a period of 30 years. Bosnia was to be administered by the Austro-Hungarian empire and before that it was part of the Ottoman empire for a few hundred years. In 1908 Austria-Hungaria annexed Bosnia, which was contrary to the decisions agreed at the Berliner Kongress. The majority population of Bosnia at that time was Serbian. There were no Austrians living in Bosnia, nor Hungarians. Austria-Hungaria's claim to Bosnia is therefore disputable. Bosnia was annexed against the will of it's inhabitants, who were fed up of beeing enslaved by empires. So saying the Prince had no business being in Bosnia is like saying President Bush cannot tour the southwest of the US, because of Mexican separatists like Aztlan, is like don't having a clue really.
But their intention was more than to just end the terrorism. If I recall correctly, Austria wanted to crush Serbia, and issued an ultimatum that no country could accept, if it wished to retain its independence.
It's interesting that our recent war has led us to accept the doctrine that "cleaning out a rogue state" is an acceptable practice that doesn't have dangerous consequences. The current situation, though, is a product of the end of the Cold War. As sole superpower, we have options that aren't available in a closely balanced system of many powers in roughly equal alliances.
One had to tread more carefully in early 20th century Europe, even in dealing with regimes that were squalid or inclined to terrorism. In this the pre WWI had more in common with the Cold War, or with most of the rest of European history, than with the present era.
Germany, on the other hand, is pretty much responsible for the state of affairs where one of the great powers of Europe was not allowed to clean out a rogue state in peace. Its monarch decided to push away Russia in the hopes of courting England, then scare England into being an ally by building a fleet to challenge England's. This all resulted in a suspicious, unstable atmosphere in which anything could set off an explosion.
In the big picture, Germany made a lot of mistakes during the years before the war. And the harm that had been done over the years, couldn't be undone in a time of crisis. In the immediate situation, the German government ought to have restrained Austria and worked to resolve conflict, rather than give Austria a blank check. Russia would not sit by and let Austria crush Serbia.
Pat, and the author--whose book he is reviewing--are correctly analyzing the reality of the time. But the worldview of Pat's, which you denounce, is that of the Founding Fathers'--it is about avoiding entangling alliances. It is Wilson, not Buchanan, who compromised American principles, when he tried to get us into the League of Nations. Fortunately, there were a few bold men in the U.S. Senate, who insisted on debating that issue, until they woke up enough of the public to defeat it. In 1945, the Roosevelt Administration managed to have a steam-roller in effect, before FDR died, which squelched any chance for a real debate on the UN. But both the League and the UN came after Wilson had first undermined the old balance of power in Europe, by out entrance into the War.
Your comment about Israel, shows how out of touch you are with the history involved. There would have been no need to establish a Jewish homeland, had there been no Hitler to brutally uproot European Jews. There would have been no Hitler, but for World War I. The Hohenzollern monarchy had provided the most tolerant society towards Jews in modern Western history; only equalled by the Old South in America.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct. And can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period a great nation to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that in the course of time and things the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it?...
In the execution of such a plan nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur.
Hence frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation prompted by ill will and resentment sometimes impels to war the government contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject. At other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility, instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations has been the victim.
So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation....
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.
Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.
Why forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?
It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world, so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs that honesty is always the best policy....
Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.
Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand, neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences … constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that by such acceptance it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.
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