It is April 6, 1917 – a day of great betrayal. The House of
Representatives of the United States votes to declare war with 373 to 50 votes.
Two days ago the federal Senate approved the declaration with 82 to 6 votes, with
8 Senators absent/abstaining. The same day President Wilson signs the
declaration of war against Imperial Germany, a declaration he asked for in a
speech before a joint session of Congress just four days ago.
Those United States are just
about to intervene in the Great European War on a quest to make the world safe
for democracy. The fall of the Russian Emperor was celebrated in the federal
capital on the Potomac just the previous month, although the Russian monarchy
is to be formally abolished several months later. Those United States are to declare war on
Austria-Hungary exactly eight months and a day later. The day that truly will
live in infamy – December 7, 1917.
Gone are the framers’ strong fear of and opposition to
democracy. The nation is now to go on a crusade to make the world safe for
democracy. Gone are the framers’ warnings against foreign entanglements. The
nation is now to intervene in an armed conflict of the old world, a European
conflict of the type the framers decried.
The Fall
of the Romanovs
Given that Tsar Nicholas II had
been forced to abdicate only three weeks earlier, in effect deposed, the
crusade against the old European order could come full-fledged into the open.
The conception that Russia was a backward country has been debunked by the
great, late Austrian scholar Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn – in his Leftism Revisited. Bolshevik propaganda against the
monarchy is slow to die. As Matthew Dal Santo notes, Western chroniclers so often delight in
character assassinations as if they themselves were part of a 1917 Russian
bread riot. Nicholas Henshall in his book The Myth of Absolutism from 1992 tells us of
the growing dissatisfaction with the theory that the Russian monarchy was an
Asian despotism with none of the European characteristics of limits on power.
At the outbreak of the war, there was the Western Emperor and
the Eastern Emperor (the German Emperor was a novelty on the side from the
recent German unification of 1871). The latter was the Tsar of Russia.
The Fall
of the Habsburgs
The former
was the Habsburg Emperor, Francis Joseph, who was going on his 66th year
on the throne in July of 1914 – and on that fateful day, July 28, when war was
declared on the Kingdom of Serbia. Few in the vast Habsburg lands could
remember any other Emperor. Bionic Mosquito draws to our attention the claim of
historian Jack Beatty that the Emperor’s long life was a cause of the massacre
of millions that the war was.
While the
Habsburg Kaiser certainly was the one finally responsible for going to war, as
he was the Emperor and the one who signed the declaration of war at Bad Ischl,
he was not the one most eager in pushing for war. The German Chancellor and the
Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister both
played a game. Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to cool down the Austrians. His
Chancellor delayed and filtered his message. Count Leopold Berchtold, the
Foreign Minister, lied to Francis Joseph about Serbia already having opened
fire at the border.
We often
hear that the Habsburg Empire was just waiting to collapse. Alan Sked in his
book The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 disagrees
and makes the case that the Habsburg Empire was well cohesive until 1917.
Pieter M. Judson also believes there was no doom to failure, as William Anthony
Hay takes note of. Also, John Deak of the
University of Notre Dame gave
a talk a few years ago, making the case that the
Austro-Hungarian army made war on its own peoples, and that this was in large
part what destroyed the loyalty of the empire’s peoples. Apparently, the theory
that the Habsburg Empire was not doomed to fail is not particularly
controversial amongst Habsburg historians, whereas more general military
historians typically believe that the empire was doomed no matter what.
German
Guilt
Then there
is the issue of the claimed German guilt, a myth that is pretty persistent, as
Paul Gottfried remarks (Prof. Gottfried was also
interviewed a couple of times on the Tom Woods Show in 2014, the
centennial year of the outbreak).
Historian
J.H.J. Andriessen points out in his book World War I in Photographs (my notes are from
a Norwegian translation) that the Royal Navy was bullying the German merchant
fleet. The Royal Navy could supremely rule the waves, but for any challenger, a
navy buildup is blamed on an inferiority complex towards grandmother (Queen
Victoria), uncle (King Edward VII), and cousin (King George V).
We are
generally appalled by the German unrestricted warfare and the sinking of the
Lusitania, which basically was a cargo warship with no escort – but with a
“human shield” of civilians. On the other hand, we tend to pay little attention
to the blockade against Germany, severely harming civilians, a blockade that,
as the late Ralph Raico noted,
Churchill was instrumental in establishing.
The Cause
of a New War
Keynes predicted a new war would come after twenty years.
Keynes’ theories are wrong on a few other essentials, but in this prediction he
was pretty accurate. The two world wars have been labelled a European civil war
with a twenty-year truce. In a sense this is correct, but it is also confusing,
given the very significant differences between the Wilhelmine and the Hitlerite
regimes.
The
mainstream belief is that it was the Versailles Treaty and its harsh terms that
gave us Corporal Hitler at the helm and World War II. Churchill in his
six-volume work The Second World War points at a second
factor, namely the vacuum created by removing the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns
from their thrones.
While he is probably largely right in claiming this vacuum was
also a significant factor, Churchill himself was not exactly innocent in bringing
about the situation, with his role as First Lord of the Admiralty, the
equivalent of Secretary of the Navy, but he puts the blame on “American and
modernizing pressure.”
The “war
to make the world safe for democracy” was not purely an endeavor of Woodrow
Wilson and the Americans. The quest had European driving forces as well. David
Lloyd George, who had succeeded Henry Asquith as Prime Minister in late 1916,
gave a speech to the American Club in London
six days after Congress had decided to go to war, clearly stating how he viewed
the war as an ideological war.
Transformation
of Our Civilization
In the mainstream, we hear that the only real problem beyond the
mass killing and the war itself was the interwar period and its problems
leading up to Nazism, Fascism, and World War II. That problem has been solved.
So, no worries?
Not so fast!
World War I
transformed civilization and society and gave us problems we still are stuck
with today. The transformation was profound. Much revisionist work had been
done, and, as Hunt Tooley tells us, much work remains. The world has
moved from a norm of monarchy to a norm of democracy, a process which
Hans-Hermann Hoppe describes in his book Democracy – The God That Failed as
civilizational decline. William S. Lind describes the fall of the large European
monarchies as the poisons that were the French Revolution were let unchecked
upon our civilization.
But it is hardly just a question of monarchies removed or not.
War first and foremost destroys. As mentioned, making war on the peoples of the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy destroyed the empire’s cohesion and fabric.
We went from traditional society to modernism. We went from
small to bigger and bigger government, as the bureaucracy and regulations of
wartime translated into the same in peacetime. And this goes to show that
Randolph Bourne was right when he told us that war is the health of the State.
Mass
participation in war translated into mass participation in government. And we
eventually got equal, universal suffrage and mass democracy. Belief in the
divine got a hard blow, as Christians were fighting each other at an
unprecedented scale. Monarchic, aristocratic, and religious checks on the power
of the masses were all but gone when the war had completed its destruction.
The United Kingdom had gotten its House of Lords already in 1911
reduced to a debating club, in the words of Bertrand de Jouvenel. However,
governance was still largely by the aristocratic class. The war gave
aristocratic participation at the battlefields, reducing their numbers greatly
through massacre, such that it was depleted as governing class. In came new
overlords.
American
Guilt
But all this was started by the Europeans, and those United
States entered late in the conflict. So why does American intervention matter
at all?
First
of all, the first American troops landed in France a whole 16 months before the
Armistice in November 1918. That is a whole lot of time in an industrial scale
war. And according to Hunt Tooley, momentous
American decisions were crucial to the further development of the war. It is highly probable that American
entry prolonged the war, for which a small committee in Christiania
(today’s Oslo), Norway just a few years later apparently thought President
Wilson was worthy of a peace prize.
Perhaps even more important, however, is the status of those
United States before April 1917. We are told they were neutral, so it doesn’t
matter. But the United States were never really neutral. It was a faux
neutrality. The Allied Powers “knew” the United States would not let the
Central Powers win. That certainly would influence the Allied Powers’ willingness
to negotiate an early peace.
Entering the war also had
severe domestic consequences for the United States. Big government got a boost.
The oppositional speech was silenced. The American idea of limited government
was betrayed.
Certainly, the American
decision to enter World War One gave us a world to the worse for America,
Europe, and the world at large.
J.K.
Baltzersen [send
him mail] writes from the capital of the Oil Kingdom of Norway. He
is the editor of the forthcoming book Grunnlov og frihet: turtelduer
eller erkefiender? (in Norwegian and Swedish; translated
title: Constitution and Liberty: Lovebirds or Archenemies?),
with Cato Institute’s Johan Norberg amongst the contributors. Follow him
on Twitter.
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