Thursday, July 17, 2014

Bad History: The Myth that the Versailles Treaty Caused Nazism and World War II

One of the pernicious myths of “history” as created by ideologues called historians is that the blame for the rise of Hitler and the ensuing Second World War is down to the “unjust” and “harsh and punitive” Treaty of Versailles. That is to say, when dealing with obvious criminal psychotics like the Germans, if you are only NICER to them, they’ll leave you alone.

But who made Germany attack an invade France in 1890? Who made the Germans ravage and lay waste to France from 1914-1918? They won the previous war with France, and got what they wanted. Wasn’t that “fair” and “generous” enough for them? No, they went on and did it again in 1914, on the pretext of some Austrian aristocrat getting bumped off by a Serb nationalist! (“Grand Duke Ferdinand,” was the puffed-up title of the imperialist parasite who bit the dust.)

Does appeasing aggressive psychopaths placate them? I think the evidence of concession after concession handed to Hitler disproves that. And the Germans only paid a small fraction of the reparations they agreed to pay for the destruction they wreaked when they signed the Treaty.

Remember that in World War I Germany invaded neutral Belgium, to carry out the Schlieffen plan, a grand flanking maneuver aimed at annihilating the French army. While in Belgium, they busied themselves committing atrocities, murdering civilians, and committing cultural genocide But the Germans were “provoked,” you see. The Belgian army had the effrontery to resist the invasion of their country. What arrogance! Why, the Germans HAD to kill Belgian civilians and burn a historic library down, destroying irreplaceable manuscripts, to teach the Belgians a lesson. The lesson being, don’t resist invasions by psychopaths.

The fact that British propagandists during the war invented fake atrocity stories has for years been trotted out by U.S. (and other) “historians” to discredit the FACT that Germany committed REAL atrocities in Belgium- not to mention the crime of aggression by invading a neutral country in the first place. This is mendacity disguised as history. People who do that should be called propagandists, NOT historians. When you deliberately falsify history to advance a covert political and ideological agenda, that makes you a propagandist, not a historian. Unfortunately, most well-known “historians” seem to fall into this camp to some degree. This creates a huge burden on people who want an accurate understanding of the world. You have to read so much, and study for years, just to find out more or less what really happened. Needless to say, the average person does not do this and is thus an easy mark for the professional brainwashers to dupe. And professional brainwashers are what propagandists really are.

And what about the Holocaust? Did the Treaty of Versailles cause the Holocaust? I guess the “historians” should say yes- although few seem to have the nerve to do so. But if the Treaty “caused” the rise of Hitler, and "caused" the Second World War, then it must follow that it is to blame for all of Hitler’s works, including the Holocaust. Now you truly enter the arena of ludicrousness.

But it has been in the interest of Zionists to lay the blame for the Holocaust on historical anti-Semitism (obviously appropriately, but that isn’t sufficient explanation by itself), and the Zionists have dibs on Holocaust-causation. And there’s the uncomfortable fact that the “Western democracies” barely lifted a finger to save Jews, and in fact blocked their escape from the Nazis’ clutches for the most part.

Now what was the motive for the distortion of history claiming Versailles as causative for World War II? It is to exonerate Germany, because Germany after World War II was part of the U.S.-bossed anti-Soviet bloc in Western Europe. The former German enemy had to have a heavy coating of ideological make-up applied to make it attractive to Western publics who had been put through two major, costly wars by Germany. (The Soviet Union, on the other hand, NEVER invaded Western Europe, NEVER declared war on the U.S. or bombed its ships at anchor as Japan did- another rehabilitated foe turned subaltern nation to the U.S. The Soviet Union was invaded by two dozen western nations right after the Bolshevik revolution, in a failed attempt to reverse that revolution. And of course Germany invaded in 1941 and caused horrendous carnage and wreckage. But the Soviet Union was the Bad Guy.)

The end of the Cold War has changed nothing, since now Russia is still viewed as an adversary- apparently because it won’t let itself to be so reduced in power that its influence ends at its own national boundaries. For this it is faulted for “behaving like the Soviet Union” and “restarting the Cold War” or “acting like the Cold War never ended.” (Hey, Western imperialist propagandists, would you like me to lend you a mirror?)

In fact, to accept the Versailles Treaty as leading to World War II, because it embittered fanatical German nationalists like Hitler, is to imply Germany had a legitimate grievance to start World War II.
Well then, given that Germany suffered far worse destruction in World War II (its cities weren’t systematically bombed into rubble in the First World War, nor was it occupied), plus Germany was shrunk in size, permanently lost Prussia (the heartland of its militarism), Danzig, and more, and the truncated remainder was divided into two, logically Germany had an even BIGGER grievance after World War II than after WW I. So they should have armed themselves with nuclear weapons and started World War III!

The thing is, taking the irrational grievances of fanatical German nationalists at face value is like taking their stated grievances against Jews as having “caused” the Holocaust. I don’t hear those historians who blame World War II on Versailles (because German fascists used it to rile people up) blaming the Jews for the Holocaust. But by the same logic, they could. The point is, Versailles was just an excuse, used as agitprop by the Nazis, the same way they used anti-Semitic propaganda as agitprop. Quite simply, the Germans (many or most of them) were pathological people with burning imperialist ambitions combined with a virulent sense of “racial” superiority. They dehumanized most of the rest of humanity and had no compunction about slaughtering and enslaving most everybody else on the planet. Versailles had NOTHING to do with it. If there had been NO Versailles Treaty, Hitler would STILL have risen to power, and STILL have started World War Two in Europe. It’s idiotic to argue otherwise if one has read deeply about Germany between the wars (as I have). Who could seriously believe that the Versailles Treaty made Germany invade Russia yet again, killing twenty million of the people there, with the intention to ultimately annihilated fully THREE QUARTERS of the “subhuman” Slavs and make slaves of the rest, working on giant German plantations? Russia didn’t impose the Versailles conditions on Germany. Germany defeated Russia in World War I, and imposed onerous peace terms on it! So by the logic of “Versailles made Germany do it,” the Soviet Union should have invaded Germany in World War II, not the other way around. After all, Germany imposed an unfair peace treaty on Russia. Whereas the Versailles Treaty was fair, and should have been enforced. Hitler should not have been allowed to break it by increasing the size of the German army and by remilitarizing the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty. [1]

No, the fault lay in the pathological German character. Thankfully that character has changed to a large degree, mainly in the younger generations.


1] World War I started in 1914. Russia was defeated in 1917. The U.S. then entered the war, because New York bankers fretted about getting their war loans to Britain and France repaid if Germany won. With fresh U.S. troops on the Western front, Germany sued for peace in fall 1918. The slimy and cowardly German general staff, headed by Field Marshals von Hindenberg (who appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933, opening the door to Nazi dictatordship) and von Ludendorff (who participated in the 1923 coup attempt by Hitler to overthrow the Weimar Republic government, for which he was not prosecuted for treason and subversion, not imprisoned or shot- as Hitler should have been) pulled the weaselly and cunning move of making civilians take the rap for the defeat, claiming the military was never really defeated and promulgating the “stab in the back” canard, that traitors at home (in a dictatorship- remember Germany was a monarchy headed by the Kaiser, or “king,”) made Germany surrender. The Nazis heaped a lot of the blame for the “betrayal” and “treason” on “the Jews.” In World War II this was a big factor in the Allies insistence on unconditional surrender, and occupation, so the Germans wouldn’t once again pretend that they weren’t actually defeated.

1 comment:

  1. Warfare is a fascinating subject. Despite the dubious morality of using violence to achieve personal or political aims. It remains that conflict has been used to do just that throughout recorded history.

    Your article is very well done, a good read.

    ReplyDelete