All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and today's Armistice Day.
Pretty much every Armistice Day for the past six years or so, I've interviewed Jim Powell, author of Wilson's War, how Woodrow Wilson's great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II, and then he left out the Cold War and the Terror War and whatever, I'm sure just for the brevity of the book title.
You can also read a great article at lewrockwell.com by Jim called What We Can Learn From Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder, The Case for Staying Out of Other People's Wars.
Welcome back to the show, Jim, how are you?
Thank you, glad to be with you.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And I love this book.
It's been a few years since I've read it, obviously, but I sure learned a heck of a lot from it.
And so I think here's where we want to start this interview out.
A lot of people, I think maybe if you tune in the history channel, they'll say, well, World War One was really part one of World War Two.
It was one big war and and World War One kind of helped to cause World War Two.
And, you know, these kinds of vague statements with obviously some truth in them.
But what you really nailed down in this book is that it's not just World War One caused World War Two.
It's Woodrow Wilson's American intervention in World War One that tipped the scale and changed everything.
And especially, as you point out, gave the the breathing space, I guess, the time necessary for Lenin and Trotsky to cease power in Moscow and create the Soviet Union, the stripping of all of Germany's territories and the humiliation that led to the German people's acquiescence to the rise of the Nazi Reich.
And then, of course, Britain and France got the Middle East from the Ottomans and helped draw those lines, including Palestine and Iraq and all the problems that we're having to this day.
So time is very limited, but I was hoping we could start with what Woodrow Wilson's intervention in World War One had to do with the situation in Russia and how you know what role that played in the creation of the Soviet Union.
Well, you had a three-year stalemate during World War One.
The war started in 1914.
Three years later, it was a stalemate with neither side able to impose its will on the other.
So what Wilson did was to intervene, persuade the United States, persuade Congress to declare war and get the United States into it in 1917.
And it was the additional soldiers, the military hardware, all the rest of that, that enabled the British and the French, who were allied with the Russians, to win the war.
Now Russia, since you're asking about Russia, Russia was completely unprepared for the war.
It did not have enough railroad capacity both to move a million soldiers to the eastern front and to continue supplying food and everything else to their population, which of course covered a very large area.
So what they did was to move the soldiers to the front.
So from the get-go in 1914, there were food shortages.
The Russians did not have enough guns to give all the soldiers.
They told each soldier, if your buddy gets shot, grab his gun, that's your gun.
Well, so from the very beginning, there were families back in Russia who were outraged that their boys were being sent without any guns to be killed by the Germans.
During the course of the war, there were more shortages.
You had corruption in the government.
So Russia began deteriorating from the time that they got into it.
There was a revolution in the spring of 1917, and the czar was overthrown.
You had a provisional government, a socialist government, and because Wilson had got the United States in the war, he became frantic to keep the Russians in the war.
Because if Russia made a separate treaty with the Germans and got out of the war, they were negotiating a treaty, and the Germans demanded harsh terms.
This is the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
A settlement in the east with the Russians and Germans would have enabled the Germans to send at least some of their troops from the eastern front to the western front, where they would be more trouble for the British and the French and the Americans who had just arrived.
So Wilson wanted to keep the Russians in the war, to keep the Germans on the eastern front, to keep them there and not move west.
Well, we had to bribe the Russians, give the Russian government, which is broke, give them millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, to stay in the war.
There was one more offensive in the summer of 1917.
It was a disaster.
There were hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who were fleeing, who were deserting, so that they could get their allotment of land.
They had heard that free land was being given out, so their interest in further participation in the war was zero.
Lenin tried to attempt a coup to take over the government in the summer of 1917, and even with all this desertion, the collapse, the final disaster brought about by the incompetent Russian generals, despite all that, Lenin could not seize power.
It was not until the fall of 1917 when the Russian army had just about collapsed, there was hardly anything left, it was only in those circumstances that the comparatively small band of Bolsheviks was able, on the fourth attempt, to seize power.
And it's pretty much certain then that Kerensky, the interim leader, the guy that Lenin ended up overthrowing, but who had overthrown the czar, that he would have gotten out of the war and brought those soldiers back if it hadn't been for Woodrow Wilson's bribery?
Well yeah, the country, it wasn't so much a matter of his policy to bring them home, but the whole thing was collapsing, so it took a heroic effort, an idiotic effort, because there was no purpose in it.
Since they were already collapsing, that's why Kerensky was able to achieve the revolution that he did, to seize power in the spring of 1917.
So it took a heroic effort to have one more military campaign.
Now it was idiotic, because all it did was accelerate the collapse of the regime, which ended up in communist hands.
Well, and we can't overstate the consequences of that.
175 million Soviet citizens killed by their own government, something like that.
Right, so if we had stayed out of the war, we wouldn't have cared whether Russia stayed in the war or left the war, and the accumulation of failures, inflation, shortages, all that would have had them out of the war.
They would have lost a lot of territory under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but they would have been out of the war before the regime completely collapsed and was wide open to the Bolshevik takeover.
I think Lenin would not have been able to take over if there was any kind of Russian army or this German army left standing.
And for the young listeners, Jim, they may not be aware if they just go to government school, the extent of the evil of the government of the Soviet Union.
I mean, before World War II even broke out, Stalin had already murdered tens of millions of Ukrainians and others.
That's right, and of course Chairman Mao learned about the wonders of communism from the Soviet Union and how to set up a totalitarian state.
So you had the tens of millions more deaths that occurred in communist China to the toll that accumulated in the Soviet Union.
Well, plus all the dead in Korea and Vietnam and the rest of the Cold War battlegrounds, proxy wars and all that.
It's absolutely horrible.
All right, hold it right there, everybody.
It's Jim Powell.
He's the author of Wilson's War, FDR's Folly and Bully Boy, the truth about Theodore Roosevelt's legacy.
And we're talking about Wilson's War, how his great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and World War II.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Jim Powell.
He's the author of Triumph of Liberty, Bully Boy about Theodore Roosevelt, FDR's Folly, obviously about FDR.
And the subject of discussion today is this great book, Wilson's War, how Woodrow Wilson's great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and World War II.
And now in this segment, Jim, if it's all right, I'd like to focus on the effect of American intervention in World War I on the battle lines between the Germans and the French, the allies and the central powers and the effect that this had on Germany.
People say that, well, yeah, you know, the rise of the Nazis is due to, in part, the Treaty of Versailles and the harsh conditions at the end of World War I. But it's just sort of taken as a given that, I guess, that this would have happened with or without American intervention.
But your book says, no, it's all American intervention that tipped the scale and led to the rise of the Nazi Reich.
Well, yeah, the reason is because there was a stalemate for three years after the initial charge in August of 1914.
The battle lines were pretty well set.
They moved back and forth a bit, but they had all these trench systems.
None of the generals on either side seemed to realize that a soldier in a cloth uniform was quite vulnerable to machine gun fire.
So, for the three years, they just kept ordering brigade after brigade after brigade of men to stand up, charge out of their foxholes and run toward the machine gunners.
They all got mowed down by the millions.
So, if the United States had stayed out of the war, it's highly likely there would have been a negotiated settlement because there was war fatigue on both sides.
The British Navy had effectively thrown a blockade around continental Europe to severely restrict the things that Germany needed and could only get from outside sources.
There was plenty of war fatigue within Germany, a lot of unrest, and it became harder for the German factories to function as well as people weren't getting bread.
So, as the war dragged on, there was increasing prospect of getting a negotiated settlement with neither side able to dictate terms to the other.
Now, Wilson was an incredibly poorly informed and naive man, and he assumed that he could come in as a white horse, the American savior of the British and French, and then everybody would sit around a table and work out some reasonable settlement.
But, of course, the British and the French had already lost more than a million men each.
Most of the fighting during World War I took place in France, the destruction of farmland and so on.
So, no big surprise, the British and especially the French, especially Clemenceau, the French premier, was anxious for revenge against the Germans, for all the men that they had lost, for the farmland, for railroads that were broken up, destroyed, and so on.
And they couldn't be stopped.
The British, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, could not be stopped in pushing through the Vindicta Versailles Treaty.
And Wilson was completely helpless.
Again, as I said, since the Europeans, the French and the British were the ones who suffered the most, it was really very hard.
Well, and I think you say in the book, too, that if he had just sent Colonel House, then House could have said, I'm sorry, guys, the boss back home insisted that this is the line and we cannot compromise.
Well, since it was him, he didn't have anywhere to go.
He was the boss.
Well, that's right.
He was completely unprepared for the overwhelming determination to avenge their suffering.
And I mean, what you're describing is the very amateurish negotiating strategy from Wilson.
He could have sat back in Washington, issued his orders to his chosen representative, Colonel House, and that's it.
Colonel House would have said, I'm not in a position to negotiate.
I'm taking my orders from the president who's back in Washington.
But, of course, Wilson had a big ego and he wanted to parade on a world stage and he wanted to be showing that the upstart American republic, as it was at one point, could negotiate with all the European kings and all the established powers in Europe.
But he was completely unprepared for it, the setup where now people are pressuring him directly for concessions.
He's the boss.
He can make concessions.
And Clemenceau is saying, what the hell are you doing?
We're the ones, the farmland, blah, blah, blah.
So you have the Vindictive Versailles Treaty and that triggered the nationalistic reaction in Germany, right or wrong.
It triggered an overwhelming reaction in Germany, which enabled Hitler, who was just a nobody at that time, to begin to build the cadre that eventually enabled him to take power.
Well, you say in your book, he began every speech denouncing the traitors of 1918, the Democrats who, Wilson, this is the part that just drives me nuts.
Wilson refused to accept German surrender from the people who'd been waging the war.
He insisted that only Democrats and democratically elected people are legitimate representatives to sign the peace treaty.
So then Hitler's entire shtick was that the people who had opposed World War I were the traitors all along who sold us out to the British and the Americans and etc.
Right.
The German generals didn't want to have anything to do with surrender and accepting the treaty.
So it was elected representatives.
So the Germans resented the individuals who signed what they viewed as the giveaway, the humiliating surrender.
So it was the democratic elected officials, not the generals whose reputation was destroyed, whose credibility was destroyed.
So from the get-go, the confidence in a democratic type of government was undermined.
Well, then his Beer Hall push, Hitler's Beer Hall push, his first attempt to take over the government happened in the midst of the hyperinflation, right?
And that was the beginning of his real rise to power.
That's right.
It was during the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty.
So the humiliation from the war, plus the runaway inflation that climaxed in the fall of 1923, destroyed the middle class, destroyed savings.
All the loyal Germans who had bought war bonds only to find out that they were completely worthless.
They might have millions and millions of marks worth of war bonds, but be unable to buy a loaf of bread.
Hitler appealed to these people in his speeches as starving billionaires.
They had billions and billions of paper marks, and they couldn't buy anything with them.
They were all impoverished.
So that was a substantial...
Now, I might add that most people probably believe that reparations that were demanded in the Versailles Treaty were primarily responsible for the runaway inflation, but that's actually the reparations were only part of the story.
During the war, the German government expanded enormously and became the world's first experience really with what came to be called war socialism.
Yeah, totalitarianism, where even your reproduction is your duty to the state.
It was the first real totalitarian state.
That's right.
Well, yeah, okay.
The government expanded control over everything, over industries, the ones that it didn't own outright.
They had an enormous number of regulations that tell them exactly what to do.
And actually, it was the German war socialism, the way the government ran the economy during the war, that's what Lenin took as his model.
Because Lenin in Russia, he didn't have a clue how to run an economy.
He thought that the way you run an economy is to have accountants.
So he took for granted the all the enterprises that capitalists had set up to generate wealth, to create products, to do all the things that a market provides.
Lenin assumed all of that, that when he comes in and establishes a communist state, it'll have some kind of an economic machine just like the capitalists have, except you have to be very careful and keep track of the money.
So he thought, well, we'll just have accountants come in and keep track of everything so we can control it.
Of course, he didn't really have a clue how do you create the wealth in the first place.
But Lenin looked at the German war socialism, that's how he's going to run his government, he thought.
So what the Germans did, you're just asking where Russia had an impact on what happened, and it became a model for what Lenin wanted to do there.
But anyway, I'm getting a little off track.
It was not just the reparations, this war socialism, where the government controlled everything.
Most of that continued into the 1920s.
Not the military part of it, but the government ran opera houses, they had government-run sausage factories, they had all this stuff, and the German government couldn't even make money making sausages.
They had all kinds of stuff, cafes were government-owned, all this stuff was government-owned.
The railroads were the biggest money losers.
But the government had all this stuff and it was all losing money, just like government enterprises always do.
And so actually, this leftover war socialism, or big government, because it wasn't dedicated to the war anymore, but all this stuff was losing money.
So this was actually a bigger drag on the government than the reparations.
For one thing, all this big welfare state losses started right away.
They never went away after the war, so they just lost more and more money.
Whereas with the reparations, several years went by, the Allies were negotiating and demanding, and the French couldn't agree on how much to ultimately demand from the Germans.
So all of this was kicking numbers around before the Germans actually had to start paying while they were losing on the welfare state from the get-go.
They had a big social security system, a big retirement system, government-run retirement system, all that way before we had social security, but that was one of the models for what we did.
Social security in Germany, as you know, started in the 1880s and 90s under Bismarck, Chancellor Bismarck, strongman in Germany.
Anyway, so it was all these big government losses plus reparations, and meanwhile the German productive capacity had been damaged, and then the French seized a lot of territory and railroad cars and factories, which made it even harder for the Germans to pay.
So they figured, what the hell, we'll just print all this money and turn our backs on it.
Yeah, well, and then so that destabilization led to Hitler's first try, but then he just went to jail.
He didn't win in the Beer Hall Push, he just went to jail, but he made a bunch of friends while he's in jail.
And when he gets out, he runs on, and this is the thing, you know, I had always heard about the war reparations and the hyperinflation and all that, not so much the war socialism part you just emphasized, but the rest of it I kind of, I think, pretty much heard as the basic narrative ever since I was a little kid in government school.
But the part that was really left out, which you really emphasize, is that the reason that the people of Germany, because the hyperinflation was over by, you know, 33 and whatever, the reason that they supported Hitler's rise to power in any real part, and then put up with it for the 12 years they put up with it, was because he was promising to retake the pieces of Germany that had been stripped away.
It wasn't that he said, you know, for the greater glory of the German people, I'm going to conquer the whole wide world, so come and support me and let's get going.
He said, I'm going to take back what was taken unjustly from us.
And what had been taken, I'm not justifying what he said, I'm just saying that's how the people of Germany justified it.
And again, it comes back to American intervention.
It would have been a stalemate.
The armies were in revolt, the war was basically over.
The only reason that France and Britain were able to dictate that Germany had to give up all these provinces, especially in the east, was because of American intervention.
That's what really led to the rise of the Nazi Reich, was Hitler's promise to retake all those stolen territories.
Right.
Yeah, Hitler was definitely looking east.
He was not looking west in 1939.
It was his Lebensraum, or living room, that he had talked about.
That all involved looking east toward, you know, Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary and so on.
He wasn't looking at France.
Hitler didn't really want to get into a war.
He didn't want to get involved in a two-front war in the very beginning, so he didn't actually start it until he had a deal with Stalin to split the spoils in the east.
Right.
And at that point, he moved.
Well, and the funny thing is, is that even though TV says that World War II is the good war and it's great and America was Superman and beat the bad guys and this and that, the reality is World War II was the worst thing that happened ever, ever.
60 million people were killed.
The entire world was turned upside down and then divided between, you know, Moscow and DC.
Two-thirds for us, one-third for them, and then, what, 50 years of Cold War and all of this empire and unintended consequences all over the place.
I guess we don't even have time to address the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the takeover of its former territories by the British and the French, but obviously that has a lot to do with where we are right now in terms of our Middle East policy.
Right.
Iraq was, the borders for Iraq, the setup in Iraq was determined by Winston Churchill as a consequence, as part of the Versailles Settlement.
The British got jurisdiction for what became Iraq, and I think it was Churchill who was the colonial secretary at the time and decided to throw these three different peoples together, the Kurds, the Shiites, and the Sunnis.
People had never been together before, you know, it didn't exist before.
They were, you know, they were basically people who moved around.
Anyway, so that's a whole other story.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill, where he says World War I ended, the American intervention in World War I ended up expanding, or maybe this is your book, I forget, expanded the British Empire by a million square miles.
Right, and the irony that you alluded to earlier was that here we'd fought World War II to liberate people in the territory that had been controlled by the Nazis, only to give everybody away to Stalin.
Right.
So you had, and of course, by 1945, America as well as everybody else was exhausted, and we didn't give a rip about the Poles, the Hungarians, and all those other people.
They'd endured life under Hitler, and now they're kind of back where they started.
So here we are, we have, initially we have two totalitarian rulers, Hitler and Stalin, fighting each other, and so we make an alliance with one, and defeat the other, and the other tyrant ends up getting all the territory.
Yeah, the whole thing's a disaster.
And then, you know, we don't ever even talk about this, except, you know, the show M.A.S.
H., but the forgotten war, Korea, there were millions of people who were burned to death by the U.S. Air Force in that thing, and that's because it wasn't just we were fighting the communist guerrillas who had fought the Japanese in Korea during the Japanese occupation, it's that they were backed by the Chinese communists and the Russian communists, and it was part of this whole Cold War.
Between three and five million Vietnamese died in that war as part of this same Cold War.
That's the rounding estimate.
Somewhere between three and five million people died, you know?
Yeah, well, the Korean War is another illustration of the unexpected consequences of warfare.
Obviously, before going into a war, one or both sides have to develop pretty high confidence that they can win it, and it begins to look easy.
So, we didn't really give much of a thought to Korea during World War II, then after the second atomic bomb is dropped on Japan, Stalin enters the war in the east and starts advancing into Manchuria and Korea.
He's trying to go as fast as he can.
He does not want to settle anything until his soldiers have occupied as much territory as they can get, and then there's a bit of a negotiation on the 38th parallel that's going to divide the Soviet-occupied from the American-occupied zone.
Then, of course, the North Koreans attack, start the Korean War.
MacArthur is enormously successful charging north, but he does not anticipate that the Chinese are going to come in.
So, then the Chinese come pouring in, and we end up right back where we started at the 38th parallel, you know, that Stalin controlled in the days following, basically when the Japanese were ready to surrender.
Most of the American soldiers who were killed during the Korean War were killed after the armistice.
They had a long period, a couple of years, when there were seemingly endless negotiations.
So, that whole thing was a mess.
Well, you can see why it's the forgotten war, because nobody wanted to think about it or talk about it.
They'd rather pretend that Harry Truman was a hero and a great president and all these things.
So, let's just forget that that whole thing ever happened, I guess.
Yep, you're right.
Really, they didn't make MASH until Vietnam.
MASH was really about Vietnam, not Korea, but that's the most I know about the Korean War.
That's what most people know about it, is Hawkeye and B.J. Honeycutt and all that crap.
You're absolutely right.
All right, terrible shame.
All right, well, listen, I've already kept you over time here, and I really appreciate you staying here on the show with me to talk about this book.
It's an extremely important book.
I strongly urge people to read it.
I highly recommend it.
It's called Wilson's War, How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II.
And as I said, you can also find a great essay, the very short version of the book, at LewRockwell.com, What We Can Learn from Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder, The Case for Staying Out of Other People's Wars, by Jim Powell.
He's also the author of The Triumph of Liberty, Bully Boy, about Theodore Roosevelt and FDR's folly about the latter one of those.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Really appreciate you, Jim.
My pleasure.
Thank you very much.
