Extracts from 'Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War'
(How Britain lost its Empire and the West Lost the World)
by Patrick J. Buchanan
"Let us therefore brace ourselves to do our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ "
Winston Churchill
"We ought to arm night and day in conjunction with other friendly countries and make ourselves independent of all these monstrous and fathomless intrigues. The stronger we are, the more upright and free-spoken, the less danger will there be of the civilised and normal nations being drawn into the quarrels of cruel and wicked forces at either extreme of the political gamut."
Winston Churchill
"foul baboonery of Bolshevism ...a pestilence more destructive of life than the Black Death or the Spotted Typhus."
Winston Churchill
In Six Crises, Richard Nixon warns that "the most dangerous period" in any crisis is "the aftermath. It is then, with all his resources spent and his guard down, that an individual must watch out for dulled reactions and faulty judgment."
In the Great War, Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, and the United States together almost failed to prevent Germany from occupying Paris. Now, without Russia or America, and with Japan and Italy hostile, Britain and France were going to keep the German army out of Warsaw. Writes British historian Capt. Russell Grenfell, "A British guarantee of Poland against Germany was about as capable of implementation as a guarantee of Mexico against the United States."
"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves."
Winston Churchill
"The Polish Guarantee was the surest way to produce an early explosion, and a world war. It combined the maximum temptation with manifest provocation. It incited Hitler to demonstrate the futility of such a guarantee to a country out of reach from the West, while making the stiff-necked Poles even less inclined to consider any concession to him, and at the same time making it impossible for him to draw back without "losing face.""
Liddell Hart
"With the Germans we risk losing our liberty," Polish marshal Eduard Smigly-Rydz told the French ambassador, "with the Russians we lose our soul."
Indeed, as of that night, Hitler had brought the Saar, Austria, and the Sudetenland under Berlin’s rule, made Bohemia and Moravia protectorates of the Reich, overthrown the detested Versailles regime in Central Europe, and raised Germany from the depressed and divided nation of 1933 to the first economic and military power in Europe in six years without firing a shot. He was a figure in German history to rival Bismarck. But Hitler could say, as Bismarck could not, that he had done it all with diplomacy and without bloodshed.
"In the cutting off of the lives of men and women, no Asiatic conqueror, not Tamerlane, not Jengiz Khan, can match the fame" of Lenin.
Winston Churchill
The Allies had been warned of what they were inviting. But they had not listened. Shortly before his death, "exhausted and disillusioned," Gustav Stresemann, the widely respected German foreign minister, summed up his dealings with the Allies: "I gave and gave and gave until my followers turned against me. . . . If they could have granted me just one concession, I would have won my people. But they gave nothing. . . . That is my tragedy and their crime."
"To invoke the general principle of self-determination, and to make it a supreme law of international life was to invite sheer anarchy...."
Walter Lippmann
Hitler "owed all his successes to his tactical opportunism," wrote Sir Nevile Henderson.
"One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations."
Winston Churchill
"We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation. . . . [H]istory is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim, and even frightful methods but who, nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler."
Winston Churchill
"Governments and individuals conformed to the rhythm of the tragedy, and swayed and staggered forward in helpless violence, slaughtering and squandering on ever-increasing scales, till injuries were wrought to the structure of human society which a century will not efface, and which may conceivably prove fatal to the present civilization. . . . Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat. It was not to give even security to the victors. . . . The most complete victory ever gained in arms has failed to solve the European problem or to remove the dangers which produced the war."
Winston Churchill
on the First World War
"I have a strong belief that there is a danger of the public opinion of this country . . . believing that it is our duty to take everything we can, to fight everybody, and to make a quarrel of every dispute. That seems to me a very dangerous doctrine, not merely because it might incite other nations against us . . . but there is a more serious danger, that is lest we overtax our strength. However strong you may be, whether you are a man or a nation, there is a point beyond which your strength will not go. It is madness; it ends in ruin if you allow yourself to pass beyond it."
Lord Salisbury, 1897
The Queen’s Speech
"A European war cannot be anything but a cruel, heart-rending struggle, which, if we are ever to enjoy the bitter fruits of victory, must demand, perhaps for several years, the whole manhood of the nation, the entire suspension of peaceful industries, and the concentration to one end of every vital energy of the community [and] can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings. . . "
Winston Churchill, 1901
Not one European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birthrate that will enable it to survive through the century. As a share of world population, peoples of European ancestry have been shrinking for three generations. The character of every Western nation is being irremediably altered as each undergoes an unresisted invasion from the Third World. We are slowly disappearing from the Earth.
Patrick J. Buchanan - The Unnecessary War
World Wars I and II, two phases of a Thirty Years’ War future historians will call the Great Civil War of the West. Not only did these two wars carry off scores of millions of the best and bravest of the West, they gave birth to the fanatic ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, whose massacres of the people they misruled accounted for more victims than all of the battlefield deaths in ten years of fighting.
Like all empires, the British Empire was one day fated to fall. Once Jefferson’s idea, "All men are created equal," was wedded to President Wilson’s idea, that all peoples are entitled to "self-determination," the fate of the Western empires was sealed. Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, saw it coming: "The phrase [self-determination] is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized....What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!"
"Self-determination, which has nothing to do with self-government but has become confused with it, is barbarous and reactionary: by sanctioning secession, it invites majorities and minorities to be intransigent and irreconcilable. It is stipulated in the principle of self-determination that they need not be compatriots because they will soon be aliens. There is no end to this atomization of human society.Within the minorities who have seceded there will tend to appear other minorities who in their turn will wish to secede."
Walter Lippmann
There has arisen among America’s elite a Churchill cult. Its acolytes hold that Churchill was not only a peerless war leader but a statesman of unparalleled vision whose life and legend should be the model for every statesman. To this cult, defiance anywhere of U.S.hegemony, resistance anywhere to U.S. power becomes another 1938. Every adversary is "a new Hitler," every proposal to avert war "another Munich."
When a colonial adventurer pressed upon him Germany’s need to enter the scramble for Africa, Bismarck replied, "Your map of Africa is very nice. But there is France, and here is Russia, and we are in the middle, and that is my map of Africa."
"British policy for four hundred years has been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving together a combination of other countries strong enough to face the bully. Sometimes it is Spain, sometimes the French monarchy, sometimes the French Empire, sometimes Germany. I have no doubt about who it is now. But if France set up to claim the over-lordship of Europe, I should equally endeavour to oppose them. It is thus through the centuries we have kept our liberties and maintained our life and power."
Winston Churchill
Twice this policy would bring Britain into war with Germany until, by 1945, Britain was too weak to play the role any longer. She would lose her empire because of what Lord Salisbury had said in 1877 was "the commonest error in politics . . . sticking to the carcass of dead policies."
"A preventive war is "like committing suicide out of fear of death."
Bismark
"He sees himself moving through the smoke of battle—triumphant, terrible, his brow clothed with thunder, his legions looking to him for victory, and not looking in vain. He thinks of Napoleon; he thinks of his great ancestor. Thus did they bear themselves; thus, in this rugged and most awful crisis, will he bear himself. It is not make-believe, it is not insincerity; it is that in that fervid and picturesque imagination there are always great deeds afoot with himself cast by destiny in the Agamemnon role. . . . He will write his name big in the future. Let us take care he does not write it in blood."
A. G. Gardiner on Churchill (1911)
"to make the world safe for democracy,"
A phrase first coined by H. G. Wells in August, 1914
"Injustice, arrogance, displayed in the hour of triumph will never be forgotten or forgiven."
Lloyd George, 1919
"Those three all-powerful, all-ignorant men . . . sitting there carving continents with only a child to lead them."
Arthur Balfour
"With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each of us must fight on to the end. . . . Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement."
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig
"We must not allow any sense of revenge, any spirit of greed, any grasping desire to overrule the fundamental principles of righteousness. Vigorous demands will be made to hector and bully the Government in the endeavour to make them depart from the strict principles of right and to satisfy some base, sordid, squalid idea of vengeance and avarice. We must relentlessly set our faces against that."
Lloyd George
"Suffering does not always make men better.... People are not always more reasonable than governments . . . Public opinion . . . is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics."
George Kennan
Before going to war, America had denounced as a violation of international law and human decency the British blockade that had kept the vital necessities of life out of neutral ports if there were any chance the goods could be transshipped to Germany. But when America declared war, a U.S. admiral told Lord Balfour, "You will find that it will take us only two months to become as great criminals as you are."
Decades later, Hoover, a former president and senior statesman, was still decrying the post-Armistice "food blockade" of Germany as "a wicked thrust of Allied militarism and punishment" that constituted "a black chapter in human history."
"Nations can take philosophically the hardships of war. But when they lay down their arms and surrender on assurances that they may have food for their women and children, and then find that this worst instrument of attack on them is maintained — then hate never dies."
In the old canon law of the Church it was laid down that everyone must have a hearing, even the devil: Etiam diabolus audiatur (Even the devil has the right to be heard).
"Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom"
LLoyd George
"You may strip Germany of her colonies, reduce her armaments to a mere police force and her navy to that of a fifth rate power; all the same, in the end if she feels that she has been unjustly treated in the peace of 1919 she will find means of exacting retribution from her conquerors. . . . Injustice, arrogance, displayed in the hour of triumph will never be forgotten or forgiven. . . .
I am, therefore strongly averse to transferring more Germans from German rule to the rule of some other nation than can possibly be helped. I cannot conceive any greater cause of future war than that the German people, who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races in the world, should be surrounded by a number of small states, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamoring for reunion with their native land."
Lloyd George
"The proposal of the Polish commission that we should place 2,100,000 million Germans under the control of a people which is of a different religion and which has never proved its capacity for stable self-government throughout its history must, in my judgment, lead sooner or later to a new war in the East of Europe."
Lloyd George
"Rather than loosen the bonds Bismarck had forged among Germans, the peace of Versailles reinforced a spirit of nationhood. The treaty had defeated its own purpose, writes John Laughland, for it "allowed the Germans to think of themselves as victims. The debt itself, which obviously fell uniformly on the entire nation, also made the Germans feel solidarity with one another; they became united in their common protest. It made Bavarians and Saxons feel for the territorial losses of Prussia, whereas fifty years previously, such losses would have concerned only Prussians. The tribute which the Germans had to pay to the French thus united them in common resentment. With Germany bordered to the East with nothing but new weak states, this was a fatal combination."
John Laughland
"Even if beaten, Germany will pride itself on having resisted the entire world; no other people will be so inebriated by their defeat."
Anatole France
The treaty writers of Versailles wrote the last act of the Great War and the first act of the resurrection of Germany and the war of retribution. Even in this hour men saw what was coming: Lloyd George in his Fontainebleau memorandum; Keynes as he scribbled notes for his Economic Consequences of the Peace; Foch ("This is not peace, it is an armistice for twenty years"); and Smuts ("This Treaty breathes a poisonous spirit of revenge, which may yet scorch the fair face—not of a corner of France but of Europe)."
Secretary of State Lansing said of the peace he and President Wilson brought home: "[T]he Versailles Treaty menaces the existence of civilization."
In Italy, the wounded war veteran and Fascist leader Benito Mussolini warned: "The dilemma is this: treaty revision or a new war."
Hans von Seeckt of the German General Staff agreed: "We must regain our power, and as soon as we do, we will naturally take back everything we lost."
The total number of fatalities for the British empire as a whole was 921,000: the originator of the Imperial War Graves Commission, Sir Fabian Ware, calculated that if the dead were to march four abreast down Whitehall the parade past the Cenotaph would last three and a half days.
"A generation had been decimated on the battlefields of Europe," Mee continued. "No one had seen the likes of such slaughter before: the deaths of soldiers per day of battle were 10 times greater than in the American Civil War," heretofore the bloodiest conflict in the history of Christendom.
Charles Mee
"When I gave utterance to those words [that "all nations had a right to self-determination"] I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day.
Wilson
Versailles had "draped the crudity of conquest . . . in the veil of morality."
H.A.L. Fisher
And something new and ominous had come out of the war. The Russia of the Romanovs was gone. Atop the largest nation on earth sat a grisly gang of Bolshevik terrorists committed to world revolution and the destruction of all the Western empires and nations.
In March 1920, after a trip to Europe, Churchill, who had been almost alone in urging Allied intervention in Russia, wrote Lloyd George what one historian calls "one of the great prophetic documents of European history."
"Peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik tyranny" was Churchill’s message.
"We may," he wrote, "be within measurable distance of a universal collapse and anarchy across Europe and Asia."
You ought to tell France that we will make a defensive alliance with her against Germany, if, and only if, she entirely alters her treatment of Germany.... Next you should send a great man to Berlin to help consolidate the anti-Spartacist anti-Ludendorff elements into a strong left-center block.
Churchill had perceived the real threat: Germany was now so prostrate she could no longer fulfill her ancient duty—to keep the Russians out of Europe.
"Making the world safe for Democracy!" I wonder whether in this reactionary peace—the most reactionary since Scipio Africanus dealt with Carthage—he [Wilson] still hears the mute appeal of the people to be saved from the coming war.... What a ghastly tragedy this is.
Jan Smuts.
"Germany had ignored the Fourteen Points as long as it thought that it had a chance of winning the war, and had . . . imposed a Carthaginian peace on Russia at BrestLitovsk, violating every one of Wilson’s principles. The only reason Germany finally ended the war had to do with pure power calculations—with the American army involved, its final defeat was only a question of time. . . . Germany was exhausted, its defenses were breaking, and Allied armies were about to drive into Germany. Wilson’s principles in fact spared Germany much more severe retribution."
Henry Kissinger
There was scarcely a promise Wilson made to the Germans at the time of the armistice that was not broken, or a principle of his that he did not violate. The Senate never did a better day’s work than when it rejected the Treaty of Versailles and refused to enter a League of Nations where Americans soldiers would be required to give their lives enforcing the terms of so dishonorable and disastrous a peace.
Lloyd George, who had realized all of Britain’s ambitions and was, as T. E. Lawrence said, "head and shoulders above anyone else at the peace conference . . . the only man there (in a big position) who was really trying to do what was right," saw what was coming.
He returned home triumphant but grim. Awarded the Order of Merit by George V, he said, "We shall have to do the whole thing over again in twenty five years . . . at three times the cost."
As U.S. historian Thomas Bailey wrote, "The victor can have vengeance, or he may have peace, but he cannot have both" from the same treaty.
"This war should never have come unless, under American and modernizing pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Austria and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer onto the vacant thrones. No doubt these views are very unfashionable."
Winston Churchill
"A war with Japan! But why should there be a war with Japan?
I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime. The Japanese are our allies. The Pacific is dominated by the Washington Agreement. . . . Japan is at the other end of the world. She cannot menace our vital security in any way. She has no reason whatever to come into collision with us. . . . War with Japan is not a possibility which any reasonable government need take into account."
Winston Churchill 1924
"In the end, blood is stronger than any document of mere paper. What ink has written will one day be blotted out by blood."
Hitler