[NV Greens] Blame Wilson

[Bob Tregilus]

Below is an excellent piece on the roots and horrific results of

American foreign interventionism. While Woodrow Wilson's influence can 
be be seen in WWI & WWII, I think the trend can be traced back to the 
1898 Treaty of Paris which resulted in the Philippine-American War.

As Rousseau once noted: "Our greatest misfortunes come to us from 
ourselves." It's to bad Americans did not and do not heed Thomas 
Jefferson when he admonished us in 1801: "Peace, commerce, and honest 
friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none."

Bob T

--

April 23, 2005
Blame Wilson
by Scott Horton
For links to references cited in this article visit:
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=5711

"[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and 
the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, 
were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve 
herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and 
intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the 
colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her 
policy would insensibly change from liberty to force."
-John Quincy Adams 1821

Woodrow Wilson's decision to bring the United States into Europe's 
"Great War" (1914-18) wasn't made in 1917. In fact, his agents had 
already reached an agreement with the governments of England and France 
to involve the U.S. in the autumn of 1915. He then spent all of 1916 
campaigning for reelection on the slogan, "He kept us out of war." When 
Wilson, who had already invaded Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti and the 
Dominican Republic, finally got Congress to declare war against the 
Central Powers on April 8, 1917, based on the ridiculous Zimmerman 
Telegram, the renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans, 
and trumped up charges of atrocities against the Belgians, he didn't 
just get more than 100,000 Americans killed, he solidified the last 
century's turn toward warfare and totalitarianism that eventually killed 
over two hundred million people. So says Jim Powell, author of Wilson's 
War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and 
World War II. Perhaps he left the Cold War, the Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict, and the wars against terror and Iraq out of the book's title 
for brevity's sake.

Powell makes a compelling argument that by the time the U.S. got 
involved, World War I was a stalemate. Peace was sure to break out soon. 
The soldiers on all sides were sick, freezing, and invariousstates of 
mutiny.

The Russians in particular had been devastated, many of their soldiers 
were without weapons, and their luck on the battlefield was running out. 
The commanding generals were so incompetent that Czar Nicholas II left 
the capital to lead the war from the front. What little existed of a 
modern economy was being ruined. Primarily due to his refusal to 
withdraw from the war, Nicholas II was deposed in a popular uprising on 
March 15, 1917. As soon as the U.S. Congress declared war less than a 
month later, Wilson began applying diplomatic pressure and paid the 
Russians $325 million to continue the fight. An Anglophile to the core, 
Wilson didn't care about the fate of the Russians. His concern was in 
keeping German forces split along two fronts. The payoff worked: 
Russia's provisional prime minister Aleksandr Kerensky kept the Russians 
involved in the war.

Finally, on their fourth try, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his sidekick 
Leon Trotsky seized power. As Powell says in the book,

"If Russia's Provisional Government had quit the war and negotiated 
peace with Germany in early 1917, we might never had heard of Lenin. He 
would have returned home to find Russians celebrating the end of the 
war. Soldiers would have been returning home and the process of reviving 
the economy would have begun ... Finally of course, the Czar was gone, 
and the Russian army would have been there to defend the Provisional 
Government, virtually ruling out prospects for a Bolshevik coup.

Alexander Kerensky and some others in the Provisional Government wanted 
Russia to stay in the war, and maybe they would have prevailed if they 
had decided on their own. But relentless diplomatic pressure from 
Britain and France, and diplomatic pressure and bribes from Woodrow 
Wilson, helped assure that the virtually bankrupt Provisional Government 
would stay in the war."

Wilson's intervention led to the creation of the Soviet Union, the 
Cheka, KGB, Red Terror and Operation Keelhaul. Because of him, Joseph 
Stalin inherited a dictatorship; next came Lend-Lease, the Gulag 
Archipelago, ColdWar, nuclear arms race, Korean and Vietnam wars, the 
Contra "freedom fighters," and the Afghan Mujahidin.

Though the Germans were more interested in seeking a negotiated peace 
than the Allies led by Britain and France, the Western battlefield was 
still on French soil. Without the help of conscripted American soldiers 
it is much more likely that the Allies would have negotiated sooner and 
demanded less vengeful terms. And vengeful terms they were: Clause 231 
and 232 of the Treaty of Versailles forced the Germans to accept blame 
for the entire war, and to "make compensation for all damage done to the 
civilian population of the Allied and Associated Powers and to their 
property during the period of belligerency of each as an Allied or 
Associated Power against Germany by such aggression by land, by sea, and 
from the air, and in general all damage." This amounted to an open ended 
claim for German reparations. These articles were to be enforced by 
"measures as the respective Governments may determine to be necessary in 
the circumstances." This, as all school children presumably know, caused 
the German Government to turn on the printing presses, leading to 
terrible hyperinflation and the complete destruction of the German economy.

Wilson'shandler, Colonel Edward Mandell House, had tried to send an 
ambassador to Versailles, and keep Wilson at home. At least that way a 
diplomat would have had the excuse that he had to follow instructions 
from the boss back home. Wilson, however, insisted on "playing his role" 
on the "world stage," and at Versailles, this advantage was lost – he 
was the boss. He supposedly thought he could restrain the hateful 
impulses of the British and French. If he had had details in mind for 
just peace terms, it might have been different. Instead he was 
thoroughly dominated by the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and 
the British foreign secretary Lord Edward Grey.

One wish of Wilson's was granted: he had demanded that the German Kaiser 
resign. He would only accept surrender from a "democratic government," 
presumably meaning one like his. Due to this decision, the German 
democrats who had opposed the war were discredited for being those 
responsible for signing the terrible treaty. The opposition took all the 
heat, rather than the people who got the country into the war in the 
first place.

The series of maneuvers Hitler used to seize power were difficult enough 
as it was. Without the destruction of the German economy by the demands 
of massive reparations and the discrediting of the moderate factions, 
Adolph Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party would 
never have been able to seize power. Hitler's entire propaganda program 
was based on the idea of punishing the "traitors of 1918" (those who 
signed the Versailles treaty), and restoring dignity to a country so 
humiliated by the aftermath of the first world war. Wilson enabled the 
rise of Nazi Germany and its bloody fruition, World War II – 50 million 
individuals killed, the master race, the holocaust, the American Empire 
and the Bush family fortune.

Wilson's blunder also paved the way for our current conflicts in the 
Middle East. With the overwhelming victory of the Allies, made possible 
by US involvement, the British Empire expanded by over a million square 
miles. The French were able to greatly expand their territories as well. 
The current nation-states of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, 
Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and what was then called Palestine were drawn 
on a paper napkin by Winston Churchill with no regard for local 
populations at all. On top of all this, Lord Grey's successor, British 
foreign secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour, issued his famous 
"declaration," in the form of a letter to Lord Lionel Rothschild 
declaring the "establishment in Palestine of a national home for the 
Jewish people..." This has been, and will continue to be, a cause of 
major problems for the West, and the United States in particular, to say 
nothing of the people who live there.

The common refrain that "if only the Versailles treaty had been ratified 
by the U.S. Senate and we had participated in the League of Nations 
everything would have been great," is as old as Wilson himself:

"This is the Covenant of the League of Nations that you hear objected 
to, the only possible guarantee against war. I would consider myself 
recreant to every mother and father, every wife and sweetheart in this 
country, if I consented to the ending of this war without a guarantee 
that there would be no other. You say, 'Is it an absolute guarantee?' 
No; there is no absolute guarantee against human passion; but even if it 
were only 10 percent of a guarantee, would not you rather have 10 
percent guarantee against war than none? If it only creates a 
presumption that there will not be war, would you not rather have that 
presumption than live under the certainty that there will be war? For, I 
tell you, my fellow citizens, I can predict with absolute certainty that 
within another generation there will be another world war if the nations 
of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it."

Consider the unlimited arrogance of this man, who could send a hundred 
thousand people to their deaths, set up millions more for the same fate, 
and then blame those who would preserve America's independence for the 
consequences of the first part of his program by their refusal to go 
along with the rest of it.

Woodrow Wilson's presidential legacy consists of central banking, 
national income taxes, the destruction of the separation of powers, the 
Palmer raids, massive expansion of the national government's power and 
the worst slaughter of Americans since 1865. No wonder he's George W. 
Bush's hero. Let's hope the consequences of the foreign adventures of 
our current megalomaniac-in-chief are not as harmful as those of his 
predecessor.