The liberal pacifism of the 1920's and 1930's

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I have long been fascinated by the highly irrational, inscrutable mind of the leftist liberal. It suggests a mind so ensconced in books and romantic literature as to have lost all contact with reality. So much self-assurance combined with so much foolishness! It is an enigma. So full of bad assumptions, bad suppositions! It suggests shallowness, lack of depth of thought, and a gross lack of understanding of people and life. It is the difference between the mind of the practical person with both feet squarely on the ground (a person with a prosaic fact-oriented mind), and the mind of the idealistic dreamer totally removed from reality. It seems to me that one of their traits is that they tend to be very trusting and easily deceived. In the real world trusting, naive people quickly fall prey to the tricks of fraudsters.

Basically, it seems to me, that liberals just tend to lack in good sense and judgment. That seems to be a basic problem. Good sense and judgment.

Perhaps the liberal mind of the 1920's and 1930's can give some perspective on the liberal mind of today.

No one can reveal intellectual foolishness quite as well as Thomas Sowell.

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Intellectuals and Society. Part IV. Intellectuals and War.

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It is true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it. John Jay, The Federalist, Number 4.

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Like virtually everyone else, intellectuals generally prefer peace to war. However, as already noted in Chapter 6, there are some very fundamental differences in ideas on how to prevent wars. Just as the vision of crime prevention among intellectuals goes back as least as far as the eighteenth century, so too does their vision of war and peace. In contrast to the tragic vision, which sees military strength as the key to deterrence, the vision of the intellectuals has long been one that relies on international negotiations and/or disarmament agreements to avoid wars.

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...... Intellectuals have sometimes been strong supporters of particular wars and sometimes strong opponents of other wars. ....

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As already noted, the vision of the anointed is a vision of intellectual and moral elites being surrogate decision-makers, imposing an over-arching common purpose to supercede the disparate and conflicting individual purposes and individual decisions of the population at large. War creates a setting in which this vision can flourish.

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The First World War

The First World War was a shock to many people in many ways. Nearly a century without a major war on the European continent had lulled some into a comfortable feeling that European civilization had somehow left war behind, as a thing of the past. Many on the far left believed that international working class solidarity would prevent the workers of different countries from killing each other on the battlefields, supposedly for the benefit of their exploiters. In countries on both sides, generations that had no experience with war marched off to war with great fanfare, exhilaration, and a sense of assurance that it would all be over — victoriously — in a relatively short time.

Few had any idea of how modern technology would make this the most lethal and ghastly war the world had yet seen, for both soldiers and civilians alike, how many of the survivors across the continent of Europe would end up hungry or starving amid the ruins and rubble of war, or how many centuries-old empires would be shattered into oblivion by war, much less what a monstrous new phenomenon — totalitarianism — would be spawned in the chaotic aftermath of that war. Intellectuals were among the many whose illusions would be brutally smashed by the catastrophes of the First World War.

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No matter how drastically intellectuals had ben forced to change their minds in the wake of the First World War, they remained as convinced as ever that their views on the subject of war and peace were vastly superior to the views of the general public. Circumstances were part of the reason for the spread of pacifism, especially the grim and heart-rending experiences of the First World War. But part was due to the way people reacted to the circumstances, especially the intelligentsia, most severely the intelligentsia in France, which suffered most among the Western democracies. The most fundamental of these circumstances were the stark facts of that war itself:

About 1,400,000 French lost their lives; well over 1,000,000 had been gassed, disfigured, mangled, amputated, left permanently invalids. Wheelchairs, crutches, empty sleeves dangling loosely or tucked into pockets became common sights. More than that had suffered some sort of wound. Half of the 6,500,000 who survived the war had sustained injuries. Most visible, 1,100,000, were those who had been evidently diminished and were described as mutiles, a term the dictionary translates as “maimed” or “mangled” and English prefers to clothe in an euphemism: “disabled.”

With most of the war on the western front fought on its own territory, France suffered tremendous casualties in the First World War. More than one-fourth of all Frenchmen between the ages of 18 and 27 were killed in the First World War. Moreover, neither the financial nor human costs of the First World War ended when the war itself ended. Although the number of males and females in France’s population were roughly equal before the war, the massive wartime casualties among young Frenchmen meant that in the 1930s the number of women between the ages of twenty and forty exceeded the number of men of those ages by more than a million — meaning that more than a million women in the prime of their life could not fulfill traditional expectations of becoming wives and mothers. During the 1930s, there were not enough babies born in France to replace the people who died during that decade.

The sense of faith in the French government was also devastated, as people who had patriotically invested in bonds to help finance the First World War saw the value of those bonds drastically reduced by inflation, cheating some citizens out of their life savings. No country was more fertile soil for pacifism and demoralization, and no one created more of both than France’s intelligentsia.

Anti-war novels and the memoirs of military veterans found a vast market in France. A translation of the anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front sold 72,000 in ten days and nearly 450,000 copies by Christmas, L’Humanité serialized it and Vie intellectuelle praised it. In 1938, the year of the Munich appeasement of Hitler, Echo de la Nièvre said, “anything rather than war.” Novelist Jean Giono, long critical of his own French government, likewise urged acceptance of Hitler’s terms at Munich.

Very similar trends were apparent in Britain in the years between the two World Wars where, for example, All Quiet on the Western Front sold 300,000 copies in six months.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the pacifist mood was being fuelled by the flow of memoirs and novels exploring the horrors of the Great War — Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man were published in 1928, and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front appeared in 1929. Lewis Milestone’s film of Remarque’s book had a powerful impact.

In addition to many anti-war novels about the First World War, eighty or more novels about the horrors of future wars were published in Britain between the First and Second World Wars.

One of the remarkable developments of the 1920s was an international movement among intellectuals, promoting the idea that nations should get together and publically renounce war. As prominent British intellectual Harold Laski put it: “The experience of what world-conflict has involved seems to have convinced the best of this generation that the effective outlawry of war is the only reasonable alternative to suicide.” In the United States, John Dewey spoke of those who were skeptical of this movement for the international renunciation of war that he supported, which led to the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, as people with “the stupidity of habit-bound minds.” He saw arguments against the renunciation of war as coming “from those who believe in the war system.” With Laski, Dewey and others, the issue was not simply a matter of one hypothesis about war and peace versus another but was a question of the anointed versus the benighted — the later being dismissed with contempt, rather than having their questions answered.

Being a pacifist in the 1920s and 1930s was a badge of honor, and pacifist phrases facilitated admission to the circles of the self-congratulatory elites. At a 1935 rally of the British Labor Party, economist Roy Harrod heard a candidate proclaim that Britain ought to disarm “as an example to others” — a very common argument at the time. His response and the answer it provoked captured the spirit of the times:

‘You think our example will cause Hitler and Mussolini to disarm?’ I asked.

‘Oh, Roy’, she said, ‘Have you lost all your idealism?’

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Given the high personal psychic stakes for pacifists, it is not surprising that those with a contrary vision on issues of war and peace — as on other issues — were lashed out at, as personal enemies or as people threatening their soul, and were demonized rather than answered. As noted in Chapter 8, Bertrand Russell claimed that the man who opposed pacifism was someone who “delights in war, and would hate a world from which it had been eliminated.” In a very similar vein, H.G. Wells spoke of a substantial portion of “human beings who definitely like war, know they like war, want it and seek it.”

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In short, the unworthiness of opponents was taken as axiomatic, making substantive arguments against their arguments unnecessary.

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Such views were not peculiar to British and American intellectuals. The French intelligentsia played a major role in the promotion of pacifism between the two World Wars. Even before the Treaty of Versailles was signed, internationally renowned French writer Romain Rolland — recipient of France’s Grand Prix de Littérature, later elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences and offered the Goethe Prize by Germany, as well recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature — issued a manifesto calling on intellectuals in all countries to oppose militarism and nationalism, in order to promote peace.

In 1926, prominent intellectuals from a number of countries signed an internationally publicized petition for “some definite step toward complete disarmament and the demilitarizing of the mind of civilized nations.” Among those who signed were H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell in England and Romain Rolland and Georges Duhamel in France. The petition called for a ban on military conscription, in part “to rid the world of the spirit of militarism.”

Behind such arguments was the crucial assumption that both physical and moral disarmament were necessary to sustain peace. Neither in this petition nor in other statements expressing similar views was there much, if any, expressed concern that both kinds of disarmament would leave the disarmed nations at the mercy of those nations which did not disarm in either sense, thus making a new war look more attractive to the later because it would look more winnable. Hitler, for example, banned the antiwar classic All Quiet on the Western Front, as he wanted neither moral nor physical disarmament in Germany, but carefully followed both phenomena in Western democracies, as he plotted his moves against them.

Pacifists of this era seemed not to think of other nations as prospective enemies but of war itself as the enemy, with weapons of war and those who manufactured these weapons — “merchants of death” being the fashionable phrase of the times and the title of a best-selling 1934 book — also being enemies. The “merchants of death wax fat and bloated,” declared John Dewey in 1935. Romain Rolland called them “profiteers of massacre.” H. G. Wells said, “war equipment has followed blindly upon industrial advance until it has become a monstrous and immediate danger to the community.” Harold Lanski spoke of the “wickedness of armaments.” Aldous Huxley referred to a battleship as a “repulsive” insect , a “huge bug,” which “squatted there on the water, all its poisonous armory enlarged into instruments of destruction, every bristle a gun, every pore a torpedo tube,” and added: “Men had created this enormous working model of a loathsome insect for the express purpose of destroying other men.”

Pacifists did not see military forces as deterrents to other nations’ military forces but as malign influences in and of themselves.

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Such views — seeing weapons rather than other nations as the danger — were not simply intellectual fashions but created political bases for national policies and international agreements, beginning with the Washington Naval Agreements on 1921 -1922 among the leading naval powers of the world to limit the number and size of warships, agreements hailed by John Dewey among others, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, renouncing war. “Away with rifles, machine guns, and cannon!” said France’s Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand, co-author of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. In a letter to the New Republic in 1932, Romain Rolland urged, “Unite, all of you, against the common enemy. Down with war!” Later Georges Duhamel, looking back on the interwar pacifists in France, including himself, summarized their approach, which avoided seeing other nations as potential enemies:

For more than twelve years Frenchmen of my kind, and there were many of them, spared no pains to forget what they knew about Germany. Doubtless it was imprudent, but it sprang from a sincere desire on our part for harmony and collaboration. We were willing to forget. And what were we willing to forget? Some very horrible things.

The view of war itself, rather than other nations, as the enemy began shortly after the end of the First World War, as did the idea that patriotism must be superseded by internationalism, in the interests of peace. Addressing school teachers in 1919, Anatole France urged that they use the schools to promote pacifism and internationalism. “In developing the child, you will determine the future,” he said. “The teacher must make the child love peace and its works; he must teach him to detest war; he will banish from education all which excites hate for the stranger, even hatred of the enemy of yesterday,” he added. Anatole France declared, “we must be citizens of the world or see all civilization perish.” Such ideas became dominant in French schools during the next two decades.

A key role in the spread of pacifism in France was played by the schools — more specifically, by the French teachers’ unions, which began organized campaigns in the 1920s, objecting to postwar textbooks favorably depicting the French soldiers who had defended their country against German invaders in the First World War. Such textbooks were called “bellicose” — a verbal tactic still common among those with the vision of the anointed, of reducing views different from their own to mere emotions, as if in this case only pugnaciousness could account for resisting invaders or for praising those who had put their lives on the line to do so. The leading teachers’ union, the Syndicat national des instituteurs (SN) launched a campaign against those textbooks “of bellicose inspiration” which it characterized as “a danger for the organization of peace.” Since nationalism was said to b one of the causes of war, internationalism or “impartiality” among nations was considered to be a required feature of textbooks.

Leaders of the drive to rewrite history textbooks called their goal “moral disarmament” to match the military disarmament which many regarded as another key to peace. Lists of textbooks targeted for removal from the schools were made by Georges Lapierre, one of the SN leaders. By 1929, he was able to boast of all the “bellicose” books the SN campaign had gotten taken out of the schools, rewritten, or replaced. Faced with the threat of losing a share of the large textbook market, French publishers caved in to union demands that books about the First World War be revised to reflect “impartiality” among nations and to promote pacifism.

The once epic story of French soldiers’ heroic defense at Verdun, despite their massive casualties, was now transformed into a story of horrible suffering by all soldiers at Verdun, presented in the much sought after spirit of impartiality. “In short, men who had once been honored as patriotic heroes for having sacrificed their lives in a desperate struggle to hold off the invaders of their country were now verbally reduced to victims, and put on the same plane as other victims among the invaders. Ceremonies dedicating monuments to commemorate soldiers who died in battle were sometimes turned into occasions for speeches promoting the pacifist ideology.

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France’s behavior in the Second World War was in extraordinary contrast with its behavior in the First World War. France fought off the German invaders for four long years during the First World War, despite suffering horrendous casualties — more wartime deaths than a larger country like the United States has ever suffered in any war or in all of its wars put together. Yet, during the Second World War, France surrendered after just six weeks of fighting in 1940. In the bitter moment of defeat, the head of the teachers’ union was told: “You are partially responsible for this defeat.” Charles de Gaulle, Francois Mauriac, and many other Frenchmen blamed a lack of national will, or national moral decay, for the sudden and humiliating collapse of France in 1940.

Although France’s sudden collapse caught much of the world by surprise, Winston Churchill had said, as far back as 1932: “France, though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core.” Hitler was not surprised by Frances sudden collapse, and had in fact predicted it. When he pressed his generals to draw up plans for the invasion of France immediately after the swift German victory in Poland in the summer of 1939, the generals’ analysis of the various military and logistical factors involved led them to doubt that such a project could be undertaken, with any realistic hope of success, before 1941 or perhaps 1942. But the most delay that Hitler would grant them was until the spring of 1940, which in fact was when the German invasion of France began. Hitler’s reasons were wholly different from the objective factors which German generals had analyzed. It was based on his analysis of the French themselves.

Hitler said that France was no longer the same country as the France that had fought doggedly through four years of the First World War, that the contemporary French were lacking in the personal strengths necessary for victory, and would falter and surrender. This is in fact largely what happened. The objective factors, such as the number and quality of military equipment available to France and its British allies versus those available to the German invaders led military leaders in both France and Germany to conclude at the outset that France had the greater prospects of victory. But Hitler had long made a study of public opinion, as well as official opinion, in France and Britain. The words and deeds of both politicians and pacifists in those countries went into Hitler’s calculations.

The invasion of France took place when it did only because Hitler insisted upon it, dismissing the contrary advice of his own generals. Decades later, scholarly studies in both France and Germany reached the same conclusion as that of the French and German military leaders in 1940, that the objective factors favored a French victory — and certainly nothing like the swift and total collapse that occurred. How much of that collapse can be attributed to the large role of chance and misjudgments inherent in war, and how much to a fundamental inner erosion of morale, patriotism, and resolution among the French themselves, is a question unlikely to be answered definitely.

What is clear, however is that the irresolution which marked French political responses to the German threat in the years leading up to the Second World War carried over into the war itself, beginning with the long months of the “phony war” from September 1939 to May 1940, during which France had overwhelming military superiority on Germany’s western front, while German military forces were concentrated in the east, fighting Poland — and yet France did nothing. The German general responsible for defending the vulnerable western front said, “Every day of calm in the West is for me a gift from God.” In the earliest days of the war, when German military forces were most heavily concentrated on the eastern front, one of the generals under his command had informed him that, if the French attacked, he did not have enough resources to stop them for even one day. Even a civilian like American foreign correspondent William L. Shirer was amazed as he observed the French inaction during the “phony war” and their irresolution ad ineptness when the Germans attacked in 1940.

While France is the most dramatic example of “moral disarmament” during the interwar years, it was by no means the only country in which such views prevailed among the intelligentsia. British pacifists likewise often depicted wars as being a result of national emotions or attitudes, rather than calculations of self-interest by aggressive rulers. In a 1931 editorial in the New Statesman and Nation, Kingsley Martin said that “modern war is the product of ignorance and idealism, not of far-sighted wickedness.” Therefore what was needed to prevent a future war was “bringing up a new generation to recognise that martial patriotism is an out-of-date virtue” because taking part in a future war would be “something that is individually shameful as well as socially suicidal.” Bertrand Russell defined patriotism as “a willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.”

In 1932 , British author Beverly Nichols publically declared himself in favor of peace at any price, and later wrote Cry Havoc!, one of the most prominent pacifist books of the decade. In 1933, students at Oxford University publicly pledged themselves not to fight in defense of their country, and what became known as “the Oxford pledge” spread rapidly to other British universities, as well as being echoed in Britain by such intellectuals as Cyril Joad and A. A. Milne, famous author of Winnie the Pooh, and in France by André Gide, who spoke of “the courageous students of Oxford.” Joad said that “the best way to ensure peace is to refuse in any circumstances to make war.” He urged “an intensive campaign to induce the maximum number of young people to announce their refusal to fight in any war between nations.”

Joad was one of those who wrote graphically of the horrors and agonies of war, though Winston Churchill warned that Britain “cannot avoid war by dilating upon its horrors.” In Britain, as in France, patriotism was considered suspect as a cause of war. H.G. Wells, for example, declared himself against “the teaching of patriotic histories that sustain and carry on the poisonous war-making tradition of the past” and wanted British citizenship replaced by “world citizenship.” He regarded patriotism as a useless relic to be replaced by “the idea of cosmopolitan duty.” J. B. Priestley likewise saw patriotism as “a mighty force, chiefly used for evil.” A letter to The Times of London , signed by such prominent intellectuals as Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, and Leonard Woolf, called for “spread of the cosmopolitan spirit” and called for “writers in all countries” to “help all peoples to feel their underlying kinship.”

Meanwhile, Hitler was following such developments in Britain and France, as he made his own plans and assessed the prospects of military victory.

Almost as remarkable as the lengths to which the pacifists of the 1930s went was the verbal virtuosity with which they downplayed the dangers of the pacifism they were advocating while Hitler was rearming on a massive scale in Germany and promoting the very patriotism among Germans that was being eroded by the intelligentsia in the democracies. Bertrand Russell used an argument that went back as far as 1793, when William Godwin claimed that a country which presented no military threat or provocation to other nations would not be attacked. If Britain would reduce its armed forces, as Bertrand Russell advocated, “we would threaten no one, and no one would have any motive to make war on us.”

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Widespread pacifist sentiments among the intellectuals in Britain during the interwar period were echoed in the political arena by leaders of the British Labor Party:

In June 1933, at the East Fulham by-election, the Labour candidate received a message from Labour Party leader, George Lansbury: ‘I would close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world “do your worst”.’ Clement Attlee, who was to succeed him as leader, told the Commons, 21 December 1933: ‘We are unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament.’ Labour consistently voted, spoke and campaigned against rearmament right up to the outbreak of war.

Two years later, Attlee said, “Our policy is not of seeking security through armament but through disarmament.” As late as 1937, Harold Laski said, “Are we really to support this reactionary government ...... in rearming for purposes it refuses to declare?” The Labour Party’s opposition to military preparedness did not change until the working class component of the Labour Party, represented by its unions, eventually overcame its intellectual component, represented by Laski and others with a doctrinaire opposition to military defense.

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Similar anti-military and anti-armament views were common among the American intelligentsia. John Dewey, Upton Sinclair, and Jane Addams were among the American signers of a 1930 manifesto against military training of youths. In 1934, Oswald Garrison Villard urged a “decrease by one-third of the United States army and the mustering out of 50 per cent of our reserve officers as evidence of good faith. Nor were such sentiments among intellectuals without influence upon holders of political power. When the Roosevelt administration cut the Army’s budget, Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur had an angry confrontation with the President, offered his resignation, and was so upset as he left the White House that he vomited on the steps.

In such an atmosphere between the two World Wars, international disarmament conferences and agreements in which nations renounced war became very popular in the Western democracies. But, as with domestic gun-control laws, the real question is whether arms-limitation treaties actually limit the arms of anyone except those who respect the law, whether international or domestic. Both Japan and Germany violated armaments limitations agreements that they had signed, producing among other things larger battleships than the treaties allowed and larger than anything in either the British and American navies.

Violations of arms control treaties are not a happenstance. Such agreements are inherently one-sided. Leaders of democratic nations are under more pressure to sign such agreements than are leaders of dictatorships who can control, suppress or ignore public opinion. In democratic nations, neither academic nor media intellectuals are usually as concerned with scrutinizing the specifics of disarmament agreements as they are celebrating the symbolism of the signing of such agreements and the “easing of international tensions” that they bring, as if emotional catharsis will deflect governments bent on military aggression. Thus intellectuals like John Dewey had cheered on the Washington Naval Agreements of 1921 - 1922, and The Times of London praised the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 as the outstanding fact in Anglo-German relations,” as an “emphatic renunciation of hostile purpose towards this country” by Germany, and a “clear-sighted decision of HERR HITLER himself.”

Conversely, those with this vision roundly condemn leaders of their own country who refuse to compromise in order to reach such agreements. In addition to terms that explicitly tend to favor those nations whose intelligentsia are not free to criticize their governments, subsequent violations of these agreements by aggressor nations are more likely to be tolerated by leaders of democratic nations, who have no incentive to be quick to announce that they have been “had” in signing agreements that were widely publicized and widely celebrated when they were signed.

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With the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, unrestricted German rearmament went from being a demand to becoming a reality — in stages, beginning cautiously and then continuing more boldly as the Western democracies did nothing to enforce the restricting provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. Because of the initially small size of the German military under those restrictions, these violations began at a time when France alone had overwhelming military superiority over Germany and could have intervened unilaterally to stop the buildup of the Nazi miliary machine — a fact of which Hitler was vividly aware, and German military leaders even more fearfully so.

The crucial step, without which the Nazis’ wars of aggression would be impossible, was the stationing of German troops in the country’s industrial region, the Rhineland. Only after its own industry was secured could Germany attack other nations. Hitler clearly understood both how essential the stationing of German troops in the Rhineland was — and how risky it was, given the relative sizes of the French and German armies at the time.

“The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland,” Paul Schmidt, his interpreter, heard him say, “were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”

The stakes were the highest — military conquests abroad or the collapse of the Nazi regime within Germany. “A retreat on our part,” Hitler later admitted, “would have spelled collapse.” Hitler bet everything on irresolution by the French. He won his bet and tens of millions of people later lost their lives as a result. Yet this action in the Rhineland, like others before it, continued to be viewed among the British intelligentsia as an abstract question about abstract nations. A phrase repeated again and again in the British press after Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland was that, “After all, they are only going into their own back-garden.” A very similar view was taken in the French press. Despite French military superiority, the lack of political will paralyzed them from using that military superiority to prevent Hitler from remilitarizing the Rhineland:

Nowhere in France was there the slightest indication that the public wanted or would even tolerate military action on account of German remilitarization of the Rhineland. The satirical weekly Le Canard encbainé expressed a common view when it said: “The Germans have invaded — Germany!” Communist leaders, supposedly in the forefront of opposition to Nazism, called stridently for preventing “the scourge of war from falling on us.” They urged that the whole nation unite “against those who want to lead us massacre.” Socialist spokesmen termed “inadmissible any response that risked war,” saying that even reinforcing the Maginot Line would be “provocative.” The right-wing dailies Le Matin and Le Jour declared that conflict with Germany would benefit only communist Russia.

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In retrospect, we now know that Western democracies’ inaction in response to Hitler’s repeated provocations were crucial to his decisions to move toward war, confident that Western leaders were too timid to respond in time, or perhaps at all.

This was especially clear in other international crises leading up to the Second World War. The West’s half-hearted and ineffective response to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, in defiance of the League of Nations, was one of the inactions which led Hitler to doubt their will. Their inaction in response to the German remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, and to both Germany’s and Italy’s interventions into the Spanish civil war that same year, followed by the Western democracies’ inaction in response to Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, all contributed to his contempt for western leaders and his confidence that they would do nothing more than talk.

The crisis that most solidified that confidence on Hitler’s part was the crisis over his demand to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, adjacent to Germany and populated mostly by people of German ancestry. At the Munich conference in 1938, France, Britain, and Italy concurred in Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland, abandoning Czechoslovakia to its fate, despite France’s mutual defense treaty with Czechoslovakia.

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Seeing each of Hitler’s successive demands as a separate issue (the perspective of a one-day-at-a -time rationalism), the French saw the 1938 demand for German annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudtenland as a question of “Should the French get themselves killed for Beneš, the Free Mason?” as Je Suis Partout put it in 1939, as Hitler demanded German annexation of Poland’s lone port of Danzig (Gdask), the question was posed as “Do We Have to Die for Danzig?” as a headline in L’CEuvre put it. The phrase “Why die for Danzig?” was considered a hallmark of sophistication among the intelligentsia at the time, but was instead a sign of their dangerous talent for virtuosity, which can pose questions in ways that make the desired answer almost inevitable, whatever the substantive merits or demerits of the issue.

Contrary to a one-day-at-a time rationalism, the real question was not whether it was worth dying over the Rhineland, over Czechoslovakia, over Austrian annexation, or over the city of Danzig. The real question was whether one recognized in the unfolding pattern of Hitler’s actions a lethal threat. By 1939 the French public seemed to have reached a more realistic understanding of what Hitler was doing than some of the country’s intelligentsia. A poll in France in 1939 showed 76 percent of the public willing to use force in the defense of Danzig. A history of this period noted that French premier Édouard Daladier “complained that he could not appear in an open space or in a bistro without seeing people stand up and cry, ‘Lead! We will follow you!’”

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Considering all of the liberal foolishness that Thomas Sowell has detailed above, it seems to me that I can see all of the same kinds of foolishness in the modern world of today.

It is all about integrity, morality, courage and personal judgment. Underlying these things is right values, the right moral upbringing, a Christian moral upbringing. The modern West has abandoned God. Good sense, good judgment is dependent on a moral foundation, on moral character. Things are coming apart and the reason is the western abandonment of the Bible.

30 Jan 2024