PJB: How the West Lost the World

Europe, the Mother Continent of Western Man, is today aging and dying, unable to sustain the birth rates needed to keep her alive, or to resist conquest by an immigrant invasion from the Third World.

In “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” published today, this writer will argue that it was colossal blunders of British statesmen, Winston Churchill foremost among them, that turned two European wars into world wars that may yet prove the mortal wounds of the West.

The first blunder was a secret decision of the inner Cabinet in 1906 to send a British army across the Channel to fight in any Franco-German War. Had the Kaiser known the British Empire would fight for France, he would have moved more decisively than he did to halt the plunge to war in July 1914.

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.

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.”

Pat is really on this World War Two thing defending the “peace loving” Germans. Why doesn't he mention Mein Kampf? Hitler was repulsively open about his territorial and racial ambitions.

With Pat, everything happens in a vacuum. He starts with the Sudeten agreement and then blames Poland for the war. Germany had been rattling sabers for years. Churchill and Duff Cooper warned against the Nazis constantly during the thirties. Germany first reoccupied the Rhineland and then armed Franco in the Spanish Civil War. They twice meddled in Austria and finally invaded there, after a so called election.

Between the Sudeten crisis and the invasion of Poland, Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia. He violated the agreement with Chamberlain. He violated them constantly. The only thing that could have possibly been done to stop Hitler was going to war earlier in the decade, and the British and French publics wouldn't have gone along with that at all.

Hitler wanted living space taken from sub-humans. That was his grand design. He murdered between 6-10 million people. But Pat makes him sound like a misunderstood diplomat. Pat is in essence, apologizing for Nazi Germany.

I've foolishly defended Pat here for way too long. This is revisionist history at its worst. He has lost it.

Without question, one of the most original and provocative writers on the scene today is Patrick J. Buchanan. Every time a piece written by him appears in Free Republic, it engenders a flurry of posts and much invective grounded in the belief that Buchanan is anti-Semitic. It is not my point here to argue one side or the other that issue, however, I restate my general proposition that ad hominem arguments are a very bad way of getting at the truth and in the long run only serve to divert this forum from its grand potential which is to be a leading light of conservatism as the movement enters its exile in the wilderness.

My quarrel with Buchanan is that he appears to judge historical figures according to hindsight and not upon a standard limited to what the figure knew or should have known at that time. Here is an example of the absurdities into which this practice can lead a historian:

It is absurd to pin blame on a politician or a statesman for a policy that goes wrong two decades later. This is an old trick of the left. For example the left blames Dwight Eisenhower for installing the Shah in Iran nearly 3 decades before the Shah was ousted and our people were taken as hostages. In between, a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, declined to act to save the Shah. To impute responsibility to Eisenhower for the hostage crisis 30 years later or, equally, to British statesman for the fall of Singapore 20 years later, is preposterous.

Seems to me, without having my judgment handicapped by actually reading Buchanan's book, this amounts to little more than parlor game, a "what- if" game. It is one thing to examine history to distill from it the essences of timeless truths. Is appeasement a good and safe policy? Are secret alliances a smart policy? Should commitments be made which in reality are so impractical that they cannot be honored? Should commitments be made the implications of which cannot be known? These are all legitimate questions coming out of the run-up to World War I and they present some truths that clearly have application to our war on terror today. It is quite another thing to play parlor games with history.

Buchanan's article, and presumably his book, contains other problems:

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.

Has Buchanan not heard of unrestricted submarine warfare? Is he unaware of German surface Raiders attempts to starve Britain at the beginning of the war? Does he not know that the ultimate near starvation of the German homefront by 1918 was a principal reason for the disintegration of Germany, causing Hindenburg and Ludendorff to tell the Kaiser there was no option but surrender?

With respect to the, "air terror against open cities in 1940," one can only respond: is Buchanan ignorant of Rotterdam? Of Coventry? Of the decision by the Luftwaffe in mid-September 1940 to divert its attacks from English airdromes to English cities thus commencing "the blitz?"

These kinds of ludicrous assertions which actually are wholly counter to historical reality betray a shallowness or more likely a need to create controversy in order to sell books.

Similarly, Buchanan claims:

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.

It is no good playing with the English language like that. Either Churchill was responsible for Gallipoli and should therefore be blamed or he was not. In either case, a historian making this kind of an assertion is obligated to marshal facts to prove it. It is only cute to say that Churchill "was behind" the Dardanelles disaster-was he or was he not responsible and why? What does it mean that he was "behind" it?

If Buchanan wanted us to explore the real lessons of World War I and other lessons from Churchill's career, he might have talked about how technology outran the generals of World War I, or how secret alliances confounded diplomats before 1914. He might even argue that by 1939 there was very little option but to appease Hitler and the practice should have never gotten that far.

These are all respectable points of view that can be argued. When one writes revisionist history as Buchanan has apparently done here one owes it to the reader to be very careful with the facts.

When one undertakes to undermine the reputation of the man whom I think is the greatest man of the 20th century, one ought to consider how Churchill drew his moral judgments from World War II:

In war: resolution

In peace: magnanimity

In defeat: defiance

In victory: Goodwill

Had the Kaiser known the British Empire would fight for France, he would have moved more decisively than he did to halt the plunge to war in July 1914. 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.

This is such total crap.

ONE. The Kaiser Wilhelm II was an young ambitious man when he came to power, and he began building his army AND his navy immmediately with the absolute determination to become the conqueror of Europe. There is absolutely nothing that England could have done to turn him from his ambition, just as there was nothing they could do in the 1930's short of war to turn Hitler from his ambitions.

Until near the start of hostilities in WWI, Churchill had a pleasant relationship with the Kaiser, who was a grandson of Queen Victoria, while Churchill was the grandson of a Duke and part of England's aristocracy which allowed them to interact with respect for each other.

Churchill was reluctant to believe the Kaiser had such great ambitions and was such a threat to England, but when he saw the Kaiser building up Germany's Navy, Churchill as the Lord Admiral of the Navy could not let England be overshadowed. Two thirds of England's food supply was imported. The British Navy was needed to defend the merchant marine bringing goods and food back from the far flung British Empire. So, Churchill, with great resistance from the government of the time, built up their Navy even more than before so they could blockade any attempt by the Kaisar to take control of the English Channel.

Looking at the close proximity of French ports to England, and knowing that Southern England was undefended to any landing attempt by a hostile nation, Churchill realized that they could not allow the Kaiser to overrun the European continent, as then he would be in a position to gravely threaten England.

Churchill decided that they would have to make alliance with some nation in Europe to defend it against German invasion, and strategically they decided that France was the best bet. The British public was dead set against any involvement in Europe, although they did consider Belgium an underdog that should be defended if invaded. But for a couple of reason the decision to defend France was made secretly. One, that to give away one's strategy to an implacable enemy in advance would simply mean that the enemy would subvert your strategy by choosing another route to conquer Europe. And two, the British public did not yet realize the grave threat posed by Germany and wouldn't have allowed the government to stand if such a strategy had been made public.

Buchannan has always been a Nazi apologist, and to excuse Hitler, he has to excuse the Germans in WWI and condemn the peace treaty that was so onerous to them after the war.

For the record, Churchill begged Prime Minister Lloyd George and the King of England to send a dozen ships with food to Germany after its surrender in WWI. And he and Lloyd George both were against the onerus terms of the Versailles treaty, but Lloyd George wanted to shoot the Kaiser while Churchill did not. It was the French under Clemenceau who were adamant about reparations as they had suffered incredible destruction due to the occupation of the Germans.

TWO. If the British had not declared war on August 4, and entered with their army already ready to go and NAVY war games planned, France would have been overrun. Japan and Italy refused to become allies of the British. England had nothing to offer them in return, except to turn a blind eye if Japan should invade China or Italy should grab territory in Africa. And it is totally laughable to suggest that the United States would have entered the war early. Who is his right mind thinks that holds any water??

But then Buchannan has always been insane.

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