Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Tom Woods.
He wrote a bunch of books, including Meltdown, a free market look at the crash of 2008.
Also, Questions You're Not Supposed to Ask About American History.
And he helped edit with Murray Polner this excellent compendium of American anti-war writings, We Who Dared Say No to War.
Also, Who Killed the Constitution, Nullification, Rollback, and all those things.
And you all love his podcast.
And he's also at the Mises Institute.
It's the great Tom Woods.
Hey, Tom.
Scott, great to talk to you.
Hey, man.
Very good to talk to you, too.
Very happy to have you back on my show.
It's been way too long.
Yeah, absolutely.
So here's the big deal, man, is yesterday was Armistice Day.
And I guess, you know, when it falls on a Sunday, the government employees still get their vacation day.
So they're celebrating it two days this year.
So no government employees, like, say, for example, at the post office are doing their job today.
The banks are all closed.
Some of us are trying to take care of business.
But, no, anyway, it's Armistice Day, the celebration of the end of World War I.
And I know that they renamed it Veterans Day in the 50s and all that, because there were so many new veterans of so many new wars already.
But I was thinking that, you know, World War I, they call it the Great War.
They used to call it the Great War back before World War II.
And it really is that big and important.
And yet I am of the understanding that most people really don't understand very much about the war.
You know, World War II is so easy because it's America and England and our friend Joe Stalin against the evil fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Good guys versus bad guys.
Good guys win.
That's pretty easy.
You could teach it to a kid and they can understand it.
But World War I is a lot more messy and complicated.
So I was wondering if you could kind of give us a little bit of a background into the war itself first.
And then we can talk about the end of it, which was more important than the actual waging of it, I guess.
Oh, boy.
It's been quite a while since I've done it.
But, sure, I can do my best.
Just to help people wrap their heads around it a bit, I would just start by naming the countries that, let's say, eventually or at one time or another, wind up fighting together.
So the key powers on the side of the allies would be Britain, France, Russia and Italy.
Italy is kind of a fair weather friend.
The central powers being Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.
Those are the primary powers that are engaged in the war.
And when you try to – you're right.
With World War II, it's not that difficult to trace out the events leading up to it.
And you can create an easy narrative about German rearmament and the West's lack of response because they started thinking maybe that Versailles Treaty was a little bit too harsh after all anyway, et cetera.
It's very easy to come up with a narrative here.
But with World War I, you have colonial rivalries and you have secret agreements between countries going back a very long time, decades and decades.
You have resentments going back to, let's say, the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.
There's a lot that's going on here.
And so that's why you have a situation where one assassination, one political assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a radical Serb nationalist can lead to such unbelievably momentous consequences because it's – you have a powder keg of rivalry to begin with, of an arms race.
I mean, for example, the British.
The British policy was that because obviously they're an island, they need to have a really, really powerful navy.
So their military policy always was we have to make sure that we have a navy that is double the strength of anybody else.
So in other words, we've got a navy that's like the navy of two other countries put together.
So when the Germans begin massive armament process, well, then that's going to naturally force the British to up their military investment because they have to stay at a level of two countries' worth of a navy.
So there's an arms race going on.
There's colonial rivalries going on as Western imperialism is proceeding apace.
And, of course, when you have imperialism, you have rivalries within and sometimes conflicts brewing beneath the surface in these colonies.
So it's just one thing after another.
So the long and the short of it is the Germans wind up basically willing to say to Austria-Hungary, this is what's referred to as the blank check.
You take whatever measures you think you need to against these nationalist Serbs, one of whom just shot the heir to the throne, and we will back you.
That's what's meant by the blank check.
We'll back you in this.
And this, of course, OK, the Austrians didn't need a further invitation, and they proceeded to make demands of the Serbs that the Serbs could in no way accept.
I mean, in some ways it actually recalls to me the demands that the U.S. made of Serbia in 1999 or that NATO made of Serbia, that there's no way that the Serbs as sovereign people could accept.
So anyway, what wound up happening is that this leads to a series of—a cascading series of events because the Russians had long considered themselves the protectors of the Balkans and of a lot of these peoples, and the Russians have their own interests.
The French are going to support the Russians, and the Russians are meanwhile telling the French, you can get Alsace-Lorraine, you can get revenge for some of the territory that you lost to Germany back in 1871.
And then the British had had a secret agreement with the French, and it was just one thing after another.
And then when the Germans—when the war actually begins and the Germans make their way into France via Belgium and they cross through neutral Belgium, well, the violation of Belgian neutrality becomes justification for the—alleged justification for the British to get in.
So as you can see, it's not a—it's a very messy story.
It's not an easy story.
But the one thing you can see from the story is that this has nothing whatsoever to do with the United States, that this is one of the moments when you would say, I am so grateful that we have in effect seceded from Europe, that we don't have to worry about this crazy nonsense.
It's great that our ancestors moved out of this place.
Now we can enjoy peace over here.
That's what most Americans thought at the time, and that's why it took such an unrelenting propaganda campaign to try to persuade them that it—several years later, that it is necessary for the United States to get into the war.
They had to use the military draft.
They had to have people haranguing you on street corners.
They had to have propaganda movies because the good common sense of Americans in those days told them whatever the hell this war is about, we have no stake in it.
So the big key to the American entry into the war, I think a lot of people think it's the Lusitania.
But really, that was a couple of years earlier, and that failed to do the trick.
It was the Zimmerman telegram.
Was that as ridiculous of a thing as it seems like to me, especially in this era of fake excuses for starting wars?
Yeah, totally.
Yeah, totally fake excuses.
Yeah, you're right.
The Lusitania was 1915, and no doubt there were people who thought that that justified war.
But it didn't.
It didn't lead to the war.
1917 is when it happens, and there are several contributing factors to it.
I mean there were—for example, there was the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on the part of the Germans.
And that was bound to lead to American casualties, particularly because Woodrow Wilson refused to give common sense advice.
Listen, it's a wartime.
It's wartime, so don't travel aboard an armed, belligerent merchant ship carrying weapons of war through a war zone because you might get killed.
I mean it would be like people thinking that they were just going to walk right down the middle of the Western Front or something.
I mean who in his right mind would do this and what government would—like the Scandinavian countries, I'm fairly certain, told their citizens, look, don't—for heaven's sake, don't get on ships that are going to get you shot at.
I'm pretty sure during the Russo-Japanese War, that was the position the Scandinavian countries took.
You're Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and you're on one of these ships, and you get killed in the middle of that war.
That's on you.
We're not going to avenge your death because you're an idiot.
But Wilson wouldn't do that, so that was one thing.
But certainly another one was this Zimmerman telegram in which it was discovered that there had been communication between the Germans and, of all people, the Mexicans.
And the argument there was the Germans were saying that if hostilities should break out between us and the United States, if, then we would help you to win back some of the territory that those greedy Yankees took from you all those years ago.
And so this was, of course, trotted out as a great outrage.
But to me, the key word there is if there are hostilities, which there weren't at that time, and if you were seriously committed to avoiding war, you would not have let, obviously, a diplomatic faux pas like that lead to all-out war.
I mean, seriously.
Hey, guys, check out my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, by me, Scott Horton.
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I mean, come on.
And the Germans are going to—they can't even sail out of their own ports at this point.
They can't attack England, but they're going to come to Mexico and help invade Arizona?
Right.
I mean, come on.
If the Germans could have—if the Germans had the naval power to do that, they would have had the naval power to get enough food for themselves, which they couldn't do.
Yeah, seriously.
And, you know, I don't know if any of them had ever looked at a map or if any Americans had seen one, but the American Southwest, it's pretty big.
It was pretty big back when they stole the northern half of Mexico in order to—maybe the northern two-thirds of Mexico in order to make it the American Southwest in the first place.
There's no taking that back.
The whole thing is wildly implausible.
And if Wilson can get away with making all kinds of threats constantly, if the Germans continue their policy, they will have to—if he can do that so the Germans can't say, well, all right, how about if you continue being belligerent toward us, then we're going to do—I mean, that's what happens in war.
You talk trash to each other.
Yeah.
But still, obviously, no kind of credible threat there.
But that was good enough for the declaration of war.
Now, look, the way I have the narrative here, Tom, it's all very simple.
And everything negative that has ever happened, or positive for that matter, but really all the bad stuff that has ever happened since then in the world is all Woodrow Wilson's fault for this.
He said he wanted peace without victory, meaning we're not trying to conquer Europe and make it a new American colony or anything like that.
We're over there in a selfless manner trying to bring peace, and we're going to do it in a way where everybody is so fair to each other that we avoid this—avoid a situation where this happens again.
And so—and yet, right at the time that he was doing that, you actually had a peace without victory.
You actually had all sides were just completely out of gas, out of soldiers, out of ammo, out of everything.
And it was really cold outside, and it had been four years of fighting and millions of casualties all around.
And everybody had just about had it.
And so that if America had stayed out, the Kerensky government in Russia probably would have stood, and the Russian army would have been there to protect the interim government there, the revolutionary government from the communists for the October Revolution.
And you would not have had a situation where the British and the French were able to strip Germany of all their territories and make all these insane reparations demands.
And for that matter, you wouldn't have had the British and the French carving up all the former Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and creating Israel and all these problems that the United States has been dealing with since the end of World War II.
And it's all just simple as that.
I don't know what would have happened instead, but it wouldn't have been Lenin and Stalin, and it wouldn't have been Adolf Hitler, and it wouldn't have been the Second World War.
And therefore, no Bush family fortune, no Cold War, no American empire either.
Not like this, anyway.
But maybe that's just nonsense, and I like it because it sounds right, and maybe, I don't know, something else.
No, I think there's plenty to that, and there's a really good book that kind of lays out specifically exactly the kinds of consequences that you're speculating about here, and that's Jim Powell's book called Wilson's War, published I think all the way back in 2005.
Yeah, it really is excellent.
Yeah, it really does summarize all these different consequences, and it reminds us of the Ron Paul point about unintended consequences.
I mean we get these conservatives who tell us all day long that domestic policy has unintended consequences.
So if you have milk subsidies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, I get that conservatives are really good on milk subsidies.
But there are unintended – if that has unintended consequences, why wouldn't this – why wouldn't World War I have unintended consequences?
They might be consequences even more momentous than milk subsidies.
Well, and it really is the answer to, oh yeah, well what about Hitler, which is always the go-to for opponents of the American empire.
That without the American empire, Hitler would rise in Germany and would conquer the entire planet and then eventually North America too or something like that.
But it's the obvious response to what about Hitler is that Woodrow Wilson should have never given birth to him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a T-shirt that for a while was fashionable among conservatives, and it said – it says on the front, war never solved anything.
And then it says except slavery, fascism, blah, blah, blah.
So fascism, I thought, okay, it was war that created fascism.
We wouldn't have had this problem.
There wouldn't nearly have been the problem that Europe faced if it hadn't been for Wilson basically tipping the scales in one direction in that war and basically preventing the possibility of a genuine negotiated peace.
That's where that comes out.
And not to mention the very model of fascism.
I mean look at the way fascism looks at how society should run.
It's the idea that we don't want to – I mean the reason they don't care about democracy is that their idea is that democracy is a bunch of competing groups trying to each grab hold of the center of power.
We need one will representing the interests of the nation as a whole setting domestic policy.
And, of course, that's the wartime model.
We can't have a bunch of people debating about the war.
We have one will carrying through the war.
We don't want regional differences.
We want to encourage one single unified national culture.
So, again, in peacetime, that's what we want.
We don't want regional culture.
We want one single German nationalism.
So it takes the wartime model and it applies it to peacetime.
It says that just as in war where the private interest had to give way to the so-called public interest, that's the way we ought to organize society even in peacetime.
So the very model of fascism takes its inspiration from war.
So it is unbelievably rich even for conservatives to walk around with an idiotic shirt like that.
It was like I was saying on your show the other day about Star Wars, about how that's a theme throughout there is there's no time to discuss this in committee.
I'm not a committee.
Well, in other words, it's an emergency, and so the captain has to go ahead and take charge, and that's the story of Han Solo on his ship.
But it's also the story of the emperor cleansing the galaxy of the separatists and all that too.
Yeah, it's so – with all this stuff, it's always – everything is always – every big issue is always an emergency.
We don't have time to listen to your objections.
And you people are too stupid.
The experts will figure everything out.
And then years later, we're totally vindicated, and then they act as if no one could have predicted, blah, blah.
I mean – and you can come up with like just even something as – compared to World War I, mundane as bailing out AIG after the financial crisis of 2008.
Well, there were people who said you could easily let AIG go bankrupt.
This will have no effect whatsoever.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Listen, we don't have time to listen.
This is a major emergency.
It turned out – when they looked into it, it turned out – yeah, look, it's only about like a dozen firms that were really exposed to AIG.
And the amount of their exposure is so trivial.
It would just amount to like a year's worth of executive bonuses foregone.
I think they could survive it.
And then the former CEO of AIG says, you know what?
In retrospect, we probably should have just let us go bankrupt.
So in other words, we were right all along.
And as usual, nope, no time.
We can't think about the consequences.
It's like they can only think of – and you don't know if it's – are they really dumb or do they just have their own sinister motives?
And that's why they can't really allow us to have any input because is it really the case that they really can only think about one thing at a time?
Like let's go smash the Germans.
There might not be – there will be no consequences from this.
Let's just do that.
It reminds me of that old G. Edward Griffin interview with Norman Dodd, who was the investigator for that congressional committee.
He talked about the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace being founded in 1908 on the question, is there any means more effective than war?
Assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people.
And how then they studied it for a year with all this money and professors and smart people and studied groups and whatever.
And they came back and they said, nope, that's pretty much the best way to do it is to have a war.
And then you can regiment all kinds of things in the name of the emergency.
You can do all kinds of things, which of course leads us to the question of Woodrow Wilson's wartime administration because there was – it was really a great leap forward in terms of New Deal policies before the New Deal, wasn't it?
Well, I mean certainly there's nationalization of railroads and a heck of a lot else and basically a kind of economic planning.
And the Federal Reserve is coming into its own at this time as well.
So that's what makes it particularly interesting to note what Rothbard points out.
Murray Rothbard has a really great essay on World War I and the intellectuals.
And maybe you've read it.
It's really great because what he does is he goes back and reads – It's called War as Fulfillment, Power and the Intellectuals.
Yeah, it's an amazing essay because what he's done is he's gone back and looked at really the premier periodical of the progressive era, even though it was developed only late in the progressive era, The New Republic magazine, which as Bill Coffin would say has always been an enemy of the old republic.
The New Republic.
And was a J.P. Morgan orbit project in the first place.
I think Rothbard says that too.
And that sounds like this kind of thing Rothbard would have dug out as well.
But you read these people and, yeah, they'll say the Germans are in the wrong and we really got to go smash them.
But what really seems to float their boat is that while we're smashing them, this is such a golden opportunity to wean Americans away from their primitive attachment to the idea of private property and private life and try and get them thinking more in terms of, again, subordinating the private good to the public good and getting them to understand that we're going to need the state to exercise more authority over resource allocation.
This is our opportunity to plan.
This is our opportunity to be technocrats and to exercise power in Hamiltonian fashion and move away from the old dumb superstitions of earlier America.
That was the way they thought.
I'm not making that up.
That is the way they thought.
So that's a big deal.
Right.
Hey, and it goes to kind of a very modern question too.
I had a Stephen Walt on the show last week and he has this new book, The Tyranny, pardon me, The Hell of Good Intentions.
And not the hell with good intentions, but the hell of good intentions.
Yeah.
And, you know, Stephen Walt is the realist school guy and he's from Harvard University.
And so he's a very polite gentleman and all that kind of stuff, which is fair is fair.
And I'm not saying that he's anything but completely honest in his take, but his take comes from his perspective as part of faculty of a university where they discuss stuff like this in kind of a very gentlemanly and scholarly way, I guess, this kind of thing.
But in his entire take on the, I mean, what he's arguing in the book is that there is a severe difference of opinion of whether we should use American might to help people all over the world into creating this wonderful new liberal order of benevolence and selflessness, or whether we should have kind of a more hard nosed national interest kind of a point of view.
And I even was asking him in the interview, like, hey, I mean, it sounds like maybe there's some question begging going on there that every interventionist always only just means well.
And none of this is cynical.
None of this is a put on or an excuse to, you know, for certain groups to take advantage for their own interests, which is funny because, you know, he wrote the book on the Israel lobby and all their avarice in America, all the stuff they get away with for their interests, which doesn't have much to do with spreading democracy, does it?
But so anyways, yeah, his take was like, yeah, no, this is all just a difference of opinion.
There are interventionists who think that if you are moral and caring, then you must intervene everywhere to help people.
And then there are other people who are a little bit more realistic about, you know, whatever.
Anyway, so now back to World War I. You have J.P. Morgan, who made a bunch of loans to the British so they could buy a bunch of guns from J.P. Morgan, his other companies, the gun manufacturers.
And then you have this entire kind of neoliberal, like center-left ideology of do-gooderness and militarism that you're talking about that J.P. Morgan was bankrolling, including the flagship publication, The New Republic, and fanning all of these flames.
And, you know, of course, the Morgan group always had a tremendous interest in the Woodrow Wilson government in the first place and all of that.
And so I wonder, I guess, first of all, maybe I'm begging the question here.
Do you think that J.P. Morgan's interest in those loans and those arms sales to England had a lot to do with Woodrow Wilson's policy?
And then secondly, does that mean that The New Republic was always just a put-on for arms manufacturers and bankers and securing their profits at our expense?
I mean, I guess it's always kind of both, right?
They found a lot of intellectuals to bankroll, though, to get their same dirty work done, it seems like.
Well, that is really the question that we even ask ourselves today.
What I will say is that Thomas W. Lamont, who was in the Morgan orbit, said, look, we were never neutral.
Wilson, at the beginning of the war, said Americans should be neutral in thought, word and deed.
But he said we were never neutral.
We didn't know how to be.
We poured everything we could into the side of the Allies.
And it is true that they had a huge amount of outstanding loans to the Allies.
And obviously, if the Allies lose, the chance of collecting on those loans is much lower.
So I don't think it's conspiratorial.
I mean, it's just common sense that obviously – I mean, imagine if you as an individual lent money to two people who are in a fight to the death.
Well, you're probably going to hope that if only one of them survives, it will be the guy who owes you the dough, right?
So, I mean, it's just common sense.
But exactly how that translates into Wilson's decision to intervene, that's the part that's never really been made clear to me.
And I think plus he was such a dour Presbyterian – I'm not trying to criticize Presbyterians.
But he was like the worst kind of caricature of a Presbyterian moralist that I just don't think he would think that way.
He would think that he was acting out of pure righteousness.
But they're just as dangerous.
Those people are just as dangerous, if not more.
In fact, there's a guy named Richard Gamble who teaches now at Hillsdale College.
And Richard has a book called The War for Righteousness.
And what he did in that war was he went and looked at what so-called progressive social gospel Christians were saying about the war.
And you would think, based on the way – everything you learned in third grade, that they probably believed in peace because they were Christians and whatever.
They were the most bloodthirsty people imaginable.
They were drawing analogies between Christ and the American soldier.
We see that on bumper stickers even today.
And between the Germans and Satan.
Now, if the Germans are Satan, you can't possibly have a negotiated peace that's sensible.
You can't.
How would you – you're going to sit down and negotiate with Satan?
So these people – I mean in a way I almost wish it was just venal people out for a buck because they would understand, OK.
Complete unconditional surrender means we're never – we're not going to get as much money as if the defeated power, let's say, is able to keep something and survive.
Whereas the moralist, the person who can't think – who can't say, look, this is a finite, limited question.
It's a battle between two competing interests, and one of them wins and one of them loses, and let's hash it all out.
They cannot think that way.
The results are going to be very bad.
Yeah.
Well, and we do see this all the time too.
I mean I remember this was a huge part of the debate about Iraq was are we going to be amoral and just worry about what's good for America?
Are we going to do the right thing even in an altruistic way, a self-sacrificial way?
Because you know what?
You're right, Tom Woods.
It's not in America's interest to attack Iraq.
But that's why it's so important that we do it because it's the right thing to do.
That was the way that they spun it, the morality-based foreign policy versus the mean old heartless realists who would rather stay out.
And it's such an irritating way to put it because then the whole discussion of foreign policy, as with so many political discussions, gets bogged down in two very unattractive options.
Either you're going to be an idealist Wilsonian or you're going to be a hard-headed realist like Theodore Roosevelt.
Those are my choices.
That's a pretty good three-by-five index card allowable opinion right there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's definitely – it seems to be the way that it shakes out.
And of course, you know, Wilson to this day is known as this great idealist.
I remember I actually have a book of Wilson's letters and it was one of those things at this book fair back when I was a kid, I guess, a teenager.
I put my hand on this book right as this lady was also trying to get it, but I got to it first.
And then she and her friend – and you could tell they're kind of liberal Democrat Bill Clinton types or whatever.
And then they have this conversation about how sad they were that they didn't get the book.
And then the one says to the other, oh, Woodrow Wilson, you know, he was such a great idealist.
You know, and it's always just that daydream of like, what if, you know, just a regular person like us had total power to remake the world, to make it nice?
You know, this kind of thing.
That's basically like when Hillary Clinton said, don't call me a liberal because the word liberty is still in there with the root word, and I don't like that at all.
Call me a progressive because I've got a plan for remaking everything, and there's no limit to what I want to do for you, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
He makes a great founding father for the modern American Democrats, I think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
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All right.
Well, so now I kind of went over with my little narrative there, but I'm sure I missed some.
Is there some good context that you could add to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany?
And obviously part of that was in reaction to the communists who were also Woodrow Wilson's children in the Soviet Union.
But, you know, I would hate for people to not really have a very good taste for just how much of America's fault that was.
Well, there's no – well, first of all, it's the first – it's not a coincidence that the first time that Hitler really makes an attempt to seize power is right around the time of the German hyperinflation.
Now, why was there a German hyperinflation?
Did that hyperinflation have just occurred with no – just if there had been no U.S. intervention, if there had been no Treaty of Versailles?
Almost certainly not.
It was that the Germans were in a position where they had to make enormous reparations.
They were even being made to pay the old-age pensions of all the soldiers that they fought against.
It was just an impossible sum.
And so after a while, they just refused to carry – they were not making the payments.
And the French then occupied the Ruhr Valley, and the Germans basically told their people to go on a patriotic strike and refused to work under those conditions.
So, OK, who's going to pay them?
Where are they going to get their pay from if they're not working?
Well, don't worry.
We've got the printing press.
And so the hyperinflation comes about as a direct result of the financial pickle that the Germans were put in.
There's no way there would have been enough power to put them in that position.
And so there you see – now, again, obviously Hitler's not successful in 1923 and 1924.
But, well, he's on the map.
That's for darn sure.
But secondly, the fact that he's able to exploit that Treaty of Versailles – remember the context of the Treaty of Versailles, by the way.
Woodrow Wilson had been preening about since early 1918, making clear that any peace settlement he was part of was going to be far better than those self-seeking peace settlements that these stupid Europeans would probably enter into if they weren't overseen by Woodrow Wilson.
Now, by the way, the Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic Wars, more or less ushered in 100 years of European peace, with some exceptions here and there.
So it was a bit much to take for Wilson to be lecturing the Europeans like they don't know diplomacy like he does.
I mean, after all, he's a Princeton professor.
So Wilson then said, I'm going to propose – and he laid out in his speech what became known as the 14 points.
We're going to have all – we're going to make sure that we have an impartial settlement.
We're going to have a peace without victory.
That is to say the victors are not just going to go in and swoop down and grab the spoils.
But we're going to try to be impartial in the way we administer competing colonial claims when we – in dealing with territorial adjustments and populations.
We're going to be impartial.
And then when it turned out that, no, actually only the Germans would have their colonies taken away and only the Germans would have to disarm and only the Germans would have the principle of self-determination mocked, then, yeah, then somebody like Hitler could go around and say, look, if you want to be a self-respecting German, you cannot possibly sit back and accept a regime that's going to quietly go along with these humiliating peace terms.
Now, again, the – surely the United States' involvement – I mean the United States was the industrial power of the world at that time.
The involvement of the United States and the seeming infinite number of troops that could eventually be brought over at a time when the Germans are collapsing makes it decisive.
It makes the American intervention and therefore this harsh punitive peace absolutely decisive.
And it's that peace that Hitler really makes his career opposing.
And remember the Germans by the end – by 1918, as 1918 is going on, they are having to resort to getting younger people in the army or, conversely, much older people in the army.
You have Ludendorff saying that probably only 30 percent of his divisions are reliable and a huge number of them are just simply unreliable, that they could not be counted on in any serious confrontation.
Well, with the German forces degraded that badly and this seemingly unstoppable supply of fresh American recruits, well, it's – it looks pretty hopeless.
There's no chance for a stalemate there.
The point is that that is what pushes the scale and that's what makes it possible to impose that kind of peace that then Hitler then uses to appeal to the natural patriotism of Germans and makes his career.
Well, a couple of real ironies there too is certainly from their point of view, as you say, they were overmatched.
Better quit now than later after it's just worse, right?
Like they could see the writing was on the wall, full stop, no arguing about it, and yet the British and French and Americans did not have troops on German soil.
They were still fighting on French soil, not very far into it, but – and so it was an armistice, right?
It wasn't a surrender or I guess it somewhat was, but the German people I guess were told that it wasn't, that it was basically a timeout, that everyone was sort of calling it quits where they were.
And then all of a sudden it was as though they'd been completely defeated and conquered and they were treated as though they'd been completely defeated and conquered when that was news to them because it never had gotten that far.
And then on top of that was the post-war blockade where – and Andrew Coburn had this great thing about the Iranian sanctions in Harper's once where he told the story of the post-World War I blockade and how the British bureaucracy enforcing the blockade on the Germans was just being completely perfected and implemented right at the end of the war.
And so, hey, it was a government program.
They wanted to keep it going.
And so they kept it going and continued to starve millions of Germans.
And I can't remember my footnote on this anymore, but I actually just learned this relatively recently that many of the most influential Nazi officials later in the Nazi party had suffered greatly, specifically under that starvation program a generation before.
That was a huge part of that, whereas just – they hadn't quite all the way really been defeated and yet they were just absolutely had their nose rubbed in it to the nth degree.
So – and all their territory stripped away and all this stuff.
And as you say, they kept that hunger blockade in effect after November 11th.
Right.
Yeah, for months, right?
Or half a year or something.
Yeah, and that – I mean obviously the Germans are not going to be able to restart the war.
So they're just sitting there – I mean that is just pure spite and, I mean, just revenge.
I mean Woodrow Wilson apparently objected to this, but a lot of good that did the world.
I know he thought that he would be able to pull one over on the European diplomats, but quite the opposite occurred.
Yeah, and then there's something in Jim Powell's book, Wilson's War, where he talks about how Wilson – he's so high-minded, you see, that he refused to accept surrender from any of the actual guilty German militarists.
And instead he insisted they step aside and allow this democratic government to take its place and then insist that that new democratic government be the ones to sign the treaty and accept the surrender.
And so they were the ones who got all the blame.
And then, as you said, Hitler made his career on that.
As Jim Powell says, he began virtually every speech denouncing, quote, the traitors of 1918, the Germans who would dare to have gone along with that.
And it was not the guilty who'd caused the war at all, but the ones who Wilson had insisted be the ones to accept the surrender and were therefore completely delegitimized, right?
When the CIA backs your Iranian student group, it kind of hurts more than it helps.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Well, let me just make one more quick point.
You notice that on what we used to call Armistice Day, what you get always from the politicians are platitudes with no context.
We're just speaking about abstract people who just died.
Like, we know they died in war, so they're at least that specific.
But we don't get anything about politicians who maybe caused their deaths in ways that were avoidable, like wars that shouldn't have been fought.
You never really get a case of real self-examination or anything.
It's always, let's honor our fallen troops, and then just leave it.
Just leave it at that.
And then if you complain and you say, well, wait a minute, these wars they fought in were horrible, then you get criticized and condemned because you're not respecting the troops.
That's a really good racket they have going.
As soon as you actually start to point the fingers at why are these people under the ground, well, then you're not being respectful.
Right.
I mean, come on.
Yeah, it is.
Although I think that's really wearing thin.
You know, and I'm not that old, but I remember a time where it was perfectly acceptable to say, you know what, the domino theory actually was wrong.
I mean, once one domino fell, the rest of them didn't fall.
Thailand didn't go commie.
And so, yeah, geez, it was a lot of well-intentioned people prosecuted some pretty brutal policies based on a theory that it was absolutely necessary.
And really, that was a mistaken view in that, you know what, we're all grownups here, right?
It's okay to talk about that.
Like, don't take it too far and start questioning whether we need a Pentagon at all or anything like that.
But now, no.
Right.
There was a time, I don't know, early 90s or whatever, I could hear conversations like that in polite company more often.
Whereas now, as you're saying, oh, no, you can't question the policy in Afghanistan or you're going to hurt the feelings of some guy I don't know, but who I imagine would be mad if he heard you say that because he served there.
You know?
Yeah.
And I think the opposite really is true.
There are some people who would feel offended, but I get told so many times by so many veterans that actually, a lot of times behind closed doors, they have nothing but contempt for the people who sent them into those places where they went.
And they're much more receptive to people who are critical of this stuff than we're led to believe.
Right.
You know what?
Everybody should read Catch-22 in high school.
If that's the good war, then we have a real problem, I think, you know?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeez, I remember that.
But, gosh, it's been almost three years.
I mean, that ought to be a real inoculation from ever having to believe in these guys at all, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Reading about Captain Cathcart and all these, Colonel Cathcart, was it?
Yeah.
Anyway.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'll stop wasting your afternoon here, Tom, but I like talking with you.
Thanks for doing the show.
I'm very glad to do it, Scott.
Thanks.
All right.
That is the great Tom Woods.
Check out his great show, The Tom Woods Show.
I know that's the only reason you guys are listening to me is because you heard of me from him in the first place.
So, you know, TomWoods.com.
Just sign up for that.
And check out his page on Amazon.com.
He wrote about half the books they sell on there.
It's a pretty big quantity.
All right.
Thanks, you guys.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash ScottHortonShow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
