How the West Lost the World

[Frenchy]

A great read on the late, great Europe, and mistakes made. I think Buchanan's view has merit, but some may disagree.
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How the West Lost the World
by Patrick J. Buchanan (more by this author)
Posted 05/27/2008 ET
Updated 05/27/2008 ET


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.
What happened to the nations that only a century ago ruled the 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.
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.
How the West Lost the World - HUMAN EVENTS

[gsx1138]

My take. We put greed in front of our own country.

[Bree]

Frenchy...

I like Pat Buchanan a lot but I'm not at all sure that I agree with his view of history or his conclusions. I think we are in the process of losing the world but for different reasons.

[DanTheEldest]

Originally Posted by Bree

Frenchy...

I like Pat Buchanan a lot but I'm not at all sure that I agree with his view of history or his conclusions. I think we are in the process of losing the world but for different reasons.

Same here. Hitler came to power due largely to the ill feelings of Germans as a result of the way the first war ended, but WW2 IMO was a righteous fight against one of the most unabashedly evil regimes ever to walk the face of the planet. Bombing civilian centers I think can be legitimately debated both on moral and strategic grounds, but to me, to have followed an isolationist ideal with Hitler would have been a true crime against humanity. There are some times when you just have to fight, even if the aggressor isn't on your home continent.

"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

[Bree]

Originally Posted by DanTheEldest

Same here. Hitler came to power due largely to the ill feelings of Germans as a result of the way the first war ended, but WW2 IMO was a righteous fight against one of the most unabashedly evil regimes ever to walk the face of the planet. Bombing civilian centers I think can be legitimately debated both on moral and strategic grounds, but to me, to have followed an isolationist ideal with Hitler would have been a true crime against humanity. There are some times when you just have to fight, even if the aggressor isn't on your home continent.

"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

I'm not big into the good and evil stuff but I think you are 100% right. These folks were evil in the darkest sense of the word. The idea that the rest of the world could have played their cards differently and stopped Germany from bringing Europe to ruin is naive at best.

The fault lies squarely with the German people themselves. They are the ones who supported these leaders in both the 1st and 2nd World Wars. They rose to the nationalistic cries. They filled the ranks of the military with their sons. They sought to occupy the lands of other countries by force and force them to submit to German will. The German people did nothing to stop this indeed they wallowed in their sensation of power.

War was inevitable. Heck... Europe had been a battleground for just about all of recorded human history. Why would anyone think that some political actions by the Brits or the US were going to change the nature of this beast? Did political talk stop Napolean or the long line of warring kings in Europe?

When I see film of Neville Chamberlain with Hitler, I see a lamb brought to the slaughter. As if anything Chamberlain could SAY was going to have any effect at all upon Hitler and the Nazis.

The only language that Hitler understood was the language of force and violence. That was the language that brought him and his party to power in the first place. And as Russian artillery leveled his beloved Berlin, he finally heard the true language of power and violence. Then he spoke the final words of violence with his handgun as he took his own life rather than face justice for the millions he caused to die. Indeed... Germany itself had to hear the words of its own destruction to finally get the message. Nothing else would have sufficed.

[Mercmar]

Western Civilization was doomed when that first boat of Africans made it across the Atlantic!

[Bree]

Originally Posted by Mercmar

Western Civilization was doomed when that first boat of Africans made it across the Atlantic!

African Americans had nothing whatsoever to do with the problems we face.

For the life of me, I don't understand why someone would make such a ridiculous comment and one that disrespects so many good people on this system for no reason at all. Sheesh.

[KEVWYO]

Originally Posted by Mercmar

Western Civilization was doomed when that first boat of Africans made it across the Atlantic!

I'm surprised the mods have let this post stay. I am absolutely stunned and dumbfounded at the stupidity and frank racism implied. Mercmar ... I would suggest you be ashamed at your comment but if you're stupid enough to write it you're probably too stupid to understand why.

[XDConvert9mm]

Originally Posted by Bree

African Americans had nothing whatsoever to do with the problems we face.

For the life of me, I don't understand why someone would make such a ridiculous comment and one that disrespects so many good people on this system for no reason at all. Sheesh.

Originally Posted by KEVWYO

I'm surprised the mods have let this post stay. I am absolutely stunned and dumbfounded at the stupidity and frank racism implied. Mercmar ... I would suggest you be ashamed at your comment but if you're stupid enough to write it you're probably too stupid to understand why.

I'll go with both of these opinions. A larger problem we face is the absolute ignorance of a small percentage of our population IMO.

[Frenchy]

Originally Posted by Mercmar

Western Civilization was doomed when that first boat of Africans made it across the Atlantic!