11/11/14 – Jim Powell – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is Jim Powell.
He's the author of this great book, Wilson's War, how Woodrow Wilson's great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II.
And of course, just for brevity's sake, he left out the entire Cold War, America's terror war, and on and on, I guess all the way down into Mali and Nigeria.
Now, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jim?
Thank you.
Doing great.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you here.
And listen, everybody, you really, this is only two 10-minute segments here is the best we can do it.
It's a short thumbnail, but you've got to read this book, and you'll hear why in just one moment.
But first, let me say that you can read the much shorter version, if you must, at LewRockwell.com.
What we can learn from Woodrow Wilson's great blunder, the case for staying out of other people's wars by Jim Powell.
That's at LewRockwell.com, what we can learn from Woodrow Wilson's great blunder.
And so there you go.
Let's break this subtitle right down.
How is it, Jim, that Woodrow Wilson's decision to declare, to get Congress to declare war, to bring the United States into World War I on the side of Britain and France and Russia, how did that help lead to all these things you say?
I think the conventional wisdom is everybody knows that World War I kind of led to Hitler somehow.
But you're blaming Wilson, not just the leaders of Britain and France.
So how so?
Well, I think that this is a good case of how politicians overestimate the amount of power they have and the things that they can control.
Wilson was not able to control his allies, who were the British and the French.
He thought that by going in to help the British and the French, they would be subservient to us, America, the bigger and wealthier ally.
But Wilson could not control the allies, because the war was being fought on French soil, and the French were determined to achieve a piece of vengeance against the Germans, which was likely to have unexpected consequences.
So he got into the war, but he couldn't control, having given them the advantage of a powerful ally.
Now they, who had been stalemated for more than three years, suddenly had an overwhelming advantage against the Germans, and they proceeded to control the so-called peace negotiations and get the vengeance.
The second thing that Wilson found out was that he could not control the enemies, the Germans.
He could not control how they would react to the peace of Versailles, all the terms, the assets that we were going to take away, all the various restrictions and the money that they were going to have to pay.
That of course led to the overwhelming nationalist response that Hitler exploited to begin his career as a demagogue and ultimately a dictator, but Wilson couldn't prevent the Germans from having that reaction.
The third thing was he couldn't control Congress.
He assumed Congress was going to go along with the Versailles settlement and join the League of Nations and so on.
Of course that didn't happen.
So he couldn't control our allies, he couldn't control our enemies, and he couldn't control Congress.
So that's basically how we got into the mess that we were in.
Alright, now, to kind of skip a few, I think people know that the hyperinflation led to the chaos in Germany, the war reparations led to the hyperinflation that led to the chaos for Hitler's first attempt to seize power.
That was still back in the early 20s, and so I wonder, you know, so much time went by, is it really fair to pin the rise of the Nazis somehow on Wilson?
How do you do that?
Well, Hitler would have been a disgruntled corporal of no consequence if we had not contributed to a mass of embittered people.
If the United States had stayed out of the war, the war was stalemated when the United States got into the war, so neither side was able to impose its will on the other.
They would have loved to have done that, but they couldn't do it.
So they're stalemated, and they continued to be stalemated until the United States got in and tipped the balance decisively in favor of the French and the British.
And so if we had stayed out, they probably would have had some kind of negotiated settlement, neither side able to impose its will on the other.
So they both would have complained about a resulting settlement, because they both expected to win and they both wanted everything.
So there would have been disappointment over some kind of negotiated settlement, but you are unlikely to have had the kind of bitter nationalist reaction that occurred when one side, namely the Germans, were crushed, were humiliated, stripped of assets, and had to pay the steep reparations that contributed to the runaway inflation.
I think, Jim, the way we learned it in high school, the way I learned it in high school, focuses a lot on the runaway inflation.
There are pictures of the people taking a wheelbarrow full of currency to go buy a loaf of bread and that kind of thing, and all of that.
I think they maybe deliberately under-emphasized just how much territory was stripped away from the Germans.
And so even though the hyperinflation was licked and over by, I don't know, 25 or whatever at the latest, I don't know, 23, that wasn't it.
It was the dismemberment of the German state, and not just their foreign empire or whatever, but German-speaking people who had been more or less what you would consider part of legitimate Germany had been stripped away.
And that was the open wound that Hitler was able to exploit that whole time, as you explain very well in your book.
Right.
You have the humiliation from the war, then you had the middle class wiped out in 1923 by the runaway inflation.
In the late 20s, there was actually a limited recovery, because the Weimar Republic, which is what they call the German regime of the 1920s, that was a welfare state.
And actually, the inflation was really, that was really an added blow, because the German government was a bankrupt welfare state after World War I.
The government was into everything.
There were government bakeries, there were government breweries, there were government railroads and factories.
The German government subsidized sausage-making.
As we might expect, the government couldn't even make money.
The Germans, who had been producing sausages for centuries, the government-owned sausage factories in post-World War I Germany, they lost money.
So you had a fragile government.
But even as fragile as it was, in peacetime, the German people gradually lost interest in the Nazis.
There was a Reichstag, which is a legislature election in 1928, and the Nazis got about two percent of the electorate.
So if things had remained peaceful, the bitterness over the Versailles settlement, the wreckage of the economy, that would have gradually stayed below the boiling point.
But then what happened?
You got more mistakes.
All right, we've got to stop right there and take this break, Jim.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Jim Powell, author of Wilson's War.
And read this great article at urockwell.com, what we can learn from Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, talking with Jim Powell from the Cato Institute, author of Bully Boy, that's right, about Theodore Roosevelt, but also Wilson's War, how Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II.
All right, Jim, what about that?
We talked about Frankenstein monster number one, Hitler, created in Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House's laboratory there, but what about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin?
In 1914, Russia was starting to go through an industrial revolution, but it was a very fragile country, very fragile regime, and when the war hit, the war, of course, is the most expensive, complicated, unpredictable thing that governments do.
In 1914, Russia did not have enough railroad capacity to send both a million men to the front and to ship bread and other food to civilians, so they began sending the men to the front.
So right away, there's disgruntled civilians, they're not getting the food, the Russians didn't have enough guns to provide all the soldiers, they basically told each soldier, they sent a lot of soldiers to the front without a gun, they said, when your buddy gets shot, you get his gun, that's your gun, and same thing with his shoes.
So from the get-go, in the beginning of Russia's participation in the war, there was a lot of bitterness about what they were doing to the young men of Russia, and the economy went downhill from there.
There was economic chaos, there was a lot of resentment, and then you have the high-living stories about the high-living of the monarch and his family.
So by 1918, there were soldiers who were deserting by the tens of thousands.
They had heard that free land was being given to the peasants, and they didn't want to miss out, so they deserted from the army.
It was imperative that the Russians get out of the war before there was a total collapse.
Well, the United States gets in the war, and so right away, President Wilson had an incentive to keep the Russians in the war.
Because the last thing Wilson wanted was for the Russians and the Germans to make some kind of peace settlement that would have enabled the Germans to transfer some forces from the Eastern Front, since there was no longer fighting Russia, to the Western Front, which would mean more trouble for the British, the French, and the Americans.
And Wilson offered money, so he's basically bribing the Russians, he'll provide assistance to the financially strapped Russians, provided they stay in the war.
They had to stay in the war, and things just went from bad to worse.
So in the summer of 1917, Lenin, who was the head of the Bolsheviks, which were a small group, they were small, made three coup attempts.
Three times they tried to seize power, and despite all the chaos, despite the tens of thousands of Russian soldiers who were deserting so they could get back home and get some of that free land they heard was being distributed, despite all the chaos, Lenin was not able to seize power during those three attempts.
And it wasn't until the fall of 1917, when the Russian army had completely collapsed, that the small group of well-organized Bolsheviks were able to seize power.
So it was the pressure and the bribing of the Russian regime, the revolutionary regime, that kept the Russians in the war, worsened the chaos, and enabled the Bolsheviks, a small number of people, of armed people, to seize power.
And that, of course, gave us 70 years of Soviet Communism.
Yeah, well, and of course the Russians helped Mao in seizing power in China and all that, so yeah, you're talking into the hundreds of millions of people killed, you know, more than 100 million anyway, by their own governments, that include all the wars and the inevitable clash between the National Socialists and the International Socialists in Germany and Russia.
And then, of course, as you point out in the book, the British Empire expanded a million square miles because of the disillusion of the Ottoman Empire.
The Turks were left with the rump state, and the Brits and the French, mostly the Brits, got everything else, divided up, drew the borders that are being erased right now, and including created Israel.
Right, and the British had authority over Iraq, which didn't exist as a country at that time, but it was Winston Churchill who was administering the post-war settlement of what used to be Ottoman territory, and put together the Kurds and the Shiites and the Sunnis who had never been in the same state before.
And didn't have any reason to stick together, they didn't particularly like each other, so that was more trouble for the future.
And propped up the minority Sunni to rule over the Kurds and the Shia, which is certainly setting us up for horrible chaos to come, as we're dealing with right now.
And then on and on, it just goes to show, because I mean, really, when you talk about you get into World War II, which is of course the good war, nobody wants to stick up for Woodrow Wilson, but in World War II, the enemies were so plainly evil, the Nazis, the Italian fascists, the Japanese imperialists, were such monsters that it makes the American empire look completely golden by comparison, and yet, it's as Robert Higgs says, truncating the antecedents and omitting how things came to be that way, and of course, ignoring the inevitable consequences of America having to go stop Hitler and the Japanese, you know, the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists.
Yeah, well, World War II is very much a conflicted war, since you have, you know, the Japanese were certainly bad guys.
On the other hand, we got into the war, the Pearl Harbor was primarily a retaliation for cutting off the shipments of petroleum and scrap steel and steel to Japan, so that was a consequence of the sanctions that we imposed.
The Japanese decided that it was more important for them to pursue their conquest of China than to tolerate the restrictions of the United States, which would have put their navy out of business in a year without oil.
Well, and as far as liberating China from the Japanese imperialists and their, you know, criminal, aggressive occupation of China, even the Japanese couldn't have killed as many Chinese as Mao Zedong ended up killing.
Well, yeah, I think Chairman Mao is the biggest killer of all time.
And then you have the American, you know, so-called efforts to contain Chinese communism in Korea and in Vietnam, killing millions in both cases.
Right, and, you know, it was a good thing that Hitler was defeated, but the territory that was controlled by Hitler ended up being controlled by Stalin, Eastern Europe.
And so, you know, World War II turns out not to be a very good model for policy from the standpoint of the people living in Eastern Europe.
Right.
Well, and then the entire effort to contain communism, supposedly in the Cold War, amounted to America inheriting every empire except Stalin's, right, Stalin and Mao, but we got everything else.
All the French and the German and the British and the Dutch and the Japanese empires all fell into American hands.
Right.
And so, which must be why, you know, nothing but trumpets and salutes all morning on TV today on Veterans Day, where militarism is the highest virtue in American society now, because it's been a hundred years of this, nonstop, because of Woodrow Wilson.
Yeah, well, as I started out saying, it illustrates the difficulties that are involved in predicting the future, predicting outcomes of policies.
Yeah, there's one thing we can predict, it's the unpredictable, and to the negative, too.
I mean, it's so rare that any of these things work out.
I mean, people like to point at, well, the great outcome in occupying West Germany and occupying Japan and turning them into our allies, but at what expense?
And even to this day, at what expense?
Where right now, China could get us in, I mean, Japan could get us into a war with China over a couple little islands.
And that's your best case example of the success of American imperialism you could possibly cite right there.
And it still comes loaded with all kinds of burdens.
Yeah, well, as I said, these unexpected experiences illustrate the point that power tends to magnify the harm done by human error.
We can't predict the future, we can't predict what our allies are going to want.
In any situation, any alliance that we have, our interests are likely to be different than the interests of our allies.
We may both want to defeat the same bad guy, but in the post-war settlement, in the case of the British who wanted to maintain their empire, they had all these other things that they wanted to do that really had nothing to do with us.
The most dramatic example of that is dealing with Stalin.
What he wanted, we both wanted the defeat of Hitler, but obviously his ambitions were to extend a totalitarian regime.
And Stalin was constantly complaining we weren't sending him enough weapons, we weren't sending him enough food, and so on.
So I think all these experiences tend to lead one back toward a policy where you maintain a strong military, principally as a deterrent, but also you have to defend yourself.
History is littered with civilizations and nations that collapsed or were attacked.
There's always somebody, if you manage to have a good thing going someplace, there's always somebody who's going to come along eventually and wants to take your stuff.
So I do believe you have to defend yourself, but beyond that, it really gets complicated.
Even embarking on a fairly limited, simple effort to gain territory or to do something to an adversary in one's region, the outcomes are so often very different than what they thought they would be.
It really seems there are complications that our wise leaders did not anticipate.
And so it seems to me it makes sense to have a policy that's really simple, focused on self-defense, and beyond that, try to be friendly with everybody, but there are also dictators and bad people out there who are going to cause complications, and so you want to reserve your strength and your resources for dealing with those.
All right, well thanks very much, Jim.
I sure appreciate your time on the show again.
It's been great.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all, that's Jim Powell.
He's a scholar at the Cato Institute.
He's the author of Bully Boy and of Wilson's War, How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II.
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