[lit-ideas] Why an interest in 1919?
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2007 10:57:17 -0800
Why is there a resurgence of interest in World War One and its aftermath?
As World War Two rolled around, the events that took place in Paris of 1919
were revisited and it was seen that mistakes were made in regard to Germany
that made World War Two an inevitability. What were those mistakes and who
made them? Probably France's Clemenceau made most of them in respect to
Germany; though he got the others to go along with him. Germany made France
suffer grievously and Clemenceau believed it should be made to suffer in its
turn. While this approach may have satisfied Clemenceau, it eventuated in
far worse suffering for France in the not-to-distant future.
Yes, Yes, World War Two, but why an interest now? We are interested now
because this 1919 Committee is the group that bollixed up the Middle East.
They created the artificial borders that Arabs and other Muslims have fought
over almost ever since. So who is this cast of players that set about to
establish these artificial borders? We learned about the vindictive
Clemenceau. Next we learned about the ignorant Lloyd Jones. Even if we
knew nothing about the aftermath in Germany or the Middle East, we would
believe that it didn't bode well for them. But perhaps Wilson could make a
difference. He was certainly better informed than Lloyd Jones and not at
vindictive like Clemenceau, but he tended to preach and to antagonize the
people he needed to work with. Clemenceau told Colonel House, Wilson's
second in command, "You are practical. I understand you but talking to
Wilson is something like talking to Jesus Christ."
Clemenceau didn't like Lloyd George much either. At another time he said in
a phrase that went the rounds of Paris, "I find myself between Jesus Christ
on the one hand, and Napoleon Bonaparte on the other."
Macmillan writes, "Wilson puzzled him: 'I do not think he is a bad man, but
I have not yet made up my mind as to how much of him is good!' He also
found him priggish and arrogant. 'What ignorance of Europe and how
difficult all understandings were with him! He believed you could do
everything by formulas and his fourteen points. God himself was content
with ten commandments. Wilson modestly inflicted fourteen points on us . .
. the fourteen commandments of the most empty theory!'"
Someone (was it Colin Powell?) said about the invasion of Iraq, "you break
it, you own it," and it is true that we were much better at the war than its
aftermath, but the same sort of thing was true in 1919. Europe, the Middle
East, and much of the rest of the world were "broken," and this was the
group that "owned" them. Would they do any better in the fixing of them
than the Bush Administration has thus far done in Iraq? Here is what
Macmillan writes on page 55:
"It was already two months since the end of the war, and people were
wondering why so little had been accomplished. Part of the reason was that
the Allies were not really ready for the sudden end of the fighting. Nor
could they have been. All their energies had been devoted to winning the
war. 'What had we to do with peace,' wrote Winston Churchill, 'while we did
not know whether we should not be destroyed? Who could think of
reconstruction when the sole aim was to hurl every man and every shell into
battle?' Foreign offices, it is true, colonial ministries and war offices
had dusted off old goals and drawn up new demands while the fighting went
on. There had been attempts to think seriously about the peace: the British
special inquiry, established in 1917, the French Comite d'Etudes and the
most comprehensive of all, the American Inquiry, set up in September 1917
under House's supervision. To the dismay of the professional diplomats,
they had called on outside experts, from historians to missionaries, and had
produced detailed studies and maps. The Americans had produced sixty
separate reports on the Far East and the Pacific alone, which contained much
useful information as well as such insights as that, in India, 'a great
majority of the unmarried consist of very young children.' The Allied
leaders had not paid much attention to any of their own studies."
Thus we see that not only were the Allied leaders not using the best
information available to them, there was apparently no one to convince the
impatient Allied populaces that important decisions needed to be made and
that if the committee rushed through the process precipitously, just because
an ignorant populace couldn't see what was taking them so long, the world
would pay for that haste later on. And that is what did happen. The
leaders were themselves ignorant and ill-prepared to "fix" what had become
"broken," but they knew how to listen to the folks back home who urged them
to hurry, hurry, hurry. Those people back home didn't know what was at
stake and there was no one to explain it to them. What happened instead of
a self (and populace)-education process is that the committee hurried and as
a result the world became even more broken.
Some now suggest that enough is known about the world so that we should
never again "break" a nation until we know how to "fix" it later on. That
certainly is one lesson we should have learned from World War One and its
aftermath, and we did learn it in regard to Europe. We "broke" Europe
during WWII and did a much better job of fixing it the second time around,
but we apparently haven't "learned" in anything like a universal way. What
we learned in Europe (and Japan) doesn't apply well to the Middle East.
But another thing that we should learn is that the populace is going to
remain ignorant unless someone explains matters to them. It can't be
someone like Wilson who does it in an arrogant way. It can't be someone
like Clemenceau who would do it in a vindictive way, and it shouldn't be
someone like Lloyd George who is too ignorant of Foreign Affairs to do it
intelligently, but it should be done. Otherwise, the populace will say,
"hurry, hurry, hurry," and we will rush off leaving a nation unfixed or at
best poorly fixed and open to the increased possibility that we will one day
have to go back and fix it again.
Lawrence
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