Leaving World War II Behind. David Swanson

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      3. WWII did not have to happen

      “One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, ‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.” —Winston Churchill⁷³

      World War II grew out of World War I, and almost nobody tries to argue that World War I was just or glorious. Generally it’s treated, even in school history texts, as pointless and even barbaric. Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1962 book The Guns of August tells the story of the slow launching of WWI, driven by war planners and the momentum of their plans. Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel All's Quiet on the Western Front described WWI so well that the Nazis banned and burned it. By behaving more wisely, governments could have chosen not to launch World War I, or not to end World War I in a manner that had people predicting WWII on the spot. A war that could have been avoided is only a justifiable war if actually desirable, if actually preferable to peace -- a position generally limited to sadists and weapons dealers. Of course what was still avoidable in 1939 might not be the same as what was avoidable in 1919, and we’ll come to that (see Chapter 12 below, but please read the intervening chapters first). Let’s start with the full 20 years of completely unnecessary actions. If we went back an additional 20 years to the proposals for peace discussed at the Hague in 1899 but never acted upon, our case would be that much stronger.⁷⁴

      Jane Addams and her colleagues not only predicted in 1919 that a second world war would come, but also detailed what would need to be changed about the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations in order to avoid it -- and launched a global peace organization to advocate toward that end. That organization, which is still around, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), posted on its website in 2019 an account of what had been said one century earlier.⁷⁵ The famous 14 points promoted by President Woodrow Wilson, nine of which WILPF took credit for having proposed to him, were largely lost in the Treaty of Versailles, replaced by brutal punishment and humiliation for Germany. Addams warned that this would lead to another war.⁷⁶

      Months before the treaty negotiations, Wilson had told Congress, “Food relief is now the key to the whole European situation and to the solution of peace.” But a commission led by Winston Churchill recommended maintaining the blockade against Germany, because “it would be inadvisable to remove the menace of starvation by a too sudden and abundant supply of foodstuffs.”⁷⁷ One wouldn’t want starvation to stop too suddenly! And it certainly didn’t. As Adolf Hitler later gained power, he made frequent reference to his own experience with hunger, which he blamed not on England, France, Italy, or the United States, but on a global Jewish conspiracy. The very next day after Germany had ratified the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler had begun attending Army propaganda classes aimed at repressing revolutionary tendencies and at promoting antisemitism. The endless “we’re about to win” WWI coverage of the German media -- which resembled, in reverse, that of the British and Americans⁷⁸ -- made defeat and the subsequent demand for reparations payments shocking to the German public, made it easy to blame a treasonous scapegoat.⁷⁹

      The British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1919 in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, “If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation." ⁸⁰ There are many far less sensible things that Keynes wrote that were taken far more seriously than this warning was.

      Thorstein Veblen, in a highly critical review of Keynes’ book, also predicted the Treaty of Versailles leading to more war, though he understood the basis of the treaty to be animosity toward the Soviet Union, against which, it should be noted, the United States and allied nations were fighting a war in 1919 that rarely shows up in U.S. history books.⁸¹ Veblen believed that reparations could have easily been taken from wealthy German property owners without imposing suffering on all of German society, but that the primary goal of those making the treaty had been to uphold property rights and to use Germany as a force against the communist Soviet Union.

      Woodrow Wilson had promised “peace without victory,” but, in the treaty negotiations, given in to French and British vengeance toward Germany. Afterwards, he predicted World War II unless the United States joined the League of Nations. The United States did not join, and World War II came. Whether joining the League as it then existed would have prevented World War II is hard to guess. WILPF wanted the League transformed into a league for peace, rather than for war alliances. WILPF thought disarmament was needed, and that no league could prevent war while its members all armed themselves in frantic anticipation of more slaughter. In 1928, the powerful nations of the world outlawed war with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, but didn’t stop arming and didn’t prosecute violators.⁸² Would the League have done the trick?

      Veblen thinks Wilson didn’t cave in and compromise at the treaty negotiations, but rather prioritized enmity toward the Soviet Union. However, Veblen, unlike Keynes, wasn’t there. And those who were there knew that Wilson began by forcefully arguing against vindictive punishment of Germany, but that Wilson was struck down by the so-called Spanish flu, that he was weakened severely, that he spoke as though delusional, and that he quickly agreed to abandon much of what he had promised the world.⁸³ The Spanish flu (so called because, although it probably came from U.S. military bases to the European war, Spain allowed its newspapers to write about unpleasant news, a forbidden practice in nations at war) had infected the White House.⁸⁴ The previous fall, on September 28, 1918, Philadelphia had held a massive pro-war parade that included flu-infected troops СКАЧАТЬ