One hundred years ago this month -April 1915 – the Allies and Germany were stalemated on the Western Front. Winston Churchill, the young, ambitious First Lord of the British Admiralty proposed a scheme first advanced by France’s prime minister, Aristide Briand. The best way for Britain and France to end the stalemate and link up...
Read MoreRon Paul • December 28, 2014 • 600 Words
One hundred years ago last week, on Christmas Eve, 1914, German and British soldiers emerged from the horrors of World War One trench warfare to greet each other, exchange food and gifts, and to wish each other a Merry Christmas. What we remember now as the “Christmas Truce” began with soldiers singing Christmas carols together...
Read MoreA full century after World War I we still cannot understand how generals sent so many soldiers to be slaughtered. Ten million soldiers died on all sides; millions more were left maimed or shell shocked. Seven million civilians died. 20 million horses died. The image we have of hapless soldiers being forced to climb out...
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Buchanan, Churchill and the “Necessary” Book
Back in 2008 Patrick J. Buchanan published his volume Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War. Although it was reviewed and discussed at the time, perhaps because it dealt with world history on such a vast, scholarly scale, or because the subject matter seemed to be more the province of academic specialists (which Buchanan isn’t), it...
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About how America became involved in certain wars, many conspiracy theories have been advanced -- and some have been proved correct. When James K. Polk got his declaration of war as Mexico had "shed American blood upon the American soil," Rep. Abraham Lincoln demanded to know the exact spot where it had happened. And did...
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Those Intellectuals Who Know Nothing of the Past May Help to Repeat It
I recently received an unexpected gift from American historian and political theorist Barry Alan Shain, The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context, a 600 page collection of documents from the era of the American Revolution, with accompanying commentaries and a long introductory essay, published by Yale University Press. It would be marvelous if Barry’s ambitious...
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The 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I is upon us. Well we should mourn this cataclysmic event and continue to draw lessons from it. As a former soldier and military historian, I’ve always felt that WWI was the most tragic conflict in modern history: a totally avoidable madness that wrecked Europe’s glittering...
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In Part 1 of this article, I provided an account of the Jewish role in the events leading up to World War One, with an emphasis on their influence in the UK and United States. Woodrow Wilson was shown to be the first American president elected with the full backing of the Jewish lobby, and...
Read MoreShambles on the Tigris - a general’s complacency and an abject surrender
In the British military cemetery at Kut on the Tigris River 100 miles south of Baghdad, the tops of the tombstones used to be only just visible as they stuck out of a swamp full of small green frogs. A broken cement cross rose over a reed bed in the middle of the slimy water....
Read MorePARIS – 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...
Read MoreThe myth of the rational actor.
I was in England for Remembrance Sunday this year. The wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph was very moving. I had forgotten how much emotion the British invest in this and how high a proportion is imaginatively keyed to WWI. Remembrance Sunday is defined to be the Sunday closest to Armistice Day, November 11, when the...
Read MoreW.E. Johns's tales about the often derided but intrepid fighter pilot have been unfairly maligned
A tidal wave of commentary on the First World War is about to break as we approach the 100th anniversary of its outbreak. Growing up in the 1950s, it was accounts of the Second World War that dominated my reading. I began to pay real attention to what had happened between 1914 and 1918 only...
Read MoreIt was exactly 95 years ago: the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the moment when major hostilities in the charnel house that was World War I ended. In 1919, November 11th officially became “Armistice Day” in the United States. As it happened, though, major hostilities were suspended for...
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The Enduring Folly of the Battle of the Somme
[The illustrations in this piece come from Joe Sacco’s The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme with the kind permission of its publisher, W.W. Norton, and the slightly adapted text, which also appears in that book, comes originally from Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story...
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In 2006, an inebriated Mel Gibson allegedly said this: “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” There followed the predicable storm of anti-anti-Semitism, ad hominem attacks, and various other slanders against Gibson’s character. But virtually no one asked the question: Is he right? Or rather this: To what degree could he...
Read MoreSince neoconservative journalists, at least to my knowledge, have not been lately slamming the “German connection,” I rejoiced at a feature article in yesterday's New York Post (March 20) going after the “series of German outrages” that helped push us into World War One. A commentary by Thomas A. Reppetto, on German saboteurs during World...
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A vastly underexplored topic is the British government’s role in greasing the skids for World War I. Until recently it was hard to find scholars who would dispute the culturally comfortable judgment that “authoritarian Germany” unleashed the Great War out of militaristic arrogance. Supposedly the British only got involved after the Germans recklessly violated Belgian...
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On August 1, 1914, as dreadful war was breaking out in Europe, the German ambassador Prince Lichnowsky paid a visit to Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. Dr Rudolf Steiner commented as follows upon this meeting – in a 1916 lecture which he gave in Switzerland: At that meeting, he averred that, with just one...
Read MoreUnfortunately, I can’t resist pointing out minicon stupidities, and the latest example of this problem came to my attention in a recent syndicated column by Rich Lowry. In what is intended to be a discourse on American exceptionalism, Lowry goes through the anti-democratic evils of continental countries and then gets to England, which is awarded...
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A frequently heard complaint on the Old Right is that American foreign policy has changed for the worst because of the neoconservative ascendancy in public affairs. Supposedly there was a time when sober white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or other staid types were running Foggy Bottom, or wherever US foreign policy was made. These embodiments of prudence,...
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The latest issue of The American Conservative (July 14) includes a provocative symposium on whether World War II should be considered “the good war” and, no less significant, whether Winston Churchill deserves the adulation that the media have accorded him as “man of the century.” The contributions are all well documented and boldly framed, and...
Read MoreAlthough Sid Cundiff in a recent blog praises me as someone who recognizes “shades of grey,” I may be losing that capacity when it comes to certain neoconservative journalists. In an article for the Canadian National Post, which was also published on NRO (November 11, 2007), David Frum bewails the fact that Canadians are not...
Read MoreEven a broken clock is right twice a day. Abe Foxman, the head of the Jewish-Masonic thought police misnamed ADL, easily one of the most repulsive men in American public life, is not as good as a clock, but he can be right once in a while; and this time is now. The US Congress,...
Read MoreWorld War I, which came to an end on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, is today but a faint, sinister memory, recalled only by red poppies and barely noticed Remembrance Day and Veteran's Day ceremonies. Lest we forget... The Western Front, December, 1916 After twelve months of...
Read MoreThis month marks the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of World War One, perhaps the great civilizational catastrophe of the past half-millennium. (Principal contender: The collapse of Chinese Imperial civilization following the mid-19th-century encounter with the West.) For anyone raised in Britain, WW1 has a powerful emotional pull. I've written about this myself on this...
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