Today we're going to be talking about the World Wars. You'll notice I've already put up a very exciting map on the wall. There's a story behind these maps, so there are going to be others. They happen to have, there's going to be maps of Europe in between the wars. They happen to have cost Cato an enormous amount of money. Someone convinced, and Ed is very mad about it, someone convinced Roy Childs that they were the original maps used by Hitler to invade, to invade Russia. But since we have them, we might as well use them. My topic this morning is going to be Europe and the world in the 20th century, the great century of statism. And I'm going to start by discussing the First World War. First World War, historians increasingly recognize, was a watershed, and the great watershed of 20th century history. What came out of the First World War was, first of all, the establishment of communism in a great power, Russia. It's extremely doubtful that Lenin and his few thousand Bolsheviks could ever have come to power in Russia, except for the dislocations and chaos produced by a losing war on the part of the Tsarist government. Also out of the First World War came fascism in Italy and the fascist movement throughout Europe. Because of a vindictive peace treaty, after a little more than a decade, the Nazis came to power in Germany. And with them, the seeds of World War II, also to be found in the First World War. And more generally and abstractly, throughout the world, there came state planning on an unprecedented scale. By 1900, we already witnessed the twilight and decline and lingering death of classical liberalism in the Atlantic world. Liberalism had been in decline since around 1870. If we take the date proposed by the British legal historian Dicey, by the 1890s, a British liberal politician could say, we are all socialists now. One of the things that had aided in the demise of liberalism was the rise in the 1880s of the welfare state. This was the idea of the German statesman Otto von Bismarck. And it's interesting that people don't consider the origins of the welfare state a little more closely. Bismarck, after all, was a militarist, an authoritarian, a man who distrusted liberalism and parliamentary government and initiated and pioneered the welfare state. It's as if the time had come in the history of economic development, where there was a possibility that the average person and the average working person could finally become independent, self-reliant, the master of his own fate. Because of the progress of industrial capitalism. And it was at that point that Bismarck reattached the masses to the state through welfare legislation. And again made them reliant on the state for pensions, sort of pensioners of the state, people who were going to be tied to the state through gratitude for all the benefits the state gave them. You see that? It could have been a different development, but the welfare state came in there to reattach the masses of people to the government in gratitude for these benefits. Bismarck was aided along these lines by the rise in Germany of academics called socialists of the chair. That is, they weren't socialists like the Marxist socialists in the street. They were very prominent professors. As a matter of fact, there were anti-Smeaksists. But they did preach the kind of socialism and prostated theology that George Smith was talking about last time as having been preached in the United States. The need for centralization, the need for state control in the economy. These ideas are spreading throughout the Western world. And there are some significant dates in the first decade or so of the century as far as the leadership of the international liberal movement goes. In 1903, Herbert Spencer dies. One of his last essays had been an attack on the imperialist British effort in the Boer War. And Herbert Spencer says, all my life I was a British patriot in the sense that England was the home of many individual liberties. It was the home of the respect for the industrious enterprising middle class, but my British patriotism died in the imperialist Boer War. In 1906, the last great German liberal, Oigen Richter, dies. He had voted against Finterpitz's naval buildup in the last few years in the Reichstag. And in one of his last speeches, he says, if we let the banner of liberalism fall, we who are the last, then who will take it up again? And there was to be nobody who would take it up again. And what is to happen in the next decades in Germany to Richter's beloved German people and by Richter's Germany is a true tragedy. It's not anything that a classical liberal of the time could have imagined the decades to come in this awful 20th century. In 1910, William Graham Sumner dies. And one of his last acts had been a decade before to attack the Spanish-American war, the American annexation of the Philippines, and the war, the least known war, the war we waged for three or four years against the Philippine people in order to subdue them to American rule. In 1912, Gustav de Molinari, the great Belgian-French economist and the dean of the classical liberal school of French economists in his time, dies also. Around this time, one of the last liberals who's left, the Italian Pareto, says everyone is a socialist. They're either revolutionary socialists or they're nationalist and protectionist socialists. But there's no one who believes in the free society in Europe anymore. This is the period also of the growth of imperialism, the famous rebirth of imperialism after a kind of low in the middle of the 19th century, actually largely caused by classical liberal ideas and values. After around 1880, imperialism becomes not only an important movement again, it becomes a frenzy, especially as we approach the end of the century and the first years of the 20th century. There are a number of reasons for this, for this rebirth of imperialism. You understand what's involved, especially the scramble for Africa, as it's called. A number of reasons for this. One is that begins to drift back and then steadily or gradually more and more quickly towards protectionism. The era of pretty much universal free trade is a very, very short one, just about in the middle of the century. In 1979, Bismarck in the new great unified German Reich decides to go over to a protective tariff. The years that follow, France, which had always been tempted to do so, had been a classical country of protectionism, does the same. Russia, Austria, Hungary, and other countries. Now, you understand that with a regime of protectionism, this makes imperialism much more likely. If there's universal free trade, then it doesn't really make very much of a difference who owns a particular colony in the sense of who has military or political sovereignty over it. If we have a regime of universal free trade, then it doesn't really make much of a difference whether Britain owns Jamaica or France owns Jamaica or Jamaica's independent. Because the Jamaicans will buy goods in the cheapest market, and they will sell goods in the dearest market, regardless of the nationality of the suppliers and the buyers. So the imperialist country only has the expense of keeping up the government, exercising political jurisdiction, having a military garrison there, and so on. There is no economic advantage to any major group in the home country. With protectionism, it's different. And you can force some captive area in Africa to buy from you rather than from someone else. This does help certain elite groups in the home market. So with the growth of protectionism, there's a concomitant growth of imperialism. Another element that's involved, a political element of the time, is the fact that France had been defeated in the war of 1871, which led to the unification of Germany and created this great unified German Reich, right in the middle of Europe. And overseas expansion was a way for the French to sort of re-establish their pride. They had been defeated by the Germans. They went along with the Premier Nation on the continent of Europe. But after all, they had the foreign legion in Algeria. They had a navy in Indochina. They were taking big chunks of Africa. And the French were one of the leaders of imperialism at the time. Now, as far as imperialism goes, there's a famous movement around 1900 that's important in the history of thought that seeks to link imperialism very closely with capitalism. This includes a number of Marxist authors and also an important British so-called liberal, called himself a liberal at this time. It's an indication of how far liberalism had come. The German Hilferdink writes a book called Finance Capital. The Polish, the Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg, the same. The most famous is the book that Lenin himself writes in 1917, imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. Around 1902, a British radical that is not Marxist but radical named J.A. Hobson writes imperialism a study. And this is all an attempt to debit imperialism to the account of capitalism. And it's interesting in the history of thought, the circumstances into which this comes up. Joseph Schumpeter was a great economist, a great social philosopher, wrote a book called Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy After the Second World War. He makes a very interesting statement. He says capitalism stands trial before judges who already have the sentence of death in their pocket. And what I take that to mean, as he explains, is that regardless of the charge that's made against capitalism, the time comes when capitalism, let's say the market basically, is acquitted of that charge, a new charge will be brought up. And an indefinite number of charges until the guilty verdict is reached and the sentence of death is pronounced. Around 1900, it had become obvious that the Marxist predictions about the market were not coming true. It was not the case that the middle class was disappearing. The total monopoly was coming into existence. It was not the case that the business cycle had reached the point of collapse of the capitalist system. Above all, it was not the case that the workers were getting poorer and poorer. That's what Marx and Engels had said in the 1840s. They never changed their view. But by 1900, you simply could not deny the evidence of your senses. The working class in capitalist societies was becoming richer and richer. OK, so that set of accusations and charges against capitalism has to be put aside. And the revisionists, as they were called, in Germany and in other places, led by the moderate Marxist Bernstein, say, we cannot use these charges against capitalism anymore, unfortunately, all right? But the sentence of death is still there. You have to have some charge to give the sentence, to justify the sentence. And the new charge then arose. Capitalism may not be responsible for the collapse of the economy or cartelization or the poverty of the working class, which are not real facts. But it is responsible for a new horror and evil called imperialism. So this charge of imperialism then takes the place of the older discredited charges. With always the same psychological background, which is that there's no way this defendant is going to get off the hook. Whatever charge we have to bring up, when I was a kid, it was the affluent society. That's before the war on poverty was discovered. It was not only the affluent society, it was the contemptible taste of American consumers in preferring tail fins on their cars. This was the message of John Kenneth Galbraith in those days. All of these awful things are supposed to prove something rotten and decadent about capitalism. Now, according to these theorists, what was responsible for imperialist expansion was the need of capitalist economies to place investments overseas. The need, because of the 14 rate of profit, to find areas in the third world that would bring profitable investment. So this capital flow was supposed to bring the capitalists there. Once the capitalists are there, the capitalists look around and say, it's better if our own government, our own system of laws here, we'll work together with the politicians and force them to take over this area. Now, since these theories were developed, around 1900 and between 1900 and 1917, let's say, historians, that is not theorists or polemicists like, of course, Lenin, but actual historians have been at work on this thesis to try to test it. And I've actually done some work. In fact, I teach a course on theories of imperialism. The fact of the matter is, when it comes to testing this thesis by actual empirical work, the thesis collapses at every point. And I can refer you to the works of DK Fieldhouse, for instance, a British economist. The theory of capitalist imperialism is his book. An older book in the 20s, Eugene Staley, imperialism and the Private Investor. And there are specific books for specific countries. As far as France goes, the French historian Brunschweg, Henri Brunschweg. And a very nice little book has recently been published last year by Oxford University Press that very neatly summarizes many of these issues. It's a translation from a German historian named Baumgart, and it's called imperialism, a nice short treatment, really, summarizing many of the findings. What conclusion do these historians come to? First of all, it's inconceivable to explain the imperialism of many of the imperialist powers of the time through the need for overseas capital investment, because these countries were net capital importers. There was no such thing as a capital glut in Russia, if not the chief imperialist country of the time, certainly one of the most important imperialist countries of the time. Russia was an enormous importer of capital, especially from Western Europe. No capital glut in Japan, which had become an imperialist power. No capital glut in Italy. Italy became an imperialist power at the time. The Italians, these things have a sort of division of labor about them. The Italians around 1900 specializing in the collection of deserts. Why deserts? Well, I must know it in Rome, but Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya. There was very little capital for export in Germany. As a matter of fact, when the time came for the Germans to get the concession from the Ottoman government to build the railroad to Baghdad, there wasn't enough free German capital for export available. They had a cold in French capitalists also. The United States, by the way at the time, was a net capital importer also, still by 1900. Then of the countries which did export capital, where did that capital go? To these third world areas, by no means. French capital went almost exclusively to Southwest and Southern Europe, to the Balkans, and very largely, maybe about 40% of it, to Russia. Not to any area that they're taking over imperialistically, but to these other areas. British capital, for instance, went to the old empire, that is, Canada, India, Australia, and so on, to the United States, to Argentina. But again, not to these areas which were being taken over imperialistically at the time. So there is really no connection between this alleged need to place capital and imperialist expansion. In fact, the question of imperialism at this time is much more complicated. Occasionally it is the case that some capitalists will go to the government and say, we would like you to take over this area. We need to expand in this area. This was the case, for instance, in connection with some German expansion in the Pacific, which was encouraged by the shipping lines in Hamburg. But by and large, this was not an important factor in connection with the new imperialism of 1880 on. And the question really is complicated. The factors involved vary from case to case. In the case of British West Africa, it is largely an attempt by the British to take over territories because the French are expanding, and the French, once they take over some territory, do establish a protectionist system. The British rely on free trade, but the British preemptively take over so they're not excluded by French protectionism. That's West Africa. When it comes to East Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and so on, the main reason is strategic, as Robinson and Gallagher show in their book on Africa and the Victorians. Strategic, the defense of the Sudan, which is necessary for the defense of Egypt, which is necessary for the defense of the Suez Canal. So the defense of the Suez Canal and the routes to India. The Suez Canal itself, by the way, the British took it over and occupied Egypt in 1882, not primarily for economic reasons whatsoever, as Disraeli himself said, but for strategic reasons. The Suez Canal was going to be used to quickly shuttle troops between the British Army in India and the European theater whenever it was necessary. The Seaport Mutiny had only been about 15 years before. There might be a mutiny in India. You want to shuttle troops there or bring them to the European theater to block Russia or whatever. So strategic and military reasons were involved. But not capitalism in any form, and certainly not the free market, certainly not free market capitalists really, by definition, but not even state capitalists to any large extent in this period of imperialism. It was the old reasons of state, as they say. Military reasons, strategic reasons, reasons of prestige. Reasons of loving the idea of a strong state. This is the period of public education in every little school house in Europe and now in America at this time, not before I learned recently, you had the flag of your country. Before the end of the 19th century, the American flag was not typically displayed in public school houses. But in every country, you have the flag of your country. You have a map of the world with various areas of the world colored in the same color as your own country, which is so beautiful it almost makes you want to cry. That, Italy, should own a million square miles of desert in the north, a half a million square miles of desert in the east. The time will come when deserts are going to be very rare, and Italy will have the world by the throat, OK? So through the public school systems, which are expanding in every country, through conscription, which brings people into the army for a few years, indoctrinates them, this idea of the grandeur, the necessary grandeur of imperialist expansion is spread to the mass of people. It's something which the people take up really as actively as the politicians do. But the chief pushers of the specific acts of imperialism, according to the historical record, are the military leaders, the civilian politicians, the special nationalist groups which are set up in Germany. The Navy League has over a million members by the time of the First World War. These are people in every walk of life who for sentimental emotional nationalist reasons push the imperialism of their own country. These imperialist rivalries create hostilities and antipathies among the powers, especially when the imperialism is something that expands, occurs in Europe itself. You understand, it's not only overseas that you can set up colonies, OK? But by expansion in Europe. And any kind of attempted expansion in Europe is infinitely more dangerous at this time than in Africa or the Pacific or East Asia. This imperialism by 1914 has been going on for three and a half decades or more. Everybody is used to it. Everybody almost endorses it. Another important thing that exists on the eve of war in 1914. And really, what immediately brings about the World War is the alliance system of the European powers. The European powers have engaged in collective security now for a number of decades. Bismarck is thrown out of office by the new Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890. But by the time he leaves, he has created a number of alliances in order to preserve the status quo, which he thinks is to the benefit of Germany. Germany has an alliance called the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary. I don't know if you can see this here. This is an old country that is destroyed by the First World War called Austria-Hungary, ruled by the Hapsburgs, the Hapsburg family, which is the most famous name in the history of Europe. I think that's a nice thing to have, the most famous name in the history of Europe, and composed of a number of different small nationalities. So Bismarck has an alliance with Austria-Hungary and with Italy also called the Triple Alliance. He has on the side an alliance with Russia. The whole aim is to isolate France to prevent the French from somehow starting up trouble in order to gain back their lost provinces of Al-Sassan al-Rein. In 1871, when the unified Germany comes into existence, the Germans take away from France one and a half provinces over here, called Al-Sass, that's a whole province with the capital of Strasbourg, and part of Lorraine with the town of Metz. This is an intense humiliation to the French. Bismarck says, look, it'll take them a long time to forget this. In the meantime, let's make it so that they can't cause any trouble by isolating them from any possible allies. The British at this time sort of engaged in splendid isolation would not be involved in the alliances on the continent. So Bismarck has done what he wanted to do. He has alliances with the powers over here, separately with Russia. England is minding its own business and France is not in a position by itself to attack Germany. Once Bismarck is dismissed, things start to change very quickly. The new Kaiser and his advisors decide that it's impossible to come to terms both with Austria-Hungary, they're involved in this alliance, and with Russia, they're involved in that alliance, and they choose Austria-Hungary as ultimately the more dependable country, and they say, look, there's no chance that France is going to ally with Russia, right? France is the only great republic in Europe. It is a democratic country. Russia is an absolutism. To give you an example of how ludicrous it is in Russia at this time against the law to play the Marseillais in public. Because the Marseillais is a revolutionary song. So there's no chance these two countries are going to ally. Let's go with Austria-Hungary and as the more dependable Germanic power. So in 1890, the treaty with Russia is permitted to lapse. Two years later, the Russians and the French signed an alliance. And very quickly, it becomes a military alliance. And Bismarck in his last years sees the nightmare beginning to materialize what he always considered the nightmare, and that was the possibility of a two-front war. With Germany in the middle, on this side, the second best army in the world, and on this side, by far the largest army in the world. This alliance, a system intensifies as we approach 1914. More and more, each group considers itself separate and hostile camp. After the turn of the century, after around 1900, a very, very bright and very ambitious and very aggressive French foreign minister, named Del Cassé, brings about a brilliant coup, and that is not the alliance, the understanding, the entente with England. Not a formal binding alliance, as the French-Russian alliance is, but an understanding that increasingly, as time goes on, brings the two countries closer and closer together, and their leaders closer and closer together. This entente comes into existence in 1904. So you have Germany still with its rather weak allies to the south, but France now becomes a kind of hinge that has an alliance with Russia and an understanding with England. And in 1907, the French want to bring their two friends together, and England and Russia come to an agreement about all outstanding colonial problems, begin to grow closer and closer together. So by 1914, what you have is an alliance system composed of the triple alliance in the middle of Europe, and what comes to be known as the triple entente with France, England, and Russia. If we had a map of the world, and not simply a map of Europe, this would appear to you I think much more dramatically. Because what you see on a map of the world is Europe, of course, as a very small peninsula jutting out of the vast mass of Asia. And what you see is Germany as about the size of a thumb. If this were a map of the world, Germany would be the size of a thumbnail. And what does the world look like from the German point of view? One quarter of the globe is colored pink. That is the British Empire on which the sun never sets. Includes whole continents like Australia. The next largest empire, the French. And then on the eastern side of Germany, what? Russia, the Russian Empire. Stretching from the German border to the Sea of Japan, going through 11 time zones, one-sixth of the land surface of the globe. Things look rather frightening from the German point of view, actually. This creates a tension, a suspicion in Germany that's gonna be very dangerous when the last days of July come about in 1914. By the way, this is something we should keep in mind. That is, what is a world, to take a similar example in our own time, what does the world look like from the Soviet point of view? If we had a map of the world. Well, the Soviet Union is in the position that the United States would be if on our northern border we had not Canada and the sweet Canadian people, but China, okay? If on our southern border we had not Mexico, but the nations of NATO assembled led by Germany. And if Cuba were not Cuba, but Japan, okay? That is the position the Soviet Union feels itself to be in. Do you understand what I'm saying? The position we'd be in if we had China on one border, NATO led by Germany on another, and instead of this little island of Cuba, Japan were there. That's the position of encirclement which the Soviet Union finds itself in. I'm not saying this justifies anything, but we ought to understand the psychology of people who are in a position to make very dangerous decisions. We'd understand how things look to them from their point of view. And after 1907, the world looks like an extremely dangerous place to the Germans. There's a kind of sense of encirclement that comes about. Also what's been going on, also what's been going on is an armaments race. Okay, now, most of the people in this room were born, I think virtually everybody of you, were born into a world. Where an armaments race was a normal part of life. That is, of course, every year you build more and more in the way of ships and planes and tanks and so on in order to forestall some enemy. This was not the case in the 19th century, in the liberal 19th century. Armaments budgets kept going down and down and down for most of the century. Unless there was some war in the Orphi, some war of national unification, let's say. But with the collapse of liberalism and the growth of imperialism and militarism, the nations of the world begin to engage in very threatening arms races. Every country wants to build a huge ocean-going navy and the British want to maintain their standard of a navy equal to that of the next two largest navies put together. You can see that that will tend to get out of control. That sort of arms race. Conscription has been introduced into every European country except Britain and we have mass armies, mass standing armies and enormous reserves of trained soldiers, people who have been through the conscript system and are ready there to be called back to the colors. The armaments budgets just keep getting larger and larger and every country thinks every other country is spending more than they are. It's frightened of every new development, every new change in the design of a rifle. With these great armies that are there standing armies in the army already or latently there, ready to be brought into existence in a few days. In other words, as the years pass, approaching 1914, Europe is on a hair trigger, a hair trigger. Anything could start the armies moving. But nobody believes that because Europe has been through a number of crises and has survived them all. There are the crises over Morocco. Morocco is this Arab country here in Northwest Africa, which the French want to take over. The Germans say, look, there's not that much territory left in the world. You can't simply take it over. The French say, okay, we'll give you something, but conference is a necessary in 1905 and 1911. And there's some chance of, it seems some chance of going to war, but the crises are diffused, are diffused. Okay, and then afterwards everybody breathes a sigh of relief. We didn't go to war that time. It would be so crazy to go to war, so crazy to go to war. It's not likely to happen at all. There's a crisis over Bosnia. If you think Bosnia sort of sounds funny, especially if I say Bosnia and Herzegovina, those are the sort of places that wars start over, right? Nablus and Hebron, the West Bank, places that no one has ever heard of, nobody, Nicaragua, places no one has ever heard of or really cared that much about. Things going on there and governments involving themselves there in a way that when the time comes, they cannot any longer extricate themselves. And the people back home had no idea, had no idea that the world is going to go to war, because of a terrorist attack in Sarajevo, Bosnia, nobody on January 1st, 1914 would have been able to say. But there is a crisis over Bosnia. In 1908, Austria-Hungary and Russia get together and make a secret agreement. Austria, which has occupied Bosnia, will now formally annex it. The Russians will tear up part of the treaty, which limits their exit from the straits in Constantinople, so there'll be a quid pro quo. The Austrians take over Bosnia. The Russians, however, are faced by England, who says no, no, no. We may be friendly with you, but remember, this is a very touchy thing to us. You're getting into the Eastern Mediterranean that way, so you be good boys and tear to the treaty. But, and so the Russians go to Austria and say, in that case, you can't take over Bosnia, because there's no quid pro quo anymore. And the Austrians say, well, we've taken it over, we've annexed it. The Russians say, well, give it up. And the Austrians say, go talk to Germany about this. And the Russians, who had just gotten out of the Japanese war, and were in bad military shape, say, I see, I see. But they promised themselves, never again, this is the last time we're gonna back down. Just as, in 1962, when the superior American nuclear strength forced the Russians to back down over the Cuban missile crisis, when the final negotiations were made between the American and Russian negotiators of the withdrawal of the Russian missiles, the dismantling of American missiles in Turkey, the Russians made it a point to express to the Americans, this is the last time. You humiliated us, you forced us to back down, we will now proceed to an enormous military buildup which will make us the equal of you in strategic nuclear weapons. And the Russians did that through the 1960s and 1970s, as you know it. In 1911, the process begins of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This is known as Turkey, or the Turkish Empire, but also the Ottoman Empire, after the kind of Turks who had taken it over, the Ottoman Turks. And they had at one time, exercised rule over an enormous part of the Balkans, this is the Balkans area, and also North Africa. And the Turkish rule is falling to pieces. The Italians, it's at this time that the Italians take Libya, and the small states in the Balkans all get together and attack Turkey and take each some little area of Turkey in the Balkans. And this is dangerous, any gun that's fired in anger by a government in Europe is very, very dangerous. So that the fact that a war is going on in the Balkans makes everybody very nervous. There's a second war when all the other small Balkan states jump on Bulgaria, whom they think has taken too much from Turkey, and that's already 1913. So armies are fighting on European soil. In 1912, at the time of the first Balkan war, as a matter of fact, the Austrians mobilized their forces, thinking that Serbia, which is a protégé of Russia, was getting too much territory, was going to infringe on Austrian interests, and the Russians began to counter mobilize. Cooler heads prevailed, and that was called off. But the public at large is really mistaken when it thinks that these crises have been weathered and therefore any crisis that comes about in the future, sure.  In June of 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and his wife, Francis Ferdinand and Sophie, are assassinated by a Serb terrorist in Sarajevo. Sarajevo, by the way, the Winter Olympic Games is going to be held there next year, right, the 70th anniversary of the assassination in 1984. Assassinated by Princip, a Serb student who had come from Belgrade for that purpose and became a national hero in Serbia when they learned what had happened. It was the thing that ignited the First World War, the nationalism of the Serbs. The Serbian idea is to use this independent country of Serbia, which has its own king, to form the nucleus of a great confederation and monarchy of the South Slavic people. The Serbs, the Croats and the Slovenes, okay? They said the Italians did it in the last century, the Germans did it in the last century, we're going to do it. But in order to bring about this confederation of the South Slavs, South Slav in their language is Yugoslav, in order to bring this about, unfortunately from the point of view of the European peace, one of the great powers must be destroyed. They can only do what they want by bringing about the demise of Austria-Hungary. Because Austria-Hungary being a collection of small states, if they lose the South Slavs, the Czechs are going to want to leave, the Poles are going to want to leave, the Romanians will take over this area here and it will be the end of Austria-Hungary. You have then a very typical political nationalist conflict. The Serbs, in a sense, are just as justified as the Italians had been in the 19th century to create their country of the Yugoslavia. On the other hand, it requires the destruction of Austria-Hungary. And you can understand that great powers don't sit around and allow themselves to be destroyed. This then was the culmination of much agitation and harassment of Austria-Hungary by the Serbs, attempting to raise up the Slavic people in the south of their country. And Austria-Hungary says, okay, this will be it. This is it, Serbia, you've had your last chance. They give Serbia an ultimatum. An ultimatum is presented to Serbia, couched in terms such that the Serbs will have to reject it. It says, for instance, you will allow us to send our police into Serbia to conduct the investigation and they will have full police powers. No sovereign state can permit that. The Austrians, however, felt they had to do that because they had reason to suppose that this wasn't a random terrorist attack. In fact, it was not as we find out afterwards. The plan was made up by the head of Serbian military intelligence, that is the assassination of the Archduke. And it was known, it was not endorsed or planned for, but it was known to the Serbian cabinet itself, including the prime minister, who did not inform Austria that the heir to your throne is about to be blown up. Okay, in other words, the Austrians, in a sense, were justified in saying, we're never gonna come to the truth of this unless we send our own people into Serbia to have an investigation, otherwise there will be a cover-up. But the ultimatum is one that would publicly humiliate Serbia as a nation. When the Russian foreign minister gets a copy of it by telegraph from Belgrade, he looks at it and says, say la guerre or your pay-in. It is the European war. This is the war that we have feared. Now, the question of the responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War is one which has been discussed by many historians. There are practically libraries filled with works. One of the most recent historians who's gotten a following is a German historian named Fritz Fischer, who's sort of going back on the established consensus and now maintaining that it was, in fact, Germany that was responsible primarily for the war. Now, I admire that spirit tremendously. I think all historians should look for any evidence that concludes that it was their own country that was responsible for a particular war. It's a wonderful spirit. However, I think with all due respect, as enthusiasm has gotten away with him, what he really does establish is that once the war starts, the German government, including the German Chancellor, engage in imperialistic visions. They wanna take over parts of Belgium, have ports on the English Channel, and so on and so on. This says nothing about the outbreak of the war and the reasons for the outbreak of the war. And most of all, he only studies Germany. He only studies what's happening in Berlin and to a smaller extent in Vienna and not what's happening in St. Petersburg and in Paris and in other capitals, okay? So this famous question of war guilt, I think is one where the older consensus, not the consensus of the war time itself, but the consensus that developed after 1918 is the correct one. All of the powers share responsibility for the war. And none of the powers really wanted war rather than anything else for imperialist expansion. To the degree that they were willing to go to war, it was because they were frightened. They were frightened of waiting, of the other one getting in first. The Germans, you understand, have a contingency plan to deal with the real world situation, which is that they're faced with two powerful armies and they're right in the middle. The early years of the 20th century, the head of the German general staff, a man named Schlieffen, comes up with a plan for dealing with this. You know that this map here of Europe in 1914 is, constitutes a board game. Has anybody ever seen the game Diplomacy? Play Diplomacy, okay, right. This is the board and each player is a great power. Now, supposing, let me present this to you as a military contingency. You are the head or a member of the German general staff and this theoretical problem is posed to you. In the event of war, simultaneously with France and Russia, how will you deploy your forces? Are there any suggestions here? Kato is always interested in people with various talents, including perhaps military talents. Okay, any suggestions? How would you deploy the German army in the event of a war with France and Russia simultaneously? Okay, who do you get rid of first? Why France? Not necessarily stronger, no, yeah? Right, there's no, you don't get rid of Russia in one fell swoop, okay? As Marshall Montgomery said one time, the first rule of warfare is, the first rule of warfare is never invade Russia. Okay? But if you have to, don't count on a quick victory. Therefore, in order to get rid of one of their opponents, the German plan, the Schlieffen plan, was a quick march into France. They were not to use the route of 1870, but this time in order to maximize the speed, go through the Belgian plane. Okay, the plane of North Belgium here, sweep through here, cutting off Paris from the Channel ports. Circle Paris and the major French forces there and a force of French capitulation. Meantime, the Russians, they thought, would take a long, long time mobilizing through their vast empire. And a relatively small German force could hold them temporarily. They would meet the oncoming Russian army between Berlin and the border and hold them until the defeat of France, and then the bulk of the German army will be shuttled, taking advantage of the central position, shuttled across the great German railroad system to the eastern front and meet the Russians east of Berlin. Okay, this was the only way they felt that Germany could be saved. Because what's the alternative? You divide the German army in half, half the German army is inferior to the French army, the other half, if you don't only take half the German army, is inferior to the Russian army. 1914, the French standing army was the same size as Germany's because of their three-year enlistment rather than two-year enlistment and using just everybody for the army. So, this is the contingency plan for the only, the Germans think only possible salvation of the Reich and the Serbians very politely declined to accept the Austrian ultimatum and Austria begins to mobilize against Serbia.  Serbia, however, has a big friend, has a very big friend. Has a Slavic power, has a Russian protégé in the Balkans, it knows it can count on Russian help. And in the last few days of July, crucial decisions are being made in St. Petersburg and in Berlin. The key decision as far as the Russians go is the Russian decision to order general mobilization. General mobilization, the Russians lie about this when the Germans say, we have received reports of your mobilization. The Russians say, no, nothing to it, no, nothing to it. Some of the guys like to get together and sort of march. You understand why the Russian mobilization is such a threat to Germany. It makes the Schlieffen plan impossible because once the Russian army is mobilized on the German border, there's no way that the German army can be withdrawn for the defeat of France because the Russians will simply flow into the vacuum. Okay, the Schlieffen plan depends on the very slow mobilization of Russian forces. So the mobilization of Russian forces begins to panic the Germans. The Kaiser sends a letter to his cousin, the Tsar. They're both grandsons of Queen Victoria. And he says, Nicky, Nicky, what is this? But seriously, very insightful. He says, are we gonna go to war?  Who knows where we'll be at the end of this war? William II is gonna be in exile in Holland, is thrown, taken away from him. Nicholas and his family are gonna be slaughtered in a shed by the communists. Nicholas II is a man of indecision, much like Louis XVI at the time of the French Revolution. Convinced by the last person he talks to. He rescins general mobilization only to order it again when the generals and admirals come back and say, please, we have to do this, this is our only hope, our only chance. And in Berlin, when they hear that the Russians are mobilizing, the generals and admirals come to the Kaiser and say, unless we go ahead with our plan, we are no longer responsible for the security of the Reich. In the same way that the admirals and generals would come to the President of the United States at a certain point and say, the computer reading of the data being fed into it, indicate a 78% chance of a Soviet missile attack. And this is changing moment by moment. It is now 79.2. It is an 82% chance that the data that we see there indicates a Soviet missile attack. Mr. President, we have to do something about it. And the civilian who's in charge of the American state is in the hands of the admirals and the generals. The Kaiser was in the hands of his military people. And a German ultimatum is sent to the French government. What is your attitude, beginning with an inquiry, what is your attitude in the event of a war between Germany and Russia? Will you guarantee to remain neutral? And if you say yes, would you kindly hand over the following French forts to be garrisoned by the German army, including Verdun, which controls Paris? The French say, well, I don't know, we'll say pas, possible, and Germany declares war on France and a few hours later on Russia. And the Great European War has begun. There is the question of where Britain will stand in all of this. Through the entente, the British government has grown closer and closer to the French, although the British people don't know anything about this. For instance, in 1912, the British say, in the event of any war between Germany and France, the British Navy will guard the French channel ports so that the French Navy can concentrate on the Mediterranean against Italy and Austria if they're Germany's partners. An enormous, immoral commitment, and in fact, military commitment. This is not known to the public. So the British government has a problem. France is being attacked. It may be the Schlieffen plan is gonna win. The Germans will dominate the continent, or France will be knocked out. But, and we have a moral obligation. The French believe that we're gonna come to their aid. How will we get into this war? The Germans solve their problem for them. Look, because the Schlieffen plan calls for the German army to go through Belgium, which is neutral according to an old treaty signed by the major European powers. In England, the Asquith government, this is the prime minister at the time, is debating whether to get into this war. And there are people who are on the war side, like Winston Churchill and Lloyd George, and finally, led by Edward Gray, the prime minister, they decide to go to war. One of the ministers in the Asquith cabinet is old John Morley. Distinguished, revered, old gentleman by this time, famous British man of letters, a classical liberal, the biographer of William Gladstone and Richard Cobden, wrote a great biography of Cobden, writer of biographies of Burke, the French encyclopedists, an eminent man, and he performs the last act of English liberalism. When the cabinet decides to go to war, he resigns in bitter protest. Why he says this war is going to be the end of the world that we knew of the 19th century, and indeed in many ways it was. And as George Kennan, perhaps you know, the eminent and respected American diplomat and historian, says about the First World War. I mean, if we look back and think to ourselves that the world went to war, even if you believe what the Entente said, to stop the Kaiser from dominating Europe. And we think of what followed the Kaiser. If we could have back that world of 1918 with the Kaiser and the conservative German elite, efficient, dynamic, basically respectful of the foundations of Western civilization, this dynamic conservative German elite in charge of Germany. We think of what followed that, a Germany divided between the Nazis and then the communists. There are very few people who wouldn't say, let's have back the Kaiser. Long live the Kaiser. Okay, long live the Kaiser. You don't have to join. Now, the character of this war is very difficult to communicate. On the Western front, by the way, in case you were wondering, the Schlieffen plan doesn't work. Okay, the German army has stopped at the morgue. And that's where they stay for four years. On the Western front, the front does not move more than about 30 kilometers, either way, over the next four years. It is horrendous. It's, what happens on the Western front is captured to a small extent. Have you read the novel by Eric Maria Remarque or quite on the Western front? How many people have read that? Very good. If you have not, it's a very good novel and captures the experience of a German soldier, but this was the same for either side. It was trench warfare. All together in the war, who knows, some 10 or 12 million people died. People experienced things, both in combat and the people back home understanding what was happening, that dazed them, that stunned them. You know, it's almost as if for a few generations, the peoples of Europe had been increased, sort of like a flock of sheep by their shepherds, okay? Through industrialization, through the spread of liberal ideas and institutions, through the decrease of infant mortality, the raising of standards of living, the population of Europe was enormously greater than it had ever been before. And now the time came to slaughter some part of the sheep for the purposes of the ones who were in control. There is no way of expressing the horror of some of the battles. At Verdun in 1916, as I say, the fortress that controls the approaches to Paris, 275,000 Frenchmen died and 250,000 Germans. At the Battle of the Somme, similar figures for the British and the Germans. Paschendale, all these horrible, horrible places.  People, one sees this in their diaries, record funny dreams along these lines. There is no reason for this war ever to end. The new generation will come and they'll be put into uniforms and sent into the trenches and sent into wild, massive, murderous attacks. It'll just go on forever. And human nature began to tire. There are mutinies in the French army put down brutally. At Caporetto, when the Austrians and Germans attacked the Italian front collapses. Italian front collapses. I didn't get any laugh that time. I'm supposed to get a laugh every time I talk about the Italian front collapsing. But laughable, I mean, I don't see it that way. I don't see it that way.  The Neapolitan's and the Sicilians and the Galabrians. They think that people in Rome are foreigners. What are they doing up here in the north? Who are these people? And fighting for what? King Umberto is not a member of my family. Okay, he has his own family. Okay, why are we fighting here? Okay, so the Caporetto in 1917, the Italian army simply deserts. And I only learned recently from the Dennis Mac Smith's biography of Mussolini that in order to reestablish order, thousands of them were executed. Thousands of them were executed by the Italian army, of course. Okay, let me just mention that all of the governments involved here are cynical to an extreme, are callous to an extreme. But the Italian government perhaps more than others because in 1914, Italy does not go to war. It waits. In 1915, the Italian politicians begin to shop around. Who'll give us the best deal for entering this war? They say to their, the countries who were supposed to be their allies, Austria and Germany, how about giving us Trieste here, the South Tyrol? And Austria says, that's my territory. What are you talking about? That's not something that we can give as part of the spoils of war. The Italians go to the British and French and the British and French say, sure you can have Trieste in South Tyrol. Not only that, when the time comes and we carve up the Ottoman Empire, you'll get a nice colony over here. By the way, these are the secret treaties of 1915 where the Entente powers in the classical imperialist manner divide up the spoils that will come to them once the war is over. The Russians, for instance, are again Constantinople in the Straits, which means control of the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. This is a major reason to talk about things snowballing and having consequences. When the Tsar is overthrown in 1917, a moderate and democratic government comes to power, as you probably know, led by Kerensky. This government refuses the one condition that the Russian people's demand of their new government, which is peace. A friend of mine happened to teach at Stanford many years ago, Stanford University. This is in the late 60s. And Stanford is a very fine university, my friend taught Western civilization. They happened to be, at that time, at the Hoover Institution in residence, Alexander Kerensky. So my friend happens to be, his name is Ron, happens to be somewhat pushy, coming from New York and all. Gives a call to the Hoover Institution. Kerensky says, sure, I'll come over and address your class of Stanford freshman, addressing the class of Stanford freshman on the Russian Revolution. Okay, what happened? And my friend had lunch with him afterwards and said to him, why didn't you make peace? You were in power, why didn't you make peace? Lenin would never have gained control. And Kerensky said, we could not do that. It would have been a betrayal of our valiant allies, countries on occasion betray allies for their own interests. The reason is the secret treaties. They had to stay in the war in order to get what they'd been promised, which was what the Tsars had been aiming at for generations. They would control, they would not only have the Black Sea as a total haven and free port for the Russian Navy, they would have access to the Mediterranean. And once they got that, once the war was over, then that great imperialist expansion and victory would solidify their position with the Russian people. So for that, they remained in the war and were beaten by Lenin. So, to get back to the point I was making, the Italians get the best deal from the Entente powers and callously and cynically go to war. The war will cost 900,000 Italian dead for the sake of the expansion of Italian political power. Okay, now, how does the US enter this war? For a while, they had been the growth of American meddling in other parts of the world. We went through a stage of actual territorial imperialism, of the expansion of American territory, the acquisition of colonies. This had to do with the war against Spain in 1898. The war against Spain is one of our less heroic wars. The Spaniards, by the time the war was declared by Congress, the Spaniards had agreed to all American conditions for getting out of Cuba. This fact was not communicated by President McKinley to Congress. So, we got into war and from this war received Puerto Rico, basically a protectorate over Cuba. The imperialists took advantage of the Jingoism and nationalism of the time, finally to annex the Hawaiian Islands and we became an Asian power through the annexation of the Philippines. The war to a large extent and the acquisition of the Philippines really totally are the work of an imperialist cabal, an imperialist group in Washington, led by Undersecretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, and including Brooks Adams, the famous writer, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and a man named Alfred Thayer Mahon, an admiral in the U.S. Navy. Let me just quote, since I can't give the evidence here, from Ken and also, who please, you must understand, certainly doesn't believe in any kind of Bilderberger conspiracy controlling American foreign policy or conspiracies at all. It's a very mainstream man as far as that goes and he says of the taking of the Philippines in 1898, it looks very much as though in this case, the action of the United States government had been determined primarily on the basis of a very able, quiet intrigue by a few strategically placed persons in Washington, an intrigue which received absolution, forgiveness, and a sort of public blessing by virtue of war hysteria. Okay, I can't imagine that that's the sort of thing that you were ever taught about the Spanish-American War. Or the acquisition of the Philippines. The war against the Philippines is our first war against Asians, by the way. And it is waged in, since it's a guerrilla war, it's a very dirty war and waged in totally racist terms. This was our first great war after the Civil War, so it brought North and South together against the substitute for the Indians or substitutes for blacks, these Asian people. Afterwards, by the way, even Theodore Roosevelt regrets having taken over the Philippines, but nonetheless, we're stuck there. Philippines are right off the coast of China and just south of Japan. We are now an Asian power, we are the major Pacific power by far. Well, in 1912, the progressives, the Wilsonian progressives take over the White House, Wilson right away gets involved in Mexico and a really comic opera incident at Veracruz over an insult, an alleged insult to the American flag. Wilson is certainly a very strange man. I think very, in many ways, overestimated. A book on this whole issue of American policy at this time, a Spanish-American war and especially on the policy of Woodrow Wilson, a very good and readable book, came out a few years ago by an author named Walter Karp, okay, called The Politics of War. And he deals with this rather complex subject in a very understandable and accessible way. Something that's certainly true and obvious is that Wilson thought a lot of himself and never conceived that he could be wrong on any issue. H. L. Menken, the libertarian critic and writer, said of Woodrow Wilson that his belief was that he was the obvious candidate for the first vacancy in the Trinity. The son of a Presbyterian minister himself in a sense of Presbyterian minister become politician, he was adamant, never admitting the slightest possibility of mistake. When war breaks out in 1914, the American people are largely interested, concerned, worried to an extent, but in no sense do they believe America's interests are involved here. Well, thank God for the oceans, thank God that we don't have the constant meddling in the affairs of other people, that this alliance system, because of a terrorist attack in a town, in a country no one ever heard of, everybody is now at war, the system of entangling alliances. Well, thank God we don't have anything like that. The American elite, however, especially in Washington, but all across, really, the Upper Eastern Seaboard, the area of the country which in those days counted solely in terms of determining foreign policy. The elite that lives from Washington through the corridor up to Boston and especially centered in New York City, the American elite was totally pro-British. A few weeks after the war begins, the representatives of the House of Morgan, of the banking house of J.P. Morgan go to the British government and say, we want to be your supplier. Among other things, we are totally on your side in this awful war caused by the German barbarians. So this pro-British attitude is one of the reasons that war is finally gonna come. There's a sentimental and emotional attitude on the part of the American governing elite, basically themselves a British stock. Naturally America's made up of a lot of people, but how shall I put it? The Irish, for instance, don't count very much at this time in terms of determining American foreign policy. The governing elite is Anglo-Saxon. There is the question of the Morgan loans and the loans of the other New York banks to the British government especially, but also to France. This establishes another tie between the two countries. And some part of public opinion at least is turned against the Germans by a brilliantly clever use of war propaganda. This is the account of the Belgian atrocities, a so-called. As the German army sweeps into Belgium, the American press begins to be filled with stories of just awful things, unspeakable things that the Germans are doing. Crucifying and raping nuns. The German national sport seems to be not soccer or what they call football, but taking babies and sort of throwing them on the point of bayonets. This is very strange stuff. After all, in America at this time, one knows many Germans, right? The Germans are one of the largest ethnic groups in America. And nobody ever said that they were the wittiest people in the world. Nobody ever said that German food was particularly delicate. The famous thing about German food being that you have a nice German meal and 72 hours later you're hungry all over again. On the other hand, on the other hand is a far cry from saying that there may be a little course in their sense of humor and in their choice of food to say that they do this for fun. All these awful atrocities. And really, when all is said and done, it's a very unpleasant thing that happens in regard to German Americans at this time. Tom Sowell in his great book, Ethnic America, a very interesting fascinating book about many of the major ethnic groups in America tells about the German contributions to American culture. One interesting thing I learned from Sowell is that the Germans invented the American Sunday. That is, Sunday as a day of rest. Before then, it had been the Puritan Sunday. Everybody quietly sort of mumbling passages of the Bible silently to themselves or else going to the saloon, getting drunk and picking up girls afterwards. The Germans invented the American Sunday, which was a family together having fun. You go to the beer garden, not to get sloppy drunk, but to be sort of mirthful, cheer up. There's the Oompa Band there. Right, the whole family is there. There's the Sportsfarina, the Sports Association is getting together and having exhibits of various kind and you have a lot of fun together. The great influx of the German immigrants in the 1840s, 1850s changed this part of American culture. Towards this more distinctively American family type Sunday. So this was not really a contemptible group which came to our country. And now their cousins and relatives in Germany are being held up as monsters. And when the time comes, they're gonna really get it over here in America. What is the story of the Belgian atrocities? The story of the Belgian atrocities is that they were faked, they were fabricated, they were phony. The pictures were photographed in particular buildings which are known in Paris. The stage sets were designed by designers for the Parisian opera. The stories were made up out of the whole cloth and spread by British propaganda as another weapon in the war, especially in the war for the minds of the neutral countries. But this turns a good deal of public opinion against the Germans. And history is very unpleasantly ironical sometimes, very cruelly ironical. More than we can imagine. In 1942, in 1942, reports began to filter out of Eastern Europe about a German policy of actually gassing Jews. And the first people who heard about this said, here we go again. Here's the old story of the Belgian atrocities. Some other stories spread by propaganda, nothing to it so that no attempt, for instance, was made to even bomb the railroads going to Auschwitz. The people felt that they had been taken in 1914. So in the Second World War, from 1942 on, when much worse things are being done by the Germans, for a long time, nobody was willing to believe it. Okay, I'll tell you what. I think, am I not correct, started at nine, didn't we? This is pretty much when we have to break. Should we entertain a few questions first? That's sort of a question itself. You follow? I mean, like, yes, no? Okay, how about some questions? Yes. When you were talking earlier about imperialism, I went and saw the movie, Gandhi, and I don't know how accurate it was, but it seemed that there was a lot of capitalistic interest in the way that the British ran India. Could you comment on whether or not that is accurate? Well, yeah, whether there was or not, first of all, would not be an answer to why the world goes in for an orgy of imperialist expansion after 1880, because India was part of the old empire. Okay, so that doesn't explain why Africa split up, why the South Pacific has split up, why people are now looking at the old corrupt empires like Turkey and Persia and China and eyeing them to be split up, you understand? That doesn't explain this new imperialist expansion. India, as a matter of fact, was run pretty much on a mercantilist basis, and that was with a lot of government control, a lot of government ownership, and some support for Indian capitalists. That's true. That's true. As I say, it's a complex issue, and in different parts of the British Empire, and certainly in different parts of the empires of other countries, which makes it a lot more complicated, that you have different factors at work as to why some territory was taken over or why it was maintained. Well, the depiction in that movie was that the British kind of wanted to really abuse the Indian population. A small proportion, a very small number of the British from the 18th century on, when they're involving themselves in India in a big way, make fortunes out of India, sure. But India, of course, is a very, very poor country. The British are making a lot more money out of America at this time. As the Americans, of course, are making out of Britain. Right? It's not that the British are exploiting America, but with the trade to America, with the placing of investments in America, the British are making a fortune. Yes? It's debated by the Germans in World War II. Does that give you pause and make you think maybe some of those stories from World War I were true? Could they have suddenly changed the character from World War II? There's no reason to have to speculate on this. The stories aren't true. The evidence on which the stories were based, for instance, Lord Bryce's report, turned out to be fabrications. Lord Bryce himself virtually admitted it after the war. Yes, uh-huh. There's a book by a man named Peterson, Propaganda for War, okay? Propaganda for War, a classic book that came out after the First World War, and that'll be an example. A book by a British man, Arthur Ponsonby, along the same lines. But I can't imagine what's being suggested by that, that because under a totalitarian, insanely racist regime, the Germans commit atrocities of an awful scale. Therefore, under a relatively mild authoritarian regime, a monarchy, they would be committing analogous atrocities. I don't see any reason to suppose something like that. I can't imagine anyone in America in 1914 who would have greeted with joy the destruction of a Japanese city and the death of 100,000 people. You ask anybody in America, you ask Theodore Roosevelt himself, okay, that old sissy probably would faint. Um, you ask anybody, okay? Would you will the total annihilation of a Japanese city? What are you talking about?  What do you mean annihilation of a city? What are we, Tamerlane? What are we, Genghis Khan? Any other questions? Yeah. I was quite certain how England got what actually did they, because the Germans went into Belgium, then where did their troops first enter the continent? In Belgium or in France or whatever? Um, literally the first troops, I'm not sure. But the British took the left flank on the western front and the French took the center and the right flank. When the Americans came in, they were more on the right flank. How they came into the war, the Edward Gray goes to the House of Commons and says, our honor is involved here. A small, Belgium has been invaded, we are a guarantor of Belgian neutrality and we have to go to the defense of Belgium because England always goes to the defense of small countries. And somebody says, what about Ireland? And Gray says, arrest that man. There was a, but the thing about, but wars never really just occur like that. A country not even being invaded. England could have said, all that the Treaty of 1839 meant is that we committed ourselves not to attack Belgium. Didn't mean that we have to go to war with any country that does, okay? What was involved was a fear of Germany, a fear of German predominance on the continent and also something which is very hard to talk about but which is the worst possible thing. And that is that for years, the war with Germany was considered the inevitable war. It was gonna come sooner or later. Just as in the 1920s on in the Navy Department in Washington, the war with Japan is the inevitable war. Just as, who knows? There are people in the, think that the war with Russia is the inevitable war. That sense that there's nothing we can do about it, it's gonna come sooner or later, might as well take the best opportunity, seize the best opportunity to wage the war. Kurt? Germany is setting saboteurs in the US, which is the public opinion is about to be mobilized against Germany. What would have been smarter for Germany to adopt a different policy as far as this US saboteur? Well, yeah, the saboteurs never really amounted to very much because it was very inept. And the great mass of Germans and Austrians and Hungarians and so on in America never had anything to do with it. I'll talk a little later about how we got into the war because I've sort of split it off and I haven't talked about the problem of submarine warfare. The Germans underestimated American power. In fact, American power decides who wins the war. Not only economic power, but even the military power towards the end. It's because of the American involvement that the war does not turn out to be a stalemate, but is decisively won by the entente powers. Any other quick questions? Yeah, Rick. Mobilized prior to the war, that sort of instigated Germany's declaration of war simultaneously against Russia and France. What was Russia doing while Germany was in France? Didn't they have the power sort of to sweep across Germany? The Russians enter into East Prussia and the Russian army is defeated at a battle called Tannenberg. The German general, later Field Marshal, is named Paul von Hindenberg and becomes a German national hero for having stopped the Russians at Tannenberg. Okay, well, we'll take our usual break. Okay, I wanna say a few words about America's entry into the war. The issue that was involved was the rights of neutrals, and especially on the high seas. As soon as the war breaks out, both sides begin violating the traditionally understood rules of naval warfare. The British, for instance, set up a blockade of the German North Sea ports, which is not legal in international law because it wasn't a close-in blockade. It was largely carried out by mines, scattered in the area. It was agreed by most international law experts that this was an imperfect blockade. And besides, the British put on the list of contraband items which had never appeared before, including food, including food. The sending of food and even neutral ships to Germany was interdicted by the British. The Germans, in response, began to exploit their weapon of submarine. Warfare, and this became a problem. The submarines cannot really obey the rules of, the cruiser rules of warfare, which involve, in the case of a merchant ship carrying contraband, the stopping of the ship, the loading of the passengers and crew onto your own ship, and then the sinking, if necessary, of the ship carrying contraband. Submarine was simply too small to carry passengers or even the crew of an enemy merchant ship carrying contraband. Early on, just at the beginning of 1915, the Germans capture British orders from the British Admiralty, which instruct British merchant ships when they sight a submarine to turn around and to ram the submarine. So that it becomes increasingly problematical for the Germans to even attempt to obey the old rules of surfacing, warning the ship, and so on. Because the very act of surfacing might bring about the destruction of the submarine. In those days, the submarine was a fairly fragile thing, so many, many, most really, merchant ships, if they turned around and attempted to ram the submarine, had a military advantage, even a merchant ship. This becomes more and more of a problem. In May of 1915, the problem is enormously exacerbated because the Germans sink the most famous ship in the world, the Lusitania. It's a British ship, Cunard, Lines, but it's carrying Americans, and also not only contraband, but munitions of war. Lusitania had violated American law by shipping munitions outside of New York Harbor on the way to Liverpool, but in any case, the fact of the death of so many people horrifies some portion of American public opinion. The Wilson administration now takes the position which will ultimately lead to war. The German government is to be held strictly accountable, strictly accountable for the death of any Americans on the high seas, regardless of circumstances. The Germans say, well, let's see if we can live with this, as long as you're willing to put pressure on the British to have them modify their violations of international law. That is, they're placing a food on the list of contraband materials which had never been done before. The British, as you know, take your merchant ships off the high seas on the way to Rotterdam because they say anything that goes to Rotterdam is gonna go to Germany, so they take American ships off the high seas. The British have put cotton, cotton on the list of contraband, confiscating these materials. They interfere with letters going to the continent because they think there's military intelligence possibly involved. The British are imposing in many ways on Americans. So, if you hold them responsible, we'll behave ourselves as far as submarines go. This was not to be the case. And the attitude of the Americans towards British violations of neutral rights were quite different. One reason is that the American ambassador to London, Walter Hines' page was an extreme anglophile. One time, for instance, he gets a message from the State Department saying, tell the British they have to stop interfering with American mail shipments to neutral ports. And the American ambassador goes to the British foreign minister Edward Gray and says, look at the message I've just got from Washington. Let's get together and try to answer this. This was his attitude. The British were never held to the same standard as the Germans. At home, Theodor Roosevelt, who in previous years had been a great friend of the Kaisers and a great admirer of Germany, now says we have to get into this war right away. Besides that, there's a campaign for preparedness, for building up the American army, the American Navy, drilling American citizens in combat techniques. There's a kind of hysteria really that travels over the country, considering that there's, at this time, certainly, no chance of some kind of immediate threat to the United States. And people like Roosevelt and Wilson begin talking in a very unfortunate way. Wilson says, for instance, in America, we have too many hyphenated Americans. Of course, he meant German Americans, Irish Americans. And these people are not totally loyal to our country. Already scapegoats are being looked for and public opinion is being roused. In 19, in January, this diplomatic negotiation, the exchange of memos goes on for the next few years. In January of 1917, the Americans are not having been able to budge the British in the least on any British violation of American rights, the British blockade intensifying the Germans really feeling hunger in a very literal sense, especially the people on the home front. The Kaiser is persuaded by his admirals and generals to begin unrestricted submarine warfare around the British Isles. The American position by this time had solidified, had become a totally rigid one. And when all is said and done, when you go through all of the back and forth memoranda and notes and principles established, the United States went to war against Germany in 1917 for the right of Americans to travel in armed, belligerent, merchant ships carrying munitions through war zones. Wilson's position was that even in that case, the Germans simply had no right to attack the ship as long as there are Americans on the ship. Shall I repeat that? Armed belligerent, that is to say English, armed English merchant ships carrying munitions could not be fired upon by the Germans as long as there were American citizens on board. And it was for the right of Americans to go into the war zone on such vessels that we finally went to war. Most Americans didn't see this as a burning reason for war. Senator LaFollette, for instance, of Wisconsin said, why don't we go to war for the right of Americans to travel on the French railroads through the battle lines? Okay. Some American wants to get from Paris to Brussels, wants to go through the trenches by railroad, and will send an American expeditionary force over there to enforce that right. Why not? Finally, in April of 1917, Wilson goes to Congress and asks for his declaration of war. Puts it in inimitable, Wilsonian terms. We are fighting for the right of small nations to exist. We are fighting so that liberty not perish from this earth and on and on and on and on. And America now assumes its role as a responsible world power. As George was explaining yesterday, the effects of this war on the home front cannot be exaggerated in terms of the growth of state power. This is the case in all the belligerents. In Germany, for instance, by the end of the war, the government and even the general staff has virtual total control of the German economy. The Germans call this, at this time, Kriegssozialismus. Okay, this is war, socialism. Keeping with the Tony quality of Kato presentations, there is your foreign word. For today, you take this down and use it. For prestige purposes. War socialism, war socialism. The effective control of the German economy by the government and the German army. And by the way, that's the model that Lenin uses when he takes power in Russia a few months later to organize the new Soviet economy, this German model. But in every country, the state power increases enormously. In the United States, the best example is the War Industries Board, which achieves temporary dictatorial control over the American economy in terms of prices, allocation of scarce supplies, and so on. The railroads are nationalized for the duration of the war. And afterwards, the government is gonna give up many of these powers, but when the depression comes and when these older progressives and new new dealers come to Washington in 1933, many of them had experience during the First World War with running various parts of the American economy. The germ, the core of the New Deal was there already. As far as civil liberties go, the American front experiences, really almost, well, leaving aside the incarceration of the Japanese Americans in 1942, it was worse than it was in the Second World War. A man who had gotten a million votes for president in 1912, the head of the Socialist Party, Eugene Debs, is thrown into prison under the Espionage Act because he says we're fighting this war on behalf of the bankers. And Wilson, as we all know, is a saint and a man of total personal integrity even after the war is over, refuses to pardon him. This is the bitter and vindictive nature of that man. It took Warren Harding to say, ah, come on, what difference does it make? You know, get Debs out of prison, this is absurd. But Wilson, until the day he got out of office, would never pardon him. There was the attack on the German Americans, which has no counterpart really in the Second World War except for the public evacuation of the much smaller group of Japanese Americans. This was the sort of thing that is almost too silly for words, as you may know. In various cities, the symphony orchestras helped the war effort by prohibiting the playing of any German music for the duration of the war, right? The speaking of German in public was prohibited in Iowa. School systems, one after the other, valiantly threw German out of the syllabus. The hamburger was renamed Salisbury Steak. And this kind of, well, you see, the hysteria was justified, they had a problem. This is the first time they were sending an American expeditionary force across the seas to Europe and they did not know how the American people were gonna react. So the people who had gotten us into the war and were managing the war were rather nervous in a way there was a tremendous amount of overreaction involved. Well, finally, the war comes to an end in November of 1918. People couldn't believe it. The people who lived in the north of France who had heard the guns every moment, virtually every moment for four years. They couldn't believe that they had stopped. The allies get together in Paris, the victors to sign the peace treaty. Of this peace treaty, the conference takes place in Paris and for each one of the defeated nations, the treaty is signed at a separate great French palace. The most important one was the treaty with Germany signed at the Palace of Versailles. So it's called the Versailles peace treaty. The treaty with Hungary is signed at the Palace of Trianon, with Austria at Saint-Germain and with Bulgaria and Turkey at other palaces. So these treaties go by these names, you see. But the most important one being with Germany, sometimes the whole settlement is called the Treaty of Versailles. This is the Europe that emerges from the Europe that existed before the First World War. If you can see the map over there, the most important new difference is the coming into existence of a number of small successor states, as they're called, from Finland all the way down to Yugoslavia. Notice, by the way, that the Serb terrorists who assassinated the Archduke get what they want. There's new Yugoslavia that comes into existence. Austria-Hungary has gotten rid of as something obsolete, archaic, and these wonderful statesmen, some conservatives say that it's only the government that can be far seen. There's a name George Will mean anything to you, for instance. I thought you were supposed to hiss.  Good, good, okay. He says this, but it's a conservative idea.  They're short-sighted. Only governments can see in the long run. Well, okay, among other things at Paris, they destroyed Austria-Hungary and made it into an agglomeration of small states. What happens to these small states? Well, since Germany is defeated in 1918, since Russia's in a civil war, for a little time these states manage. Okay, they're able to keep their independence. Just as soon as the natural equilibrium comes about in Europe again, if you have a strong Germany and a strong Russia, these states inevitably fall under the control either of Germany or of Russia, okay? So that, there's an argument to be made that this old Austria-Hungary at least gave these states all put together a certain amount of clout and power in the center of Europe. But that's not to be thought of. They're done away with. Every territory that can be taken away from Germany is. Although President Wilson announces policy of self-determination of nations, this is not used in the case of the Germans. A big Poland comes into existence which is just about two-thirds Polish. There are Ukrainians over here, many Germans over here, and the Poles are given a corridor to the sea. A German city, a totally German city called Danzig, today called Gdansk, is taken away from Germany and made into a small little country of its own. The Germans say, hey, wait a minute, what's happening here? What happened to self-determination of nations? Why don't we allow the people of Danzig to say what country they want to belong to? And the Allies say, no, because Poland needs a port on the Baltic, and we can't have Danzig in the hands of Germany. The Poles have to control its foreign policy there as an independent little country. Territory here in the Salicia is given to Poland. This country here, as you can see Czechoslovakia comes into existence. Czechoslovakia, Czechs in Slovox, six and a half million, Czechs, two and a half million Slovox, three and a half million Germans in the Sudetenland. Okay, this territory over here, solidly German, and the Germans say, why don't we allow these Sudeten Germans to become part of Germany on the principle of self-determination of nations? No, because Czechoslovakia needs a solution for superior strategic position with the Sudeten and the mountains here in the Erzgebirge, okay? And if we give the Sudetenland to Germany, the Germans will be on the other side of the mountains. Strategic reasons dictate that they be made part of Czechoslovakia. The same thing happens with the South Tyrol here, where the Italians are given German territory to take them to the Brenner Pass. Austria becomes a little rump country there with a big bloated capital of Vienna, two and a half million people and about five people in the rest of the country. The Austrians say, what if we join together with Germany? Might as well now. The Habsburg days are over. The treaties say, there is never to be, there is never to be any association between Austria and Germany, regardless of what the people there want. German colonies are taken away. And the Germans are effectively disarmed. German army is to be limited to 100,000 men. Do you know how many cops it takes to more or less keep controlled anarchy in New York City? 25,000. The whole German army is to be 100,000, which is less than the army of Lithuania. In other words, Germany is effectively disarmed. No military aircraft, no submarines, strictly limited number of surface ships. The Germans are also forced to sign article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which says, we admit that we were solely responsible for this war. Unprecedented in history, where the defeated power is required to admit its guilt for having started the war. And then the question of reparations. The idea of reparations is accepted by the Allies. The Germans say, how much should we pay? And the French say, well, you just start sending things. Some people, Cain's has a very good book on this. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It's one of his best books, really. Some people are talking in terms of $100 billion, okay? We're talking about an age when $100 billion was money, okay? Yeah. Finally, the reparations figure is put at $32 billion, but the reparations problem plagues Europe for, well, until 1933. You have the attempted French hegemony over the continent here, okay? Germany is to be kept down by the division of excision of territories, by reparations, by the military restrictions on the German military forces. Beyond that, the French enter into alliances with the new states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania. These are supposed to somehow counterbalance Germany on the east to play the role that Russia had, Russia no longer can play the role since it's a communist country. The Ottoman Empire, by the way, is divided up. This is one of the things that disillusions poor President Wilson, who some people have suggested then at the Paris Peace Conference has his usual retreat into illness, getting sick and getting the flu and then finally a stroke, because things are not working out the way he imagined, hardly at all. Keynes says of Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, he reminded me of nothing, Keynes was there, he reminded me of nothing so much as a virgin in a brothel, valiantly calling for lemonade. It's sort of out of his element somewhat, really. And then they divide, the British and French divide up the Ottoman Empire, the French get Syria and Lebanon, the British get Iraq and Palestine. By the way, one small sideline on the First World War. It was such a total war that both sides wanted to get every possible ounce of support they could. From the British point of view, it was unfortunate that many influential Jewish individuals in central Europe and Jewish firms were supporting the central powers, were supporting Germany. The reason for that was that they were much better treated by the Germans and especially by Austria-Hungary than Jews in Russia were, for instance. Tsarist Russia was the great anti-Semitic power. It was the Tsarist Russian secret police that fabricated the famous protocols of the elders of Zion, a famous forgery attempting to prove that the Jews were trying to take over the world. Well, to counteract this, the British Rothschild dresses a letter to the British Foreign Office inquiring as to the British attitude on a certain question. And a member of the British Foreign Office named Arthur Balfour sends back a letter saying it is the policy of the British government to support the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. Okay, by the way, the Balfour Declaration also says, with the rights of the president inhabitants to be respected. This is how things were done in the age of imperialism. Who owned Palestine when this British commitment was made, the Turks, okay? So the British were going on record as supporting the handing over a certain part of Turkish territory as a Jewish national homeland. The beginning then of the commitment of the British government to the ideals of political Zionism. And there's just no end to the problems created by that act of imperialism. Okay, so the world then, after 1919, when the conference takes place, seems to be pretty much under British and French control. The high point of British and French imperialism is reached. The greatest extent of the British and French empires. And then they set up the League of Nations. And why was the League of Nations set up? As you know, the League of Nations was set up for all good things. There's not a good thing that the League of Nations was not set up for, right? There's another way of looking at this, which is this. Once the treaties at Paris are signed, what do we have in the world? We have established British and French world hegemony. Okay, British and French control of the world with the possible assistance of the United States if the US is interested. But Germany has been demolished. Russia is involved in turmoil. It's not gonna be a problem for a long time. And the British and French have come to the apogee of their empires. And now let us freeze that for all time. Let us set up an international organization with all the power of all the international community behind it, which says that any crossing of any boundary is an act of aggression, which is to be answered by the whole world community. Okay, and what have you got then? You have locked in for all time British and French control of the world. That's, as I say, an alternative view of what the League of Nations amounted to. Wilson said this was the world, this was the world to make the world safe for democracy. One small point. At Paris in 1919 at the conference, the Japanese delegate is there. He had been, Japan had been on the victorious side. He says now that the whole world community is here, why don't we take a stand? Why don't we say it is the sense of this meeting and of the powers represented here that all human races are equal and should be equal in rights. And this, of course, is vetoed by the British and the French. The idea of going on record for racial equality, of course not. They control hundreds and hundreds of millions of people of the darker races and there's no question of the possibility of proclaiming racial equality there. The German delegates, by the way, unlike what happens in 1815 in Vienna, when again all the powers meet for the Congress of Vienna, for European peace. Back then the French had brought in, France had been the power that lost under Napoleon, but the new French government has brought in, takes part in the negotiations, agrees finally to the settlement.  Not in 1919. In 1919 the Germans are kept out once the whole Treaty of Versailles is arranged. The German delegates are brought in, they've shown it. The Germans say, we cannot possibly accept this. The French say, don't you remember that you surrendered? That the German army has been dispersed? The French army has not. Either you sign or we'll invade. And the Germans reluctantly sign. When the German leader, Erzberger, goes back to Berlin, he's assassinated. That is the man who signed the Treaty of Versailles, assassinated by German nationalists. Point is, German public opinion does not feel, as for instance the French did in 1815, that somehow they had lost, and this was a just enough peace treaty. The Germans are totally averse to it and can only be kept to the treaty in the next few years by force. Well, what I want to do now is get to the setting for New Deal foreign policy and how America finally does get onto the world stage in a very big way indeed. The New Deal of course begins in 1933. That is the official New Deal, the Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1933, March, they're coming to Washington of Roosevelt and his administration. Roosevelt's secretary of state is Cordell Hull. Let's get rid of the old Europe, okay. Shed it here, shed it here. Hardly, hardly. Lenin's attitude was that some of the subject nationalities in Russia should be permitted to become free. But in a number of cases, the Soviets fought bitter wars. For instance, against the Finns, and the Finns finally were able to establish their independence and above all against the Poles. There was a bitter war in 1919, 1920 between Poland and the new Soviet government. And finally, it went back and forth. The Russians, the Soviets had their own problems and in 1921 they decided to make the border at the Armistice Line. Okay, now as far as the New Deal and New Deal foreign policy go. Cordell Hull goes down in the history books you may know as being a free trader, a believer in free trade. Okay, he's a crusty old Tennessee free trader. By the way, it's a principle. Distrust any politician who's called crusty. Okay, I mean it's an attempt to make them lovable. The fact of the matter is of course he was not a free trader in any libertarian sense. He was a free trader in the sense of what could be called free trade imperialism. That is, the political and military force of the government is used in order to establish a free trade situation. Classic example is in regard to China and keeping the open door in China. That is China is to be kept open to all commercial nations. It's a policy of the United States government not to permit any nation to establish control over China and to keep out the goods of other nations. Okay, or to keep out the commercial transactions of other nations. In order to carry out this policy however, naturally you need an enormous or you can need an enormous amount of American government, political and military force applied. Okay, the true principle of free trade as I understand and as the free traders of the 19th century understood it is that there is to be no governmental involvement of whatever kind. We're not to have forced trading. For instance, on the 19th century on the Palmerston there was forced trading. The British government went to war with the empire of China to force the Chinese emperor to permit the importation of opium. Okay, and Cobden and Bright bitterly attacked that. They said that is not free trade to use armies and navies to force open a market. Free trade occurs when it's voluntary on both sides and when the government keeps out of the matter. As Cobden wrote, affairs of trade like matters of conscience change their very nature if touched by violence. That's important, isn't it? In the same way as religious faith is something different if violence comes into the picture, so is trade something different as soon as violence comes into the picture. For as faith if forced would no longer be religion but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery if coerced by warlike armaments. And this is the ultimate problem and a seat of corruption I think in the New Deal foreign policy because more than ever before in American history the full power of the American government was to be used to carve out markets for American trade in the world. President Roosevelt himself said in 1934, our government must continue to cooperate with our foreign traders if foreign markets are to be maintained in the face of many obstacles which have grown up in recent years against our foreign trade. And where did they imagine these obstacles would be most of a problem? It would be in the far east, in the far east. Keep in mind America was going through the worst depression in our history and many people thought that this depression could be solved or alleviated if we had access to the markets of the far east. This is the old delusion of the China market going back deep into the 19th century. That for all the goods America could produce we could always sell them in China because there are so many people in China. All you have to do is have the Chinese buy maybe a square inch of cloth each. And we would be selling them trillions of yards of cloth because there are so many Chinese there's no end to it or a couple of drops of oil from standard oil. Just a couple of drops of oil for the lamps of China and there'd be no problem American the oil industry and so on would be in terrific shape. The delusion, the delusion of the China trade. Even today, to this very day the idea that somehow trade with communist China is gonna be an enormous important part of our economy in years to come. The fact of the matter of course is that China is enormously poor. And not only poor but more xenophobic, more wary of strangers in strange ways than other countries are. The China market never materialized but the China market is the cornerstone and the economic policy of the New Deal in the 1930s. It's what sets the stage with the confrontation with Japan. In 1935, Cordell Hull forwarded to Roosevelt a long State Department memo which stated as our own population becomes more and more dense as the struggle for existence in this country becomes more and more intense as we feel increasingly the need of foreign markets our definite concern for open markets will be more widely felt among our people and our desire for an insistence upon the free opportunity to trade with the peoples of the far East will be intensified for in that region lie the great potential markets of the future. This is a conclusion come to by the American Secretary of State to solve our problems in terms of prosperity at home the finding of some markets for our factories and so on that would have to be in the far East. Well, this created a very definite problem because starting in the early 1930s Japan undertakes a policy of imperialist expansion. The problem from the Japanese point of view is this 1929, the stock market crashes in New York this is a kind of symbol of the onset of the Great Depression and one thing that happens throughout the world in the course of the Great Depression is that countries begin to contract themselves into their own shells. There's a drift towards autarchy, towards protectionism, towards every country being self-sufficient. You know, under Hoover, the worst tariff in American history comes into existence, a smooth holy tariff. In 1932, the British Empire goes over to protectionism. Britain, which had been the home of free trade. Well, this creates problems for every country. For Japan, it posed the threat of catastrophe. The Japanese are at this time 70 or 80 million people living on a group of islands which all together have an area about equal to that of California. Also, mostly rocky with almost no natural resources. How is this people to survive in a protectionist world? A top-level decision has arrived at by the military and political and business leaders of Japan. Japan will have to carve out a market for itself. And where is this market to be found? Across the sea in China. In 1931, the Japanese invade Manchuria. And already American policy sets its face against Japanese expansion. A man named Henry Stimson, his secretary of state at this time, under Hoover. And he wants to impose economic sanctions on Japan. Hoover, of course, as a Quaker says, no, that's too much. Economic sanctions will lead to war. We'll just make it clear to them that we don't approve of what they're doing and see what happens then. Nonetheless, the Japanese go ahead with the occupation of Manchuria. And as the 1930s go on, Manchuria itself becomes not large enough and the Japanese think to themselves, well, what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn China into our India. The British imperialists have always said that India is the chief gem in the British imperial crown. That India has made England what it is today, a world power. Well, we'll have our own India. There's nothing written in the stars that says that the British should have been the rulers of India. It happened because the British wanted to do it. Well, we'll do the same with China. And where the Japanese take over in Manchuria and then after 1937 in northern China, they do establish a protectionist regime to keep out other economic interests and particularly the Americans. The leader of the Chinese government at this time is a dictator named Chiang Kai-shek, by the way, had been a Chinese warlord and made his way to the top. The Japanese, by the way, their attitude is, well, of course, what do the Americans have to complain about? They have practically a continent to themselves. Okay, they have three and a half million square miles of their own country. They have enormous natural resources. They have the greatest single free trade area in the world within the American boundaries. And where the Americans do take over, for instance, in the Philippines, they set up protectionist measures against other countries. Look, we have to live, we have to survive. And there is, after all, the British empire, there's the French empire, the Dutch control Indonesia, there are vast empires in the world. Japan is a poor country in this world as it is today. It has to be. We have to expand or die. After the war begins in Europe in 1939, with the Hitler-Stalin pack, the division of Poland, the German war against the allies in the west. In 1940, the Japanese, as we'll see, by September of 1940, the American policy is very clear. It's a policy that's directed against Germany, that fears German expansion and also Japanese expansion. And in September of 1940, the Japanese enter into an alliance with Germany and with Italy called the tripartite pact. And this is really very bad from the Japanese point of view because what it leads Americans to think is that Japan and Germany and also Italy are involved in some vast plan and design to divide up the world. In fact, what the tripartite pact said was that the other allies would come to the defense of the country, which is attacked by the United States. Not that this was an aggressive plan. They were perfectly willing to go on doing what they were doing, Japan and China, Germany and Europe, as long as the United States was kept out of it. But the fact that the Japanese do enter now into this formal alliance with Germany frightens the Americans and creates a great deal of distrust in the Roosevelt administration. There is no doubt that the Roosevelt administration set its mind against German expansion from the very beginning. No doubt about that whatsoever. Now that the documents are out and very soon after the German advance in the West takes place, after the fall of France in June of 1940, President Roosevelt in Washington, he has not any of the qualms that Wilson had during the First World War. He's totally committed in his own mind. This is clear enough. Begins the program of assistance to the enemies of Germany and Japan throughout the world. In September of 1940, for instance, there's the destroyers deal, whereby the United States gives 50 old destroyers. It's always put in terms of old destroyers as if they were about to sink. Well, they were good enough for the British to want them. That is, they were seaworthy. 50 of these are given over in return for the British giving us bases along the North American coast of Bermuda and up in Canada and so on. This is already an act of war. According to international law, a neutral country simply may not give things like destroyers to a country which is at war to be used against its enemies. And this is even more the case for Len Lise which comes into effect in early 1941. What Len Lise involves is a sort of blank check by Congress of X amount of money each year to the president to be used as the president sees fit in assisting nations of the world which happen to find themselves at war. Len Lise is used, first of all, and most of all for England in its fight against Germany, then for Chiang Kai-shek against Japan, and then after June of 1941, Len Lise is given to Russia. Besides the Len Lise Act of 1941, that year sees a series of accelerating acts of war incidents in the North Atlantic. This is totally different from 1914. Hitler had learned at least that much. The United States was not to be provoked into this war through naval incidents. In that case, then, it was the United States that would have to create the incidents. There is the example, for instance, of the destroyer, the USS Greer, in September of 1941. Roosevelt goes on the air on the radio in those days and says to the people, I tell you the blunt fact that the German submarine involved in the incident fired first upon this American destroyer without warning and with deliberate design to sink her. The facts of the matter, as were known to Roosevelt at the time, were quite different. And you might look this up, for instance, in a standard reference book, which came out a few years ago, by Robert Dalek, a supporter of Roosevelt, a professor of history at UCLA called the Foreign Policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And the facts were quite different. The Americans in British at that time were working together militarily in the North Atlantic. The American destroyer, the Greer, spotted the German submarine and began, as per orders, broadcasting over onto the open air the location of the German submarine to be picked up by any British surface ship or aircraft in the area. A British plane comes over and together, the American destroyer and the British plane tracked the submarine for hours. Death charges are dropped by the British aircraft. After a number of hours, the German submarine turns and fires a torpedo at the Greer, which misses. The Navy Department report, as Dalek shows, which was already in Roosevelt's hands, said that there's no reason to believe the Germans were aware of the nationality of the destroyer. So, what is it? It was one of Roosevelt's famous, what, half truths. Okay, you can find this in the chapter on the Road to War in Dalek's book. It was on the basis of this incident and a couple of incidents that followed later that Roosevelt declared his policy from September 1941 on. It was American policy to shoot on site any Italian or German vessels in the North Atlantic. What Roosevelt was doing was looking for his incident that would force us into the war. There's a debate that goes on in America at this time over whether nobody really knows all the facts of what is going on in Roosevelt's mind and what he is doing behind the scenes. Some suspect the debate is, should America get into this war? On the one side are the interventionists with their headquarters in the East, especially in New York. Really, the old establishment of the days of World War I is active all over again. They have the important papers on their side. They have Hollywood. They have the loose publications. Henry loose his publications. Time, life, fortune, and so on. The intervention, the opposite camp, the non-interventionists, which as you know have gone down in the history books with a delightful name of isolationists. That sounds really nice and suggests a very open-minded person, doesn't it? These isolationists, otherwise known as non-interventionists, have their base among smaller businessmen and more in the middle class than in the upper or the working class. Geographically in the Midwest, headquartered intellectually in Chicago and if you want to pinpoint it, Colonel Robert McCormick's office at the top of the Tribune Tower. But totally outclassed socially, economically, in terms of any kind of influence. They lose the debate, although early December of 1941, still 80% of the American people favor staying out of the war unless we were attacked. Well, we are attacked. We're attacked at Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is one of those cases where something happens that directs the attention of the American public to foreign policy in a way that they can't avoid thinking about it, right? You have to admit that's a pretty spectacular and rather urgent way of forcing people to think about foreign policy as the hostage, Iranian hostage crisis was. And in the same way, for the first time Americans are now paying attention to foreign policy and they say, wow, there are such crazy people in the world. Here we are, just minding our own business. You know, we were on a picnic when the thing happened. And here these crazy people want to attack us. Well, go figure human nature. Americans are the most peaceful, sweetest, the most generous people in the world, people who love their children, right? Basically good guys and here these awful people now attacking us. Well, as you know, in the case of the Iranian hostage crisis, there was a whole history that the American people were unaware of. For 25 years, the Americans had supported in every way a government which they had imposed on the Iranians. The government of the Shah after the 1950s, the American CIA overthrew the nationalist government of Mossadeq in Iran. Supported then the Shah's government, made him our ally in that area. I set up the Shah's secret police, the Savak, with the CIA expertise. And for some reason there were groups in Iran which held this against us. And when they could, when they could humiliate us, when they could seize our embassy, when they could permit pictures to be taken of the American flag being used to transport trash out to the garbage pail, they did it to get back. The Japanese attack us on December 7th, 1941, not because they are totally insane, not because they had nothing better to do that day. They attack us because of what had happened in the months preceding. The Japanese, whatever you might wanna say about them, and during the Second World War, there was almost everything said about them. There were not too many people who were old enough to realize the degree of race hatred that was institutionalized and permitted against the Japanese in that war, much worse than against the Germans.  They don't willingly take on a country as powerful as the United States. In 1941, when the United States enters the war, American GNP is equal to that, of Britain, Germany, Russia, and Japan put together.  Why did they do this? They felt that the alternative was too humiliating. Too humiliating. American policy was that the Japanese in expanding into China, and then further down into Southeast Asia, trying to take over Indochina from the weak French Vichy government, East Asian Empire of theirs was going to cut America off from too much of the world market, and besides, there were being very bad people. With Cordell Hull, again, and with Stimson and Roosevelt, you have, again, that Woodrow Wilson type, Hectorine, Nagine, Nugine type of approach to foreign policy, okay? You're very bad people. You do bad things. What do you mean, being aggressive and trying to create a world empire at this time in history? Japanese say, well, we came too late, unfortunately, but that's the way it is. The British, French, and others have their empires. American say it's not permissible, not permissible. And the situation gets worse and worse after the tripartite pact, because the United States is very suspicious of Japan, and then as 1941 goes on. The immediate cause of the attack on Pearl Harbor was the freezing of Japanese assets and the subsequent petroleum embargo against Japan in the summer of 1941. As a last ditch appeal, Japanese say, let's get together, send Prince Kanoi, the Japanese prime minister, anywhere you want, Hawaii, San Francisco, even on American soil to discuss these issues. The Americans say, well, that sounds interesting. First of all, you have to get out of China. The Japanese say, this is unheard of. The idea that the issue to be discussed will be settled beforehand. And what country, I mean, I'm not saying that Japanese were justified in China by no means. By no means, and they were particularly brutal in an awful kind of way in China. But what other empire in history is ever voluntarily withdrawn from hundreds of thousands of square miles in control over tens and hundreds of millions of people? No countries have ever done that. We could just as easily have demanded that the English get out of India or else we would attack England. It's simply not the way things are done among great powers. But this American moralistic tone prevailed. The Japanese are getting more and more desperate. The oil embargo, of course, means that a time bomb is ticking away. The reserves of the Japanese Imperial Navy are being depleted day by day. The oil embargo is also one on the part of Britain and the Netherlands against Japan. You understand, other countries don't think that the world was made so that the United States lays down the law whenever it wants. Japanese are not gonna permit their navy to be stranded, to be grounded without petroleum. Before the reserves are exhausted, they will make a move. Okay, and they do at Pearl Harbor. That those battleships at Pearl Harbor, battleship row, again, great foresight on the part of a government agency, right? Do you know that the battleships were lined up one after the other? It looks nice. It suggests great power, that's sure it does. Those ships go into history along with the other great mystery ships. The USS Maine mysteriously blown up in Havana Harbor, edging the United States, giving a big push to the war against Spain. Or the ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. The destroyers allegedly fired upon by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, providing the reason for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which was a legal base, such as it was, for the Vietnamese war. Other ships, the Lusitania, not an American ship, but playing a role in American history. It's carrying six million rounds of ammunition, at least. What was it doing in submarine infested waters out in the open that way? Target for German submarines. The USS Liberty, the American spy ship destroyed by the Israelis in 1967. What was the real story there? Well, those ships in Pearl Harbor are another of the phantom, you might say the phantom ships or the mystery ships. The reason it's a mystery only came out after the war. President Roosevelt, of course, in this inimitable way, goes to Congress and says, we were totally surprised by this dastardly attack. There was a revisionist historian named Charles Tansel, who used to tell his classes at Georgetown. President Roosevelt went to Yalta and came back and told the American people he had made no concessions to Stalin. So the dying Roosevelt finished as he had lived with a lie on his lips. This is a man for whom deception was a way of life. This Roosevelt, well, to give you an example, from the author I mentioned before, Dalek, talking about Roosevelt's policy in staging incidents in the North Atlantic and so on. In the light of the national unwillingness to face up fully to the international dangers confronting the country, you see this is an apologist for Roosevelt. In the light of the fact that the American people were not willing to face up to our dangers, it is difficult to fault Roosevelt for building a consensus by devious means. Okay, in other words, by lying about it. He told the people that we had been totally surprised at Pearl Harbor. That wasn't true. And the main reason it wasn't true is that we had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and we were privy to the messages sent from Tokyo, to the consulate in Honolulu, to the Japanese embassy in Washington, to the Japanese consulate in Hong Kong, and so on. We intercepted their messages and we could translate them and read them. You might ask yourself, what more do you have to have to be aware of an impending attack of that magnitude? Do you have to be there right in the room where they're talking about it? Do you have to actually be there? The whole issue of Pearl Harbor is still one which is very murky, very obscure, and books keep coming out all the time. Couple of years ago, two books came out, one on either side. The pro-Rosevelt one was Pranga. Pro-Rosevelt in the sense that the story has given out by the administration that they were totally surprised by the attack, this story is maintained. The opposite, the Roosevelt administration had culpable knowledge of the impending attack as presented by the popular historian John Toland in a book called Infamy. There were a number of investigations and I think it is still impossible to say exactly what happened. What we do know is that the messages that were deciphered and translated and known to the administration become increasingly, the Japanese messages to the embassy in Washington become increasingly frantic. As November goes on, we know that on November 25th, Secretary of War Stimpson, by the way, the man who had been Secretary of State under Hoover is now brought into the administration as Secretary of War. As Tansel said, nobody ever deserved the name Moore. Stimpson, by the way, is a Republican. This is the beginning of the bipartisan foreign policy. Whatever American foreign policy is, is supported by all good Americans, whether they're Republicans or Democrats. It's another part of Roosevelt's very clever politicking in this. November 25th, Stimpson wrote in his diary about a meeting at the White House. There, the president brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked. This is November 25th. Perhaps as soon as next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. Just to give you an idea on December 1st, messages are intercepted to various diplomatic outposts from Tokyo, ordering them to begin burning documents and code books. On the night of December 6th, Saturday night, this is all in the record of the Pearl Harbor Investigations, a message is received, intercepted to the Japanese embassy in Washington, saying we are starting to send you a 13-part message. Okay, wait until you have the whole thing, then deliver it to the State Department exactly at 1 p.m. tomorrow, Sunday. Okay, a messenger comes over from the decoding agency right to the White House. President Roosevelt is there with his friend Harry Hopkins and looks over the message and turns to Hopkins and says, according to the naval officer who is the messenger, this means war. Well, this means war and what does the American, what do the leaders of the American government do that night? Knowing that war is gonna come the next day. President Roosevelt plays with his stamp collection. The head of naval operations, Admiral Stark, goes to the theater. The head of the Army, George Marshall, doesn't know what he did that night and it's the same all across the board. Well, you see, this is the sort of thing that keeps suspicions about Pearl Harbor alive. So this is very, very strange stuff. The next morning, people are going to their offices. George Marshall goes, the head of the Army, goes horseback riding, by the way. Doesn't get into his office until about 1130. For weeks they have suspected that war might break out any day. Doesn't get to his office until 1130. It occurs to him, this occurs to somebody over the Navy Department, except the Navy Department, they say, we're not gonna do anything about this. That doesn't really matter. It's a coincidence. It occurs to him that one o'clock, Washington time is dawn in Hawaii. And he's gonna send a message to General Short, who's the head of the Army in the Hawaiian Islands. Instead of using the scrambler telephone on his desk, he sends the message by commercial telegraph, by Western Union. The message is received while Pearl Harbor is burning. Now, was Roosevelt somehow planning to use Pearl Harbor as a way to get us into the war? I don't think there's any way of answering that definitively. But that Roosevelt, by that time, very much wanted to get us into the war, there is no doubt anymore. That old argument, was Roosevelt sincere when he said, I'm in favor of peace. We have to stay out of this war. There's no one who wants peace more than I do. That argument is finished. Roosevelt lied about that, and he deceived the American people. The British documents were released. One relevant document, one relevant set of documents released on January 1st, 1972. And I'm quoting from the New York Times account. War entry plans laid to Roosevelt. Britain releases her data on talks with Churchill. Formerly top secret British government papers made public today. He said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August, 1941, that he was looking for an incident to justify opening hostilities against Nazi Germany. On August 19th, Churchill reported to the war cabinet in London on other aspects of the Atlantic Charter meeting that were not made public. Quote, he, Roosevelt, was obviously determined that they should come in. If you were to put the issue of peace in the water Congress, they were debated for months. The president had said he would wage war but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. Everything was to be done to force an incident. End quote from the minutes of the British cabinet.   And that's what he did in connection with the Second World War. Time is getting very short. We're not gonna be able to get into the epic of this war in as much detail as I had thought. It is a great war. It is as we are told again and again, the last good war. Good not necessarily in terms of its consequences, which have brought about the destruction of any possibility of a balance of power in Europe and East Asia, by the total destruction of Japanese military forces, according to the constitution we forced on the Japanese, they are not permitted to have armed forces. Okay, very typical of the mentality of the time. The idea that somehow circumstances never change. Time can be frozen. The idea that perhaps the Japanese might sometime require armed forces did not occur to the American policy makers. The West Germany that exists today is one half the size of Bismarck's Reich because of the division with East Germany and also because all of these territories were taken away from Germany after the Second World War. Poland was moved west. That was one of the things that was done at Yalta. They decided to move Poland west. They did that by giving these territories, this territory to Russia and the Poles took over East Prussia, Pomerania and the Sudetenland, and Silesia, the Silesia here. Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, the Czechs finally solved the German question that had come up, that had been created with Czechoslovakia in 1919. They simply expelled three and a half million Germans. This is an aspect of the Second World War, by the way, which is not much discussed, and that is the expulsion of 17 million Germans from totally German areas in 1944 and 1945. That was one of the episodes at the end of the war, something like two and a half million Germans still unaccounted for. Clearly enough, many, many of them died in the course of the expulsion. Well, the last good war, the problem, the main problem with this idea, the last good war is that one of our allies was Joseph Stalin. And I wonder how long people can keep compartmentalized in their minds. On the one hand, last good war, Great Heroic Alliance with the Britain and Russia. On the other hand, another compartment of their minds, what we have learned from people like Zoljinitsyn in his book on the Gulag Archipelago. What was the nature of this regime, with which we allied ourselves and which we supported? And by the way, here's another insight on Roosevelt, also from Dalek's book. Roosevelt, after Russia is attacked by Germany in June of 1941, has to convince the American people that we should send Len Lise to Russia. There's a good deal of anti-communism in those days, especially among American Catholics. So, according to Dalek, he told a press conference on September 30th that Article 124 of the Russian Constitution guaranteed freedom of conscience. Freedom equally to use propaganda against religion, he said, which is essentially what is a rule in this country, only we don't quite put it the same way. Roosevelt, like Wilson, was not a very not a man with great intellectual scope. What he was trying to do in some unbelievably dumb way was convince the Americans that there was freedom of religion in Russia. Therefore, it was okay to send them Len Lise. And he actually said that this article of the Stalinist Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of religion, was pretty much the same as the American First Amendment. That's maybe the nadir of misunderstanding. What was the nature of this regime of Stalin's? It was a dictatorship from the moment that the authoritarian, totalitarian dictatorship from the moment that the Bolsheviks had taken over in 1917, the history of the Soviet secret police is so notorious that every few years they have to change their name, change their initials from Cheka to Gepeu, GPU to Agpoo, to NKVD to MVD into today, the KGB. Robert Conquest, the British historian, has a book called The Great Terror. And you can read this, of course, in Zoljinitsyn also, the Gulag Archipelago. It was a character of this regime. This was a regime which in the period of the collectivization of agriculture after 1928 caused through the famines that came about and through actual warfare waged on the peasantry, which refused to give up the land, caused an unknown number of deaths, probably in the range of four to six million. They came, the purge of the Communist Party itself in the middle of the 1930s. The great show trials in the purge of the party in which, according to Conquest, there were seven million arrests and what one out of every 10 people arrested was shot.  However, the analogous German purge, known as the Night of the Long Knives, which occurs in June of 1934, costs about 200 lives. And what's happening behind the Iron Curtain in Russia nobody knows about. The greatest number of lives, of course, were lost in connection with the Gulag itself. The system of slave labor camps that Zoljinitsyn compares to islands strung on archipelago, strung out along the great sea of the Soviet Union. These concentration camps took all comers, masses and masses of people in successive waves. At first, of course, Tsarists and Mensheviks, Russian anarchists that were sent to these labor camps, Orthodox priests, then the Kulaks, the Ukrainian peasantry and the peasantry and other parts of the Soviet Union and the members of the Communist Party itself when it was being purged. Then when Russia starts expanding east in Europe, Polish prisoners of war, many of whom were murdered at Katyn Forest, then when it takes over the Baltic states, the Lithuanian and Estonian and Latvian middle classes transported on mass into the camp system. Then German prisoners of war, Japanese, Hungarians, whoever's fighting on the Russian front. At times when they need labor in the camps to build a Baltic white sea canal, they will go into movie theaters in Moscow, put on the lights, arrest everyone there, put them into trucks and send them to the camps. This is a system of camps all across the Soviet Union. Vorkuta is up here, out on the Pacific in Siberia, across from Japan. There is the notorious, you might as well know the name, Kolima. There's a system of camps in itself, covering an area four times the size of France in which, according to conquest, probably around three million people died. This is the nature of our ally and I ask you to imagine as a hypothetical, imagine a photograph taken in the course of the Second World War. And what it shows is three allies and friends partying, wherever. Some international meeting heads of states and they're partying, toasting each other. You have Franklin Roosevelt and you have Winston Churchill and you have Adolf Hitler. Does that sound repulsive?  Winston Churchill in his endless hypocrisy goes so far at Tehran as to give Stalin a crusader's sword, a sword which had been in the possession of the British crown. It seems to me, it's a very big thing to come to a conclusion about, but this puts into doubt, this at least raises the question of the moral character of this war. The war, of course, is even further compromised by the way it is conducted. In the 19th ce