04/17/17 – James Bovard on the far-reaching negative consequences of Woodrow Wilson’s war, 100 years later – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, introducing our good friend Jim Bovard.
He wrote a whole bunch of books.
They're all really, really good.
I won't do the whole list, but check out his Amazon page.
My favorite, I have to say, is Attention Deficit Democracy.
And no, he doesn't need a lecture from you about it's a republic, not a democracy.
Please, it's in there.
Such a great book.
And of course, the latest is the memoir, Public Policy Hooligan.
Before that, there's 10 or something going back to the 1980s that are really just great.
And now he is on the editorial board or the something or other board at USA Today.
And wrote this great piece, Woodrow Wilson Made Democracy Unsafe for the World.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you, sir?
Hey, doing good, Scott.
Thanks for your kind words.
Yeah, well, you deserve them.
Everybody knows that.
And, you know, I get, for whatever reason they direct them to me, I don't know, but I get compliments about your work all the time.
Oh, really?
Yeah, because you say that Bovard is an incredible writer.
Oh, Attention Deficit Democracy.
Who was telling me this just the other day?
Attention Deficit Democracy.
Man, that's a great book, they were saying.
Well, damn, I never hear that.
Yeah, well, I'm joking.
You should get out more.
No, it's very nice that folks have kind words for the book.
I mean, it was, a lot of people hated it when it came out, but what the heck, it's still around.
That's because of how good it was.
Yeah, you know, I was on the wrong side of the torture issue, so, by a lot of people's standards, so.
In other words, the right side of it.
And you're quoted in my brand new book on the torture issue from that book, in fact.
Oh, that's great.
Well, thanks very much.
Yeah.
I won't spoil it for the audience.
Let's talk about Woodrow Wilson, the father of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and Harry Truman and George W. Bush.
Well, I'm not sure if he was the father.
I think his role might have been more closer to midwife, you know, because he certainly, you know, by plunging into the First World War and helping sow a vast amount of chaos in post-war Europe, that led to a lot of other wars.
You know, President Wilson was very proud.
Absolutely amazing.
And that was something that reminded me how little I know about the First World War.
Actually, when you talk about as the Versailles conference was going on at the end of the war, there were still this this was the 14 wars, separate wars that were still raging.
No, this is not 14 separate wars that were still raging.
This is 14 wars.
Most of them were new wars.
And they were part of the result of the making a hodgepodge of the European borders.
Oh, I see.
So it's not that these were wars that were still going on, like smaller wars within World War One.
This was after the conference when they drew the new borders, then new fighting broke out.
Right, right.
It may have been some of them might have started during the conference when things weren't flexed.
Right.
But there was just a horrendous amount of conflicts that made an absolute mockery of Wilson's attempt to label the First World War a war to end all wars or some other such hokum.
So but but it was it was that was what should have been should have been expected when the government told so many lies.
And, you know, just there were all these dominoes falling in.
And it didn't matter what Woodrow Wilson thought those dominoes were going to keep falling.
OK, now, so I don't know what they tell the kids nowadays, but when I was a kid in school, they said, yeah, World War One caused World War Two.
At the same time, though, you know how it is.
They basically teach that everything that happened in history, certainly that the U.S. government did.
It had to do at the time, because after all, it's a democracy and the democracy decided, et cetera.
And so it just goes without saying that it was right.
It must have been right that America did enter the war.
But what you're I think breaking down here, you're saying that it's not just World War One.
It's American intervention in World War One that made so much of the difference.
Why is that so?
Well, you know, I think if the U.S. had not intervened, that Germany, France and Britain would have had to reach some kind of accommodation, though that most likely would have been much less disruptive than what the Versailles Treaty finally came up with.
France was, you know, so desperate for vengeance and as was Britain.
The in the 1980s, I think it was a 1918 election in Britain, and Lloyd George campaigned on a promise to hang the Kaiser.
So, I mean, it was a very high toned election.
So but there were, you know, most of the European powers had kind of fought themselves almost to exhaustion at the point that the U.S. intervened.
And if the U.S. had not gotten in, things probably would have, you know, things could almost not have worked out worse.
Maybe that's the best way to put it, because I don't want to imply that the ending would have been happy or any such sense.
But it certainly made things worse for the U.S. to intervene and Wilson to be putting all the pressure on different levels.
And there were so many things which which Wilson turned a blind eye to.
So many atrocities, such as such as the British government maintaining a food blockade on Germany for six months after the armistice, which starved to death thousands of Germans and helped embitter them and helped sow a lot of seeds of radicalism that came to fruition in the 1930s.
Right.
Well, and that's the whole thing, right, is, you know, the absolute worst case scenario is Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
And yet, I mean, isn't that even the mainstream historian consensus that they're just without the Versailles Treaty?
No, Hitler.
Right.
Even.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Certainly.
Certainly.
I mean, there was there was there was all kinds of things which helped helped pave the path to the Nazi takeover.
But the but a lot of things in the Treaty of Versailles and some of the actions of the French government and the British government afterwards certainly pushed Germany in that direction, though there was no excuse for people voting for Hitler.
But, yeah, you know, it's it's fascinating looking back on that on this day.
Since yesterday, the Turks had a referendum on whether or not to make make the Turkish leader a dictator.
And according to the first polls I've seen, the vote for yes in favor of dictatorship won by a narrow margin.
So that's certainly what they're claiming.
Yeah.
You know, I don't trust them, but that's another story.
Yeah.
I don't know if it would have made much difference if the no vote had won over there at this point anyway.
Oh, it's it's it's very tragic.
Very tragic.
All right.
Well, and so Turkey, that's another big part of this.
Right.
And, you know, in Jim Powell's book, he emphasizes the rise of Hitler and the rise of the communists in Russia, too, as a consequence of American intervention in the war and bribing the Kerensky government to stay in the war.
We could get back to that if you want to address that.
But also there's the Ottoman Empire and the destruction of Turkish rule over Arab lands led to their possession by Britain and then eventually the United States.
The Britain and France, both because of the French and the British race in the carve up new empires.
I mean, it's one of the, shall we say, ironies of the Wilson's war to make the make the world safe democracy, that the British and the French expanded their colonies.
And in most of those colonies, there was no democracy.
So and it's it was another wrinkle that the that that you had President President Wilson, you know, top thumbing for democracy at the same time that the British were just brutally crushing the Irish, becoming far more heavy handed there.
So.
Anyhow, but you know, there's there are so many different levels of hypocrisy here for this war, and it was a great tragedy for America and for much of the world.
All right.
So talk a little bit about the changes in the relationship between the national government, the states and the individual in America during the war in Europe.
Well, yeah, the the the thing that was the biggest impact on the short run was that military conscription back at the time that Wilson first pulled the US into the war.
People were given the impression that conscription might not be that necessary, but very few people, fewer than 100000 men volunteered for the military after Wilson's appeal for a moral crusade.
So Congress passed a law to make the to allow the government to draft up to 10 million people just to make sure they had enough cannon fodder.
And once they had that, then they decide they also need to have an espionage law to make it a federal crime to to criticize the draft.
And so you had a huge amount of crackdowns on free speech, basically to try to shore up the conscription system.
Now, you know what I wonder, I've read a little bit of stuff about the right, you know, just in the early years of World War Two, people like Garrett Garrett saying stay out, let Stalin and Hitler fight it out.
There's no reason to jump into that.
Let Hitler go east and this kind of because otherwise what might happen?
We could empower Stalin and then have to have a whole new problem to deal with this kind of, in other words, really calling the score way ahead of time.
Herbert Hoover, I guess the former president had had taken this stand as well.
But I wonder when it comes to all the antiwar activism before World War One, how prescient were the critics about what the consequences might be of intervening in Europe?
Were they just saying, hey, we shouldn't do this.
George Washington said not to.
And it's immoral.
And Germany doesn't threaten us.
Or were they even saying, geez, we might help the Brits tip the balance of power so badly that it ends up with this terrible backlash and all these repercussions?
Well, there were there were a handful of intellectuals and writers, people like H.O. Mencken, Randolph Bourne and others who very clearly perceived the type of disasters that could follow from the US intervention.
But you had a very similar, I guess, tidal wave among intellectuals, the same as you had in 2002, 2003 with the neocons and the Iraq war, that the top media all of a sudden became very much saber rattling.
And that was a lot of a lot of folks who were a lot of folks who were enthusiastic about having other people go fight.
I think that was the case with Walter Lippmann, who was running for the New Republic at that point.
And I think he might have given some advice to Wilson as well.
I'm not sure.
But there was there were folks who saw the danger.
It was it was a much cleaner argument for staying out of the first First World War than the Second World War.
I mean, given the atrocities that Germany was was committing to, you know, the things that are done were far more jolting than what happened in the First World War.
Part of the reason that Americans did not react more strongly to some of the Second World War atrocities was because there had been so many false claims about atrocities in the First World War.
The British propaganda operation had basically fabricated a lot of stories.
Certainly, the German occupation of Belgium, much of Belgium, did result in atrocities.
There were thousands of innocent people killed.
But that was that was hyped in a way that was became far more dominant in the American news media.
And my impression is that the German atrocities that were committed in Belgium, anyhow, were not nearly as deadly as what the American troops did in the Philippines in the prior decade.
All right.
Now, this is something that you're a real expert on, maybe the best in America on American government intervention in our agricultural economy.
Oh, good.
Oh, good.
And this is something I was hoping for an easy question.
Yeah.
Well, this is something that nobody really knows very much about.
Of course, all good libertarians know that whenever there's a problem with the way things are working, you need to always ask what government did to make it this way in the first place before you start coming up with government solutions to them.
But so we had a problem, right?
I learned this in college that, well, you had too many farmers producing too much stuff.
And so they just couldn't get it right, man, with their crazy seasons and credit problems and things.
And so the government had to come in and take over the agricultural industry.
To continue to refuse to do so was madness, Jim.
Well, and but almost nobody still recalls how the federal government wrecked American agriculture, wrecked it in the wake of the First World War.
What happened during the war?
You had Herbert Hoover, who was a food czar.
He was encouraging, you know, there was a mantra that food is going to win the war.
And so there was a vast increase in the plannings.
Government came in with price supports, sharply drove up crop prices.
You had a lot of government credits for foreign buyers that sent land prices skyrocketing.
And the farmers thought that they were going to be on the gravy train forever.
But in 1920, the government ended the credits, prices and land values plunged, and there were massive bankruptcies across rural America.
What happened then was that the farmers felt like they had been cheated and that it was necessary to have a government takeover to guarantee them high prices like they'd had in the 1910s.
So that was that was where the idea of parity came from.
That was parity was a basically a moral doctrine masquerading as an economic policy.
It never really made any sense.
But it was the but that was a compass for federal farm policy from the 1930s to the 1970s and 1980s, which is a sign of how lame brain federal policymaking has been.
So but folks, very few folks have recognized that the federal takeover of agriculture in the 1930s was paved.
The way for that was paved in the wake of the First World War.
There were there were so many.
And that was another one of those things that you had private experts who were saying, look, you know, the agriculture economy is getting way the hell out of whack.
Once these credits and there's going to be horrendous disruption.
It was similar to what happened with the housing bust.
2007, 2008, you had you'd had Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other federal entities that just helped drive housing prices through the roof.
And then all of a sudden, when those credits ended, boom, it was like a souffle collapsing.
And that's what happened with the agricultural markets and agricultural land values after the First World War boom ended.
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You know, there was once I don't know if it's still available online anymore.
What I guess it was a headline from our dumb century.
The Onion Book from 2000 from 19 from 1917, where it's J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller and Carnegie congratulate Woodrow Wilson on getting us into the war in the first ever conference call.
Something like that.
That's funny.
But so anyways, yeah, what about J.P. Morgan and his influence on the Woodrow Wilson administration?
How much did that have to do with getting us into the war?
Good question.
I don't know.
Oh, man, come on.
I mean, this is something which I've heard.
I read a lot more about the British influence.
There's a couple of really good books I want to recommend.
Thomas Fleming did a book in 2003 called The Illusion of Victory, American World War One.
It's an absolute masterpiece and it's very well written.
I mean, that's the single best source I've found.
Hunt Tooley also did a great book on the First World War on the Western Front.
Hunt Tooley is a professor in Texas.
Great.
Yeah, he was actually recommended to me by Tom Woods recently, too.
Hunt's a good fellow.
He seems very friendly for a Texan.
Hey, we're all very, very friendly.
I just want to make sure you're paying attention.
That's what they say about us most of all is how friendly we are, us Texans.
Well, you know, I haven't heard that from people in Massachusetts.
Yeah, well, what do they know about it?
Well, anyhow.
Exactly.
All right.
Hey, so now here's the thing about it.
Everybody knows that when Roosevelt mobilized the American people and industry for World War Two that that was it, Jack.
We've been mobilized ever since.
Perpetual war for perpetual peace since 1941 on at least.
I mean, maybe there was a little bit of a lull in 1946.
Some say, I don't know, but not much of one.
But so what about World War One and the so-called merchants of death?
I guess military industrial complex was the euphemism that advertising people had come up with by 1960.
But what about that and the distortions in the industrial economy in preparation and in participation in World War One?
Good question.
Hunt Tooley's probably done some good stuff on that.
Jim Powell might have done some good stuff on that.
That was not my article and it's something which I'm cold on at the moment.
Oh, man.
Well, I'm just surprising you all over the place.
Just say it wrecked it, Scott.
It screwed up everything just like in agriculture, man.
It made these businessmen think, well, hey, why please my customer when I can just please my congressman?
Right?
Well, I mean, there was a lot of that going back to the Civil War.
The government contractors made out like bandits.
I mean, Biltmore down in Asheville, North Carolina, to some degree, it's a monument to profits from government war contracting.
No doubt.
I'll see if we get a backlash from North Carolina on that last line.
You might.
You might.
It's Jim at JimBovard.com, everybody.
I appreciate that.
Good.
Yeah, finally got a good laugh out of that guy.
All right.
So now I brought this up for a second and you dodged it, so I'm gonna bring it back up again.
Well, I don't know.
Maybe you just forgot.
What about, oh, I asked you two questions at once.
It's not your fault.
What about Lennon and Trotsky and Kerensky and Woodrow Wilson?
Is there any truth to the rumor, do you think, to Jim Powell's interpretation that without Wilson, Kerensky would have gotten out of the war and if he had, then the troops would have been there to protect his government from Lennon's coup?
That certainly sounds plausible.
I mean, you know, there were so many disruptions which were thrown to the wrenches that, yeah, I mean, it was something which you'd said earlier, it was a real, almost a fluke that Hitler rose to power in Germany.
I think it may have been a bigger fluke that Lennon took power in Russia.
But it was interesting that President Wilson's reaction to Lennon, President Wilson intensely disliked Lennon because he felt the Bolsheviks had stolen his ideas for world peace, as Thomas Fleming wrote.
It's just like, okay, well, I wonder what other ideas Lennon stole from Wilson.
I know, that's funny.
Well, Wilson's, dare I say, handler, his alter ego and independent self, Colonel Edward Mandel House, had later complained that Mussolini stole all his ideas that he clearly wrote in Philip Drew before Mussolini ever had the chance.
In fact, you know how I know that?
From the late, great Will Grigg, who wrote the foreword to the latest edition of Philip Drew Administrator, where he quotes House complaining, well, I anticipated Mussolini by several years.
Oh, that's a riot.
That's great.
Both of these guys, couple of freaks.
Well, and this is the fun of Philip Drew to me, is that it's a blueprint for a fascist American dictatorship, but it's written by the Democrats, Jim.
It's not written by the conservatives.
It's written by the progressive reformers who want to make a right wing fascist state for the greater good of the little guy.
I'm a little confused.
What do you think?
Well, it's just, I mean, folks, folks not aware of how brutally the Wilson administration crushed freedom during the war.
There were, you know, there were folks that there was a pamphlet called Long Live the Constitution.
And just, just possessing that could get you six months in prison.
And there was a, there was a censorship campaign.
There was a federal committee on public information, which simply hearing the name of that, you're going to figure, oh, this is some big propaganda, which it was.
And it was run by a bunch of journalists who were previously gung ho for truth and honesty in the American way.
But, hey, there was a war on, so, you know, we got to win.
Yeah.
Well, now you mentioned lies, too, about how, and I think you even kind of mentioned it in context of anything based on lies as badly as this war was must turn out for the worse anyway, you know, ultimately.
And so I want to ask you about the Zimmerman telegram and this threat of the Germans helping the Mexicans invade the American Southwest.
How seriously was that taken at the time?
Because I just can't take it seriously at all.
What are we talking about?
Has anybody ever looked at a map and seen where Germany is?
I think it was, it was very helpful for American propaganda.
It was really stupid that the Germans sent that telegram and then admitted that it was bona fide.
The German government was doing, you know, I'm totally down on Wilson for dragging the U.S. into the war, for lying the U.S. into the war, for being an utter demagogue on it.
The German government was doing a lot of stupid things, and the German government had become a lot more heavy handed as the war went on.
And it was, you know, there wasn't that much moral difference between some of the governments at the start of the war.
But with each passing year, I think all the governments involved became more authoritarian.
So it's been a long time since I read about the Zimmerman telegram.
I'm cold on that subject, so I would be making comments that were more ignorant than usual for me.
Yeah, that's all right.
I mean, to know that...
Folks are used to it, so...
Yeah, exactly.
We're at like number four or five of these.
No, it's okay.
It's because I read your article a week ago, so now I'm kind of winging it.
Oh, I never would have guessed, Scott.
Hey, I never would have guessed.
Hey, Scott, this is the first time for you.
Well, yeah, I should have re-read it this morning.
Sorry.
I was in a hurry.
I was talking to Ted Carpenter.
Okay.
Ted's a good fellow.
He is.
That's my excuse.
It was a Ted Carpenter conversation.
Got in the way.
Oh, yeah, I was going to say, well, it's enough to know that the Germans were promising to help Mexico invade California and Arizona.
I mean, how ridiculous can you get?
You know, Germany couldn't even get here.
But then I was going to ask you a good question, which is, well, but what about German harassment of American shipping and that kind of thing?
You and I are looking at this in hindsight and saying, boy, what a stupid, dumb war that we shouldn't have got in.
But maybe the Germans, man, they picked this fight.
They're messing with our ships.
They sank the Lusitania.
They're lucky we didn't declare war two years before.
How about that?
Well, you know, there was an impression given that President Wilson tried to make people think that the U.S. was staying out of the war.
It wasn't.
It was massively supplying weapons and money and other things to Britain, to France, to other allies.
It was trying to keep them in the war.
It had totally trampled any type of neutral standing.
There was a German blockade of Britain, which the U.S. refused to recognize.
Britain also had a blockade on Germany, which the U.S. basically accepted.
There were a lot of comments that Wilson made.
He talked about how submarines were basically like a war.
This horrible, horrible new weapon that were a violation of human rights or some such didn't really make any sense.
But it's interesting.
Going back many centuries, if there was a war and there was a blockade, then folks realized that if they violate the blockade to send arms to one of the combatants, you're getting in the damn war.
It would have been the same in 1863 if France had tried to ship a vast number of advanced carbines to the Confederacy at the time that President Lincoln had a blockade on the South.
Something like that would have been considered an act of war by Lincoln.
So President Wilson would just try to pretend that it didn't count because the U.S. was not formally in the war.
But for all practical purposes, it was doing everything it could to support the British.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I mean, that's the whole thing here, right, is even with hindsight being as good as it is and seeing all the consequences that flowed from this and how, oh, boy, you shouldn't have done that, even if we are, you know, taking too much of advantage of our perspective of history.
Hey, that's OK, because what's really important is the lesson about how dangerous things can get.
And in fact, in that previous conversation with Ted Carpenter, we were talking about how you could get in a really, really bad war accidentally and you could have no one, not in D.C., not in Pyongyang or Beijing, want to have a war in North Korea.
But you could have one anyway because stupid, because government programs like defense and intelligence departments and for that matter, the diplomatic corps of these governments, they could really screw up and miscalculate and cause the deaths of tens of millions of people.
We've seen it before.
Yeah, it has happened before.
Yep.
That's a very good point.
And take a step back to Germany.
It was idiotic and profoundly unwise that the Germans, you know, greatly increased their submarine warfare against shipping to Britain shortly before Wilson called for the declaration of war.
If the Germans had not done that, it would have been far more difficult for Wilson to pull the nation into war.
Right.
German government was, you know, I'm looking for a euphemism, but I can't think of anything that would be proper for a family-friendly radio show.
They were reckless and irresponsible with their military power.
Reckless and irresponsible.
And yeah, that's putting it mildly.
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But so back to the counterfactual again.
And I know this is more Jim Powell's book than your article, but still it's in your article too.
And the real point about how even with the war raging in Europe, American intervention was unnecessary.
Did not have to happen.
Wilson, he could have laughed off the Zimmerman telegram just like I am now.
He could have kept us out of war.
His secretary of state resigned rather than get on board the bandwagon over it.
So that goes to show, right, just like Powell, you know, went along anyway, but Warren Bush not to do Iraq.
It just goes to show he didn't have to do it.
If even Powell said he didn't have to do it.
William Jennings Bryan said you don't have to do this.
But then, and look, the fluke of the Soviet Union, the fluke of Nazi Germany.
That's all of World War II.
Sixty million deaths.
Then after that, the rise of communism in China, another 40 or 50 million.
And then, you know, Vietnam and Pol Pot, Korea, America's genocidal wars, dare I say, in those countries.
Well, not in Cambodia, but obviously in Korea and Vietnam and then leading to the Cambodian genocide as well.
It's just horrible.
For that matter, support for the Afghan Mujahideen and the coup in Iran.
That was an anti-Soviet move in 53, in a sense, part of a Cold War chessboard move there.
And then repercussions.
None of this had to be this way.
And it doesn't mean that, hell, we might have had some other nuclear war.
I don't know, Jim, things could have been entirely different in a worse way.
But it just seems like it's so obvious to see the chain of events from this unnecessary intervention and declaration.
Just like in 2003 with George Bush setting off a brush fire that just can't be contained.
Yeah, I don't know if I'd blame all those subsequent wars in the First World War.
I think some of them might have happened anyhow.
And it's hard to know what kind of idiocy would have risen to the top in Russia.
You know, certainly the chaos of the First World War and the great losses Russia had opened the door to far more extreme elements.
But, no, I mean, you know, it was – the First World War was a Pandora's box, even if not all those bad things came out of it.
Yeah, well, they did.
All right, well.
That's just me.
Hey, it's your show.
You can say whatever you want.
I don't mean to deny the agency of all the other individuals making horrible decisions there and everything.
But I'm just saying, no Soviet Union, no world communism, right?
I mean, you can't have Mao without having Lenin and Stalin first.
Am I wrong about that?
I think you're right.
I mean, I haven't – you know, I'm kind of weak on the Chinese history.
Yeah, me too.
I admit it.
It just seems like – yeah, I don't know.
And again, we might have all died in 1950-something in the H-bomb war anyway in some other timeline.
You know, I don't know.
But it just seems like pretty hard to beat World War II for the world's worst consequences of intervening in World War I, even if you just stop your chain of events right there.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Sure.
I mean, there's – I mean, that's – you know, there were dominoes that fell from 1914 to 1919.
And once the Versailles Treaty was signed, those dominoes kept falling.
And President Wilson seemed to think that with his moral rhetoric that he could change world history and change humanity.
But his moral arrogance was just incredibly damaging.
And it was also very damaging to the Democratic Party.
It's interesting that the U.S. had basically won the war by the time the November 1918 congressional elections were held.
But Wilson's party, the Democrats, still got clobbered.
And in 1920, Wilson was not running for re-election, but there was a – the Democrats got clobbered then again, partly because of the odiousness of what the war had come to stand for from Americans' point of view.
Yeah.
Another similarity with Iraq, right?
Everybody – I guess I wasn't there.
I went around for the beginning of Vietnam.
But boy, I remember a lot of denial of the real world we're living in in the run-up to Iraq about how sweet and swell and quick and easy this is going to be.
And the thing I – perhaps you know, can answer this off the top of your head, how many combat veterans were saying that?
I mean, it's my guess that there was a much lower percentage of combat veterans were saying that than pundits and intellectuals and columnists and TV talking heads.
The same kind of TV talking heads were wetting their pants over the missile strike in Syria last week.
Yeah.
Well, and I dare say virtually every regular Joe on the bottom half of economic society in America didn't support the war.
That doesn't necessarily mean the left half either.
But because there were a lot of people who are a lot more, say, country than rock and roll, for example, who never believed in little country club cheerleader, Yale boy, George W. Bush.
You know, he never represented them.
They never believed for a minute that he cared about them or that his war was for them to protect them or anything like that.
And I knew all kinds of just regular schmucks who knew way better than to believe in the war in 2002.
And yeah, I'm sure that included a lot of veterans as well.
You know, I knew – part of the reason I knew, well, just one small part of it, though, I just spent my whole life seeing Vietnam veterans standing on the side of the road begging with signs.
And that just goes to show right there, well, geez, why aren't they put up in some government boarding house somewhere being taken care of?
Man, this guy looks like he's dying, you know, on the side of the road.
Nobody cares about him at all, apparently.
But then this is that same government.
It's just George Bush inheriting that same government a generation later doing the same thing again.
Why would I believe in that?
I think a lot of people, without knowing the details of Saddam Hussein and his weapons programs, just didn't trust it.
And they were right not to.
Yeah, well, I mean, and there was so much exaggerating.
Well, you know, Dick Cheney, the kind of statements he was making were just so bizarre.
But the press corps was basically cheering him on, most of the Washington press corps, the Northeast Corridor press corps.
So it was appalling.
Well, you know, I actually heard stories of Texans getting lynched or at least attempted, you know, almost being lynched.
German, American, German Texans, Texans of German heritage, just for not being on board the war and not all hailing Wilson and this kind of thing.
Oh, that sounds very, very plausible.
There was Thomas Fleming book talks about some of the lynchings of Germans here in the U.S.
And if memory serves, there was a case in Missouri which was cheered by the Washington Post.
Wow.
Amazing.
And this is just for not being on board for the thing, right?
This isn't for sabotage at an army base or anything.
Right.
Right.
I mean, to throw on a flip side is, I mean, from, you know, it was clear from 1914, 1915 that the U.S. was aiding the war effort.
And there was some German sabotage, even by someone who grew up close to where I lived.
I was raised on a mountainside in Shenandoah Valley.
And there was, you know, I was raised in this.
Actually, here we go.
Here's our First World War story for you.
I was raised on a beef cattle research station, federal state combo.
And before that, it was Army Remount Center.
And it was one of the main centers for sending horses to the First World War.
And there were tens of thousands of horses that passed through this place that were sent to France.
I think a lot of them ended up in French restaurants, but that's another story.
But it turned out there were some Germans that had settled the area as farmers.
There was a family named Dilger.
And about two miles from where I was raised, there was a Dilger barn named after this family, whose land was seized at the time that the U.S. government decided to take this land to train U.S. cavalry.
But Dilger had a son who went to medical school in Heidelberg, then came back here and was actually trying to help sabotage some of the U.S. horses that were being sent to France.
I think he was using anthrax or something like that.
So there was actually a book about that about eight or ten years ago.
And I had no idea that I was raised close by where someone who was a World War I saboteur was raised.
It's a small world.
I didn't have space for that in the USA Today piece, but what the hell, I'll throw it out here now.
That's a good one.
Well, yeah.
It needs to be a little fresh in my mind to tell a good story, but yeah, that's a gist.
Hey, one more thing.
The flu.
What's the flu got to do with the war, Jim?
Well, the Spanish flu, according to some reports, it first came out of an army camp in Kansas.
Totally swept under the rug is that there were all kinds of scandals about the horrible conditions at the U.S. training camps that caused a lot of unnecessary deaths of American conscripts.
And among some of those unsanitary conditions, the Spanish flu came out.
It may have also come out other places.
It's unclear where it first originated.
But half a million Americans died from the Spanish flu that was spurred and spread by the war, something which happened when the Spanish flu outbreak started to happen.
In some places there was censorship, so people did not learn there was an epidemic because the government thought it would be bad for the morale or who knows what.
And that's something which probably increased the death toll.
Amazing.
All right, wait, one more thing again.
The alcohol.
The ban of beer sales.
Not wine, but just beer.
That's an anti-German measure, or they're just raising taxes?
Yes, I mean, here again, folks, a lot of people say, well, prohibition, it was too bad, but it was sold in part as an anti-German measure.
And many of the breweries, maybe most of them back then, were owned by German-Americans.
Quality of American beer was a hell of a lot better then than it was for the subsequent 50 years after prohibition ended.
So the First World War not only did it have a carnage in Europe, but it resulted in the triumph of the equivalent of the Taliban here at home.
If it had not been for the war, prohibition almost certainly would not have been enacted nationwide.
The 18th Amendment would very likely not have passed.
The 18th Amendment banned alcohol consumption.
But even before the 18th Amendment passed, President Wilson banned beer sales.
And so, I mean, what's the point of living if you can't have beer?
That's a really good question for beer drinkers.
I know beer is really important to you people.
Well, yeah, you know, I'm still hoping it's going to cause my hair to grow back.
It hasn't worked yet, but I'm still drinking.
I should try that.
Hey, listen, well, and the poisoning thing, that sounds like a lie.
You must be lying about the poisoning of the alcohol, Jim.
I had a professor decide for that source.
Yeah, this is something that probably started after Wilson.
I'm not sure when, during Prohibition, the poisoning started, but what was happening is that there was industrial alcohol that people would sometimes try to convert to drinkable hooch.
And so the thing the Fed started doing is adding poison to industrial alcohol, and there were 10,000 people who were killed as a result of the federal poisoning.
Oh, but that was under the Republicans?
That figures, too, I guess.
There was a very good book on this by Deborah Bloom.
The book's title is The Poisoner's Handbook.
Wow.
About Uncle Sam, Chief Poisoner.
Hey, you know, that's actually a much lower cost than the war on drugs, but that's a different story.
Yeah, well, it goes to show the lengths they'll go anyway.
I saw a thing this morning.
Did you see?
They arrested a guy on a 30-year-old cocaine businessman warrant from the days of Miami Vice down there.
Wow.
He'd been living in Orlando.
They couldn't catch him living 20 miles away, 100 miles away for 30 years, but they bravely announced their awesome victory this morning.
We caught him, everybody.
He was out riding bikes with his wife.
Well, I've never trusted bike riders.
Yeah, well, they're dangerous people, apparently.
Yeah, cocaine businessmen, too.
All right, hey, listen, I've wasted enough of your time today, Jim.
Thank you for coming on my show.
I appreciate it.
Hey, thanks so much, Scott, and thanks for the chance to brush some of the rust off my mind.
And best of luck to you and the Libertarian Institute.
I'm really glad you guys are out there, and y'all are doing great work.
Well, thanks very much, Jim.
I appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that is the great Jim Bovard.
Jimbovard.com, that's his website where he keeps all his stuff, including all his great articles that he's written for The Wall Street Journal and USA Today and all kinds of other great places over the years.
I mean, when I say years, I mean going back to the 80s and 90s.
I don't know.
His archive on the site goes at least back to the 90s.
A lot of great Waco stuff there and all kinds of stuff.
And then he wrote The Farm Fiasco, The Fair Trade Fraud, Feeling Your Pain, Freedom in Chains, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, and the latest is his great memoir.
It's called Public Policy Hooligan.
And you can read in there why the directors of virtually every national government department that's ever been created have specifically denounced Jim by name for his great journalism about their lousy work and dangerous work.
The great Jim Bovard, everybody.
Public Policy Hooligan.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
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