Uncovering
The Forces For War
by
Conrad K. Grieb
[Part 2]
EXAMINER BOOKS
P. O. Box 144-Station Y
NEW YORK 21, N. Y.
Copyright. 1947
ANONYMITY
“So you see, my dear Coningsby, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” — Coningsby (page 233, Century Edition, 1903) by Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield.
(First published in 1844)
VI
Contents
Foreword
1. British-American Rapprochement 1
2. British-German Cleavage 7
3. “Roping in America” — 1917 15
4. Twenty Years Armistice 27
5. “Roping in America” — 1941 49
6. Other Influences 73
7. Conclusions 89
Appendices:
No. I President Lincoln and the International Bankers of His Day 91
No. II British Concentration Camps In the Boer War 93
No. III The War in South Africa, by J. A. Hobson 95
No. IV Democracy and Social Instability, by J. Middleton Murry 99
No. V Winston Churchill in India 101
No. VI Winston Churchill on War 101
No VII Walter Rathenau Predicted Germany Today 103
No. VIII Austria Before Hitler, by Dr. Joseph Eberle 104
No. IX Danzig and The Corridor, by W. H. Dawson 106
No. X Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith 107
No. XI Theodore Herzl Confutes Nathan Ohrbach 108
Bibliography 110
Index 112
Books For Collateral Reading 117
VII
“One does not need to be endowed with an abnormally vivid imagination in order to foresee that for us to guarantee Germany’s Eastern frontier would be an act of sheer criminal lunacy.” — R. W. Walmsley, London Economist, 14th Nov. 1931 (p. 914).
Sir Walter Layton, M.A., C.B.E., Editor of The Economist, commented on the letter above as follows:
“We are apt to judge, when we look into the East Europe settlement, that its terms are inequitable and they ought not to be perpetuated even if they could be.” (Page 899.)
VIII
CHAPTER FOUR
Twenty Years Armistice
“Behind the facade of Government two occult powers are now determining the destinies of the world.”
“One of these is the disseminated Wealth of the Democracy, canalized both by the plutocratic oligarchy of the Bankers (la Haute Finance), whose clients, the Modern States, great and small, are constrained to apply to them for immense loans, and by the great manufacturers and mining proprietors, who tend to be actuated solely by economic interest and who often combine in international trusts, the operations of which are merely hampered by patriotic questions of national policy and national honour.”
“The other power is the mysterious pervasive force known as Public Opinion, which is becoming more and more conscious of its efficacy, and, as its curiosity concerning the public weal and concerning international facts and correlations grows more alert is manifesting a proportionately livelier jealousy of its prerogatives.” — (William Morton Fullerton, Problems of Power (page 1.)
The twenty years armistice between the two World Wars has been well called by one writer, John Howland Snow, the “tragic interludes of ‘Peace.” Of this period William Orton wrote in the preface to his book. TWENTY YEARS ARMISTICE — 1918-1938:
“Twenty years ago the great guns of the west ceased firing. Millions of exhausted men sought home and work, leaving their dead behind them. But up in the Arctic Circle, across the Polish marshes and the Russian plains, along the Danube and the Mediterranean, in Asia Minor and Serbia, the war went on. Suicide, assassination, and revolution swept through the western world. Bounteous harvests brought ruin and not rejoicing, debt piled on debt, hatred across frontiers reflected the deepening privation within.”
* America. . . . WHICH WAY? page 23
[Page 27]
“The first decade brought general economic disaster. In the second the political structure began to crack, as a settlement backed by force felt the strain of an answering counter thrust. No more than a collapsing house can suddenly be rebuilt could Europe swiftly be reconstructed; instead came an inconceivable rearmament. Such effort as had never been mobilized for living was again mobilized for destruction. While babies were masked against poison from the sky, old men dug holes in the ground for refuge, and millions of youths trod their fathers’ tracks the road to death.”
“Will it never end? May our children live? Is there anywhere, in this shame of civilization, the germ of a new conscience, the hope of a true peace? It is time to take stock. Versailles, Geneva, Locarno — where and how did we fail? Or is there a curse on us all: on all our pacts, treaties, and covenants? It is of no more use to group ourselves into rival gangs to defame and denounce each other, with the good men all on one side — one’s own — and the bad men all, on the other. That way lies everlasting war. It is of no more use to hope that men will become brothers overnight, with a sudden dawn of reason triumphant over centuries of passion. But hope itself we cannot abandon: because we dare not.”
“It is time to take stock; to survey these two ghastly decades from the depth of our economic and political distress, and face our errors. War is now, as it never was before, the major industry — in dollars and cents — of nearly all ‘civilized’ peoples. Even America renounces war on paper and arms to the teeth in practice; every frontier of the old world, every capital, prepares for the coming death. Something is wrong — not merely with day to day policy, but the fundamental attitudes and assumptions which that policy reflects. Perhaps a review of the record will help to reveal what is wrong. The construction of a social order based on peace instead of war cannot be accomplished by a priori schemes of, any sort whatever; it must proceed from realistic study of what has actually happened, why and how.”*
* Such is this attempt.
[Page 28]
We have reviewed a number of responsible opinions on the Versailles Treaty. Admittedly the Entent attempt at peace was a failure. We have also reviewed some influences making that “peace.” Germany, precariously shaky within, accepted an armistice on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, while her still well-equipped armies were in the field. Forced to bear the onus of the “Guilty Nation” as a sop to public opinion in the countries of the conquerors, Germany was made to suffer to an appalling extent from the British blockade for months after the armistice was signed. (For a complete description read Arthur Bryant’s UNFINISHED VICTORY, the chapter Famine Over Europe.)
Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, author of THE GENESIS OF THE WORLD WAR; IN QUEST OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE, etc., wrote in part in The New York World Telegram on March 29, 1940:
“Some maintain that one people is more cruel and brutal than another. They point to the long-since-exploded German atrocities during the World War and to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. But they overlook that fact far and away the greatest atrocity in all human history was the British blockade of Germany for months after November, 1918, as a result of which over 800,000 German women, children and old people were starved to death and millions were emaciated and stunted.”
“Had Hitler tortured and killed everyone of a half million Jews living in Germany in 1933 such a foul and detestable act would still have left him a piker compared with Britain’s blockade of 1918-19.” (Italics ours — Ed.)
* See Appendix IV.
[Page 29]
Collin Brooks, English author of books on economics and finance, writes in CAN CHAMBERLAIN SAVE GREAT BRITAIN?:
“Germany herself never accepted, and does not now accept, the view that she was blood guilty, nor the view that she was thoroughly defeated in the field. Nine days before the Armistice one of the German High Command told his Government that ‘the German army is still strong enough to stand against its opponents for months to come, to achieve local success and exact new sacrifices from the enemy.’”
“We are not here concerned to argue the rightness of either viewpoint. We are concerned only to note the indisputable fact that, whatever the guilt of Germany in 1914 and whatever the state of her armies in 1918, she accepted an armistice on terms that were afterwards deliberately broken.”
“The ‘Treaty’ was handed to her, metaphorically, on the point of a bayonet. It was, therefore, not a treaty at all, since the very word means an agreement reached by negotiation. The German Empire was stripped of its overseas possessions. These were the two most glaring breaches of faith which rankled in the bosoms of the German people long after the War had ended. That Germany should be disarmed while her small and vindictive neighbors were strongly arming rankled ‘only less’ bitterly.”
“What followed?”
“The events in post-war Germany have been often described. To avoid any suspicion of over-statement arising from personal prejudice I extract a striking account from a book written from the standpoint of observers who would place their faith in the old democracy rather than in new dictatorship, which was published in 1935. It is THE WAY OF THE DICTATORS, by Lewis Broad and Leonard Russell.”
[Page 30]
“With admirable restraint they write:
The economic distress in Germany in the decade following the War was more severe than anything known in England in modern times. It fell short, certainly, of the famine in Russia, but the German people endured privations unparalleled among civilized races in our day. As a result of the Allied blockade — which continued for some months after the War ended — there was a scarcity of all kinds of food. The nation lost much of its power of resistance to illness and infection; ill-nourishment produced a mental inertia in adults; children were to be seen suffering from hunger madness.”
“These were the conditions that saw the birth of Hitlerism.”
“The blockade was lifted; the standard of living gradually improved, but it remained, and remains below the level in England and France The working classes had a grim struggle for existence. There was the nightmare for the nation of the catastrophic plunges of the Mark, when as paper money was churned out by the printing presses the people’s wealth and savings vanished. There was a respite, and then Germany felt the onset of the world economic blizzard. The chaos of national bankruptcy again appeared imminent. Trade and industry collapsed, men went out of work thousand after thousand, until at one time it was estimated that the unemployed touched a figure of ten millions.”
“This is the background, these are the conditions which explain the rise of Hitlerism. The older democratic parties appeared to be failing in the maintenance of the old order. The people turned to Hitler as the strong man who could save the country from bolshevism. The older parties were conscious of the limitations of their ability and power. Hitler was conscious of the national aspirations, and proclaimed his ability to bring about their fulfilment.” (Page 120.)
[Page 31]
Lloyd George, in THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PEACE TREATIES, writes:
“It is not difficult to patch up a peace that may last until the generation which experienced the horrors of war has passed away. .. What is difficult is to draw up a peace which will not provoke a fresh struggle when those who have had practical experience of what war means have passed away . . . you may strip Germany of her colonies, reduce her armaments to a mere police force and her navy to that of a fifth-rate power; all the same, in the end if she feels that she has been unjustly treated in the peace of 1919 she will find means of exacting retribution from her conquerors. . . . Injustice, arrogance, displayed in the hour of triumph will never be forgotten or forgiven.”
“For these reasons I am, therefore, strongly averse to transferring more Germans from German rule to the rule of some other nation than can possibly be helped. I cannot conceive any greater cause of future war than that the German people who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races in the world, should be surrounded by a number of small states, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamoring for reunion with their native land. The proposal of the Polish Commission that we should place 2,100,000 Germans under the control of a people which is of a different religion and which has never proved its capacity for stable self-government throughout its history must in my judgment lead sooner or later to a new war in the East of Europe.”
“If we, are wise, we shall offer to Germany a peace, which while just, will be preferable for all sensible men to the alternative of Boshevism. We cannot both cripple her and expect her to pay. .. It must be a settlement which will contain in itself no provocations for future wars. . . .”
[Page 32]
Clemenceau, supported by a telegram sent to Lloyd George by 370 of his supporters in Parliament urging him to redeem his election pledges to “hang the Kaiser” and to make Germany pay till the “pips squeaked,” was able to bring to naught this belated sanity on the part of a man elected to make a peace.
Kirby Page quotes other English opinion as follows: *
“The memoirs of Lord Carnock which have recently been published contain much significant data. As Sir Arthur Nicolson, he was Permanent Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs during the critical days prior to and after the outbreak of hostilities. In the present volume which has been edited by his son we are informed that Lord Carnock ‘was incensed by the theory, which was even then (1917) being propagated, that Germany had provoked the war. .. He followed the peace negotiations with interest and apprehension. He was appalled by the Treaty of Versailles. Particularly did he resent the paragraph which obliged Germany by force to admit that she was solely responsible for the war.’” (PORTRAIT OF A DIPLOMATIST. Page 314.)
“After endeavoring to interpret the reasons why his father’s generation of diplomats felt obliged to follow policies which eventually proved to be fatal, Mr. Harold Nicolson, himself a qualified student of international affairs, wrote in PORTRAIT OF A DIPLOMATIST,”(XV, XVI.):
“This does not mean that I consider Germany responsible for the war, or that I feel anything but dislike for that ignorant and disgraceful paragraph in the Treaty of Versailles which endeavors to fix such responsibility upon her. I consider on the contrary that Germany is placed at an unfair disadvantage in all discussions of the origins, as distinct from the causes of the war. As regards the origins (1900-14) I consider Germany at fault; though even less at fault than Austria or Russia.”
* National Defense, page 111.
[Page 33]
“As regards the causes (1500-1900) I consider the main onus falls on England. This distinction requires further explanation. By 1900, having absorbed the Dutch Republics in South Africa, the British Empire was satiated. She desired only to preserve the vast possessions which she had acquired. This placed her in a defensive position — a position which it is easy to represent as being honorable and pacific. Our own predatory period — and it was disgraceful enough — dated from 1600 to 1900. During that period we were far more violent and untruthful than were the Germans during those fourteen years which preceded the war. Unfortunately, however, the historians of the war are bound from lack of space to throw the maximum emphasis upon the period when England was sitting digestive in her armchair and when Germany, young and hungry, was manifesting the unwisdom of adolescence. Before we blame Germany, we must first blame our own Elizabethans. The spirit was exactly the same. The Germans, however, owing to a higher state of culture and rectitude, behaved less blatantly; and were less successful.”
Evidently the Germans have never been quite tough enough in their war policies to entitle them to a seat among the mighty who put their official seal on all righteousness. In London on January 9, 1946, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder told high British officers that Germany had lost the war because she had not followed the principles of total warfare.* — (N. Y. Times, Jan. 10, 1946.)
Freda Utley, an Englishwoman, married to a Russian Jew, disillusioned after living for some years in the Soviet Union, writes:
“It is usual to say that the Nazis will never be satisfied, and to picture the Germans as a peculiar people, more aggressive and power-loving and chauvinist than the British and French and other ‘peace-loving powers.’ This argument takes no account of past history of the fundamental causes of German aggression.”
* See Appendices V and VI.
[Page 34]
“In the past Britain and France were just as aggressive, else they could never have acquired their great colonial empires. The scramble for colonies went on merrily all through the nineteenth century and came to an end only when most of Asia and Africa had been divided up. By the opening years of the twentieth century England and France had not only bitten off about as much as they could chew, but realized that further colonial conquest must lead to war between the imperialist powers. Hence the Open Door policy proclaimed for China by the United States at Britain’s instigation. Moreover, the ease and security which colonial exploitation had produced in England and France conduced to a pacific temper and a desire to sit down and enjoy life. Why should we assume that the Germans would react any differently to the possession of a great empire? The argument that they are peculiarly aggressive by nature simply does not hold water. Until the Napoleonic wars the Germans had little national consciousness and were regarded as hopelessly peaceful people by the more ‘virile’ French. French aggression from Louis XIV to Napoleon finally galvanized the Germans into abandoning their old pleasant unnationalist and pacific ways. They formed themselves into a nation under Prussian leadership, but by that time most of the ‘uncivilized’ races and peoples had already been conquered by Britain, France, Holland, Belgium and the United States. Since there were no more colored people to conquer, the Germans were driven, first in 1914-18, to attempt a redivision of Asia and Africa through the defeat of France and England, and then from 1933 onward to try to form a European empire.” (THE DREAM WE LOST, page 339.)
[Page 35]
Arthur Bryant writes of the Treaty (in UNFINISHED VICTORY):
“The evil went far beyond the confines of Germany Before the war she had been the best customer of Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, Holland, Norway, Switzerland and all Scandinavia, and the second best of Great Britain, France and Belgium. German capital and organization had helped to turn the wheels of industry in every country in central and eastern Europe. The economic dislocation of Germany meant, therefore, the economic dislocation of a whole continent. . . . So blinded were men by hatred after the suffering and destruction of four year’s warfare that many otherwise sane leaders of industry and finance lent themselves to this suicidal policy. They thought that by doing so they would cripple an energetic and dangerous rival forever.” (Page 69.)
“. . . the misery of Austria provided one of the most terrible spectacles of post-war Europe.” (Page 96.)
We could quote many more authorities on what the Peace of 1919 meant to Europe in starvation, misery and horror.
Two English writers tell us who used to advantage this misery and prostration of Teutonic peoples in Central Europe.
Ellis Ashmead Bartlett writes:
“Among this conglomeration of nationalities and creeds (in Vienna — Ed.) the Jew stood out prominently and dominated every situation. Jews of every race were to be found amongst this cosmopolitan throng and as the Jew knows no frontiers except the faith of his co-religionists. He was generally first in possession of news, true or false, and was thus able to control the great speculative market. .. One only sees the Jew in his real element during these world cataclysms. It is only then that his peculiar qualities have full scope for their employment.”
“Thus, dying Austria became the happy hunting ground for the Jewish vulture, although foreign ‘Has Vogels’ were also plentiful. . . . The little Jews swarmed over Vienna and devoured its decaying remains like flies round a raw steak on a hot summer’s day. One could scarcely walk in the street without treading on them. The city, its institutions, finance and material wealth crumbled in their hands and they crowded out the hotels, restaurants, cafes and shops.” (THE TRAGEDY OF CENTRAL EUROPE, page 37.)
[Page 36]
Arthur Byrant writes of Germany (in UNFINISHED VICTORY):
“The change in the distribution of German wealth that followed this great disaster (the inflation-Ed.) amounted to nothing less than a revolution. the chief gainers were those who had been able to command foreign currency. . . . It was the Jews with their international affiliations and their hereditary flair for finance who were best able to seize such opportunities. . . . They did so with such effect that even in November, 1938, after five years of anti-semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned according to the The Times (London) correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich. Most of it came into their hands during the inflation. The Jews obtained a wonderful ascendancy in politics, business and the learned professions. In the artistic and learned professions the Jewish supremacy was as marked. Authoriship in Germany almost seemed to have become a kind of Hebrew monoply.” (Pages 135-137.)
Vladimir de Korostovetz, one of a prominent pre-War Russian-Ukranian family, writes of postwar Germany:
“Organizers of the White Slave traffic swooped down on pre-Hitler Germany like birds of prey. They formed bogus companies. making adventure films. . . in South America. . . signed contracts with armies of film-struck girls who were promptly packed off to South America. The whole of this unsavory trade was in the hands of International Jewry in general and the scum of Russian Jewry in particular. German theatres and cinemas were in the hands of speculators and controlled by International Jews, whose motto was Money, Money, Money. They made fortunes fostering extremism.” (EUROPE IN THE MELTING POT, pages 96-97.)
[Page 37]
Sisley Huddleston, well-known English journalist, in his book WAR UNLESS, tells us how Germany reacted to this alien exploitation:
“There have been three stages of Germany’s revolt: first, despair, which provoked passive resistance and bankruptcy; second, finesse, of which Stresemann was the principle exponent by which Germany gradually moved from one position to another; third, force.” (Page 79.)
After years of travail, President von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist party, to the Chancellorship. The new Government’s policies were designed to bring order out of chaos. An end was put to wrangling of the numerous political parties. Restrictions, applicable only within the Reich, were imposed upon those who had taken advantage of the internal political and economic disorganization. A period of stability began Conditions improved.
The National Socialist Party had been in power scarcely six months when Samuel Untermeyer, * prominent Jewish attorney of New York, delivered a significant address. On August 7, 1933, the day of his arrival from Europe, where he had gone to attend a meeting of the International Jewish Congress at The Hague, Mr. Untermeyer said, in part, over Radio Station WABC:
“I deeply appreciate your enthusiastic greeting on my arrival today, which I quite understand is addressed not to me, personally, but to the holy war in the cause of humanity in which we are embarked. It is a war that must be waged unremittingly until the black clouds of bigotry, race hatred and fanaticism, that have descended upon what was once Germany, but is now medieval Hitler land, have been dispersed. If we once admit, as is brazenly insisted by the German Government, that such fiendish persecution of the people of one race or creed is an internal domestic affair, and not a world concern, how are we to know whose turn will be next? Now or never must all nations of the earth make common cause against the monstrous claim that the slaughter, starvation and annihiliation without rhyme or reason . . . is an internal affair against which the rest of the world must stand idly by and not lift a hand in defense . . . for the jews are the aristocrats of the world.”
*Attorney for Charles M. Schwab during First World War years, Untermeyer made millions in Bethlehem Steel Corporation stock.
[Page 38]
Thus, in 1933, Organized World Jewry publicly and openly declared war on Germany.
Here is a super-national group of people capable of frustrating efforts toward international amity whenever it sees fit to regard its racial members as being unfairly dealt with. That its members may be guilty of offenses against the customs, traditions, and national cultures of the nations in whose midst they live is, apparently, of no consequence.
Walter Rathenau, [1] ever torn between his German environment and his racial inheritance, perceived this cleavage between Jews and the people among whom they lived. In Maximilian Harden’s paper, Zukunft, March 6th, 1897, he struggles to give a clear picture of the Jewish problem:
“Whoever wishes to see it, should wander through the Tiergartenstrasse at twelve o’clock on a Berlin Sunday morning, or else look into the foyer of a theatre in the evening. Strange sight! There in the midst of German life is an isolated race of men. Loud and self conscious in their dress, hot-blooded and restless in their manner. . . An asiatic horde on the sandy plains of Prussia. . . . Forming among themselves a close corporation, rigorously shut off from the rest of the world. Thus, they live half-willingly in their invisible ghetto, not a living limb of the people, but an alien organism in its body. . . .” (Walter Rathenau, Kessler, page 37.)
1. See Appendix VII.
[Page 39]
Now, with this background, let us proceed to the world situation, which, rather than becoming more serene and secure with the advent of a stable regime in Germany, becomes increasingly agitated.
Douglas Reed, for 11 years, foreign correspondent for The London Times, in his book, DISGRACE ABOUNDING, gives a survey of conditions in Central Europe somewhat different from that of Europe being devoured by an insatiable beast, we Americans have been asked to believe. Referring to the surrender of Czecho-Slovakia to Germany by the democracies, Reed writes:
“The Austrians were of German stock; many of them wanted Hitler; many evils needed remedying in Austria, [2] which a lethargic vested interest regime, monarchists, clericals and Jews, would never have altered. But here . . . in Prague? business was thriving in Prague. One reason was Prague had become a clearing house for Jewish emigration.” (Page 458.)
“But on this occasion chance has enabled me, in an additional chapter, to give you the best possible example of the way organized world Jewry works and of the immense power it wielded in goading word opinion against Germany” (Page 477.)
Then about his American publisher declining to publish DISGRACE ABOUNDING he writes:
“The real meaning of that decision is that, you may slander and libel Germany as much as you like, and be paid for it, but you must not discuss the Jewish problem, you must not assert that there is a Jewish problem. One publisher, not a Jew, said that an American publisher would court misfortune by publishing it, because 90 per cent of the American newspapers are Jewish and the Jewish influence extends in similar proportion throughout the whole ring of trades connected with publishing. The importance of this, for you, is that you should realize that what is presented to you as ‘American Approval’ or ‘American Disapproval’ of this or that British policy is not American but Jewish opinion. . . . If you are to fight Germany again, you must do it for England’s sake. You must not allow yourselves to be egged on by Jews masquerading today as ‘German public opinion, ‘tomorrow as Czechoslovak public opinion,’ the day after as ‘English public opinion’ and the next day as ‘American public opinion.’”
2. See Appendix VIII
[Page 40]
Mr. Reed brings to us information about economic and social conditions in Europe not widely publicized in America:
“One day in the House of Commons, Mr. R. S. Hudson, of your Department of Overseas Trade, said:
Germany was not discriminating against British goods in Germany Our complaint was that Germany was by her methods destroying trade throughout the world. . . . It is difficult to get exact information of the way things are done, but in Central and Southeastern Europe the basis of Germany’s hold is that she pays to the producer much more than the world price. They obviously do that at the expense of their own people, but it does effect us.”
Then Reed says:
“Germans, in their country are not less well cared for than English people in theirs, but better.” (Page 188.)
Reed, then quotes Mr. Hudson again:
“No one wants to introduce similar methods. We do not want to see the cost of bread increased in England because we buy in competition with Germany, wheat in Rumania at over the world price. But clearly we have to meet this competition in the case of Poland, and the Government has made a survey of all possible methods. The only way the Government sees is by organizing our industries in such a way that they will be able to speak as units with their opposite number in Germany and say ‘Unless’ you are prepared to put an end to this form of competition and come to an agreement ‘on the market prices which represent a reasonable return, then we will fight you and beat you at your own game.”
[Page 41]
To this lesson in economics by Parliamentary Secretary Hudson of His Majesty’s Overseas Trade Department, Mr. Reed is quick to reply:
“This is not an answer unless you improve the condition of your work people. It is not enough to say that you will at all cost defend the profits of your manufacturers — unless you are simultaneously prepared to raise the standard of living of your work people.”
Reed, quoting Hudson again:
“Clearly this country is infinitely stronger than, I was going to say any country, but certainly Germany Therefore, we have a great advantage, which would result in our winning the fight.”
Reed, continuing his comment:
“. . . at last, at long last, and after so many years of warnings, the danger seems to have been realized. But you will have to gird your loins as you never did before, if your are really going to win this fight. You are faced with a country immensely strong in arms and immensely strong in real wealth — not gold bars in a vault of the national bank, but industry, agriculture, the thrift and energy of the work people, and the conditions of life they enjoy.”
“In Germany now they have a mighty organization, equipped with full powers, for improving the lot of the work people in factories and work shops. Their engineers and social workers and artists go into the factories and see what needs to be done. They say that a shower room, a recreation room, a restaurant, a medical clinic, a dental clinic is needed and these are provided They have a civic sense, a social conscience, a feeling of the community of German mankind — in spite of their bestial concentration camps — which you lack.” (Page 190.)
[Page 42]
Reed, placing English supremacy above any question of right or wrong, as Mr. Balfour had before him, says:
“England is rearming to meet some imminent, and deadly danger. What danger? Germany. We are not strong enough to withstand her alone; we can only withstand her if we have allies. Our War Minister has stated that in a European war in which we take part we shall send nineteen divisions to the Continental mainland.”
“Presumably to ensure the victory of the Policy of Appeasement by Non-Intervention in the Sacred Right of Self-Extermination.”
“The Czecho-Slovak army had forty-two divisions. If we had let Czecho-Slovakia fight for us, we should presumably not have needed to send the flower of a new British generation abroad to die in the most unfavorable circumstances, for what we can send is less than half what Czecho-Slovakia had.”
Here we have British diplomacy revealed: The constant quest for allies to do battle for British interests whenever and wherever their supremacy is endangered.*
We are indebted to Mr. Reed for giving us a glimpse of the forces gathering for an assault upon the continent — the dark thunderheads of war forming in England with alien, non-British aid.
*Latest press and radio reports have General Anders homeless Polish Army being made a part of the British army, the Dutch home guard being taken under the protective guidance of the British command, and the formation of a German army under. General Rundstedt to fight for British interests acquired in Germany by conquest. Perhaps this accounts for the sudden effort to establish an official government in the country against which Britain and her allies so lately fought a victorious war of destruction.
[Page 43]
Freda Utley has a word to say about Mr. Hudson’s complaint against Germany:
“When the world economic crisis began in 1920, the fall in value of their agriculture exports drove weaker nations ‘of Europe, which had no closed colonial markets, near to bankruptcy. Unable to pay their debts, they dropped out of the international monetary system and started to trade by barter. Germany took the lead in organizing and profiting from this new system of trade-trade among debtors who could no longer get credits from the United States, Britain and France because the gold standard has broken down almost everywhere. Managed currencies, quotas, blocked credits, and barter trade led to the establishment of virtual state monopolies of foreign trade in one country after another. This new method of trading enabled fascist Powers to defy the financial power of England, France and the United States, which the Germans termed international Jewish finance.” (The Dream We Lost, pages 345-346.)
Both Mr. Hudson and Mr. Reed have allowed no question of right or wrong to influence their thinking about the new method of trading which enabled the Fascist powers to escape from the burdensome tolls of international finance. Even war was no deterrent. We quote Kirby Page:
“One of the terrible results of war is found in the fact that it releases such an immeasurable volume of hatred that the victors demand their utmost pound of flesh from the vanquished and thereby sow the seeds of another conflict. The Treaty of Versailles and other World War treaties placed as crushing a burden upon the Central Powers as the Allies thought they could possibly endure. This Carthaginian peace was justified on the ground that Germany and her colleagues were solely responsible for causing the war. Competent historians have now abandoned the theory of the sole guilt of the Central Powers. But the Allied Governments still insist upon claiming the rights and privileges which were extorted from the vanquished and refuse to recognize the justice and necessity of making drastic changes in the peace treaties.”
[Page 44]
“Peace cannot permanetly be maintained if the winners insist upon preserving the status quo as fixed by the iniquitous peace treaties. The Germans are utterly unreconciled to the award of the Danzig Corridor to Poland and eventually will fight for its recovery if a pacific adjustment of this controversy is not secured. They cannot and will not continue to make annual indemnity payments of half a billion dollars for the next forty or fifty years. The harboring of the illusion that peace can be preserved without making radical changes in the peace treaties will lead to tragic consequences.” (National Defense, page 323.)
Imagine New England cut off from the rest of the United States by a corridor running down from Canada to Boston. Boston is as American as Danzig is German. Would American opinion long remain quiet in the face of cries of misgovernment and a desire to be united with the Homeland?
A review of American history will indicate somewhat more precipitate action than that followed by Germany in the case of Danzig and the Corridor. For this, an article by Fletcher Pratt in the American Mercury of December, 1938, entitled U. S. A.: THE AGGRESSOR NATION, will serve as a good illustration.
To cite the numerous statements of competent, authorities condemning the Polish Corridor is beyond our scope. *
Winston Churchill, whose fickle judgement, from political season to political season, leaves one wondering for whose best interests he speaks, said this is the debate on the King’s Speech, November 23, 1932, House of Commons (Hansard, 5th Series, Vol. 272):
*See Appendix IX.
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“. . . I would follow any real path, not a sham or a blind alley which led to lasting reconciliation between Germany and her neighbors. Removal of the just grievances of the vanquished ought to precede the disarmament of the victors. It would be safer to open questions like those of the Danzig Corridor and Transsylvania with all their delicacy and difficulty in cold blood and in a calm atmosphere and while the victor nations still have ample superiority, than to wait and drift on inch by inch, and step by step, until once again vast combinations equally matched confront each other face to face. . . . We might find ourselves pledged ill honour and in law to enter a war against our will and against our better judgment in order to preserve those very injustices and grievances which sunder Europe today, which are the cause ‘of present armaments and which, if not arrested, will cause another war. . . .”
Oh, fickle British Statesman for whom move you the tiller that has guided your country’s Ship of State and the world into that very war of which you spoke?
In his book, DOWN THE YEARS, Sir Austin Chamberlain gives us an example of the British policy ‘of aggression against the Continent. The Low Countries (Holland and Belgium) are encompassed by the extension of the British island shore frontiers across la Manche.
“For in truth,” writes Sir Austin, “their frontier is our frontier and the destruction of their independence would be a fatal blow to our own.” (Page 166.)
Joining forces twenty-five years later with this knight of British imperialism was a liberal democratic imperialist.
“Our frontier is on the Rhine,” Franklin D. Roosevelt is reported to have said to a group of Senators at a White House Conference.
Liberal democratic imperialists liberal with the territory of any country they conquer by an aggression masked in the idealism of a crusade set up themselves as the arbiters of the frontiers of the world, not with justice, but by force of arms.
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Sir Austin did concede, however, “ . . . that we (England) have no direct interest in the Polish Corridor or Upper Silesia and certainly we are not called upon to 46 assume any particular responsibility in regard to them.” Even on these frontiers, far removed from the Low Countries, Sir Austin was not too sure. “But who can predict with confidence,” he wrote in the very next sentence, “that if they (the Polish Corridor and Upper Silesia Ed.) gave rise to conflict, we should remain entirely unaffected and that the experience of 1914 might not be repeated?” (Page 165.)
With its Balance of Power policy, that heart of the British World Empire, removed from the mainland by the narrow width of la Manche (commonly miscalled the English Channel), has brought the disaster of war, death, and destruction to the Continent and the world and powerfully aided, in cooperation with an alien influence shielded in “The City”, * the ascendancy of Bolshevism to its present dominant position in the affairs of the world.
Europe was not to be allowed to progress into social amity, and political and economic stability, under the leadership of the National Socialist Government of the Third Reich. This Government had brought notable improvement to the economic condition of Germany. The measures employed were domestic and internal. They effected no other countries, except as other countries“chose to see a danger to their system of economic and financial exploitation of “Balkanized Europe” as the improved conditions in Germany began to spread throughout Europe.
It is difficult to find non-inflammatory books describing the improving conditions in Central Europe at this time. Samuel Untermeyer’s declaration of a holy war on behalf of Organized World Jewry did immeasurable harm, as it was intended to do, to any fair reporting of the conditions in Europe. Honest scholarship disappeared under pressure from this strongly organized minority.
* See The Empire of “The City,” by E. C. KIIluth.
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An American observer in Germany writes:
“Lurid as were the details of bodily mistreatment, it must be emphatically stated that this form of National Socialist attack on Jewry was exaggerated by the foreign press far out of proportion to its importance in the German anti-Jewish movement and was as far removed from the general tone of German life as Negro lynchings in our South is from normal American life.” (UNDER THE SWASTIKA, page 193, John B. Holt.)
Freda Utley gives us some idea why the details were lurid:
“The Soviet Government’s suspicion that many of its citizens would escape from the socialist paradise if they could is probably justified. Perhaps Stalin has been wiser than Hitler in this respect. Whereas thousands of Jews and a goodly number of liberals have been allowed to leave Germany, and even former victims of the Gestapo have succeeded in getting out of the country to tell the tale of their sufferings to a horrified world, Stalin has shot or interned in concentration camps all whom he suspected of disliking the regime and has prevented even the ‘free’ citizen from leaving the country for a short visit abroad. Consequently, whereas the horrors of Nazi Germany are known to the whole world, very few people know anything about the suffering and oppression of the Russians under Stalin” (DREAM WE LOST, page 306.)
(The reader will understand why Freda Utley’s book “THE DREAM WE LOST” is out of print and scarce.)
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