How the West Lost the World
Had Britain not declared war on Aug. 4 and brought in Japan, Italy and the United States, the war would have ended far sooner. Leninism and Stalinism would never have triumphed in Russia, and Hitler would never have come to power in Germany.
The second blunder was the vengeful Treaty of Versailles that added a million square miles to the British Empire while putting millions of Germans under Czech and Polish rule in violation of the terms of the armistice and Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points.
A third was the British decision to capitulate to U.S. demands in 1921 and throw over a faithful Japanese ally of 20 years. Tokyo took its revenge, 20 years later, by inflicting the greatest defeat in British history, the surrender of Singapore and an army of 80,000 to a Japanese army half that size.
A fourth British blunder, which Neville Chamberlain called the “very midsummer of madness,” was the 1935 decision to sanction Italy for a colonial war in Ethiopia. London destroyed the Stresa Front of Britain, France, and Italy that Mussolini had forged to contain Germany, and drove Mussolini straight into the arms of a Nazi dictator he loathed.
In 1936, France sounded out the British to determine if they would support a drive to push German troops out of the Rhineland that Hitler had occupied in violation of Versailles. The British refused. And Churchill congratulated France for taking the matter up with the League of Nations, and said the ideal solution would be a voluntary Nazi withdrawal from the Rhineland to show the world that Hitler respected the sanctity of treaties.
Munich, 70 years ago this September, was a disaster. But it was a direct, if not inevitable, consequence of a Versailles treaty that had consigned 3.5 million Sudeten Germans to Czech rule against their will and in violation of the principle of self-determination.
But the fatal blunder was not Munich.
It was the decision of March 31, 1939, to hand a war guarantee to a neo-fascist regime of Polish colonels who had joined Hitler in the rape of Czechoslovakia.
Britain gave Warsaw a blank check to take her to war over a town, Danzig, the British themselves thought should be restored to Germany. Result: a Hitler-Stalin Pact and a six-year war that left scores of millions dead, Europe in ruins, the British empire bankrupt and breaking, 10 European nations under the barbaric rule of Joseph Stalin and half a century of Cold War. Had there been no war guarantee to Poland, there might have been no war, no Nazi invasion of Western Europe and no Holocaust.
Churchill was the indispensable war leader who held on until Hitler committed his fatal blunders, invading Russia and declaring war on America. He was also the man most responsible for Britain’s fall from mistress of the greatest empire since Rome to an island dependency of the United States.
About the character of the Bolshevik regime in 1919 and Nazi regime in 1933, Churchill had been right. About British rearmament, he had been right. But Churchill was also often disastrously wrong.
He led the West down a moral incline to its own barbarism by imposing a starvation blockade on Germany in 1914 and launching air terror against open cities in 1940. These policies brought death to hundreds of thousands of women and children.
He was behind the greatest British military blunders in two wars: the Dardanelles disaster of 1915 and the Norwegian fiasco of 1940 that brought down Chamberlain and vaulted Churchill to power.
While excoriating Chamberlain for appeasing Hitler, Churchill’s own appeasement of Stalin lasted longer and was even more egregious and costly, ensuring that the causes for which Britain sacrificed the empire—the freedom of Poland and preventing a hostile power from dominating Europe—were lost.
Churchill was, however, surely right when he told FDR in their first meeting after Pearl Harbor that they should call the war they were now in ”The Unnecessary War.”
He was a Great Man—at the cost of his country’s greatness.
Comments
It seems strange that someone who murdered innumerable civilians with incendiary or phosphor boms should have a claim to greatness. Phosphor, for those who might not know, burns to the very bone and cannot be xtinguished, even under water, as it doesn’t need oxygen. Those blazing women who jumped with their children into the icy rivers didn’t know this, of course. This said, it seems more likely that the man can be found at the lowest opart of the human ladder, there where it is at its darkest and most hideous.
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Yes, but...but...Hey Pat! Don’t confuse us with the facts.
Starvation blockades funfact: In the aftermath of both WWI and WWII, the Allied policy of targeting the civilian population with starvation was overturned by the intervention of that callous Republican whose name has become proverbial for lacking compassion, Herbert Hoover. He administered aid programs in Germany after both wars.
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And if the Russian Empire were not enthralled with Slavophilia World War 1 would not have occured.
If the German High Command had not helped install the Bolsheviks World War 2 would not have occured.
Counter history is fun!
It is also generally a vapid argument.
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A reading of Mein Kampf reveals Hitler’s ultimate goal: the creation of a vast
“Germania” to rival all of history’s empires. He likened himself to history’s greatest
conquerors and preached to his generals that the price of such greatness required
unflinching will. He reminded them that Rome utterly destroyed Carthage, that the Turks
wiped out the Armenians, that Alexander erased whole empires in his path, that the
English settlers eradicated Native Americans, and, above all, that few historians
lamented the passing of these peoples. Regardless of the temporary alliances that served
the fleeting political needs of Italy, France or England, Corporal Adolf Schickelgruber
would have his way one way or another.
No one drove Hitler to dreams of conquest but Hitler.
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To “man”: about incendiaries.
Phosphorus bombs are put out by sand. When I was young, all schools and public buildings in England still had collections of sand buckets along the corridors and in every room, ready to put out incendiaries.
We were all taught how to use them - after all we still faced a war with Russia - by adults who had actually used them in the Blitz. I think most older Europeans remember that incendiaries were a central part of the Nazi’s terror tactics against civilians – ALWAYS hitting civilian concentrations hard in order to break their will.
Please understand that those German women had cheered the immolation of their counterparts in neighbouring countries and had much better bomb shelters to hide in – we just had small trenches and a few sandbags. Their government was rather better prepared for mass murder for some reason!
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Thoroughly disagree with RonL. “What if?” questions are a wonderful way to deepen your
knowledge of history. They’re only “vapid” if your knowledge is meager.
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One thing that is quite surprising to me in these kind of analyses is that it is now fair game to criticise what happened to the Germans after Versailles (rightfully so). But another treaty that had effects equally as drastic is the Trianon treaty that regulated the Kingdom of Hungary. The alleged principle was also national self-determination, and the results are similarly disastrous to those of the Treaty of Versailles. Central Europe ha basically been more or less consistently disfunctional ever since.
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Nicholas II,
I did not call counter-history vapid. I called the use of it to back up a histocally inaccurate argument vapid.
PS. Is your name an homage to
Czar Nicholay Alexandrovich Romanov or Pope Nicholas II?
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Great article Pat. Thank you for having to guts to go against the simplistic counter factual history that is taught in our schools.
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Good reminder of how we are at the mercy of decision-makers who, many times, have no foresight whatsoever. If the driver runs the bus off a cliff, everyone aboard dies. Wonder how many Versailles-sized wrong turns this country has made since - say - 1994. From Bosnia to Iraq, what have we done other than make and enemies… and compound their numbers?
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That last sentence should read:
“...make blunders and enemies...”
Well… didn’t make any enemies… did I?
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HA-HA-HA-HA!
What about Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty, Pat?
What about the exterritorial corridor from Reich to Prussia Hitler demanded from Poland?
Fancy an all-Mexican motorway through Midwest to Canada, Pat?
How many folks did your “neo-facist Polish colonels” killed in Czechoslovakia?
Or how many Ukrainians, Jews, or Germans living in Poland from 1918 to 1939, Pat?
I knew the Holocaust indsutry is working hard to blame it all on Poland for starting the
war, but I didn’t know you jumped on the bandwagon. Bravo!
Yeah, Poles killed Goebbles in Bavaria in 1943 when he went to Mass with his six children
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One thing that “Great” leaders from Alexander to Churchill, Hitler and Stalin have in common is a complete lack of empathy with the fate of their fellow man. They look upon the rest of humanity as a tool to be used for their own dreams of glory and sacrificed at a whim. Our founding fathers had the right idea about preventing people like that ever coming to power through restricting the power to be wielded by a single man. However, as long as people are happy to abdicate their own responsibilities by “following the leader”, these super-criminals will continue to plunge humanity into war and misery in the name of “liberty, national honor, democracy”, or whatever other cause of the day is suited to gaud the unsuspecting dupes into killing and being killed. And it is getting worse. At least an Alexander stood in the frontline and risked his life. Our present leader “sacrifices” by giving up his golf game.
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This is a brilliant article, gives lots of new perspectives on the most epoch series of events in world history.
BANA
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Buchanan’s book should be read in conjunction with <em>Conjuring Hitler: How Britain And America Made the Third Reich</em
http://www.amazon.com/dp/074532181X?tag=tispeofthyeme-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=074532181X&adid=1RNN29W86ZATC1NWHKWD&
Nazism is usually depicted as the outcome of political blunders and unique economic factors: we are told that it could not be prevented, and that it will never be repeated.
In this explosive book, Guido Giacomo Preparata shows that the truth is very different: using meticulous economic analysis, he demonstrates that Hitler’s extraordinary rise to power was in fact facilitated—and eventually financed—by the British and American political classes during the decade following World War I.
Through a close analysis of events in the Third Reich, Preparata unveils a startling history of Anglo-American geopolitical interests in the early twentieth century. He explains that Britain, still clinging to its empire, was terrified of an alliance forming between Germany and Russia. He shows how the UK, through the Bank of England, came to exercise control over Weimar Germany and how Anglo-American financial support for Hitler enabled the Nazis to seize power.
This controversial study shows that Nazism was not regarded as an aberration: for the British and American establishment of the time, it was regarded as a convenient way of destabilising Europe and driving Germany into conflict with Stalinist Russia, thus preventing the formation of any rival continental power block.
Guido Giacomo Preparata lays bare the economic forces at play in the Third Reich, and identifies the key players in the British and American establishment who aided Hitler’s meteoric rise.
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