World War I: 1914-1918

CAUSES OF WORLD WAR I, by the prolific James Corbett.  Thank you to Charles Burris.  Posted on Sunday, November 13, 2022.

 

Alex produces a good analysis here.

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AMERICA’S ROLE IN WORLD WAR I

1. From James Bovard’s “How World War I Still Haunts America,” James Bovard, September 25, 2017.

To broaden support for the war, Wilson partnered with the Prohibition movement. 

You can’t make this stuff up. 

To broaden support for the war, Wilson partnered with the Prohibition movement. Prohibition advocates “indignantly insisted that … any kind of opposition to prohibition was sinister and subversively pro-German,” noted William Ross, author of World War 1 and the American Constitution. Even before the 18th Amendment (which banned alcohol manufacture, sale, and transportation) was ratified, Wilson banned beer sales as a wartime measure. Prohibition itself was a public-health disaster; the rate of alcoholism tripled during the 1920s. To punish lawbreakers, the federal government added poisons to industrial alcohol that was often converted into drinkable hooch; 10,000 people were killed as a result. Deborah Blum, the author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, 2011, noted that “an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place.” It took more than half a century for the quality of American beer to recover from Prohibition. And the effects of the booster shot that organized crime received in those years lasted even longer. Even worse, the war on alcohol paved the way for the war on drugs; many former Prohibition agents signed up to crusade against marijuana after the ban on booze ended. 

Here is another stunning management disaster by the federal government that Bovard illuminates for us: 

As Bourne noted, “War is the health of the state.” The war provided the pretext for unprecedented federal domination of the economy — and endless debacles. In early 1918, the government “shut down all the factories in the country east of the Mississippi River for a week” to save fuel, as Fleming noted. 

It’s clear that the economic fiascos of the WWII economy were rinse and repeat from WWI.  

They, in turn, spurred perennial political discontent that helped lead to a federal takeover of agriculture by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. When the New Deal imposed price controls across the economy in 1933, World War I was the model that administrators touted. 

Britain, and its conspirator in the empire, the U.S., worked to crush Germany.  Was it because their leaders were related by blood?  

World War I was ended by the Treaty of Versailles, which redrew European borders willy-nilly and imposed ruinous reparations on Germany. Wilson had proclaimed 14 points to guide peace talks; instead, there were 14 separate small wars in Europe towards the end of his term — after peace had been proclaimed. The League of Nations charter was written so smarmily that the United States could have been obliged to assist Britain and France in suppressing revolts in the new colonies they garnered from the war.

The chaos and economic depression sowed by the war and the Treaty of Versailles helped open the door to some of the worst dictators in modern times, including Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and Russia’s N. Lenin — whom Wilson intensely disliked because “he felt the Bolshevik leader had stolen his ideas for world peace,” as historian Fleming noted. 

BRITAIN STARTED WORLD WAR I, NOT GERMANY

Germany didn’t start WWI; the British did.  Germany was the only country standing in their way of the British elite [Cecil Rhodes, Milner, and others] creating a new world order.  Here is the complete and full transcript of the interview.

John Denson

Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War

Prolonging the Agony: How the Anglo-American Establishment Prolonged the War for Two-and-One-Half Years.

It’s like a judge hearing two different briefs. 

First Lie: Germany is responsible for WWI.

Truth: The British started it. 

Inspiration came from Carol Quigley . . . books on WWI and WWII.  Anglo-American Establishment, 1949.

10 years later, Tragedy and Hope. 

Clinton gave tribute to Quigley.  Also, he was a Rhodes Scholar.  The plan was to bring Americans to Oxford.   

Quote from Tragedy and Hope on an influential group:

There does exist and has existed an anglophile network, roundtable, and has no aversion to cooperating with the communists; they, in fact, do work with them.

Quigley had no aversions to its goals or aims but to some of its beliefs.  It wishes to remain unknown.  How do you get a world war over the assassination of Archduke of Ferdinand?

1870, John Ruskin at Oxford: Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner created a group that started the Boer War against the Dutch farmers in South Africa.  Their farmland happened to control the world’s best supply of gold and diamonds. The country of Rhodesia is named for Cecil Rhodes.  So is the Rhodes Scholar.  Rhodes made Milner the executor of his 7th will, and that’s when he created the Rhodes Scholarships, 1902.  Ruskin thought that the British Empire was the greatest political organization that had ever been in the world, created by the most intelligent, wealthy people and that needed to be expanded into reclaiming America into the Anglo-American establishment or secret elite. 

Both books contain a diagram of who exactly these people are.  It shows you an inner circle of about 7 people.  Wow.  Tragedy and Hope, this group had a terrible effect on the 20th century by causing WWI and WWII.  Wars are not natural events.  They’re man=made.  The way to end wars is to learn of these mistakes.  The sources they went to were phenomenal, all over the world.  Rothschild was a member and financed many wars.  Control the academia, politics, and international finance.  JP Morgan and Rockefellers became members.  For getting into WWI, they needed America and needed a central bank.  they went secretly to Jekyll Island and created the federal reserve.  First, the bill was opposed by President Taft.  They had to get rid of Taft, so they promoted Teddy Roosevelt.  Colonel House went to promote Woodrow Wilson to New Jersey Governorship who wanted to create the federal reserve and get America into the war. 

Here’s their plan: the only way they could create a new world order with English speaking hierarchy in control was to get rid of Germany.  Germany had progressed to the point economically and other ways to even surpass the British Empire in some ways and was a real threat to their idea of English speaking Anglo-Saxon world government.  So they planned this war.  And they knew that they had to get Russia and France, their land armies, to squeeze Germany, and there was a lot of behind-the-scenes talking to Russia and France back as early as 1904 about the war.  None of this was known to Parliament all secretly done.  So they promised the Russians that if they get into this war, they would get Constantinople.  And get your war port and get into the Mediterranean.  When in reality they never intended Russia to be successful with that.  And they promised Alsace Lorraine to the French [that the French lost in the Franco-Prussian War].

England is more of an Atlantic state than a European one.  And Russia was more French than some Siberian outpost.

They were waiting for a spark to fan the flames to get Germany into war.  There was an incident in Morroco that looked promising but the Germans didn’t take the bait.  But the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, they took that spark by putting in representatives inside the Austrian gov’t and in Serbia to make sure that they did not settle that incident.  The demand that Austria made was we want to come into Serbians and make our own investigation, and the Serbians were instructed not to agree to that.  And the Kaiser had indicated to the Austrians that he would support them.  And then when he saw how bad it was getting, he tried to talk them out of the conditions, and Austria then declares war. 

Edward VII, related to the Russian Czar, he was considered a ne’er do well by Victoria and she had him on a very strict allowance.  But he was traveling, going around on pleasure trips.  But Lord Rothschild created an unlimited expense account for him.  And he would talk to heads of government.  The Russians were convinced that they needed to mobilize and go to war.  So then the Treaty with France brought France in.  So Russia and France mobilized before Germany did anything.  Germany had to act to protect itself.  So that’s how they got WWI started, using the Archduke as the spark, but they had all these other plans to get the war going.  

16:32

Lusitania. 

3.  “The Great Experiment in Mass Murder,” T. Hunt Tooley, November 2, 2017.   This article mainly expresses the dismay that comes from an appalling lack of historical knowledge on wars, battles, key players, and the thrust of violence that gives one pause to realize that history is doomed to repeat itself.  Sort of.  He offers some terrific images to capture what Jordan B. Peterson calls the “pathologizing of society.” 

See James Corbett’s videos and show notes.  His reporting is extensive.

WWI DOCUMENTARIES
The WWI Conspiracy, November 19, 2018 from the James Corbett Report

People’s Century documentary consists of 26 episodes with each part assigned its own title, like a chapter, and was published in 1995.

Part I is titled, People’s Century, Part I, 1900 Age of Hope.

People’s Century, Part II, 1914: The Killing Fields, The original title is Killing Fields: Marching to Glory, Soldiers Face Death on an Industrial Scale in a Ghastly Global War, 1995.

Trench Warfare from Conquest, 2015.
Tactics and Strategy.
The World at War, Ralph Raico.
WWI: The American Legacy.

HISTORY WRITTEN BY THE WINNERS, James Corbett, December 15, 2018.  This is mainly about the historical record and who writes it.  [posted Sunday, November 13, 2022]

1960S REVISIONISM STARTED A DEBATE OVER WHO STARTED WORLD WAR I

1961 sparked new debate on how The Great War broke out and who started it.  It started with Fritz Fischer, a German professor with alliances in the Nazi Party, who launched a series of debates referred to as the “Fischer Thesis Debate.”  Go figure.  

In 1961, Fischer, who by then had risen to the rank of full professor at the University of Hamburg, rocked the history profession with his first postwar book, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (published in English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), in which he argued that Germany had deliberately instigated World War I in an attempt to become a world power

Thankfully, Paul Gottfried has taken Fischer’s claim to task.  Gottfried explains that 

Fischer and his followers ignored what other European countries did to provoke the Great War, unfairly blackened the reputation of German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg—who tried earnestly to iron out differences between England and his country for at least three years before the war started—and misquoted key German actors in the conflict, such as the Kaiser and the chief of the German general staff. 

Each country that made up the Allied Forces in World War I had their own enemy in their sights.  

The avoidable disaster of 1914 teaches us, according to Christopher Clark, how the Great Powers “sleep-walked” their way into a war from which European civilization never recovered. Russia in its drive to dismantle Turkey and control the Dardanelles; Britain in its efforts to reduce a rival’s power even at the risk of encircling the German Empire with hostile alliances; Serbia in its attempts to split apart the Habsburg Empire; and France in its desperate desire to punish the Germans for defeat in the Franco-Prussian War all helped stir the pot.

Fuel for British firebrands. 

Canis has shown in staggering detail how German foreign policy after the fall of Bismarck floundered for decades. The German Naval Program designed to achieve a 3:5 ratio in relation to the British navy, which was then the world’s largest, was an irritant to British political leaders. It allowed firebrands like Winston Churchill—who became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911—to exaggerate German hatred for England, which in fact was never particularly great, as Canis documents by looking at the German press.

Tom Woods interviews Paul Gottfried.  He asks about Gottfried’s review of Sleepwalking Through World War, about the Fischer debate, German guilt, and the different treaties signed at the end of World War that simply crippled nations antagonistic to the Allied powers.  Toward the end, Gottfried mentions German author, Hans Fenske, who wrote about Germany’s exhaustive efforts to bring the war to a peaceful resolution Peace to End All Peace,  I did not know that Wilson was committed to the destruction of the Hapsburg empire or that Austria was put under the rule of the Italians in accordance with the Versaille Treaty. 

Toward the end, Gottfried

For books on World War I, see this list.  See this list for podcasts on World War I.  

TOM WOODS PODCASTS ON WORLD WAR I

“World War I, Sleepwalk to Suicide,” Episode 87, November 1, 2014.  Paul Gottfried’s article of the same title in The American Conservative, January 21, 2014.

“The Start to World War I,” Episode 208, November 2, 2014.
“World War I, the Last Crusade,” Episode 209, November 2, 2014.
“How World War I Changed America,” Episode 211, November 2, 2014.

“Creepazoid Leftist Clergy Salivated Over World War I” with Richard Gamble, author of  The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. It turns out, contrary to what we’re led to believe, that left-wing clergy, far from being “pacifists,” were among the most bloodthirsty and belligerent pro-war voices in the United States. More stuff you’ll learn on my show, and not in school.

“World War I, the Evil Woodrow Wilson, and More,” February 4, 2014.

Read the original article at TomWoods.com. http://tomwoods.com/creepazoid-leftist-clergy-salivated-over-world-war-i/

“How World War I Changed America” with Robert Higgs, July 31, 2014.
“World War I, the Legacy,” Episode 212, November 2, 2014.
“World War I’s Pivotal Year, a Century Later,” Episode 575, January 20, 2016.

RALPH RAICO

See and listen to more of his great work.

Ralph Raico’s “The Great War Retold” is excellent.  Here he endorses Hunt Tooley’s book,

The Western Front: Battle Ground and Home Front in the First World War (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003) by Hunt Tooley, who teaches at Austin College, in Texas, falls into the academic category, and for such a short volume (305 pages) it offers a very great deal indeed.

Tooley traces the roots of the world-historical catastrophe of 1914—1918 to the Franco-Prussian war, which, while achieving German unification in 1871, understandably fostered an enduring resentment in France, “a country that was accustomed to humiliating others during 400 years of warmaking and aggression” (p. 5). Bismarck sought to ensure the Second Reich’s security through defensive treaties with the remaining continental powers (the ones with Austria-Hungary and Italy constituted the Triple Alliance). But under the new (and last) Kaiser, Wilhelm II, the treaty with Russia was permitted to lapse, freeing Russia to ally with France. The over-ambitious Wilhelm’s extensive naval program was perceived by the British as a mortal threat; starting in 1904 they developed an Entente cordiale (cordial understanding) with France, enlarged in 1907 to include Russia. Now the Germans had good reason to fear a massive Einkreisung (encirclement).

“The Why of World War One,” Ralph Raico, 2000.

LEAD-UP TO WORLD WAR I

Eric Margolis on the significance of Pont Alexandre III Bridge, “The Killing Machine of World War I,” Eric Margolis, May 17, 2014.  This is a decent history on the bridge and the political context out of which it was built.

Of the many bridges that span the Seine River, none is more beautiful nor majestic than the Pont Alexandre III. Just south of the splendid Grand Palais, this bridge was named in honor of Russia’s Czar, Alexander III.

Completed in 1892, the bridge is a monument to France’s Bel Epoque and represents the high-water mark of European civilization at the end of the 19th century. It’s also an odd monument to Czarist absolutism here in the birthplace of the French Revolution.

For me, the Pont Alexandre III recalls tragedy and immense sorrow, for this bridge symbolically lit the fuse leading to World War I, whose 100th anniversary we observe this fall.

Pont Alexandre III 3

“Who Started World War I?” Ralph Raico, September 15, 2014.  Raico cites and reviews Christopher Clark’s findings in The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, By Christopher Clark, HarperCollins, New York 2013, 697pp.  

The crisis began on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, the capital of the Austrian-annexed province of Bosnia.  It had its roots, however, in the small neighboring kingdom of Serbia and its strange history. As Serbia gradually won its independence from the Ottoman Turks, two competing “dynasties”—in reality, gangs of murdering thugs—came to power, first the Obrenovic then the Karadjordjevic clan (diacritical marks are omitted throughout). A peculiar mid-nineteenth-century document, drawn up and published by one Iliya Garasanin, preached the eternal martyrdom of the Serbian people at the hands of outsiders as well as the burning need to restore a mythical Serbian empire at the expense both of the Ottomans and of Austria. According to Clark, “until 1918 Garasanin’s memorandum remained the key policy blueprint for Serbia’s rulers,” and an inspiration to the whole nation. “Assassination, martyrdom, victimhood, the thirst for revenge were central themes.”

When Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 after an occupation of forty years, all of Serbia was outraged. The prime minister, Nicola Pasic, and other leaders spoke of the “inevitable” life-and-death struggle against Austria in the sacred cause of “Serbdom.” Yet the country was economically backward, the population largely illiterate. What was required was a great-power sponsor. This they found in Russia.

To better understand Raico’s overview, maps help.  Try this one:

Balkans 191278BK

Yugoslavia, a nation born in 1918, was a country in Southeastern and Central Europe for most of the 20th century. It came into existence after World War I . . .  under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the merger of the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs (itself formed from territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the formerly independent Kingdom of Serbia. The Serbian royal House of Karađorđević became the Yugoslav royal dynasty. Yugoslavia gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris.[2] The country was named after the South Slavic peoples and constituted their first union, following centuries in which the territories had been part of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary.

Renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929, it was invaded by the Axis powers on 6 April 1941.

The review by Raico is fabulous.  Check out a few other details about the war that I’ve never learned until now. 

Clark also deviates from the mainstream in demoting the naval race as a critical factor in British antagonism. London never took Wilhelm’s grandstanding about his ocean-going navy seriously. The British always knew they could outbuild the Germans, which they did.

Russia’s disastrous defeat in the war with Japan, 1904-05, served to divert Russian expansion westwards, to the Balkans.

During the approach to war, in the western democracies, public opinion was a negligible factor. The people simply did not know. When in 1906 British and French military leaders agreed that in the event of a Franco-German conflict British forces would be sent to the continent, this was not revealed to the people. “The French commitment to a coordinated Franco-Russian military strategy” was also hidden from the French public. So much for democracy. 

KEY PLAYERS

The Central Powers

Were the German Empire, the Austro-Hugarian Empire, the Turks (or Ottoman Empire), and the Kingdom of Bulgaria.  Consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria—hence also known as the Quadruple Alliance—was one of the two main factions during World War I (1914–18). It fought and was defeated by the Allied Powers that had formed around the Triple Entente. The origin of the Central Powers was the alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1879. The Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria did not join until after World War I had begun, although the Ottoman Empire retained close relations with both Germany and Austria-Hungary since the beginning of the 20th century.

MEMBER STATES

The Central Powers consisted of the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the beginning of the war. The Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers later in 1914. In 1915, the Kingdom of Bulgaria joined the alliance. The name “Central Powers” is derived from the location of these countries; all four (including the other groups that supported them except for Finland and Lithuania) were located between the Russian Empire in the east and France and the United Kingdom in the west. Finland, Azerbaijan, and Lithuania joined them in 1918 before the war ended and after the Russian Empire collapsed.

WWI PROPAGANDA

An illustrated account of WWI propaganda.

Falsehoods in War Time: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War, Arthur Ponsonby, 1928.  Thanks to this 2017 talk given by Mark Crispin Miller.

Miller cites Robert Parry’s reporting on Obama’s spin on barrell bombs.

“How Media Bias Fuels Syrian Escalation,” Rick Sterling, Consortium News, April 10, 2017.

BATTLES OF WWI

from Anti-War.com:

The biggest battle in US Army history was the 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive. This World War I battle is rarely mentioned in our media and school history books. Once a million American draftees were assembled for combat in France, they were ordered to charge into the strongest German positions, resulting in 26,277 American soldiers slaughtered in just 47 days.

10 Significant Battles of WWI

1. First Battle of the Marne, September 6-10, 1914
2. Gallipoli Campaign, April 1915 to January 1916.
3. Battle of Jutland, May 31 to June 1, 1916.
4. Battle of Verdun, February to December 1916.  Eric Margolis on the Battle of Verdun.
5. Battle of the Somme, July 1 to December 18, 1916.
6. Brusilov Offensive, June 4 to September 20, 1916.
7. Third Ypres Campaign, July 31 to November 10, 1917.
8. German Spring Offensives, March 21 to July 18, 1918.
9. Battle of Amiens, August 8 to November 11, 1918.
10. Battle of Megiddo, September 19 thru 25, 1918.

And the rest . . . .

ARMISTICE DAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1918
1.  “World War I Wasted Lives on Armistice Day,” Joseph E. Persico, 2005.
2.  Hunt Tooley on what that morning looked like.
3.  Jim Bovard on Veteran’s Day in Baltimore.
4.
5.

WWI DEPICTED IN FILM
Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 Paths of Glory depicts the trenches of WWI as well as suicide attacks executed by Americans.  It was designed to slaughter thousands of young American men.  Funny how the WWII commentators and press stoked American fear by citing the Japanese kamikaze fighters, but the U.S. instituted their own kamikaze combatants for no other reason than mass slaughter.

 

All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930.

They Shall Not Grow Old, 2018.  This is a documentary of sorts that captures the comments of the British soldiers who served in the war.  When released it was noted for the color revitalization of the film.  The color doesn’t come into the film until 25;30 mark.

A few decent photographs in this article.  

TRENCH WARFARE

WWI in POETRY
Isaac Rosenberg, 1890-1918.  Poetry Foundation and Poem Hunter.  “Break of Day in the Trenches,” 1916, is the Rosenberg poem read at the end of that documentary on trench warfare.

AFTERMATH of WWI, SHELL SHOCK
Though some of the footage of injured soldiers is interesting, the commentary or assessments of the causes of their debility really is in itself criminal, citing the mind as the source of their problem and not the war itself, the trench warfare, the malnutrition during the war and extended periods of being in a dangerous combat zone replete with dead comrades, trenches turned into toilets, infested with rats that the soldiers were sometimes forced to eat.  Oh, and not to mention the constant bombardment.  And the behavior patterns one develops specifically from that kind of life for months on end.  Don’t listen to the doctors in the documentary; listen to the poets.

Anti-War Activists, WWI

Jane Addams, 1860-1935.  Thanks to this Tom Woods episode on WWI propaganda. Single biggest factor for WWII was the Versailles Treaty post-WWI that the Allies imposed on Germany.

THE PROLIFIC CHARLES BURRIS on “Royal Cousins at War.” I posted this here on Sunday, November 13, 2022.

BOOK LIST

PRESIDENT WILSON’S INFLUENCE ON WWI & BEYOND

Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II, Jim Powell, 2005.

The Holocaust, the gulags, the Cold War and a death toll exceeding 61,911,000 can all be laid at Wilson’s doorstep, contends this sophomoric work in isolationist historiography. Powell, a Cato Institute fellow and author of FDR’s Folly, argues that Wilson’s intervention in WWI enabled the Allies to defeat Germany and impose a punitive peace settlement that made Germans bitter and anti-democratic, facilitated Hitler’s rise, etc. Extending—indeed, almost parodying—Niall Ferguson’s contrarian arguments from The Pity of War, he insists that a victorious German Empire would have subsided under its own weight, with Hitler and Stalin remaining unknown malcontents. Powell rehashes his arguments at inordinate length to associate Wilson’s policies with subsequent Nazi and Soviet atrocities. When not flaying Wilson, Powell rides Cato’s hobbyhorse of libertarian doctrine, sprinkling his chronicle of totalitarian horrors with prim sermons on free trade and laissez-faire economics; the Bolsheviks are thus scolded for their opposition to “consumers freely voting with their money, deciding which quantities, qualities, brands, styles, colors, prices, and so on that they preferred.” Powell scores some points criticizing the flimsiness of Wilson’s pretexts for intervention. But in using the unforeseen consequences of Wilson’s actions as a brief for isolationism, he ends up blaming the 20th-century timeline on one man. The result is a tendentious and heavy-handed distortion of history. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

BOOK LIST ON WWI [posted on Sunday, November 13, 2022]

from AnarchTeacher, Charles Burris.

Friday, June 21, 2019
The following list comes to us courtesy of David Gordon, originally listed at Lew Rockwell.

Denson, John V., ed., The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, 1999. Comprehensive anthology on America’s wars, from an anti-war perspective. Ralph Raico’s essays on Churchill and World War I are especially notable. Rothbard’s classic “World War I As Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals” is a must.

INTERNATIONALISM

Dickinson, G. L. The International Anarchy, 1904-1914, 1937. Argues that secret diplomacy led to the world war

ARMS DEALERS

Engelbrecht, H. C., and F. C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death, 1934. A bestseller during the thirties; argues that arms dealers helped promote war.

WWI ORIGINS STORY & WHO’S TO BLAME FOR WWI?

Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, 2014.

 The Origins of the World War, Fay, Sidney B., 1966. (2 volumes) A balanced and comprehensive account of war origins. Guilt for the war does not rest primarily on any one country.

In Quest of Truth and Justice: Debunking the War Guilt Myth, 1928. A comprehensive account of the many controversies over war origins in which Barnes was involved. Harry Elmer Barnes.

Barnes, Harry Elmer. (1889-1968) The Genesis of the World War: An Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt, 1926. A pioneering revisionist book, first published in 1926. Argues that a plot between Russian Ambassador to France Alexander Izvolsky and French President Raymond Poncaré played a major role in the origin of the war.

Schroeder, Paul W. Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe, 2004. Contains an important essay arguing for British responsibility for the war through pursuing an encirclement policy toward Austria-Hungary. Harry Elmer Barnes.  Best Price: $22.00Buy New $289.22(as of 12:10 EDT – Details)

The Lusitania, Colin Simpson, 1972. Defends the view that Britain provoked the German attack on the Lusitania.

IMPACT OF THE WAR, POST-WAR ANALYSIS, WHAT WWI WROUGHT: Communism, Fascism, & Welfare State. 

The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell, 1977. A detailed study of the impact of WWI. The analysis of the “war poets” is especially notable.

“How 1936 Consolidated the Progressives’ Triumph of 1913,” Gary North, 2014.

Gary North on World War.  On Why the World Lost on June 28, 1914.  

WILSONIAN POLICY

Gamble, Richard M. The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation, 2003. Shows how liberal ministers embraced WWI as a means to promote social reform. Good on the religious impulses behind Wilsonian policy.

GERMANY

The Myth of a Guilty Nation, Albert Jay Nock, 1922. Germany should not be portrayed as a “devil nation.”

Cochran, M. H. Germany Not Guilty in 1914, 1931. A sharp response to a leading anti-revisionist account of the war, B.E.Schmitt, The Coming of the War.

Butterfield, Herbert. History and Human Relations, 1951. Contains the important essay, “Official History: Its Pitfalls and Criteria” suggests that Germany was responding to fear of Russian expansion.

EUROPEAN DIPLOMACY

The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, Carl Schmitt, 2006.  Defends the classical system of European diplomacy, in which wars between the European powers took place under limits, against the abstract universalism introduced by Woodrow Wilson.

AMERICA’S ENTRY INTO WWI & SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR

Tansill, Charles C. America Goes to War, published in 1939, this remains the most important account of America’s entry into the war. Stresses Wilson’s indulgence to British violations of American neutral rights, in contrast with his strictness toward German violations.

The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic, Walter Karp, 2010. The Spanish-American War and American entry into WWI resulted from resistance to domestic reform measures.

Bourne, Randolph. War and the Intellectuals: Essays, 1915–1919. Bourne broke with John Dewey and other Progressives over American entry into WWI. He indicts American intellectuals for viewing the war as a means to enhance their own power and influence. “War is the health of the state.”

CHURCHILL & BRITAIN

Thomson, G. M. The Twelve Days: Two Weeks in Europe’s Fatal Summer, July 24 to August 4, 1914, 1964.  Churchill’s role in pressing for war is stressed.

Great Wars and Great Leaders, Ralph Raico, 2015. A collection of essays by a great classical liberal historian. Raico emphasizes the warmongering of Winston Churchill.

The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson, 1998. Britain ought to have stayed out of the war.

Ponsonby, Arthur. Falsehood In Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulating Throughout the Nations During the Great War, 2010. Criticism of British atrocity propaganda by a leading British opponent of war and a leader of the Labour Party in the House of Lords.

THE VERSAILLE TREATY

Wegerer, Alfred von. A Refutation of the Versailles War Guilt Thesis, 1930. The author was the leading German expert on war origins during the 1920s and 1930s.

Economic Consequences of the Peace, J.M. Keynes, 1919. A famous criticism of the Treaty of Versailles, arguing that Germany could not pay the reparations burden imposed by the treaty.

WWI AS MORAL CRUSADE

England’s Holy War: A Study of English Liberal Idealism During the Great War, Irene Cooper Willis, 2018. Criticizes British portrayals of the war as a moral crusade.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

END OF WWI, NOVEMBER 11, 1918

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