[BRIGADE] PJB: How the West Lost the World
Published: Tue, 05/27/08
Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Europe, the Mother Continent of Western Man, is today aging and
dying, unable to sustain the birth rates needed to keep her alive,
or to resist conquest by an immigrant invasion from the Third World.
What happened to the nations that only a century ago ruled the world?
In "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War': How Britain Lost
Its Empire and the West Lost the World," published today, this
writer will argue that it was colossal blunders of British
statesmen, Winston Churchill foremost among them, that turned two
European wars into world wars that may yet prove the mortal wounds
of the West.
The first blunder was a secret decision of the inner Cabinet in
1906 to send a British army across the Channel to fight in any
Franco-German War. Had the Kaiser known the British Empire would
fight for France, he would have moved more decisively than he did
to halt the plunge to war in July 1914.
Had Britain not declared war on Aug. 4 and brought in Japan, Italy
and the United States, the war would have ended far sooner.
Leninism and Stalinism would never have triumphed in Russia, and
Hitler would never have come to power in Germany.
The second blunder was the vengeful Treaty of Versailles that added
a million square miles to the British Empire while putting millions
of Germans under Czech and Polish rule in violation of the terms of
the armistice and Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points.
A third was the British decision to capitulate to U.S. demands in
1921 and throw over a faithful Japanese ally of 20 years. Tokyo
took its revenge, 20 years later, by inflicting the greatest defeat
in British history, the surrender of Singapore and an army of
80,000 to a Japanese army half that size.
A fourth British blunder, which Neville Chamberlain called the
"very midsummer of madness," was the 1935 decision to sanction
Italy for a colonial war in Ethiopia. London destroyed the Stresa
Front of Britain, France and Italy that Mussolini had forged to
contain Germany, and drove Mussolini straight into the arms of a
Nazi dictator he loathed.
In 1936, France sounded out the British to determine if they would
support a drive to push German troops out of the Rhineland that
Hitler had occupied in violation of Versailles. The British
refused. And Churchill congratulated France for taking the matter
up with the League of Nations, and said the ideal solution would be
a voluntary Nazi withdrawal from the Rhineland to show the world
that Hitler respected the sanctity of treaties.
Munich, 70 years ago this September, was a disaster. But it was a
direct, if not inevitable, consequence of a Versailles treaty that
had consigned 3.5 million Sudeten Germans to Czech rule against
their will and in violation of the principle of self-determination.
But the fatal blunder was not Munich.
It was the decision of March 31, 1939, to hand a war guarantee to a
neo-fascist regime of Polish colonels who had joined Hitler in the
rape of Czechoslovakia.
Britain gave Warsaw a blank check to take her to war over a town,
Danzig, the British themselves thought should be restored to
Germany. Result: a Hitler-Stalin Pact and a six-year war that left
scores of millions dead, Europe in ruins, the British empire
bankrupt and breaking, 10 European nations under the barbaric rule
of Joseph Stalin and half a century of Cold War. Had there been no
war guarantee to Poland, there might have been no war, no Nazi
invasion of Western Europe and no Holocaust.
Churchill was the indispensable war leader who held on until Hitler
committed his fatal blunders, invading Russia and declaring war on
America. He was also the man most responsible for Britain's fall
from mistress of the greatest empire since Rome to an island
dependency of the United States.
About the character of the Bolshevik regime in 1919 and Nazi regime
in 1933, Churchill had been right. About British rearmament, he had
been right. But Churchill was also often disastrously wrong.
He led the West down a moral incline to its own barbarism by
imposing a starvation blockade on Germany in 1914 and launching air
terror against open cities in 1940. These policies brought death to
hundreds of thousands of women and children.
He was behind the greatest British military blunders in two wars:
the Dardanelles disaster of 1915 and the Norwegian fiasco of 1940
that brought down Chamberlain and vaulted Churchill to power.
While excoriating Chamberlain for appeasing Hitler, Churchill's own
appeasement of Stalin lasted longer and was even more egregious and
costly, ensuring that the causes for which Britain sacrificed the
empire -- the freedom of Poland and preventing a hostile power from
dominating Europe -- were lost.
Churchill was, however, surely right when he told FDR in their
first meeting after Pearl Harbor that they should call the war they
were now in "The Unnecessary War."
He was a Great Man -- at the cost of his country's greatness.
SOURCE:
http://patbuchananbooks.com/churchill-hitler-and-the-unnecessary-war
/how-the-west-lost-the-world/