"I bought Fronkinds “The Peace To End All Peace” about twenty years ago"
I have read and have that book here, along with:
Margaret MacMillan's c2001 "Paris 1919 -- Six Months that Changed the World"
and Christopher Catherwood's c2004 "Churchill's Folly -- How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq"
Here's the important point: all of these books are highly critical of US, British and French diplomacy at the end of the First World War -- and with some justification.
However, and it's a big however: the REAL reason, the core reason that Versailles did not produce a more peaceful Germany was NOT because of it's supposedly "harsh terms."
The real reasons were because Germans in their hearts and souls did NOT believe that:
- Germany had started the Great War. The truth is, Germany DID start the war, but no German believed it. and
- Germany had LOST the war. The truth is, Germany had been utterly defeated, but again, no German believed it.
For an utterly DEFEATED nation, the Versailles treaty was more than fair and just -- and this is proved beyond any possibility of doubt by the very peace terms GERMANY imposed on nations it had defeated, such as Belgium and Russia.
But Germans did not think they had started the war, did not think they had been defeated, and they were mad as h*ll about it. What it all proves is the unlimited power of a really Big Lie.
“and
•Germany had LOST the war. The truth is, Germany had been utterly defeated, but again, no German believed it.”
They had good reason to believe so, since the allies decided not to invade. Rightly so, in my opinion. No need to carry on death and destruction when the enemy is ready to surrender. However, even if those who surrendered knew they lost, it doesn’t follow that it felt like a loss to the German people. How could we lose, they’d think, if we laid waste to France and Russia all those years while no foreigner touched our soil? Nonsense!
Come to think of it, does it really feel like we lost the Vietnam War? I know we did, intellectually. But in my gut I know that aside from the 57,000 or whatever people who died, the lost prestige, and all the money wasted, we didn’t lose much. Relatively speaking. That is to say, it wasn’t like what happened to Germany and Japan in the recent past. That’s what losing a war is supposed to look like. earth is salted, your women raped, etc.
Ours was a limited war with limited aims. North Vietnam had no way to hurt us except insofar as we sent people over into harm’s way. Normally, you don’t get to go on as if nothing happened. Germany was in one of those kind of wars, or so it thought. They had reparations to pay in the end, of course, and ended up foolishly wrecking its economy over them. But in 1918 their national monuments weren’t demolished. Their leaders weren’t hung. How easy it was to pretend as if their loss somehow wasn’t real. Because in many ways, it wasn’t.