I quote bjamnjn: “I’ve studied as much history as possible understanding what led to WWI and WWII. Their causes were quite different. Germany got hosed after WWI despite not starting it they were left to pay all reparations mostly b/c they were the strongest axis power and held out the longest.”
You’ve obviously not studied much history. Events in the Balkans and some nasty behavior by Austria-Hungary may have been the cause of the war, but the war began when Germany attacked France through Belgium.No Belgian invasion, no war. No one at that time debated that. They quarreled over whether Germany was justified in starting the war because Russia had mobilized its huge army, threatening it in the East.
I quote again: “The same thing as happened to German from mid ’20s through late ’30s could easily happen right here in the US. All it takes is a hopeless population and a good public speaker with wrong intentions.”
No it couldn’t. The U.S. simply doesn’t have the numerous cultural pathologies that haunted Germany at that time, pathologies that were frequently discussed then and best expressed by G. K. Chesterton, who warned during WWI that if Europe did not force Germany to change, within a generation the nation would start another and still more horrible war. In 1932, he went still further and warned that Germany would soon acquire a dictator and that the next war would break out over a border dispute with Poland, precisely what happened in 1939.
In Germany, the Great Depression produced militarism. In Britain it produced appeasement. In the US it produced isolationism. Each was an expression of national character at that time. No “good public speaker” could have led the U.S. to launch wars of aggression. It took FDR’s considerable powers as a speaker and a politician merely to get the US into a just war in defense of democracy, and even he needed Pearl Harbor.
Like people, who have a character that determines what they will and will not do, nations have an underlying culture that determines how they act in the world for good or ill. The horrors of WWI and WWI were expressions of German culture, not merely the result of an unfortunate series of events. Chesterton explain that quite well. Read the collection of his articles on war that I edited if you want to know more.
–Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II.
