11/11/15 – Jim Powell – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And whether you know it or not, our next guest is your hero.
He wrote a book, two books, trashing both Roosevelt presidents.
Isn't that great?
Bully Boy and FDR's Folly.
But then my favorite is Wilson's War, how Woodrow Wilson's great blunder led to everything horrible that happened since then, including Mao Tse-Tung and George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good, good.
Glad to be with you.
Very, very happy to have you here.
OK, so long story short, you make the case in your book that World War I was wrapping up until big, stupid idiot Woodrow Wilson stepped in and ruined everything.
How so?
Well, the central powers, Germany, Austria, and on the other hand, England, France and their allies had a stalemate that was going since 1914 into 1917.
Three years their stalemated, neither side able to impose its will on the other.
And when the United States became involved on the allied side, on the side of Britain and France, that enabled Britain and France to win a decisive victory, meaning they could dictate terms if they wished to the losers, Germany, Austria, and so on.
And Wilson, the president at the time, assumed that he could control what the allies did, he could control what the losers did, and he could control what the Congress did.
And it turned out he couldn't control any of those things.
Wilson gave a famous speech, his 17 points for a just resolution of the conflict, but he couldn't get his allies to agree with it, because most of the fighting had been in France, both France and England, and Russia for that matter.
Russia was also in a lie until they dropped out of the war.
But they lost several million men, and that plus the territory that had been occupied, they were heavily damaged during the war.
The French were absolutely determined to avenge their suffering.
They didn't care for a just settlement that Wilson was talking about, they just completely ignored that and proceeded, since they ended up on the winning side by a wide margin, they proceeded to dictate humiliating surrender terms to the Germans.
So that was step one.
Step two was, how did the Germans react?
Well, they didn't just take it, they were angry.
They had been told by their people, by the generals and politicians in Germany during the war, that they were winning.
And so when it became obvious that Germany was having to surrender, it wasn't until then that it really hit home to the Germans that they were losing this thing and being humiliated to boot.
So you had a lot of anger and disillusionment, and that's what Hitler very skillfully exploited to develop a political base.
And that was worsened by the reparations that were demanded by the French and the British.
And the Germans ended up figuring the easiest way to pay off the reparations, and that was to maintain a big welfare state that the Germans had, was just to print money.
So they print money in one of the most famous runaway inflations, 1923, 1924.
And it ruined the middle classes, so it disillusioned all the people who had believed that if you work hard and save your money, you'll have a comfortable old age, you'll have security.
And all that went out the window.
There were many stories about people who bought war bonds before the war, Germans who bought German bonds before the war, or even Germans who bought war bonds to finance the war.
All of that was supposedly to be for their retirement, but as a consequence of the inflation, you could buy a box of matches or you could even buy a loaf of bread with some of these bonds that were supposed to support them in their middle age.
So the middle class was basically wiped out in Germany.
And people were bitter and disillusioned, and when they're bitter and disillusioned, they'll support lunatics.
So that was the beginning of that.
And then, of course, during the Great Depression, Germans were even more disillusioned and bitter because you had 6 million Germans were unemployed, banks were failing, and all that had to do with a lot of the disruptions caused, economic disruptions caused by the war that were not resolved during the 1920s.
Certainly not capable of withstanding the additional blows, economic blows that hit during the 1930s.
And so that's how Hitler got going now.
All right, now, hold on.
Let's get to Russia in a minute, but I'm going to go back over a couple of things here real quick if we could, which is that, first of all, I learned in school, in government school as a kid, that, yeah, the Treaty of Versailles and the harsh conditions and the reparations after World War I helped lead to World War II.
They never explain how much of the territory was stripped away.
They mentioned the hyperinflation a bit, just to show you a lady with a wheelbarrow full of money and a little bit of that.
And I'm sure they don't teach this at all anymore, but this was in the 80s.
But they certainly don't explain how it couldn't have been like this if Wilson hadn't got America in to tip the balance so far in favor of the Allies, which is, of course, the ultimate point there.
But then also, I really like how in your book you talk about how important it was that Hitler's entire shtick from the hyperinflation in the 20s all the way through to the rise to the actual rise of power in the 30s, that every speech began with the denunciation like a ritual of the traitors of 1918 who had signed the Versailles Treaty.
And by the traitors, he meant the Democrats who had actually opposed the war, but who Woodrow Wilson, as you show in your book, had insisted must be the ones to accept the surrender, not the German militarists who had actually got them into the war and fought the war.
But he made the good guys accept the terms of surrender, forever delegitimizing them.
Right.
Wilson insisted that the generals all resign or get fired, that he would only deal with what he called the legitimate government.
Well, with the generals no longer in command, the civilian politicians were the ones who had the unenviable task of basically handing over the keys to the store.
And actually, one of the chief politicians involved in this transition process, he was assassinated not long after that by Germans who were angry at the humiliating surrender, which they, you know, when when the smoke cleared, it was civilians who were holding the bag.
So they were the ones who were facing the fire.
Right.
And I think you write about in your book, too, about how it didn't just radicalize people into Nazi into the Nazi movement.
It radicalized a whole generation of German communists, which then itself helped push more and more people toward the Nazis in reaction to them.
Yeah, well, there are many interesting aspects of this.
And now we're at the break and you can't even hear the communists, Marxists and utopian communists, so-called believe in abolishing private property.
They none of none of those people, Lenin, Lenin, Trotsky, none of those people had any idea what a socialist economy would look like, how it would work.
You know, they were criticized.
They were talking about the stages of economic development starting in primitive times.
And then comes capitalism and capitalism creates the the proletariat and the proletariat, which is mainly a city that's urban.
They're thinking in terms of factory workers.
There's somehow there's going to be a dictatorship of the proletariat.
And then they're then we're going to get to a communist regime and there's going to be no no private property and the government will wither away.
In other words, the devastation was so bad that reason had been completely obliterated as well, it sounds like.
But right there, Jim, we're at a break here and I don't want the live audience to miss too much of this.
But so hold it right there.
We'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jim Powell.
He's the author of Bully Boy.
About T.R., the madman, lunatic, would-be dictator of the world.
Oh, and then his second cousin twice removed or whatever, FDR's folly, president for life, FDR there.
But we're talking about a guy who might as well have been a Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, for as harmful as he was for American interests.
And how his getting America into World War I ruined everything for everybody ever since then.
And Jim has explained how tipping the scales in favor of the British and the French and the Russians helped to give them such advantage over the Germans that they ended up leading to the creation or creating the groundwork for the rise of the Nazi Party and the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler's dictatorship and World War II from that end.
But now we got to talk about Russia, because Russia, of course, was allied with France and Britain in World War I against the Germans.
And I think, Jim, I'm trying to remember, wasn't it that Congress voted to join the war just one month after the Tsar had been overthrown by the mobs and they had created this interim government?
It's called now.
I don't know if it was meant to be interim then, the parliamentary government of Kerensky, which lasted from March to October 1917, correct?
Correct.
Yes.
And then so what's Woodrow Wilson got to do with the Kerensky government?
Well, Kerensky wanted to get out of the war.
I mean, Russia was unprepared for the war that started in 1914.
Russia was in a process, an industrial revolution had come to Russia.
So it was in the early stages of considerable economic development.
And there was a lot of reform going on, but it had just started.
And when the war started, it did not have enough railroad capacity, both to send a million men to the front, to the Eastern Front, and at the same time to continue shipping food to Russian cities.
So there was a compromise.
A lot of the Russian soldiers who were sent to the front were sent without guns.
And they were told that when your buddy is shot, you grab his gun, that's your gun.
And of course, a lot of people were upset that their sons were being conscripted and sent to the front without any guns.
And so the problems began from there, and you had corruption, and you had all kinds of other problems.
So it was a catastrophic decision by the Tsar to get into, for Nicholas II to get into the war.
And by 1917, it was clear that Russia was deteriorating.
It had been stressed beyond the ability to hold things together.
And Kerensky, Alexander Kerensky, was going along with that situation as best he could.
Now, he was not advocating that Russia leave the war.
He was going along with the flow.
You know, he's in a collapsing building and trying to figure out, is there anything he can hold up?
Is there anything he can do about it?
He's trying to hold the government together, because the Tsar has already fled.
And it's actually Lenin who starts demanding.
Lenin was the Bolshevik, was the only one who is demanding, who is campaigning, trying to exploit the clear desire of the Russians to get out of the war.
He's promising peace, land, and bread.
And most of the Russian soldiers were peasants.
And so they're promising land for the soldiers.
Soldiers can, you know, come show up in all these different villages where there was land available.
A lot of people have been killed.
There was empty land.
They wanted to get it back into cultivation.
So by the summer of 1917, you had the peasants in the Russian army fleeing by the, they were deserting by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands.
I mean, they did not want to miss out on land.
That's what they've always dreamed of owning is land.
So the Russian army is collapsing rapidly.
Now, it's interesting that Lenin, summer of 1917, Lenin tried three times to gain power with a coup, and he was not successful.
He failed three times.
And it wasn't until October of 1917 that the Russian army was completely gone.
So in that circumstance, the small number of Bolsheviks were able to seize power.
And very quickly, they started the Cheka secret police.
Lenin authorized the Cheka.
The main purpose was to suppress the opposition because the army wasn't a problem.
The army was gone, but they had a lot of political parties.
Most of them were socialist.
But most of the demand in Russia was for a socialist coalition.
The Bolsheviks wanted exclusive power for them to use violence by any means that was politically necessary.
And did I get it right in my article, Jim, that Wilson had given them $325 million?
Well, the Wilson was...
In order to stay in the war, basically?
Right.
Before Kerensky was chased out in October by Lenin, as I said, he was trying to deal with everything happening.
And one of the things that was happening was the British, the French, and the Americans were alarmed that Russia may be leaving the war, which was becoming a more obvious catastrophe for the Russians.
And they wanted to keep the Germans divided on two fronts, obviously.
Yeah.
Right.
The British and the French and the Americans didn't want Russia to leave the war.
And then that would enable Germany to send many of its troops to the Western Front and make things harder for the Americans, the French, and the British.
So he bribed the Kerensky government.
Kerensky agreed to stay in the war because they desperately needed the money.
And but the fact of prolonging the war really accelerated the collapse of the army during the summer of 1917.
So...
Yeah, I mean, you really make the case very strongly in your book that if Wilson had not put together that money to bribe Kerensky to stay in the war, the soldiers, with or without guns, with or without very many of them, at least they would have been around to protect the new regime from the communist overthrow.
But they weren't.
They were out starving on the front.
The summer of 1917, Lenin tried three times to pull off a coup.
And he could not do it because even though the Russian army was collapsing as peasants were deserting by the hundreds of thousands to try to get the land that was being offered, even that remnant of the Russian army was enough to prevent the takeover by Lenin.
He couldn't take power until October when the Russian army was completely collapsed.
Yeah.
All right.
So, Jim, you're saying intervention can be problematic?
Uh, it is very difficult to predict what is going to happen with many things, and certainly with how other people react to things that we do.
The more we intervene, the more, you know, the more instability we can cause, because we have no control over how other people react.
We can control what we do, maybe, but we cannot control and often overestimate our ability to control how other people react.
And so, in this case, you're talking in the whole case of intervening in the First World War, you're talking about we could not control how the allies, our own allies reacted.
And as I said, they went from a stalemate to dictating the peace and the Treaty of Versailles specified, among other things, that Germany was exclusively responsible for the war and had to pay all the costs of the war, you know, and all that.
Wilson was completely powerless.
Uh, once we made it possible for the British and the French to have a decisive victory by virtue of our intervention, and we could not control how the Germans reacted, and we could not control what happened after that.
But once we intervened and enabled the British and the French to be on the side that could have a decisive victory to break the stalemate, I mean, that's basically where Wilson lost control.
And, you know, the same thing, you look at Iraq in the early part of this century, where not only did they overthrow Saddam, which was bad enough for destabilizing the place, but then they made sure that there would not be a negotiation between the old power and the new power by just taking the side of the Shiite majority and then waging a five year civil war for them in order to drive all the Sunnis out of Baghdad and make it almost 100% Shiite city now.
And then the reaction to that among especially the Saudis and other parts of the American government that are more pro-Saudi and didn't mean for things to turn out that way, where they handed southern Iraq to Iran.
They just turn right around and start backing the Mujahideen in order to undermine Iran's position in Iraq and in Syria and leading ultimately to the rise of the Islamic State.
And we're going to be dealing with the consequences of George Wilson Bush's intervention for the next 100 years, just like Bush was actually going in, screwing around, messing with the consequences from 100 years before.
Yeah, it was certainly a mistake to get involved in dictating the borders of a lot of different countries, certainly including Iraq, where you had a Sunni majority and a Shiite minority where there happened to be oil fields and then the Kurdish areas up in the north.
So these people had never been in a national government before where they had to get along and so on.
So we had no control over that.
And a related case, of course, is what happened in Iran, where we, back in the early 1950s, helped the Shah gain power, confirm his power, and everything was fine for a while.
But then the Shah, in the 1960s, actually earlier than the 1960s, he started to develop an authoritarian regime that was secular.
And the secular part of it especially inflamed radical Muslims in the 1960s, and Ayatollah Khomeini became an enemy of the Shah's as early as the 1960s.
And so our friend the Shah, who helped us during the Cold War by keeping Russians out of the Middle East, our buddy had enemies in the radical Muslims, so we became their enemies or they became our enemies.
And you end up with the taking of American hostages in 1979.
And what went on there, and then we went on to back Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s when he went to war against Iran.
So we had two reasons for the Iranians to be hostile and start focusing on us.
So now here we are, and there aren't very many easy things that can be done about it.
And so it goes on and on.
Right now we're fighting on both sides of the war.
We're still fighting for Iran's position in Iraq, while we're fighting for al-Qaeda's position against them in Syria.
We're fighting for and against al-Qaeda at the same time in Yemen right now, as Saudis backing al-Qaeda against the Houthis and we're helping them at the same time we're still drone striking them.
So I don't even think Hitler could figure that one out.
Yeah, well, I would, you know, one of the hardest things in foreign policy is to go from, is to manage the transition from heavy intervention to lesser or non-intervention.
To manage that process, go from where you're constantly intervening in an unpredictable, often unpredictable ways, to go from there to a non-interventionist foreign policy is extremely difficult.
Well, Obama's approach to that has been to walk away from it.
And that's, that doesn't work out very well, because there are people in the world who are aspiring dictators, terrorists, and so on.
Wait, where did he walk away from?
What's that?
Where did he walk away from?
Not Yemen, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or Libya, or Syria, or Iraq.
Oh, he's trying to walk away from intervention.
He's just saying, I'm not interested, I'm not participating in this anymore.
I mean, he's, he is having, you know, he has gone back on some of that.
He's announced that we're going to be in Afghanistan longer than he had said.
You know, he hasn't done anything in Syria.
Oh, come on now, Jim.
Where have you been the last four years?
He's been backing al-Qaeda suicide bombers in Syria against Assad for Turkey, and Saudi, and Israel this whole time.
Right, he's going, he's going back and forth.
He's saying, you know, I'm, I don't want any, you know, I don't want to do this anymore.
I'm pulling out.
And so then he gets forced, you know, after a lot of, since he gets forced into, uh...
Well, it's true the PR is different from the reality, but don't mistake that for, for the policy flip-flopping.
He's one of the world's worst negotiators.
So, you know, if, if, if you're trying to get to a non-interventionist position, you, uh, you need more sophistication than simply saying, I'm going to walk away.
And...
I disagree totally.
I think, I think your premise is all wrong.
Your premise is all wrong.
He hasn't walked away.
If he had walked away, it would be totally different.
Instead, what he's done is train proxy armies and send in, work with the Saudis and send in Mujahideen.
And, you know, he's killing people with drones.
Yeah, I mean, it's not like he's Ron Paul.
If he was Ron Paul, that'd be a different discussion.
And you could say, well, withdrawal has led to this, but he hasn't withdrawn.
He's expanded the war in Afghanistan.
He doubled down in Afghanistan with the whole surge, expanded the drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, overthrew Gaddafi.
And this is not a non-interventionist president walking away from anything.
I mean, he did pull, he did pull troops out of Iraq, but that was on Bush's timetable.
He has, he has, he has no interest in it.
So he's, his ideal is to walk away from it.
Well, you know, there are other people who rush in to take advantage of it.
I just wish that were true is all.
Anyway, listen, I'm sorry, Jim.
I really appreciate your time today, but I'm way over time here and got to go.
Okay.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.
That's the great Jim Powell, everybody.
And, and his books are just great.
It's Wilson's War, Bully Boy, and FDR's Folly.
And we'll be right back.
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