Paul Gottfried does indeed see the shades of grey, and the Neoconservatives can’t!  The Neoconservatives in their journals try to render equivalent World War I, World War II, the Cold War (the Neocon “World War III"), and the current war in Iraq (the Neocon “World War IV” against something misnamed “Islamofascism").  These wars are anything but equivalent in circumstance or justification.  The Cold War was just in principle, though how it was carried out wasn’t always just or wise.  I lost a family member in the stupid Vietnam War.  World War II was just in Europe, questionable in the Pacific, where my father and uncles risked their lives to save a silly US colony.  The War against Islam has no merit at all (and I am uneasly when certain Paleoconservatives sound like Neocons in talking about the dangers of Islam).  Paul Gottfried makes the case against World War I, the Lincolnlands’ worst foreign policy mistake, done by our worst president, one even worse than Dishonest Abe and the Great Satan, Franklin Roosevelt.

I would have been pro-German/Austrian/Ottoman in World War I.  Paul Gottfried admonishes this view.  I shall take what he says to heart.

Long live my fellow North Carolinian Claude Kitchin, the Jeffersonian leader of the House in 1917, who opposed Wilson’s War when Our Worst asked Congress to declare it. Other Congressmen told Kitchin that he was right, but he House of Morgan wanted the war on the side of Perfidious Albion— another case of the US as the water boy and lackey and cannon fodder of another country’s foreign office.

Gringos believe in three damnable myths, that The Great Satan saved us from the Great Depression, that Wilson’s War was just, and the Dishonest Abe was fighting against slavery.  We in the League of the South know the truth.

I thank Paul Gottfried for this outstanding article.

Does David Frum believe that the Newfoundland regiments at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 who were virtually annihilated because their stupid officers commanded them to march toward entrenched German positions were “well worth the price”?  The Newfies might have a different opinion.

Another great essay Paul,WW1 was the precusor of all that was bad in the 20th century.The senator from my state Robert LaFollette Sr. was the Ron Paul of this war.He was a hero among my relatives.I grew up in an antiwar home and am passing it on to my children.

Let’s give credit where credit is do.  The Centennial for the Great War is soon approaching and artists, pop and High, philosophers, and intellectuals will be weighing in. 

If 2005’s Joyeux Noelle (buy it for friends this Christmas) and A Very Long Engagement tell us anything, it’s the popular consensus of World War One as suicide, holds the lead.  Frum’s friends may well be test marketing an old counter theme, Teutoniphobia, but they will fail spectacularly.

La Follette is my hero as well.Too bad Frum could not
have been among the poor Newfies whom Wes, (his wife
is Canadian) has mentioned. But then Frum in all
probability would not have been a raging Teutonophobe
before Adolf. Indeed in 1914, he might have sided
with the Cenrtral Powers, which were then seen as
protecting Eastern European Jews against the
anti-Semitic Russian government.

Sid Cundiff is praising someone for being able to recognize shades of grey? What a lark. Sid “race does not exist and anyone who says it does is a Nazi” wouldn’t know a shade of grey if it smacked him upside the head.

Billy Bob

David Frum talking about History, as is the case with the rest of the Neo-Rabids...is like Emily Post talking about sex. They might know something about it ...like perhaps a dog knows something about scent rolling ...but damned if I would use them as a reliable source.

Dr. Gottfried,

Remember that Emperor Charles did everything he could to stop the war, and restore a stable Europe that essentially was the status quo ante bellum.  He realized that there would be no peace between Germany and France until Alsatia and Lorraine were back with France, and would have given the Germans a huge province of his, I can’t remember whether it was Silesia, Galicia, or the Ukraine.  The idiot German General Staff refused to listen to the only head of state who took pains to visit his troops at the front, and fought until they lost everything.

Emperor Charles also wrote his in-law Sixte, an Italian nobleman serving in the Belgian army, trying to see what could be done to end the nightmare.

Cast all the aspersions you want on the others, but please give Blessed Charles his due!

Frum shows that the Neo-Cons are truly a part of the lunatic war Democrats and there is nothing Conservative about them.

With no insane war there would have been no holocaust, no Gallipoli, no Nazis, no Communist Russia or China, no Viet Nam war, no Israel, and no Imperial US and no Churchill. Perhaps Crown Prince Rupprecht would have taken his rightful place on the British throne.

A generation of European’s finest would have lived and who knows what good might have happened if peace had won out or mindless war-mongering? Then again no Fort Sumter no excuse to rally the North to put down the Slaveocrats.

“, Frum reminds us that the “German occupation of Belgium pioneered the methods the Nazis would later use in Poland and Ukraine.”

That is beyond disgusting. I don’t know what Frum has against the Kaiser and I sincerely doubt if he’s much of a Canadian patriot. Suffice to say the tragedy of World War I has led to much of the world that we see today. Maybe that’s why Frum celebrates what was a stupid and senseless war while the sane people of the world mourn so much that was lost.

As a Wisconsin and someone who wrote a book on LaFollette’s opositionm to American’s entry into the war, I can tell you there are many similarities to Lafollette and Ron Paul.

As one of the last surviving members of the old Canadian Right (who recognizes that John A. MacDonald was not a neocon), I agree with my friend Paul Gottfried’s critique of those who fail to grasp the basic facts of WW One, especially the shared responsibility of all powers for that tragic blunder.

I suppose, however, that Frum (who laments the lack of awareness which Canadians have for their ancestor’s sacrifices in wars past) would have been on stronger ground had he focused on WW 2, which more easily passes the criteria of just war theory.  The Trudeau legacy of understating and even ignoring the contribution of the Canadian military to my nation’s history has persuaded many Canadians that their nation was founded by pacifist and multiculturalist ideologues.  This legacy no doubt explains why the federal government gave only $250,000 as start-up funds to the Juno Beach memorial in 2002 (Juno is the Canadian equivalent of Omaha), which forced aging veterans to go cap in hand to big business to build a monument worthy of the sacrifices of our WW2 soldiers in the D-Day campaign. (Even Wal-Mart gave more money than the government!)

Canadians often ridicule Americans for their lack of knowledge of Canada; I can only respond that self-righteous hypocrisy has won out over historic memory in much of Canada today.  Physician, heal thyself.

Wilhelm’s Germany and Franz Josefs Austria Hungry were the most Jew friendly places on earth.A lot of great Jewish scientists and thinkers were nurtured there Von Mises, Dr Erlich,Freud,etc.

Mirabile dictu! I agree with every word that my fellow
Tar Heel, Sid Cundiff has written! I knew it was bound
to happen, and it has. Run quickly to the nearest Latin
rite church and commission a Te Deum....!

And let me add my strong “thank you” to Paul Gottfried
once again, for an excellent piece. Niall Ferguson’s
PITY OF WAR, as he states, is an excellent corrective
to all the Wilsonian drivel that still is written and
taught these days. But let’s not forget Beard, Barnes,
and others, pathbreaking revisionist historians of that
tragic conflict.

And, yes, Sid, Claude Kitchin is one of my heroes too!

The Kaiser und Konig Karl of Habsburg strove manfully to
end that war and its insane carnage. He is now a Blessed
of the Church for his efforts and his life of sanctity.

Thanks for a superb essay.

Good show and then some.  Here’s a good word for a terribly unappreciated great American.  William Jennings Bryan was Wilson’s first Secretary of State.  He resigned because Wilson’s brand of neutrality was guaranteed to bring the US into the war on the British side.  As a Christian pacifist Bryan wanted no part of it.  Too bad Colin Powell was such a subservient team player.

Had the US stayed truly neutral and acted as an honest broker, a peace with which both sides could have lived was very possible.  Imagine how subsequent history might have been different had Corporal Hitler been able to pursue a postwar career as an artist specializing in watercolors of architectural antiquities in Austria and Bavaria.

1. If Frummer is spreading the old Belgian atrocities lies of the British Press office, then he’s up to very damnable work indeed.

2. Boyd Cathey, I suspect more pleasant surprises are in store for you. 

3. Niall Ferguson’s book is indeed outstanding.  And the title is so correct:  Name the most important economic power, if not the dominant country, in Europe today:  Germany—and that after losing two world wars and 44 years divided!  So if that was what so going to happen anyway, they why have these two wars and so many lives lost just to try to stop it?  Paul Gottfried is a gentleman and and scholar to praise a book from someone who may not subscribe to Paleoconservative politics.

4. Reg Stocking is correct about Bryan.  The recent biography by a Social Democrat/Cultural Marxist completely ignores Bryan’s finest hour:  His opposition to Woodrow the Worst. 

I would move only one amendment to what Reg has said.  One wonders: had there been no World War I, or had the Central Powers won it, would ol’ Adi have been an antisemite?  The record shows that he had, in his Linz and Vienna days. Jewish friends, considered himself deeply obliged and grateful to his mother’s Jewish physician, avoided joining George Schönerer’s antisemitic Pan German Union (though granted this is an argument from silence), sold his paintings and postcards in stores owned by Jewish merchants to whom he was grateful, and we don’t hear a peep of antisemitism out of his mouth or in his writing until 1919.  And as for his likely life:  No World War I, and my guess is that ‘Dolf would have ended up a copy boy in the architectural firms of Speer und Speer.

Bryan wasn’t a pacifist. He was an ardent whooper for the Spanish War until he found out that the enterprise was an imperialistic one, and even volunteered to fight in the war.

You write:

“I was amused by Frum’s reference to German atrocities in Belgium foreshadowing those of the Nazi occupation of Poland and Ukraine. Presumably he is still reading the horror reports of Lord Bryce, who was in charge of British war propaganda. Unlike Frum, however, Bryce admitted to having invented his facts, as a wartime patriotic act.”

You are quite right that reports of German wartime atrocities (particularly in Belgium) were thoroughly exploited by allied propagandists. The charge of atrocity is not for all that without foundation, quite the contrary. I would suggest you take a look at John Horne and Alan Kramer’s German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (Yale, 2002), the most authoritative and sustained examination of the question to date.

There is of course an important difference between Belgium and the Ukraine (apart from the question of scale and duration): in the latter but not the former, the murders were part of a well-organized, genocidal campaign of extermination. In Belgium, by contrast, the killings had not been planned and the practice was quickly eliminated once conditions on the front had settled.

The problem in assuming WW I could have been stopped may be in causality.  Once nationalism got strong hold of people in the late 19th century and became mixed with social Darwinism’s “Struggle for Existence” and “Survival of the Fittest” morality, it may no longer have been possible for anybody to stop European nations from acting out the implications of those ideas.  Keep in mind that people danced on the streets when WW I was declared. 

You might want to look at Bryan’s undelivered (he died before he could give it) last speech in the Scopes trial.  He discusses Darwinism’s moral implications, particularly as they could be observed in Germany.  In that speech, Bryan was one of the very few people to foresee that something like the Holocaust was about to happen.

The reason for emphasizing the above is that if we want to prevent something we have to deal with its real cause.  Working with just the symptoms is like attempting to heal cancer with pain relievers.

I would have been pro-German/Austrian/Ottoman in World War I.  Paul Gottfried admonishes this view.

I would have been against the war, period.  It put the West in a downward spiral from which it has yet to recover.

We in the League of the South know the truth.

Sid, are you a member or an informant?

A member in good standing and in complete agreement with its stated principles as found on the League’s website. We also have Black members.

Now answer my question:  Are you, Peter Ramus, an agent provocateur for the SPLC?

(you’re correct on WWI)

When I lived in West Germany 30 years ago, and worked at a German university, I remember meeting many German students and scholars who had studied for a time at American universities, where Jews really are not a minority group (and I’m glad of that!) These students would tell me how some Jewish professors born in the USA treated them like trash.  Yet when these students met German Jews living in the USA or teaching at an American University—many of whom lost family members and friends in the Nazi genocide, all of whom had to flee for their lives—the German students were treated kindly, as if they were fellow countrymen. “Oh, you’re from Essen?  I used to live there.  Is such and such still there?  How I wish I could walk down the street again and get a sausage, or really good bread, and outstanding beer” etc. etc. 

These students (all too young to have had anything to do with the genocide or Nazi Germany) were not surprised at the first reaction, and many considered it understandable.  They were astonished at the 2nd.

Guilt is not inherited, folks.  Guilt is committed by an individual, and he alone must answer for it.  The rest of us have the duty to see to it that such crimes, and the attitudes and ideas that foster these crimes, don’t happen again.

Excellent Article Mr. Gottfried.

From what I understand is that the Germans were the last to mobilize.  How can a nation that was last to mobilize, be responsible for a War? From this article, this author writes that it was Russian instransigence to peace that caused the war.http://drchojnowski.blogspot.com/2006/10/pope-saint-pius-x-prophet-of-great-war.html

My take on the WWI was that it was purposely planned to topple the rest of the monarchies in Europe and End the Old Order. And set up something to in the vacuum created in order to discredit nationalism. Churchill’s bellicosity is revealing. I believe Churchhill, from Gottfried’s article, is that Churchill is the nexus for BOTH World Wars.

“"A congenital alcoholic born to an American-Jewish mother and a degenerate gambling-addicted alcoholic fortune-hunter of an English aristocrat, who subsequently contracted syphilis and succumbed to syphiloma of the brain exacerbated by severe alcoholism. Having lost all his money at the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, as a bankrupt, Churchill was also about to lose his Parliamentary seat, but remained in Parliament as a paid agent of the Jewish Board of Deputies. The Inland Revenue never learned how much money he received as an anti-British spy and traitor, who dragged his unwilling country into WW2 on behalf of the Rothschilds & Co and bankrupted Britain in the process.”

I believe that WWI and WWII were planned far in advance and it is all a conspiracy.  Notice the similarity between Woodrow Wilson wanting to establish a League of Nations with his WWI and FDR instigating a Japenese attack so he could implant the United Nations---I smell conspiracy at the highest levels! Here is a link to the traitorous activity of FDR http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/denson8.html

WWII was planned. It was planned in London.

Here is that link again on WWI, http://drchojnowski.blogspot.com/2006/10/pope-saint-pius-x-prophet-of-great-war.html

Many thanks, Sid, for noting W. J. Bryan’s virtue.  We disagree about many things, but not that.  As I’ve learned history, Hitler fell into a frightful Jew-hating mess in Vienna.  This caused him to blame Jews - the Rothschilds in particular - for the Central Powers’ defeat.  He utterly failed to consider the arrival or one million fighting Americans and all their gear in France plus another million on the way.  Had he realized what contributions Jews might have made, he wouldn’t have created the environment which caused Einstein to flee.  Had he properly appreciated America’s strength, he would have behaved far differently.  Please don’t ask for details.

One of the causes of the perennial wars between Germany and France that seems to be overlooked from the American and British perspective is the fight over Elsass Lothringen, which is the remnants of Lothar’s kingdom - itself the result of the partition of the Frankish kingdom. Sandwiched between the new emerging kingdoms of France and Germany, it was bound to be sooner or later absorbed into one of them.
Since the majority of people in Elsass Lothringen was German, it was only understandable that, with the emergence of the German nation state in the 19th century, Germany felt an obligation to bring these Germans “Heim ins Reich”, which was successfully accomplished in 1871. So there was no reason for Germany to enter into a war, as opposed to France, which was looking to regain that province.
Speaking with my grandfather, a WWI veteran of the Kaiser’s army, his reason for supporting Hitler was that Adolf promised to free the Germans in Elsass-Lothringen from the French yoke, (besides the Sudeten Germans from the Czech one, the people of Danzig from the Polish rule and atrocities, and allow the Austrian’s to join their brethren in Germany), all a result of the loss of WWI.
So war between France and Germany was a foregone conclusion as long as there was a German population under French rule, and hence the willingness for Germans to go through another horrific war experience in WWII to rectify the perceived wrong of the Versailles treaty..
Looking at the aspirations of other people – especially in the Austria-Hungarian – multinational empire, in 1914 to look for self-rule, WWI as well as its continuation in WWII, seem inevitable. A look at most other conflicts since those two great wars point to these aspirations as the main reason for people to pick up arms.
It is in artificially created state constructs – like Iraq, Sudan and Yugoslavia – where we see unrest.
The hype about “war of civilizations” and “ideologies” is mainly hype, fanned by those who make good money in wars. Common people like to be ruled by their own kind and otherwise just want to be good neighbors.

Frum is a national embarrassment.

On the contrary, Gottfried is an embarrassment.

Writers relying upon such neologisms as “Germanophobe”, like “Islamophobe”, are adapting the extreme of political correctness - namely, refusing in the name of self-righteous ego to recognise the tremendous evil brewing in either of these cultures well before their explosions of violence; evil on such a scale takes centuries, not months, to ripen. Having lived under both cultures and had contact with older generations, I can affirm that on the general matter of the cultural mores, Frum is far closer to accurate than Gottfried.

If Observer is embarrassed by Dr. Gottfried, than I’d guess he is proud of George Koval, now revealed as one of the most important spies in history, having passed America’s nuclear secrets on to Uncle Joe Stalin.  I guess a fellow motivated to help Uncle Joe must not have done it out of any evil motive. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/us/12koval.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

November 12, 2007
A Spy’s Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
He had all-American cover: born in Iowa, college in Manhattan, Army buddies with whom he played baseball.

George Koval also had a secret. During World War II, he was a top Soviet spy, code named Delmar and trained by Stalin’s ruthless bureau of military intelligence.

Atomic spies are old stuff. But historians say Dr. Koval, who died in his 90s last year in Moscow and whose name is just coming to light publicly, was probably one of the most important spies of the 20th century.

On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.
The announcement hailed Dr. Koval as “the only Soviet intelligence officer” to infiltrate the project’s secret plants, saying his work “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”

Since then, historians, scientists, federal officials and old friends have raced to tell Dr. Koval’s story — the athlete, the guy everyone liked, the genius at technical studies. American intelligence agencies have known of his betrayal at least since the early 1950s, when investigators interviewed his fellow scientists and swore them to secrecy.

The spy’s success hinged on an unusual family history of migration from Russia to Iowa and back. That gave him a strong commitment to Communism, a relaxed familiarity with American mores and no foreign accent.

George Koval was born in 1913 to Abraham and Ethel Koval in Sioux City, Iowa, which had a large Jewish community and a half-dozen synagogues. In 1932, during the Great Depression, his family emigrated to Birobidzhan, a Siberian city that Stalin promoted as a secular Jewish homeland.

Henry Srebrnik, a Canadian historian at the University of Prince Edward Island who is studying the Kovals for a project on American Jewish Communists, said the family belonged to a popular front organization, as did most American Jews who emigrated to Birobidzhan.

Of course the murderous blockades and endless wars needed to forestall the evils of other cultures are, well, ... regrettable, but not in any way whatsoever evil in themselves. It is unthinkable to imagine that persons amongst us spreading such goodness in the world may in fact have some ulterior motive.

World War I created Communism and World War II helped spread it across a third of the planet.  It’s impossible to imagine that enduring Kaiser Bill would have been worse for humanity than Stalin and Mao.  All that tragedy, just to avert Austria-Hungarian influence in the Balkans?  No, WW1 was not worth it!

What would Benjamin Freedman have said?:
http://rense.com/general75/neneb.htm

Twelve Prepositions for discussion on World War I

1. John Lukacs, my favorite historian of modernity, (I refer to him from memory) argued about 15 years ago that we know that we are living in a new age, beginning in 1989, because the high massif called World War II is no longer casting its shadow upon us.  I would ask, As move away from that mountain range, can a higher one can be seen: World War I?  Are we still living in the sad age which is largely the consequence of that war?

2. In fact, World War I is still persists, with renewed violence, in the Balkans and in the Near East, complete with the same Serbian, Arab, Zionists, and Turkish Nationalists; a Russia with the same ambitions as the Czar; Great Powers struggling for hegemony (regional, colonial, and global), and one Anglophone power attempting to maintain supremacy on the seas.  There is no doubt that Wilsonianism – be it Neocon, be it Social Democrat – still dominates American thinking.

3. A friend of mine is a historian, specializing in later modernity.  He says that, from a historian’s viewpoint, when comparing the two world wars, the First is the more interesting conflict.

4. One of the many fine points of Ferguson’s book is that it puts the final nail in the coffin of the Fischer Thesis.  The Germans neither planned, started, or wanted the War.  They entered it nervous, frightened, reluctant, and praying that it would be over quickly.  The “Guilt Clause” in the awful Versailles Treaty remains an lie.

5. Another myth: That the Germans could have quickly won had they not botched the August 1914 offensive in the west.  On the contrary: in the face of the machine gun and rapid-fire artillery, and absent the tank and the armored personal carrier, no campaign of either Napoleonic 1st Generation War or Blitzkrieg 3rd Generation War could win, and the result of trench warfare, as at Petersburg VA in 1864, was only the result.  Even after the war, the tank theorists were dismissed as fools, among those theorists being a man named De Gaulle.

6.. The generals were pygmies.  Beware when your generals are fighting the last war.  Had the tank been bettered developed and employed, the war would have been very different.

7. The same can be said for the botch at Gallipoli, when for the first time in 700 years, an non-European people humiliated Europe’s if not the world’s, greatest power, foreshadowed by the Japanese at Port Arthur.

8. The whole conflict was a conflict of pygmies.  Had giants been the leaders – if Gladstone had been running Britain, Bismarck Germany, Metternich Austria, Count Witt Russia, and even the madman T. Roosevelt the USA and the psychopath Talleyrand France – the whole conflict could have been avoided through negotiation.  Proof positive that man is not the fatalistic victim of blind forces beyond his control; he is the victim of bad leaders.  The 19th Century gave us giants.  The great political men of 1919-1989 – Churchill, Adenauer, De Gaulle – were all men of the 19th Century.

9. The Democracies especially gave us pygmies: The record of Germany and Britain after the general franchise, of the French Third Republic, and the of united Italian Kingdom in producing outstanding leaders is a poor won.  And we know about Woodrow the Worst.  It frightens me that Nurse Ratched, about to be president, is a utter clone of Wilson, especially in political religion.

10. The general public, fed a diet of “the Good War” and the specter of Naziism (and there is truth in this diet), doesn’t seem to know that in terms of battlefield deaths, the First World War was many times more bloody than the Second.  The figures are staggering, up to six figures for Britain, France, Germany, and Russia.  Italy lost 600,000 in deaths alone.

11. Now an alternative thesis.  All the intellectuals and artists from the 20s onward have decried the civilization that gave us the First World War as one of the worst, reflected in Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.  “Botched Civilization”, the “Waste Land”, etc. remain common phrases.  But is this really true about the European World of 1870-1914?  True, it was afflicted by four evils: racialism, nationalism, the Lincoln-Wilson Whigism, and socialism.  These evils are still with us.  Yet it also gave birth to two traditions and foster an third, all good traditions: The Mengerian Libertarian, the Christian Democratic and Catholic Social Teaching, and the Real Conservative (Burke).  To go a step further, when one considers the cultural achievements of the period, it might be worth asking if 1870-1914 was the happy climax of later modernity, followed by a bitter and hard decline. The Austrian Empire in particular, and especially Vienna, may have been the best place to live since Quattrocento Florence.  And Gringos are kept in the dark by our Cultural Marxists and Neocons about the superiority of German civilization from 1770 until 1933. 

12.  We need to get ready for the centenary of the Great War, and clear away the myths, myths that still directly afflict us.

In retrospect, we can see the destruction of the Second
Reich and the Austro-Hungarian empire as unrelieved
tragedies whose sequels are still with us.

And those ideologues who ranted against “Prussianism”
have much to answer for.

John Doe, I said nothing about Koval, yet you departed on your own little rant. Got a problem?

Joe said, “World War I created Communism” So centuries of Tsarist tyranny had nothing to do with it?

Deacon cites oddball Rense.

Phooey. You’re all nutters. Does Taki attract them?

Mr.Cundiff,

Your 12 Prepostions are excellent starting points!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hkP58FsQGls

On a drive through Belgium in October, we visited Ypres (now Ieper), the scene of some of the most horrible trench warfare of that “War To End War”.  At the Hooge Crater Cemetery, there are as many as eight “Known but to God” soldiers to a grave and to this day they still find as many as thirty sets of remains per year.
We later visited the grave of a long-ago neighbor, Sgt. John R. Corey, age 20, in Epinal, France.  Sgt. Corey was arguably a victim of our inept (criminal?) foreign policy of that time. Now, near a century later, we still harbor those who see war as the way to “..make things right.” Would that they would study the lead up to “The Great War”, preferably among the cemeteries in Flanders Fields.

The “Observer” is of course just another Trotskyite.  When he refers to Paul Gottfried’s “self-righteous ego” the Observerite means that Dr. Gottfried doesn’t stick with the Neo-commie line and is “off the reservation.” For those naïve readers who doubt the evil and violence inherent in the culture that spawns Neocon-Trotskyites, the following excerpt from an article in the Canadian National Post should make things clear.  Note at the end where Stephen Schwartz, who has written for the Neocon Weekly Standard and National Review, praises his idol Trotsky for his Military leadership and his founding of the Red Army, no doubt a military machine that spread “global democracy” and related values.

TROTSKY’S GHOST/WANDERING THE/ WHITE HOUSE
Jeet Heer
June 7, 2003
National Post

Other supporters of the Iraq war also have a Trotsky-tinged past. On the left, the historian Paul Berman, author of a new book called Terror and Liberalism, has been a resonant voice among those who want a more muscular struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Berman counts the Trotskyist C.L.R. James as a major influence. Among neo-conservatives, Berman’s counterpart is Stephen Schwartz, a historian whose new book, The Two Faces of Islam, is a key text among those who want the United States to sever its ties with Saudi Arabia. Schwartz spent his formative years in a Spanish Trotskyist group.

To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as “the old man” and “L.D.” (initials from Trotsky’s birth name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein). “To a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of the] disciples of L.D,” he admits, and he observes that in certain Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At a party in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max Shachtman.

“I’ve talked to Wolfowitz about all of this,” Schwartz notes. “We had this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never part of it. He’s definitely aware.” The yoking together of Paul Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right.

To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of U.S. expansionism, it is important to know something about Max Shachtman, Trotsky’s controversial American disciple. Shachtman’s career provides the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people from the Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon.

Throughout the 1930s, Shachtman loyally hewed to the Trotsky line that the Soviet Union as a state deserved to be defended even though Stalin’s leadership had to be overthrown. However, when the Soviet Union forged an alliance with Hitler and invaded Finland, Shachtman moved to a politics of total opposition, eventually known as the “third camp” position. Shachtman argued in the 1940s and 1950s that socialists should oppose both capitalism and Soviet communism, both Washington and Moscow.

“I see a psychological, ideological and intellectual continuity,” says Schwartz, who defines Trotsky’s legacy to neo-conservatism in terms of a set of valuable lessons. By his opposition to both Hitler and Stalin, Trotsky taught the Left Opposition the need to have a politics that was proactive and willing to take unpopular positions. “Those are the two things that the neo-cons and the Trotskyists always had in common: the ability to anticipate rather than react and the moral courage to stand apart from liberal left opinion when liberal left opinion acts like a mob.”

Trotsky was also a great military leader, and Schwartz finds support for the idea of pre-emptive war in the old Bolshevik’s writings. “Nobody who is a Trotskyist can really be a pacifist,” Schwartz notes. “Trotskyism is a militaristic disposition. When you are Trotskyist, we don’t refer to him as a great literary critic, we refer to him as the founder of the Red Army.”

There is some discrepancy of the Jewish ancestry of Churchill but Alfred Rosenberg writing an article about Churchill writes this:
This single sentence reveals Mr. Churchill’s entire war policy. He wants to “clean up” Europe, which means making any kind of common effort impossible that would benefit the entire continent and bring about a new order.
If this is true, that Churchill, like Woodrow Wilson, like FDR all wanted a New Order, Then he is a criminal and a traitor! (The quote comes from:  http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/schul05.htm )

Good God. 

Professor Gottfried’s criticism of Frum is
great.  But if it comes down to a contest between
Trotskyiites like Frum and Nazi apologists like
the commenter Hoermann (Werner, I hope the Red Army
used your Nazi grandfather’s grave for a latrine),
then I say a plague on both of their houses.

John Ball, you are out of line! Germany was under threat of Communist uprising and it was the internationalists, i.e. the Jews and their co-conspirators, Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR that have persecuted Germany! 

It was Kurt Eisner, the Jewish leader, that ended the Wittlesbach Monarchy that lasted 700 years and set himself up!  Read Rosa Luxemburg’s “The Nationalities Question”. Communism, which is “International Socialism” is a threat!  It is Cultural Marxism that is a threat with its sexual revolution, unisexism, unfettered capitalism, decadence, anti-bigotry, anti-racism, its de-racination agenda, and otherwise.

John Ball, If Kurt Eisner and the rest of the Jewish Communists didn’t wreck the German monarchs and princes, there wouldn’t have been an Adolf Hitler. So really, you ARE way out of line with your stupid comment. Many German soldiers died faithfully doing their duty to their country and you advocating the desecration of the dead is terribly wrong. I am not so sure the “right” people won in WWII.  If the “right” people won, Why is Europe and America Dying?

No I’m not out of line.  I learned from my father, who fought against the Luftwaffe and respected his honourable enemies, to respect all German (and Japanese) warriors of WWII - but most of them were not Nazi Party members.

The German war dead deserve respect - except for any Nazis among them.  Nazi Party members deserve no respect at all, unless they unreservedly repent from their membership in the Nazi Party.

My Dad wept whenever he spoke about the German boys in the Luftwaffe, young men not so different from him, who were killed in honourable combat.  But he always went blue with rage over the Nazi bastards (mostly civilians) who made the war happen, and who ran the death-camps, one of which he witnessed personally during its liberation and, he said, “you could smell the burning flesh for miles around.” (Shove it up your bunghole, all you holocaust-deniers out there.)

At any rate.  I will never desecrate the memory of any honourable German warrior of WW II.  Actually, one of them was one of my father’s friends - a combat veteran of the Luftwaffe, who was NOT A NAZI PARTY MEMBER, who emigrated to America and was my Dad’s colleague.  He and my dad used to get together on every VE-Day and have some beers together to celebrate the end of the war, and Germany’s liberation and the restoration of German honour and Germany’s role as a truly civilised country.  That’s how real warriors think, and behave.  At my Dad’s funeral, his friend - and his former enemy in honourable combat - bowed deeply to me and was the most gracious and compassionate guest at that funeral.

But he was not a Nazi.  Nazis are something else.  I will never desecrate the memory of any honourable warrior, but Nazis are not honourable, and my Dad’s friend who fought in the Luftwaffe would agree.

If my proposition #11 is correct, then what happened in 1914 was neither sickening farce nor dolorous calamity but classic Greek tragedy.

Sid, yes it was.  We agree on your last comment.

@John Ball,
I really take exception to your name calling.
If you would have paid attention to my comments you would have noticed that I listed only a reason my grandfather gave me for his support of Hitler. I never mentioned anything of my support.
So if you have an issue with the argument made, namely that French rule over the German population in Elsass Lothringen was one of the reasons Hitler was able to rally support for his war against France, please say so. And if you have documentation that this was not so, please let us know.
But to fashion this into an ad hominem assault on me puts you squarely on the level of Frum and friends.

PS, two qualifications to clarify my above comment to Sid:

1.  On my mother’s side, I happen to be the great-grandson of a Berlin Gentleman whose family converted to Christianity in the 1800s.  My maternal great-grandfather’s name was Wilhelm Koeplin, a chemist, a Christian of Jewish ancestry, born in Berlin in 1865.  In this way, part of my heritage is VERY similar to that of our Paul Gottfried’s.

2.  I have proudly inherited my “Jewish” (Berliner, proudly and deeply German) Great-grandfather’s gold watch, and I am even MORE proud that he emigrated to America in 1889 after he killed a German Army officer in a duel, after that man insulted my great-grandfather (a Christian) for being “a Jew”.

3.  I, as a grandson of a German Jew whose father converted to Christanity - I of all people personify the “Greek Tragedy” of the German Jews (the REAL Jews, who descend from the exiles of circa 70 AD) - I personify that tragedy of the Jews, and the Germans, and how those two so-called “races” are inseparable after all.  My so-called “Jewish” German grandfather had blonde hair and blue eyes......

...yes, this story is a tragedy and nothing other than a tragedy, the story of the Jews of Western Europe, TRUE descendants of Abraham, most of whom are (or were) more “racially” “white” than 90 percent of Americans who call themselves “white”....

...my REAL Jewish ancestors (real Jews, unlike the Turkic “Jews” of Eastern Europe) were worshiping in the Temple of Solomon, 3,000 years ago when the Celts and Germans were as savage and ignorant as any African Hottentots.

Well there ya go.  Shalom!  And Pax Christi vobiscum.

PS, @ Mr Hoermann,

If your grandfather repudiated the Nazi Party, then I will retract my insult to him.

But if your grandfather never repented from supporting Hitler, then I still shit and piss upon him.  There is absolutely no excuse for your grandfather to have been a Nazi, and I see no expression of regret from you.  Unless and until you express deep regret for your grandfather being a Nazi, I will shit and piss on his grave, and upon you, too, Mr Hoermann.

Sorry, but no, Mr Hoermann, neither I nor 90 percent of the British and Australians, nor any decent people, will let you and your evil heritage off lightly.  Don’t mention your Nazi grandfather to me, or to any decent civilised men, unless you do so with a very humble apology for his being, well, a Nazi sack of shit.

Meanwhile, to be fair, Mr Hoermann, I do appreciate your personal courtesy.  I regard you as a courteous enemy, unless and until you repudiate your Grandfather’s support of the Nazi party without any reservations.

This is the warrior way of courtesy - which the likes of Frum do not understand.  Please respect my courtesy, Mr Hoermann, and I will reciprocate with courtesy to you, as a respectful enemy.
I hope that at least we can agree to disagree in a chivalrous way.

John:
I think you should lay off the liquor before you post any further comments. Your hatred of everything German is obvious in all your postings, but to call a man whom I know as a courageous and decent human being, a “sack of shit”, just because he fell for the propaganda of a politician, is inexcusable and intoxication is the only excuse I would accept.
What were you thinking? Are you blaming all Russians who supported Stalin in WWII for the Ukrainian genocide? All Turks who were devoted to the Ottomans for the genocide on the Armenians? Any American student, who touted Mao’s little red book for the millions murdered in the cultural revolution? How would you like being called a “sack of shit” for voting in 2000 for George W. Bush, since that led to Abu Ghraib and the needless death of millions?
Man, get a grip on yourself.

@Hoerman

Please read carefully. Mr. Ball does not blame your
grandfathr for having believed in the wrong people then.
What he blames him for, and he may be wrong in that, is
in his not acknowledging that he was mistaken and
repenting his previous membership. He is under the
impression taht your grandfather still holds allegiance
to Adolf Hitler and what he stood for, and he would like
you to disabuse him of it.

So, what is it?  Your grandfather was a Nazi. Deplorable
that he believed lies then, but forgivable. But is he
a Nazi now? Does he recognize that he chose wrongly?

It is not much to ask to clarify the matter.

As for the hartred of things German, blame Hitler for
that. Before Hitler, people did have a very good opinion
of Germany (except for those in the Anglophile sphere).
Those Russian peasants who welcomed hte Nazi troops wih
flowers evidently were under the wrong impression that
these Germans were like the Germans from the last war.

I too had a friend who flew in the Luftwaffa and loather Hitler.  Being a good German and being an enthusiastic Nazi are far different.

That said, let’s say two positive things about David Frum.  The first is that, as a Jew, he found Bush II’s White House so sufficatingly WASPy that he had to get out.  The other is that he, unlike the rest of the neocons, has a soft spot for Russell Kirk.  There! That’s my good deed for the day.

Adriana,
You come to the defense of the indefensible.
It seems that you did not read my comment either.
All I mentioned was that Hitler’s opposition to French rule over a German population found my grandfathers support. Does that make him a Nazi? He also thought that the Autobahn was a great idea. I guess he needs to be ostracized for that as well. There were a lot of people, Churchill comes to mind, that at one time or another were in support of Adolf Hitler. Does that make them Nazi’s? Is everybody who ever agreed with any aspect of Karl Marx’s theories a flaming genocidal Communist?
What is it that makes it mandatory to call the exorcist before the name of Adolf Hitler is mentioned?

“What is it that makes it mandatory to call the exorcist before the name of Adolf Hitler is mentioned?”

Mostly a petty self-righteousness that likes to express itself on the cheap.  One needn’t have the slightest relationship to Germany or the NSDP, which I might add has been moribund for 60 years, or much of anything except to disagree with some characters that post here.  Marx and his minions can of course be discussed without reproach here as everywhere. Don’t take it personally and for heavens sake don’t let it discourage you.  I’ve rather gotten used to being abused by some of these posters and I can tell you it builds resolve.

For the events in Europe in the 1920s and 1930 with respect to racialist nationalism (be it Fascism, be it Naziism, be it their fellow travelers in other countries) everyone, EVERYONE, has a share in the blame: Lenin-Stalin Communists, old Classic Marxists, Trotskyites, Socialists and British Labour, Social Democrats, Liberals (in the European sense of the word), Whigs, Christian Democrats, Conservatives, British Tory Conservatives, Catholics, Protestants, Social Gospel “Liberal” Protestants, the press, artists, businessmen, labor leaders, professionals, natural scientists, men of the academy, nationalists, racialists, and of course Fascists and Nazis proper.  Only the Jews are free of blame.

Sid Cundiff writes: “Only the Jews are free of blame.”

Wow what a whopper! In the ideas that come out of the Enlightenment, there is NO mention of de-racination. It is nowhere in Enlightenment thought. De-racination is strictly a Jewish idea. Communism in is Jewish angst politicized. Communism is Jewish Ideology.  Rosa Luxemburg criticized Lenin for giving up on Internationalism. Benjamin Disraeli writes in 1849, a year after the Communist Manifesto comes out:

“"The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist; because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.”

So NO Sid, The Jews, an accursed race, are to blame! They are responsible.  They were, thru Churchill, partners in instigation of WWI that brought WWII.

I knew a Stormfronter would show his ignorance by not knowing what </i>Déracinément<i> means! But perhaps I ought to be gentle and just assume he’s a product of the Public Fool System.

I knew a Stormfronter would show his ignorance by not knowing what Déracinément means! But perhaps I ought to be gentle and just assume he’s a product of the Public Fool System.

Fair enough.  Maybe I need better glasses.

@Hoermann

To regain the lost territory could be a worthy goal,
and the autobahns certainly deserving of respect.

But on hindsight, does your grandfather recognize that
the price for them was too high? That the price should
have never been paid.

Does he say “I was a fool for believing someone who
led us to disaster and made us hated, where we had been
admired?”

I"m no fan of you or WLW Sid, but if his public school system hadn’t been so committed to uprooting him culturally perhaps he’d know.

@Adriana
Certainly he acknowledged that Adolf Hitler was not the right person to achieve the goals of liberating his countrymen. But hindsight is always 20/20. Certainly the full scope of Hitler’s madness was not visible to the average in 1933, just as the American voter trusted George W in 2000, when he promised a “more humble” foreign policy.
However one lesson that Germans took from WWII, and one that Americans still have to absorb, is that if you come visiting in tanks, you are never welcome.

“pity of war”

...is also a phrase found in Wilfred Owen’s poetry--IIRC in the poem “Strange Meeting” which was used by Britten in the War Requiem.

@Hoermann

Then I must assume that your grandfather regrets his
support for Hitler, the way millions of Americans now
regret voting for Bush?

Adriana:
Not only he, but from my observation also the vast majority of those that supported Hitler’s rather modest (at least compared to the ugly reality that followed) proposals in the 1930’s. They got their rude awakening during and after the war.
But I guess that happens to all people, who simply “follow the leader” (or “Fuehrer” in German).
You will notice such an attitude especially in societies and groups, where the work environment is devoid of independent decisions. Our modern society is mostly composed of people who receive their orders from others, so they are used to being “bossed around” and just follow orders.
In the society of Jefferson and Washington, the people who started the American revolution and were allowed to vote, were people used to make their own decisions, mainly as farmers and businessmen.
Unfortunately this group has become a minority in our modern society. Combine that with the “democracy ueber alles” habit of letting everybody vote, even those that can’t even take care of themselves, and you are opening the door to power for those who frame themselves as “leaders”, rather than as humble servants of the people.

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