08/04/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
Alright, so, our first guest on the show today is our friend Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
He writes at the Unz Review at unz.com, U-N-Z, unz.com, at LewRockwell.com, and at his own website, ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And his latest piece is World War I, Tragedy of Tragedies.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Well, I'm feeling very somber today because of the anniversary of World War I, and today is the anniversary of the crushing of the Belgian forts in Liege in 1914 that were done by Germany's 420mm cannon, a 16-inch cannon, that destroyed Belgian resistance.
And so that was the first major outbreak of fighting in the war then?
That's right, Scott.
The Belgians put up enough resistance long enough that it delayed the German plan to cut through Belgium and slice down across the north of France, set the German timetable back by about two or three days.
And those critical days, because the Germans in the Schlieffenland, their plan was to race through northern France, Picardy, and to come around on the west side of Paris, sweep around Paris and envelop the French forces who were facing the Germans on the other side.
In fact, the Germans, the Belgian forts at Liege particularly, delayed the Germans long enough so that they weren't able to get their troops in place fast enough.
And then, boy, it's kind of, in a way, it makes you wonder what would have happened then if there had been that quick of a victory, how many lives could have been saved, how quickly French independence might have been restored anyway, but without the entire catastrophe that would still unfold here.
I guess the timeline here says that this was the day that the UK declared war as well.
That's right.
I forgot to add that von Clausewitz, the great strategist, said that no war must be fought for absolute reasons or absolute goals.
Wars must always end by compromise.
And in fact, this is one of the first great tragedies of the war, that if the Germans had won early in the war, they would have made a deal with the French, and the French would have had to cough up some money, and Germany would have been the leader in Europe.
But the horrors of World War I, 10 million soldiers killed, could largely have been avoided, just as if, just as if the other catastrophe was America's foolishness, Woodrow Wilson's folly in sending American troops, a million troops, to France in 1917 and 18 that tipped the balance against Germany and prevented a stalemate that would have led to a reasonable and fair peace, we can assume.
All right, now, I definitely want to get back to that question in the second segment, because I think it's, I don't know, among the most important discussions to be had ever anywhere.
So we definitely want to talk about Woodrow Wilson and the tipping of that balance.
But to rewind a little bit back here to the beginning of the war, you know, World War II, I read somewhere sometime, the guy said his son knows what happened in World War II.
Some really bad fascist militarists popped up, and America had to go whoop their ass back down again.
And that's just the way it is.
And then we befriended our enemies after we were done beating them.
And that's yeah, yeah, it's a pretty simple narrative, World War II.
But his young son couldn't tell you a thing about World War I, because nobody really knows.
Nobody has a simple narrative that they can tell you about World War I.
All they know is a big, complicated mess, and a bunch of people died.
And they're not even sure it's interesting, Eric.
It's actually just a real bad thing that happened or something.
So I was hoping maybe you could give us a little bit of context about what the hell was really going on here to make Europe tear itself apart this way, or the politicians of the countries that make up Europe.
Well, I did a Swiss master's degree in the diplomatic history of Europe from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to 1914.
So I'm well familiar with it.
There's a new book out called The Sleepwalkers, which brilliantly, brilliantly details what happened.
And what happened was 30 years, almost 40 years of backstabbing and one-upsmanship between the major powers, that's Russia, the Austro-Hungarians, France, and Germany, and all kinds of plots and intrigues.
And each of the countries, and the little countries, they're Balkan clients trying to grab more land.
And it reminds me of what's going on in Ukraine now.
It's an area that really no one should care about.
But just the way France and Germany, they have no real serious interest in the Balkans.
But they got sucked into this snake pit of intrigue and attempts to overthrow governments, little wars, and that eventually all added up to this big explosion in 1914.
And now, weren't all these kings and queens and princes all first cousins with each other and all of that?
How did it all become so inevitable, I guess?
You know, you mentioned the Schiffen Plan there.
I guess my impression was that, and I can totally see any kind of bureaucracy in the world being just like this, too.
If Russia does this, then we do that, no matter what.
Once you encode it down on paper like that and make it a matter of quantity, not quantity, then human judgment falls to the side and we go ahead and do that thing, even if we know better now.
This war has so many lessons for us.
It should be studied and restudied.
Many of the problems that we have today, the Middle East, the Balkans, for example, even Russia, Ukraine, date from World War I.
And that's what caused the problems, issues that have never been resolved.
But what's so interesting in this period is that you say French policy or German policy, but it really, policy, foreign policy, was made by cliques of officials in these countries.
Often in competition with each other and certainly not in coordination.
So for example, in France, they were pro-German or certainly anti-German cliques, as England was infused with anti-German officials in the foreign policy network of Britain.
And you can see that eventually these groups were like today's neocons in Washington, gradually gained dominance and propelled the great powers into war against each other.
Well, and I guess that would have to include the generals too, right?
In all the various countries.
Definitely.
There was a very good book years ago about the British generals in World War I called the Donkeys.
And it was right.
But what's interesting is that the French and British generals, and the Belgian generals too, got all their military experience in colonial wars in Africa and Asia.
I mean, they were good at mowing down tribesmen armed with spears.
But when they met the Germans, they didn't know what to do.
I've often said that same problem with the United States.
Our whole military now has been attuned to fighting guerrilla wars in third world countries.
What's going to happen if we have to really meet a real army?
We're not going to be ready.
Right.
Well, and in the same sense, the reason they get whooped in all these guerrilla wars is because the last great war they won was the giant tank battle against Saddam's forces in 91, where it absolutely was a cakewalk.
And they didn't have a, I don't think an Iraqi tank got a single kill in that entire thing.
And they thought, oh, look, all we got to do is just push buttons to win wars.
No problem.
And meanwhile, they get taken out by IEDs on the side of the road.
That's true.
And the last war is almost always deceptive.
Generals will try and fight the last war, as is famously said, but they're usually fighting the wrong war.
And the generals in 1914 were not ready for modern technology.
They were still 30, 40 years behind the times.
Right.
Next, we're going to be fighting Russia with our mine resistant vehicles, you know, like they're the Mujahideen.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We'll be right back with Eric Margulies in just a sec, y'all.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're talking World War One with Eric Margulies.
Eric Margulies dot com.
American Raj, liberation or domination.
Those are his books.
Eric, let's talk about Vladimir Lenin for a minute here.
There's a great book by Jim Powell called Wilson's War.
And in that book, he makes the case that one ought to remember, for starters, that the original Russian revolution was in March of 1917 and that it took Lenin and Trotsky four tries before they were able to seize power and create the USSR of death and pain and starvation and totalitarianism and all the horrible consequences that came from that, including even the rise of Mao Tse Tung and communism in Asia, East Asia.
And so anyway, Powell makes the case that Kerensky and the interim government, even if they wanted to stay in the war, they only could have stayed in the war and they only could stay in the war because Woodrow Wilson started paying their bills and started supplying them with, you know, primitive lend lease basically to keep them in the war, which makes sense, right, to try to keep the Germans divided on two fronts to if you're going to fight them from the West.
But that was part of the American intervention.
And that only because of the American intervention then was the Russian army still out there on the front instead of back home where they could have protected the Kerensky government and spared the world communist totalitarianism.
Scott, I am not familiar with the amount of aid that the U.S. delivered in 1917 to Russia.
I know there was some, but I'm not, nor do I understand if that propped up the Kerensky government.
What I do know is that the communist takeover was not a people's revolution, it was a military coup.
And I've been in the exact room, the hall of mirrors in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg where Kerensky was working at the desk.
And the Russian cruiser Aurora came and it shone its searchlights into that room.
And the bullhorn loudspeaker said that to where the light could go, shells would follow and that they were going to open fire with their six-inch guns if Kerensky didn't resign.
And he did.
He resigned.
He handed over the government, which was pretty feeble at the time, to the Bolsheviks.
And of all things, Kerensky ended up teaching at UCLA in Los Angeles.
He did?
I had no idea that.
He did.
And he died.
I mean, I was amazed to learn that he died in California, completely forgotten by history.
Wow.
That's amazing.
All right.
And so, okay, now, to your point, I want to let you elaborate what you're trying to say.
I guess you're focused much more on the German and Ottoman angle to that same argument that the tipping of the balance by America in the war led to far worse consequences than the original war itself, which already was the Great War, the worst thing that had ever happened since Genghis Khan or maybe even including.
It certainly did.
It was a primary historical tragedy.
You know, and it's odd, because in those days, World War I, the largest single ethnic group in America were Germans.
We don't see this today, because all the Schmitts became Smiths, and everybody anglicized their names.
But there was a very strong German contingent in the United States, and there was a great deal of sympathy for Germany.
In 1900, Scott, the third-largest German city in the world was my hometown, New York City.
So that's been erased from our memory.
What brought us into the war was British propaganda.
The British, very cleverly, they controlled the Atlantic Cable and port all kinds of – they had unique control of it, so they port all kinds of outrageous propaganda about German soldiers biting babies.
And it was very successful.
A group of American bankers also wanted the U.S. to go to war.
They were very influential.
Propaganda and deception set the scene for President Wilson, who was something of an oddball himself, to throw America into the war and to reverse the course of the war, just when the Allies and the Central Powers were completely exhausted and very close to having forced to talk peace.
And it wasn't even that the Germans were about to defeat the French.
It was really both sides were – their soldiers were just laying down dead and or too damn tired to fight anymore, and that was it.
Too cold.
The Germans had the military initiative, but they didn't have enough men in the end to seize Paris.
The Germany and Austria-Hungary Empire were being starved by a British naval blockade, which is illegal under international law, same thing that's happening to Gaza now.
So the Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, were on the verge of collapse and riots and civil unrest.
They couldn't feed their people.
The French and the British were just holding on with their fingernails to keep the Germans who were, I don't know, 30, 40 kilometers away from Paris, not very far.
That was just the tipping point of the war, and just at that point, General Black Jack Pershing arrived in Le Havre and along with the American contingents.
And then suddenly everybody knew that the war was lost for the Germans.
And then, yeah, they kept that blockade for how long after the ceasing of hostilities there?
Well, I think at least a year.
They starved Germany into accepting the drastic terms, the rapacious terms of the Versailles Treaty.
And this, of course, that evil treaty took away 7 million German citizens and 10 percent of Germany's territory.
It completely dismembered Austria-Hungary and created Czechoslovakia, Greater Romania, Greater Serbia, or Yugoslavia, rather.
So it poisoned the well completely.
All right, now, we're almost out of time for this segment.
Can I keep you one more?
Because I want to talk about the British mandate and the redrawing of the lines in the Middle East and the Cold War and the rest of the results of this thing, if you've got the time.
Subject dear to my heart.
Okay, great.
Well, you heard it.
He's got an advanced degree in the subject of World War One.
It says here in this latest article at unzunz.com, Eric has walked the battlefields, at least on the Western Front.
He's a real expert in the First World War and Woodrow Wilson's massive, you know, I guess not original, but damn near original sin that ruined the 20th century for mankind.
Anyway, we'll be right back with the great Eric Margulies, author of American Barrage and writer at unz.com right after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
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All right.
Talking with Eric Margulies about the First World War and even worse than that, Woodrow Wilson's American intervention in the First World War.
And so I wanted to ask you about the role played, especially specifically there, the American intervention in the rise of the Nazis on the stab in the back theory.
Wouldn't it, Wilson, that said, I don't know what he's thinking here, if he's thinking at all, but that the German militarists who had actually waged the war, why sort of like in a Dick Cheney way.
They're such bad guys that we won't even talk to them to accept their surrender.
We have to have a regime change in Germany and put in good German Democrats that Woodrow Wilson approves of and then make them accept the terms of the surrender.
So then that way, all the Democrats ended up blamed for the German defeat and Hitler always said, oh, they're the traitors of 1918 who stabbed us in the back when we were right about to win.
Well, that's true.
You know, Hitler was lying about it.
The Germans were not about to win.
They were close.
They weren't so much stabbed in the back as the fact that there was threat of internal revolution in Germany, just as what happened in Russia.
But Wilson was showing that he was a religious fundamentalist.
He was an ardent Presbyterian, a moral deacon for the world, and he had this kind of absolutist view.
He was mocked by the other allies and during the Versailles Treaty, they thought him a backwoods rube, but they had to go along with him because America was so rich and powerful.
But in fact, it was Wilson's intervention that created, as we said, this catastrophe after the war.
And now, you know, just thinking back on my kind of public school education that I got and that kind of thing, it was always emphasized that, yeah, you know, it's true that the Versailles Treaty and all the war debts that were put on Germany, that the Americans loaned them the money to pay back the French and the British for a while and whatever, but then they printed the rest and it destroyed the economy.
We hear a little bit of that as kids, I think, in the role of the rise of the Nazis, because there's got to be some explanation and government school even will admit to blowback from World War One when it comes to the rise of the Nazis.
But the thing that they never really explain is about all the lost territories.
Of course, you know, the hyperinflation, all that was in the 20s.
So what explains the rise of Nazism through 1933?
And then they're staying in power with such an iron grip through, you know, the start of the war, through the end of the war.
It was that claim to regain what had been unfairly stripped away.
And I think it's a lot more extensive than Americans would guess.
That's right.
Germany had been humiliated at Versailles, a very proud nation.
You know, Germany was the leading industrial power of Europe, not only that, but it had the most developed social responsibility system for pensions and workers could work with compensation and working hours and all of this.
And the British and French capitalists took great alarm at this point that never comes up either, that Germany was socially progressive and they thought this might infect their own downtrodden working forces.
Before the war, and you're saying that was part of the reason they wanted to get in the war against the Kaiser?
That's right.
That's right.
I'm sorry.
I went off track on that.
The loss of territory was terrible, and the Germans who suddenly found themselves in Czechoslovakia, there were millions of Germans stranded, marooned in Czechoslovakia.
Czechs began attacking them and committing atrocities against them in the Sudetenland, in the ex-Austro-Hungarian Empire.
There were 8 million Germans stranded in Eastern Europe by the Treaty of Versailles, and who had been there for centuries, so this became a major issue for the Germans.
One can't blame them, in a way, for being upset, seeing their country humiliated.
You know, the defeat of Russia, Stalin also said that his primary objective was to regain all the territory that Russia lost in World War I, 1917, at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
All right, and then now in the Middle East, too, if America had stayed out, what would have been the case with the Ottoman Empire?
Would they have been conquered by the British anyway?
They were the weakest party in that fight, right?
Probably.
And it was British and French power that kept the Russians from taking Constantinople to Istanbul, the Straits, as it was known.
So I think the Middle East was doomed.
You know, the historian that I referred to in the book The Sleepwalkers very rightly points out that this whole business began in 1912, when Italy suddenly pounced on Libya and annexed it, took it away from the Ottoman Empire.
That then caused all the Middle East European countries, like Serbia and Greece and Romania, to start grabbing Ottoman possessions.
So the dying carcass of the Ottoman Empire was torn apart.
But what was so pernicious was that the British and French, of course, had promised the Arabs independence.
And in fact, they agreed in 1916 on the Sykes-Picot Treaty to divide up the Middle East between the two of them, which they did.
And which, of course, included the Palestinian mandate, which ended up becoming the state of Israel and the whole world's problems right now.
That's right.
They promised to both sides.
Yeah.
All right, now let me switch over to Asia for a minute here, because it was World War I that really led to America annexing the Pacific Ocean and deciding they wanted to break Japan off from their alliance with the British, right?
That's right.
The British and Japanese alliance was very important, very much feared in the United States.
And during the war, the Japanese intervened, they attacked the German colony at Qingtao, the place that produces the beer we drink today, Qingtao.
And suddenly Japan emerged as a primary power in the region.
And the U.S. then seized Samoa, the island in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific, which had been a tiny little German possession.
But this brought the U.S. into direct confrontation with Japan that would culminate 20 years later in Pearl Harbor.
Yeah.
Man, isn't that something, too?
That Woodrow Wilson.
And it's funny, too, because he really does have the legacy.
If anybody knows about him in government school, really what they teach is he was such an idealist and all he wanted was peace on Earth.
And the only thing he ever did wrong was he just wasn't persuasive enough in getting the League of Nations passed.
That would have prevented all this terrible stuff we're talking about, Eric.
And he didn't understand a lot of really what the details of these complicated situations, the history of the area, or the deviousness of his allies, the British and French and the Italians, who had completely different agendas.
It's too bad the League of Nations never was well established, but it was seen as the United Nations is today as an instrument of the Western great power.
Yeah.
I mean, the losers of the central, the central powers in the fight, they weren't going to get an equal seat.
The Germans next to the British on the council, were they?
Was that ever even in the plan?
Not at all.
So Wilson's ideas sounded very nice on paper, but in reality, they were not.
And the best you can say about Wilson, in my view, is that while he made a terrible blunder for the era of sending American troops into World War I, that was the first major step in America becoming a world power.
Yeah.
Well, and a world empire.
A world empire.
Yeah.
A blood-soaked one as bad as any of our enemies by now.
But, uh, all right.
Well, thanks very much, Eric.
I sure do appreciate your time on the show today.
It's been a pleasure, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Eric Margulies.
World War I, Tragedy of Tragedies is the article today at UNZ.com, U-N-Z, UNZ.com.
We'll be right back.
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