[BretLudwig]

How the West Lost the World

By Patrick J. Buchanan

"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."

http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/080524_west.htm

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[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On May 27, 10:30*am, "BretLudwig" wrote:

By Patrick J. Buchanan

'Nuff said. LOL!