All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's November 11th, which makes it Veterans Day or previously Armistice Day.
And heck, now that I think about it, I wonder whether most people even know what an armistice is.
We don't have many of those these days anymore.
I don't guess.
Uh, all right.
So first guest, straight to our first guest, Jim Powell.
He's the author of Wilson's War.
How Woodrow Wilson's great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II could have added in the whole terror war in there too.
Historian Jim Powell is the author of FDR's Folly and the Triumph of Liberty.
Uh, was a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
He's written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, American Heritage, Barons, Esquire, the Chicago Tribune, Money Magazine, Reason.
He's lectured at Harvard, Stanford, and other universities across the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America.
Welcome to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Uh, I'm great.
Glad to be on the show.
Thank you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I think probably when it comes to political nonfiction, this is my favorite book that I've ever read.
Wilson's War.
Wilson being Woodrow Wilson, the ruiner of all things good.
So, uh, I highly recommend that everybody go out and get this, uh, the case for non-interventionism, um, told, uh, from a historical point of view.
So I guess let's kind of start out with, uh, if you can briefly describe, um, how World War II got started and, uh, you know, where exactly the war was at the time that America finally was brought into the war.
Well, World War I began as a series of miscalculations, uh, as has often happened in the past.
The, uh, British and the French negotiated a secret treaty where the British agreed to help the French if they were, uh, attacked by Germany, except that it was a secret treaty because the British population would have been outraged to find themselves getting dragged into another European war because the treaty was secret.
It had no deterrent value on the Germans or anybody else.
The, basically you had the Archduke Ferdinand, uh, who was heir to the, uh, Austro-Hungarian empire in central Europe, who was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist and the Serbs were backed by the Russians and the Austrians were backed by the Germans and the French backed the Russians and on and on it went so that when, uh, in the name of security, all these alliances were formed.
What it turned out to be was, uh, everybody got drawn into somebody else's war that they, they didn't really want to get into.
Uh, everybody thought that the war was going to be over quickly, which is often the case.
It was certainly the case during the civil war.
Everybody expected they could, uh, volunteer heroically and come back a few weeks later.
Um, and, uh, anyway, the, uh, war was stalemated for three years.
The British and the French had more soldiers on the Western front.
The Germans had smarter generals.
They weren't quite as reckless sending German boys up against machine guns.
Uh, the British Navy had blockaded the Germans, uh, effectively preventing them from getting a lot of war materials.
Uh, hunger was an increasing problem in Germany as the war dragged on because they couldn't get all the food they needed through the British blockade.
Uh, the Germans had no way of invading England.
So the bottom line was it was a stalemate.
Neither side able to impose its will on the other.
Well, Woodrow Wilson comes in and, uh, offers his services to negotiate peace.
Nobody wants peace though.
The British and French didn't want peace.
They wanted American boys and military equipment to help beat the Germans.
They didn't care about peace.
They wanted to get even.
Uh, but neither side for three years was able to impose its will on the other.
And I, and I think if the United States had stayed out, uh, there probably would have been some kind of negotiated settlement, uh, again, neither side able to impose, uh, you know, any kind of vindictive settlement on the other.
So there would have been some kind of reluctant compromise, but Wilson got in after saying he wouldn't get in and, uh, uh, on the side of the British and the French and that enabled the British and the French to win a decisive victory.
Uh, Wilson, imagine that he could, uh, uh, persuade the British and the French to be nice and have, uh, a, uh, uh, some kind of a settlement that would leave everybody happily ever after.
But of course, having won a decisive victory, uh, uh, Wilson had no way of preventing the British and the French, especially the French from, uh, avenging themselves because most of the war took place in France, the farmland was destroyed where the, where the fighting took place.
Uh, there were horrifying losses on both sides.
Uh, certainly the French suffered more than anybody.
So they come off.
So the French prime minister was anxious to get even, uh, and he couldn't have gotten even if, if we had stayed out of the war, but, uh, so that was, that's how we ended up with the Versailles treaty, a very harsh vindictive treaty on the Germans.
What it did was provoke a bitter nationalist reaction in Germany that enabled Adolf Hitler, who at the time was just a, a, uh, a disgruntled lunatic on the sidelines, but he was able to exploit the bitter nationalist reaction against the, uh, the, uh, this, this unfair settlement as, as the Germans perceived it and build up a following.
And of course, in the, uh, uh, after the war, the Germans were scrambling around for ways to pay for all their reparations that were being demanded of them.
So the war debts were a contributing factor in the runaway inflation that climaxed in 1923.
And that was where, uh, Hitler staged his, his failed pooch, this beer hall pooch that was a very amateurish effort to take over the government.
Uh, of course he, uh, failed and ended up in prison, but it was there that he recruited a lot of the people who were to be with him in his quest for power that, uh, that continued later.
Well, now it seems, Jim, that, you know, something that was really crystallized for me in the book was I had questions about this.
You know, the hyperinflation only was, that was in the twenties and you're right, that was his first failed attempt to seize power off Hitler's.
Um, but, uh, it seems like something, you know, like the conventional wisdom they teach you in fifth grade.
Well, there were all these war reparations and whatever.
They basically admit your thesis.
This was what drove the Germans into the arms of Hitler.
But what was most important really was the stripping of all the German territories and, and the giving of pieces of Germany to all these states all around and that was the ultimate humiliation that, uh, the, the people of Germany more or less assented to, to Hitler's promise to avenge.
Uh, right.
You're you're right.
That was a, uh, major factor.
Woodrow Wilson, who was a profoundly ignorant man, thought that he could, uh, remake the map of Europe and, and, uh, allocate nationalities in different countries and, uh, and have some kind of settlement.
I mean, it's also Wilson and the Versailles settlement that gave us Iraq.
That's when Iraq was established as a nation cobbled together with, uh, Sunnis and Shiites and, and, uh, Kurds.
Right.
Because this is, this led not only to the destruction of Germany, but to the Ottoman empire as well.
Then the British and the French got to, I think you say in the book, uh, or maybe this was in Pabbie Cannon's book that because of Woodrow Wilson's intervention in world war one, the British empire was expanded by a million square miles.
Yeah.
The, you know, you had all these little countries that were created, uh, randomly, I mean, are quite arbitrarily.
The only, the only answer, you know, the only way to make a multicultural multinational society work is, uh, with, uh, basically laissez-faire capitalism where the government does not interfere and, uh, uh, does not enable one group to dominate others.
What had been going on in Europe, uh, leading up to, and, and in the aftermath of world war one was that the, the, uh, uh, expanded power of government led to a, uh, an intensifying scramble for power among the groups.
And, and interestingly, uh, public schools were a major factor in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
No, I'm sorry.
I'm going to have to ask you to hold that thought right there.
Very interesting point.
Uh, language, of course, in the schools, uh, always important.
And also we got to talk about Russia too.
It's Jim Powell.
He's the author of Wilson's war.
And we'll be right back after this show.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We're talking about the destroyer of everything that was ever beautiful.
Woodrow Wilson.
Oh boy.
Oh boy.
If we could only go back and take back the year 1912.
All right.
Uh, yeah, that was when he was elected.
Okay.
And we're talking about, uh, talking about Wilson with the guy that wrote the book.
Jim Powell.
The book is Wilson's war.
How Woodrow Wilson's great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and world war two.
And now Jim, when the hard break, so rudely interrupted us there, you were talking about, uh, the centralization of power in the empires that fought in world war one and the increasing importance of different ethnic groups, uh, dominating the central government so that they could use that central government to Lord it over the other ethnic groups.
Uh, right.
Uh, right.
I think the basic lesson here is that the, uh, the, one of the great ironies of history is that the more power government has, the more it loses control because it can't control how people react to various things.
Government does.
I w I was talking before the break about, uh, how, uh, public schools played a major role in the breakup of these multinational empires that collapsed, uh, at the end of world war one, Austro-Hungarian empire, which has dominated central Europe.
And then Wilson tried to redraw the boundaries of all these countries, uh, as part of the Versailles settlement after world war one.
Uh, but what had happened was through the public schools and, and through other welfare state programs was there's a continuous, uh, escalating scramble among interest groups, uh, to, uh, uh, to, to dominate what was, what was happening, uh, in, in the, uh, Austro-Hungarian empire, there were different alphabets.
Some people had the Cyrillic alphabet, which is what the Russians use.
There were Catholics, there were Protestants, there were different languages, and there were different ethnic histories.
So you had the Magyars dominating the public schools in Hungary.
So even though there were Germans and there were Czechs and other P other nationalities in history, everybody had to pay taxes, uh, to, to Magyar schools, send their children to Magyar schools.
And, and so what went, you know, is your local school, your local government Catholic or Protestant or Cyrillic or, uh, Western alphabet and so on and so on.
And, uh, I mean, this is why the nationalist conflicts that broke out during world war one were uncontrollable because each, each group was at each other's throats, you, you did not have a system of schools or other, uh, civic institutions that would enable everybody to peacefully go their own way.
You want to, your children taught the Magyar, uh, culture.
That's fine.
You can do it.
Uh, if you don't, you, you know, you go do your own thing because, but you know, when, when the, the, the question is where the state subsidy is going to go.
Uh, in any case, Wilson thought he, he, he could just ignore this, uh, the, the, the problems of centralized power and redraw, redraw the map of Europe.
And of course that was a catastrophe.
The, uh, the, the first world war and the unintended consequences that followed from American intervention on the French and British side, which, as we noted earlier, enabled the British and the French to win a decisive victory and therefore to impose the vindictive, uh, Versailles treaty on the Germans that triggered the nationalist reaction that enabled Hitler to launch his career.
Uh, all of that was, uh, a sequence of unintended consequences that were beyond the control, really beyond the control of anybody.
Certainly, certainly they were beyond the control of, of Wilson.
And, uh, although most, most people might be familiar with how world war one backfired in Germany.
Uh, there's also the story of how Wilson contributed to, uh, 70 years of, uh, Soviet communism because the, uh, by entering the war on the French and the British side, uh, Wilson now had standing, uh, on the allied side.
And one of the allies was Russia and Wilson put intense power, intense pressure on the Russians to stay in the war.
Now, Russia started collapsing as soon as they entered the war, 1914.
Uh, the Russians did not have enough railroad capacity to ship food to the people in the cities and at the same time to, to send a million Russian soldiers to the Eastern front.
Uh, so they sent men to the Eastern front.
So the people in the cities did without food.
Uh, the Russians did not have enough weapons to give all those soldiers being sent to the Western front.
They told each soldier, if your buddy's shot, get his gun.
That's your gun.
Uh, as you can imagine, the Russian mothers were outraged that their kids were being sent without winter clothing, without, in many cases, without guns until their comrades were shot and the guns became available.
So there was a lot of disillusionment with the czarist government.
Uh, uh, economically, it was a struggle from the beginning and they were in worse and worse shape as the war went by.
And so by, uh, 1917, they, uh, you, you, you had the, the czar was overthrown.
Uh, Kerensky, the socialist came in, they started negotiating with the Germans to get out of the war, cut the losses, the war was unpopular.
But then Wilson comes in now that the United States is in the war in 1917.
And he, he, he actually bribes the Russian, the Kerensky government to stay in the war.
The reason Wilson wanted Russia in the war is because that tied up a lot of German soldiers on the Eastern front.
If the Russians made peace with the Germans, a lot of those German soldiers could move from the Eastern front to the Western front where the, the British and the French and the Americans would have to deal with them.
So that's why Wilson wanted to keep Russia in the war.
Well, the longer Russia was in the war in the summer of 1917, the worse off they were, uh, the, the British, the, uh, the Russian generals were incompetent.
They lost the series of battles in the summer of 1917.
Lenin tried three times to seize power, uh, during the summer of 1917.
And he was unsuccessful, even though there still was a Russian government weak as it was, there was still a, uh, a Russian army again, weak as that was, but in the summer of 1917, after those, those, those, uh, blundering, uh, losses that they suffered, the Russian soldiers, uh, uh, deserted by the hundreds of thousands.
And so by the fall of 1917, there was hardly any Russian army left.
Lenin staged one more effort to seize power.
Basically after the Russian army was gone, had disintegrated, everybody went back home, Lenin didn't help either.
He was promising peace, land, and bread, giving away, uh, you know, free land to, uh, to peasants who would, who were in the army.
Well, the more they heard about land being available back home, not only where they didn't, didn't want to get killed in the war by the incompetent generals, they wanted to get some of that land that they heard about being given away.
So that accelerated the collapse.
Well, so now at this point, Jim, is there any way I can keep you one more segment here?
Cause this is such an important story and especially today.
And, uh, we'll just bump our other guests one more segment and move on.
So, uh, everybody hang tight.
It's Jim Powell.
He's the author of Wilson's war.
Uh, we're discussing how there never would have been a Nazi Germany or a Soviet union.
If it wasn't for Woodrow Wilson's, uh, American intervention in world war one.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and seriously read this book, Wilson's war, how Woodrow Wilson's great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and world war two.
And we've already established, uh, that, uh, at least there's some consequences, I don't know if we should trace them all through, but, uh, plenty of consequences of the destruction of the Ottoman empire and, uh, the turning of the middle East over to Britain, uh, mostly, and also France.
Uh, we talked about the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
And, um, all the, uh, future conflict that lay there, the stripping of Germany, of, uh, all her territories, her, its territories, and how the hyperinflation from all the war reparations helped lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler in the first place.
Um, and then now we're talking about Soviet Russia and how it was the czar's Russia that got into world war one, how the people of Russia were over it and they wanted the war over.
And then when the czar's government fell in the beginning of 1917, March, 1917, and, uh, this guy, Alexander Kerensky came in and was the interim, uh, president or prime minister or whatever it was that Wilson bribed and cajoled this guy into staying into the war.
So it was just a few months later in October of 1917 that on their fourth try, you say, right, Jim, on their fourth try, Lenin and Trotsky were able to seize the Kremlin and create the USSR.
Right.
Even in the summer of 1917, after hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were deserting, the army had been defeated.
They were humiliated despite all that.
Plus of course, the economic death, the desolation of the country, uh, resulting from four years of war.
Uh, despite all that, the, the Bolsheviks could not take over.
They, they needed a complete collapse.
Now, if Russia had stayed out of the war, the Russian army would have survived the, the government, you know, something would have survived.
Well, I think you say in the book, the Russian army would have been in Moscow to protect the government from the right.
And they, they, it, it, it would not have been possible for the Bolsheviks to take over.
They, they couldn't take over until, till the, till there was a, uh, you know, much, much more of a total collapse of the army and the government.
So, uh, the, the, the basic lesson here, which, you know, people should understand is that the more power government has, the, the more it loses control, the more it interferes, uh, or, uh, uh, intervenes in the affairs of other people, and you can say the same thing about domestically intervening in the economy, the, the more unintended consequences there tend to be because government, it can tell people what to do.
Uh, I mean, government only has four tools.
Basically it can take money from people taxation.
It can give money to people subsidies.
Uh, it can tell people what they cannot do various prohibitions, and then it can tell people what they must do.
Those are all government policies basically fall into one of those four categories, commands, prohibitions, uh, taxation and subsidies.
And, uh, what the government, it can do those things, but it can't control how people react, which is why ultimately you can have the most brutal totalitarian police state.
So it can, it can tell people what to do, but it's, it's left with no economy.
Uh, they're, you know, they're, they're stuck in, in poverty.
They can't get the economy to function based on a, on a police state, uh, operation, so, uh, you know, the government can raise taxes, they can expropriate, but of course that discourages people from, uh, taking entrepreneurial risk.
They get as much money as they can out of the country.
They flee, uh, you know, again, you, you get a destruction of the economy.
So they're, they're like North Korea.
It's basically a, they, they got an army and, uh, uh, you know, they have an army in prisons and, you know, they can keep people within the borders.
They just can't get anything to function.
And they certainly cannot raise living standards or achieve the prosperity or wealth of, uh, of freer countries.
Well, we can see in our current interventions in the war on terrorism, how we distort the, if you look at it from an economic point of view, the natural amount of power that certain groups have over others.
Well, it comes in arms up certain militias over others and things like that.
And all it means is there's going to be a backlash at some point.
Yeah.
Uh, we, we, we can see what's happened in Iraq now.
I, I don't, I don't really fault Bush for, uh, you know, uh, for making, making the decision that, you know, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
I don't know if that was an intelligence failure.
Uh, no, they were lying.
A lot.
Well, I mean, you know, was he lying or were they that had been under blockade?
Either way, you know, whether he was lying or it was simply, I mean, I can certainly believe it was poor intelligence because we don't have too many people who speak Arabic languages or are insiders in, in, uh, you know, Muslim governments to, uh, you know, to pass us the information.
So it's hard to get information, but I think the main thing there is, is that there is a risk of a preemptive war strategy, which is what, I mean, that was Bush's big mistake is a preemptive war.
Let's start a war before somebody else starts the war.
And then I went out to take it back to, to unintended consequences in world war one, right?
Uh, there sure are plenty of them, but I think we all learn in our government schools, you talk about the importance of government schools and, and language and that kind of thing.
Well, we all learn about the unintended consequence of Henry Cabot Lodge and the obstinate old Senate refusing to ratify the league of nations treaty.
And if only they had then as Woodrow Wilson had dreamed, then everything would have been fine.
So the problem was, yes, some intervention, but we didn't intervene all the way enough.
And if we continued with the Wilson policy, then everything would have worked out.
It was that you lost your faith, Jim.
Well, that, that, that gives the, uh, the league of nations, uh, an importance, which they never deserved.
Never.
It was quite apparent in the 1930s when the league of nations was completely ineffective.
Uh, you know, Mussolini decided that Italy needed to achieve some glory by, uh, occupying deserts in Africa because all the other great colonies were claimed.
League of nations couldn't do anything about that or any of the other stuff.
Uh, I mean, that's, that's, that's an illusion to imagine that the league of nations could have ever done anything or that the American, uh, acceptance or rejection of the league of nations could have made any difference.
The made the, what, what made the difference was this, this war had, had killed so many people.
There was so much bitterness, so much desire for vengeance.
And, uh, uh, all of that was intensified by the, by the total victory that was achieved by the British and French.
Now, if the Germans had won a total victory, uh, they, they, you know, they would have done the same thing.
And in fact, they, they negotiated a very tough treaty with the Russians when the, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which was to get the, uh, Russians out of the war.
They, they had to give up a lot of territory and make, make a lot of humiliating concessions to the Germans.
Uh, I mean, that was the major problem.
League of nations wasn't going to do anything.
The creation of Nazi Germany, the creation of the Soviet union, the expansion of the British empire.
It's just the set up to world war two, where we had, I guess, quote unquote, had to go and save the Soviet union from the Nazis basically.
And then the Soviet union, uh, not only survived, but of course expanded, dominated all of Eastern Europe, uh, for, you know, 40 something years and also help Mao Zedong in China and help spread communism all through Asia to the tune of the deaths of millions of people, a hundred, more than a hundred million people, maybe 200 million.
Uh, yeah, that's right.
It's, uh, because nobody has a crystal ball and the government officials cannot predict what's going to happen.
And they cannot predict what the consequences of their policies are going to be.
And until it's too late, cause it often takes quite a while for things to happen.
And then once they, sometimes it could take a long time for hatred to, uh, intensify and for people to figure out what can they do about it.
Yeah.
There's one thing predictable, really.
It's that starting a war is going to lead to unpredictable consequences.
That's right.
And they can't control it.
That's right.
All right.
Well, listen, we're all out of time, but I really appreciate your time on the show today, Jim, my pleasure.
And I appreciate this book to everybody.
It's Wilson's war, how Woodrow Wilson's great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and world war two.
And you might as well say the cold war and the war on terrorism and the rest.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, Jim.
