It's always a pleasure to be back at the Mises Institute.
Lew and I came together back in about 1982 to start this on a very small basis,
and it's grown and flourished and something I'm very proud to be a part of.
The talk today is Six Months that Changed the World,
And those six months are January 1919 to June 1919. And it was changed by three men, Woodrow Wilson, Cleminshaw of France, and Lloyd George of Great Britain.
It was actually a group to handle the peace conference after World War I. It was called the Council of Ten.
and the original idea was that there were going to be five nations that would be represented
for the allies.
That's Japan, Italy, America, France and America, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan.
And each country would have two people at the table, so that was the council of ten.
But it boiled down to really just three men, Wilson, Clemishow and Lloyd-George that did
all of this.
They made some of the most disastrous decisions that have ever been made and some of those
decisions have resulted in what you read about today in your headlines in Iraq and China
and you say, well, wait a minute, I thought the Versailles Peace Conference was about
Germany. Well, it was. But there were a lot of treaties. There was a lot of negotiation
that involved the whole world. And the Versailles Treaty is the most important because it was
about Germany. But the other treaties were signed and they're given the names of where
they were signed. So they signed the treaty in the Hall of Versailles Palace. And the
result in my opinion and my argument is that it resulted in creating the platform for Hitler
to arise in Germany and allowed him to create the most popular political party in Germany.
and led to World War II.
And it's always been my argument in looking back at that history
that World War I and II were really one war
with a 20-year recess from 1919 to 1939.
And that makes a big difference in how you interpret
the rest of history of the 20th century.
I see the World War I and II as one war,
and I see it as possibly as significant as the Peloponnesian war was to the Greek civilization.
I think that western civilization went into a steep decline as a result of those two wars
and collectivism became very dominant throughout the world.
So those six months I think are a very important part to look at in history.
The writer, William Faulkner, one time was asked, well, why don't you write about the
current things, contemporary things? You're always writing about the past. And Faulkner's
answer was, well, the past is not past. What we are today is what was done in the past.
So we are living what was created in the past. And that same theme is part of the major premise
of George Orwell's major book, 1984. And in that book he, as you will recall, has history
rewritten so that he makes the point that you can determine the present and affect the
future by how you rewrite history, how you interpret history. And so, I want to show
I'm going to show you how that happens with this. I'm a believer in the American founder's policy of non-interventionism as a foreign policy.
And whenever I discuss that or argue with somebody about it, they want to argue history with me.
And they say this, look, the founder's ideas of non-interventionism are out of date. Why so, I say?
Well, because World War II proves it. And then they used counterfactual history to state
what is now today the mainstream idea, and that is that if America had joined the League
of Nations by signing the Versailles Treaty, that would have prevented World War II. And
if they had signed and the League of Nations had been created, it would have been strong
to stand up to Hitler at Munich. And so they say that what caused World War II was isolationism
and appeasement. So my answer to that is to go back and start with World War I and why
it started and why America should not have intervened and even why Britain should not
have intervened and point out that it was the disastrous Versailles Treaty that gave
Hitler, all of the points for his platform that caused him to rise.
And it was America's intervention and abandonment of its policy of non-interventionism that
caused the disaster, which was the Versailles Conference in World War II.
The point about standing up to Hitler at Munich is that Hitler was told, and it was well known
by the delegates at the Versailles conference, and I'll read some of that to you, that the
treaty itself was very unfair. Not only was it too harsh, but it was unfair. And that
gave Hitler the confidence to know that many of the people he was dealing with realized
that the Czechoslovakian situation was very unfair to the Sudeten Germans and very unfair
to Germany, and that they were not willing to go to war over that.
It was recognized at the time of the peace treaty also that the League of Nations was
going to have to revise it significantly to avoid war and I'm going to give you some quotes
on that about people that were there.
One point I want to make about the beginning of World War I is that a lot of people see
See it as a noble war and I think it's very false. I think that it was in effect a civil
war of Europe and it was a battle between industrial powers.
The only book I like about Niall Ferguson is his book Pity of War and he says that it
was the greatest mistake Britain ever made was getting into World War I, that it was
being plotted by its generals back in 1905 and that the problem was they were fearful
of Germany, overtaking them economically. When Woodrow Wilson got back, of course you
know he went to war to make the world safe for democracy, but when he got back and campaigned
for the Versailles Treaty, here's what he said about World War I.
Why, my fellow citizens, is there any man here or any woman, let me say is there any
child here who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and
and Commercial Rivalry.
This war in its inception was a commercial war, an industrial war.
It was not a political war.
He made that statement in St. Louis, Missouri while he was trying to campaign to make the
Senate ratify the Versailles Treaty.
To show you how it was recognized after the war that the Versailles Treaty was a great
I want to call your attention to this book written by two people, William Bullitt who was a part of the delegation and of all things Sigmund Freud.
If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it to you.
William Bullitt was part of the delegation and he became so disillusioned with Wilson and the Versailles Treaty
He resigned as soon as the terms of the treaty were announced and it was known that he had such a low opinion of Wilson that he was approached by Sigmund Freud in Paris one day and asked, and Bullitt said he was going to write a book and Freud said do you mind if I join with you and if I had been Bullitt I would have said yeah I do mind I don't want you but you can't you can't tell it doesn't say this is by Freud and this is by Bullitt it's mixed in it's a
The great analysis by Freud of Wilson's psychology and his attempts to emulate and surpass his father that he admired.
And in going to the Versailles Conference, his advisor, Colonel House, who Wilson said was his alter ego, played on that psychological thing
and told Wilson he's going to be the greatest man in the world. He's going to save the world. He's going to make it safe for democracy.
The League of Nations is the greatest idea that's ever been and Wilson ate all this up and so you'll see some of that in that book but in that book it has this letter that William Bullitt wrote to Woodrow Wilson in May 17, 1919 by resigning from the delegation in complete revulsion to what was being done and he says, this is part of the letter, he says,
But our government has consented now to deliver the suffering people to the world, to new oppressions, subjections and dismemberments, a new century of war.
It is my conviction that the present League of Nations will be powerless to prevent these wars.
Therefore, the duty of the government of the United States and to its own people and to mankind is to refuse to sign or ratify this unjust treaty.
That's by a man who's playing up to Wilson, who wants to be a friend of Wilson, and he's a very ambitious guy.
He becomes very important to the Roosevelt administration in World War II.
So Bullitt is an up-and-coming guy, and here he is jumping on the President of the United States and telling him he's an idiot and going to cause a century of war, which he did.
He went on to state that Wilson in the book, he points out that Wilson had these lofty ideas about what the war was about when he came there and Bullitt told him look there are all kinds of secret aims of the British and the French to split up the world and what you're doing with this Versailles Treaty that you've done is that you've just allowed them to scramble and get loot and what the League of Nations is going to be is like the
The British have achieved all of their aims by this peace conference, and these secret aims were the destruction of the German navy, the confiscation of German merchant marine, the elimination of Germany as an economic
of the Islamic Rival, the extraction of all possible indemnities from Germany, the annexation of Germany and East Africa and the Cameroons, the annexation of all German colonies in the Pacific south of the equator, Palestine and as much of Syria as they might be able to get away from the French, the extension of their sphere of influence in Persia, the recognition of their protectorates in Cyprus and Egypt, and goes on. Albert J. Nock is one of my favorite writers.
The War immensely fortified a universal faith in violence. It set in motion endless adventures and imperialism, endless nationalistic ambition. Every war does that to the degree roughly corresponding to its magnitude.
The final settlement at Versailles, therefore, was a mere scramble for loot, end quote.
Most everyone there in the American and the British delegations recognized that the treaty was so unjust that there were going to have to be drastic revisions made by the League of Nations in order to prevent war, and I'm going to read that to you in a minute.
Let me just point out that I have brought, you have with you a handout.
On the second page has a recommendation of the books, some of the books I read in order to do this.
This is a book I want to point out and talk to you a good bit about because it's a fairly recent book.
This is Margaret McMillan's book on Paris 1919 and it's a very good book because it's the only one I've read that covers the whole spectrum of the Paris Peace Talks.
It's not limited to the Versailles Conference and there's a taped section that goes with it.
not goes with it but you can buy it separately got the same code but these are CDs that she narrates it and get that from the modern scholar and both of these will be here for you to look at and I recommend it to you although I totally disagree with her conclusion which is this she says there are many people who claim that the Versailles Peace Treaty
She says, I do not think that. She said, Hitler just came into the picture, and he was what caused World War II.
And yet, there's nothing in the book to support her on that. But that is the conclusion of the mainstream today.
And now the mainstream history interpreters of today can say, look, here's a book that is so thorough and so good, and her conclusion is that the Versailles Treaty didn't cause World War II, it was Hitler, as though Hitler just sort of sprung from the head of Satan like God used to do from Zeus.
But it's a good book and I recommend it to you because it covers so many of the facts that are relevant and is such a broad coverage of events that go beyond Versailles.
But reading her book to me is like reading a legal brief of an imposing lawyer in a case and reading history to some extent is that way for me.
You get two lawyers that take opposite sides of a case. They're both writing about a murder.
The event is the same, but one is arguing for conviction and one is arguing for acquittal.
And what they do, and the way they argue that, is they leave out certain things.
They emphasize things differently.
And so you get a different interpretation of the same event and come to opposite conclusions.
And much of history is that way.
Now here's what Macmillan does, and I might add that she doesn't tell you this, but the publisher does.
She happens to be the great granddaughter of Lloyd George.
So she's got a little bit of a conflict of interest here, but she's a history professor in Toronto, Canada.
But here's a statement that she makes that sort of hit me between the eyes.
She says, the way the armistice was made left much room for later recrimination.
The Germans were able to say that they had only accepted it on the basis of the original 14 points,
and that the subsequent peace terms were therefore largely illegitimate.
And she tells you, doesn't say anything, why the Germans had felt that way.
She leaves that out and it leads a reader to believe, well, that's just something the Germans felt with no basis.
One of the main things wrong with the Versailles Treaty that made it so unfair was that there was a pre-armistice agreement dated November 5, 1918, before the treaty was signed, before the armistice was signed on November 11.
And that's the reason they thought that they surrendered based upon the fact that the 14 points was going to be the basis of the treaty because that's what the agreement said.
And you can find out about that agreement in some other books.
Here's one, Treaty of Versailles, reassessment after 75 years. It's a series of articles about it.
Let's see if I can find it. The thing that they say in here is that they go through the
various letters that were written. It starts off in September that the German Army had
and made its last attempt to try to break through before the Americans got their full strength there.
And when the Germans realized that they couldn't break the lines and that there was a stalemate,
they had not been defeated, but they knew that they ultimately were going to be defeated completely
with the Americans coming into the war.
They have reached such a stalemate that if America had not intervened, there would have been a peace treaty, I think, at that point, between equals on a much more fair basis, an actual negotiated treaty.
Let's see if I can find my quote here.
Anyway, Max Baden was an official in the government of Germany.
And so they knew that Wilson wanted the German government to get rid of the Kaiser.
So they made the Kaiser resign.
And Baden wrote a letter in September to Woodrow Wilson and told him that we would like to
to talk about a peace treaty, and we would like for it to be based upon the 14 points
that you talked about in January of 1918.
So Secretary of State Lansing took that letter and began to talk with Lord George and Clemenshaw
in September of 1918, before the war ended, to see if they would agree to negotiate a
a Peace Treaty with Germany on the basis of the 14th Amendment.
And they, at first, they couldn't agree with all the terms.
And so Wilson threatened them that if they didn't agree to all the terms, that he would
go public and say that they were not for the 14 points and they wanted to continue with
the war.
So they backed off and said, oh, well, okay, we'll agree to it.
So then Wilson wrote back and said, well, is the Kaiser going to resign?
Yes.
Are you going to have a democratic government?
Yes.
And so finally, on November 5, 1918, Secretary of State Lansing wrote a letter back to Baden,
representative of the new government, which was going to become the Weimar Republic, and
said, okay, all of us, the Allies, all agree that we will negotiate a treaty based upon
the 14 points, which would not have been a harsh treaty against Germany.
And so the Germans have a reason to be upset that they put down their arms and walked away
thinking they were going to have a, quote, negotiated treaty, and number two, that it
was going to be based on the 14 points.
Instead, what they got was a dictated treaty that they had no input into, and it had no
relationship whatsoever to the 14 points.
violated the 14 points in every way that it could.
So that's the way Macmillan writes her book and tells you, well, the Germans felt like
they hadn't been treated fairly, and then doesn't tell you why they felt that way.
So that's, to me, one of the most unfair provisions of the treaty, and that's how she's able to
The Germans felt that they were so unfairly treated, that they were looking for someone that would oppose the Weimar Republic, because the Weimar Republic was enforcing the treaty, and so someone had to take a stand against the government, someone had to take a stand against the Versailles Treaty, and so on, and so on, and so on.
The Weimar Republic, because the Weimar Republic was enforcing the treaty, and so someone had to take a stand against the government, someone had to take a stand against the Versailles Treaty, and that's how Hitler became so popular, and became the leader of a political party that was the strongest party in Germany.
Let's talk about some other mistakes that were made in the beginning stages of the case.
The secret treaties were not known to many people until the Bolshevik Revolution came
about and Russia was aware and part of a treaty of the Sykes-Picot Treaty which divided up
at the Middle East between England and France, so it came public, but Wilson took the position
that he didn't know there were any secret treaties made during the war.
And he had the opportunity in order to arrive at the armistice to say there will be no recognition
and carrying out of the secret treaties, but instead he just kept quiet.
William Bullitt talks about, on the way over to Paris, that they talked about how we're
going to negotiate this treaty.
And all of them took as the American delegation outside the presence of Wilson said, we need
to follow the model of the Congress of Vienna that settled the Napoleonic Wars in 1814.
We need to have Germany at the table, and we need to negotiate a treaty that will cause
a just peace.
And that's one of the ingredients of a just war, is a just war is only just in the end
if you also arrive at a just peace which creates a more durable peace than you had before the
war. Instead, the Council of Ten met, they became to squabble and fight among each other,
and they never got around to inviting Germany to the table. This went on from January 1919
up until May of 1919, and they simply presented the treaty to Germany and said, you either
sign it or else. Now, the or else was this. The British blockade that had taken place
during the war was not stopped, and that was the force by which they made Germany sign
the treaty. It's estimated that approximately 600,000 German civilians starved while the
was being, quote, considered. And the Germans simply had no method by which to refuse to
sign the treaty. They had to stop the British blockade to survive. And so they were forced
into signing that. In looking at the motives of the three main people, Woodrow Wilson in
going there had only one motive that he really was crucially interested in, and that was
The League of Nations
Lord George was looking for as much loot as he could get to stop the Germans
and I've told you what their secret aims were.
Clemenshaw, on the other hand, wanted to reduce Germany down to an agricultural state.
He said, I'm tired of Germans invading France.
This is the third time they've invaded.
He didn't mention that France had declared war two of those times against Germany,
He wanted to just make Germany into an agricultural state and never have any military power.
So anytime the negotiations got rough and Wilson was pushing them for the 14 points,
they would say, well, yeah, I don't know about that.
We might take another look at the League of Nations, and Wilson said, oh, okay, okay.
Now let me look at some of the reasons that the treaty was unfair. Another one is that
Germany was blamed as the sole cause of the war. This is called the Guilt Clause, Section
213 of the treaty, which was drafted, by the way, by a very young John Foster Dulles. And
it claimed that Germany started World War I, and that was highly debated. Germany strongly
and I think without me going into it I think you can recognize you can't blame Germany
for starting World War I. The Russians mobilized as soon as Serbia was attacked and when Russia
mobilized that meant war was taking place. So you can blame it on the Austrians or blame
it on the Serbians or blame it on the Russians but it's hard to blame it on Germany because
The first book written critical of the Treaty of Versailles was written by none other than
and John Maynard Keynes, called The Economic Consequences of Peace. It's the only book
he wrote that I agree with part of. He was part of the official delegation from England
and the 14 points made the point that there was not going to be any reparations except
to pay for the damage to civilians. And what it ended up being was to pay for the whole
and the whole cost of the war for everybody. But they couldn't come to a figure. So they
just told the Germans, you've got to pay reparations, so start sending money and after a while we'll
tell you when to stop. They never told them the final amount of $32 billion until 1922.
So what they were made to do at Versailles in May and June of 1919 was sign a blank check
to the Allies saying, we'll pay for the war.
Keynes wrote about what was being discussed as to the amount and said that this would
be a horrendous burden.
And a lot of people have taken issue with that and have fought it and tried to prove
that it wasn't an impossible thing and therefore the Treaty of Versailles was okay.
Whether you take the position that it was too harsh or not, it was unfair to make them
Sign a Blank Check.
On the fact that Germans, some people say were defeated in the field and that therefore
they had no choice but to surrender, they did have a choice.
They won the war in the east with Russia.
As you remember the history of the Germans sending Lenin back to Russia to make them
Germany stopped the war, and Lenin promised to enter into a peace treaty, which he did at Brest-Litovsk, and that gave Germany so much of the Russian countryside that it tripled the size of Germany.
They won that portion of the war, and they took a large number of their troops and put them on the western front to try to finish the war.
Germany was never invaded. The war was fought completely on French and Belgian soil.
So, the Germans felt like, you know, what, we're winning the war and all of a sudden there's this, we're giving up and this horrendous treaty is enforced on us by a new government we never voted for.
So, you can see how the German people were upset and how they might elect a person like Hitler.
Here's some of the other provisions that were harsh.
The army was limited to 100,000 people. There was to be no navy and no merchant marine fleet.
The high seas fleet that the Germans had was taken to England at a place called Scapa Flow
and was being held there until the end of the negotiations.
And when the treaty was announced and the terms were announced, the German sailors pulled the plugs on the ships
I don't want you to take my statements about explaining Hitler as a defense of Hitler.
Hitler was a horrible guy, but he was the third worst murderer in history, Stalin and
Mayo being ahead of him.
But yet, it's important to understand how somebody like that can come to be elected
in a democratic process and use the Constitution to become a dictator, and that's what he did.
He could never have done it without the unfaithness and the harshness of the Versailles Treaty.
One of his main supporters in coming to power was General Ludwig Beck, who eventually became
his chief of staff.
He was a professional army guy and he was to become the head of the German government
once Hitler was assassinated.
He joined the underground movement to assassinate Hitler, and he eventually was, when they made
the attempt on Hitler, he lost his life.
But people like that were for Hitler because he was against the Versailles Treaty.
Here's an interesting statement by Harold Nicholson.
He is one of the key people in the delegation from England.
And he says this in his book called Peacemaking.
I think I have that here if I can put my hand on it.
Peacemaking right here.
He wrote this a short time after the war.
The leading statesmen in Paris, not excluding President Wilson, were vividly aware that
the treaty which was being drafted would require revision at a more distant epoch when the
hysteria of the war had subsided. They provided for that revision. They inserted it into the
Covenant of the League of Nations, an article which is too little quoted and too often forgotten,
which is Article 19, and it says this, the assembly, and that means the League of Nations,
this is out of the Treaty of Versailles, creating the League of Nations, the assembly may from
time to time advise reconsideration by members of the League of Treaties which have become
ineffable and the consideration of the international condition whose continuance might endanger
of the Peace of the World. In other words, inserted into the Treaty of Versailles was
recognition that it needed to be revised because if it wasn't, there would be a danger of peace
in the world. He goes on to say this, Nicholson does, We arrived determined that a peace of
justice and wisdom should be negotiated. He's talking about when they first got there. We
left Paris conscious that the treaties imposed upon our enemies were neither just nor wise.
It is impossible to read the German criticism without deriving the impression that the Paris
Peace Conference was guilty of disguising an imperialistic peace under the surplus of
Wilsonianism that seldom in the history of man has such vindictiveness cloaked in such
unctuous sophistry been practiced.
It was hypocrisy.
It was a predominant part of the treaty.
And war would be the inescapable result.
So one other point I want to make before leaving the treaty with Germany.
Another bad result of the Versailles Treaty was there was a meeting on May 1919 at the
Majestic Hotel in Paris between various delegates from America and the British.
And they decided that in the future America and Britain were going to have to join together
in foreign policy in order to proceed and to win.
The British realized that their empire was in great jeopardy without American firepower.
So they agreed to form organizations for the future Anglo-American cooperation.
The British formed an organization called the Royal Institute of International Affairs
was in 1919 and Americans came back and formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921.
Those two organizations are now in effect and the Council on Foreign Relations is the
main establishment organization for the foreign policy of America and one of the reasons for
that founding was to prevent future presidents from being criticized like Woodrow Wilson
was.
So those two organizations are very important to bringing America into World War II.
And if you'll read my chapter in Reassessing the Presidency, the title of it, and it's
in your handout, the reference to it, is Roosevelt and the First Shot.
But what I do is go through and talk about how World War I and II are the same and how
Anglo-American cooperation was in effect right up to America getting into World War II. There's
an excellent book I want to recommend to you that's in your outline by Jim Powell. It's
a very new book called Wilson's War. And he talks a little bit about the peace conference,
but it's mainly about this idea that it's one war, World War I and II, and that World
World War I and the peace treaty, World War I and the way it was dragged out by England
and America trying first to keep the czar in the war and then trying to keep Kerensky
in the war was to drag it out and cause the Russian government to be overthrown by the
Bolsheviks.
So World War I and American intervention helped bring about communism and then by the peace
treaty we brought about Nazism.
So, Wilson's War, How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and World War II is a good book and I highly recommend it to you.
Alright, let me switch gears now and go to what happened in Italy.
Italy had shopped around before the war to see which side to get on and they simply said, what are you going to give us if we join?
The Germans promised us something, the British and French promised us something.
So they entered into a secret treaty as to what they were to get.
So they came to the peace conference and asked for their spoils.
And the main thing they wanted was a port named Fume.
It's F-U-I-M-E, which is right on the, I guess that's the Adriatic Sea, right on the back of the boot, up at the top.
And Wilson took a strong stand and just said, no, you're not going to get it.
And so Clement Show and Lord George agreed with that.
And that Italian delegate got up crying and stormed out and left.
And when Wilson had been campaigning before the conference, they changed street names for him in Italy.
They said people put up, in addition to the Madonna and Jesus, they had Wilson on the wall.
Law.
He was just worshipped in Italy, and when he didn't give him fumet, all the pictures
came down, the streets got renamed, and all of that was undone.
And the treaty became a cause in Italy, and became the main thing that Mussolini began
to campaign against, and he called it the mutilated treaty, whereas Hitler came to power
Criticizing it as the Dictated Treaty or the Dictat.
Mussolini created fascism for the purpose of fighting communism.
He said it, we are a party of the left, we are socialist, but we are national socialist.
And there was no anti-Semitism to fascism in Italy.
It was the idea is nationalism had been growing for the whole 19th century, but it was Italy
There were only in Germany who came to a nationalistic status late in the 19th century and nationalism
was the main thing they wanted and they were not about to let some international socialism
come in and undo what they had done nationally.
So fascism was a national, socialistic movement on the left.
It was not until Hitler came to power and copied Mussolini with fascistic ideas that
He brought in anti-Semitism and at that point the intellectuals and the idea of communication
people began to switch fascism to the extreme right.
So you can see that it had a similar effect in Italy as it did in Germany.
Now let's look at mistakes as to China.
Frankly, I did not realize until I read Macmillan's book what had happened in regard to China.
I didn't realize that China declared war on Germany.
China had, as you know, been jumped on pretty well by Western powers throughout the 19th
century.
Everybody was chopping them up.
They were the victims of maybe the most unjust war of all history, the Opium War.
Britain forced them to take in opium and they got Hong Kong.
And the Japanese had been ferocious.
They, as you know, Japanese had industrialized, the only Asian country to do that.
invaded China and they had taken Taiwan and Korea and then Japan took a big chunk of Manchuria
by beating the Russians in 1905. But China saw an opportunity now with this war to get
back the main thing that they had lost that they felt strongly about and that was called
The Peninsula of Shantung, Shantung is almost directly crossed from Korea and it's shaped
in almost two peninsulas. It is the homeland of Confucius. It has great sentimental and
cultural value to the Chinese. And the Germans had what were called concessions there before
World War I. That means you could come in and build a railroad and you could do all
in that war. So they they came to the conference and asked for Shantung and
they decided that they would take it away from Germany, but the treaty said it
goes to the worst enemy China has Japan. It was the worst possible result. They'd
rather have Germany have it than Japan. So there was a protest in Tiananmen
in Beijing in May of 1919, protesting the Versailles Treaty of Negotiations in Paris.
And it was at that point that many of the intellectuals in China decided that they could
no longer trust the West, that there was no way to deal with them.
And so what we need to do is to go to the new country that seems to have so much promise,
and that's the Soviet Union.
So the communist movement was born in China in May of 1919 as a protest against the Paris
Treaties.
Some of you may have read about the big movement in America in 1949 when the civil war in China
resulted in the Chinese communist in May defeating Chiang Kai-shek and sending him.
He goes off to Taiwan.
Many people say, how did we lose China?
Where did we go wrong?
You know, Roosevelt made Chiang Kai-shek take communists into his government.
The Paris Peace Talks is where China went to the Communist Party and here we are in the 21st century with China becoming, I think, will become the industrial giant of the world and leave us far behind by the end of the 21st century.
And what a shame it is that they are a communist country. We think that communism is dead.
and here maybe the most fearful thing in the world is for this great industrial country which I think it will become is a great communist power and it starts in May of 1919 at Tenement Square as a result of giving Shantung to the Japanese.
Look at Japan. Japan, as you know, industrialized, the only industrial nation in Asia, and shocked
the world by beating Russia in 1904 and 1905. But they had entered into a naval treaty with
The British Empire in 1902. So when the war came, Britain called on Japan to help, and
they sent a large number of destroyers to encircle the British Isles to help fight the
submarine blockade of the Germans. They lost only 300 people in the war. But as a favor
to Lloyd George, they were allowed to sit at the table and be part of the Council of
and be one of the five countries represented. They came wanting three things. Mainly they
wanted Shenzhen. Second, they wanted all the German possessions of the islands in the Pacific,
which they got. And as you know, in World War II, we began to take those islands back.
Those had been mainly German islands. But they went away completely embittered toward
the conference because they didn't get number three. And number three was they wanted a
clause in the treaty that says that Asians are equal racial quality as Caucasians. It
was a racial inferiority thing that they had endured and their people had suffered from
in England and America and they wanted what they called the racial equality clause and
Lord George just had a fit and Woodrow Wilson did too and they just politically they couldn't
come back and say that they had done this.
Racism was very prevalent in England and America back then, and they were not going to let
Japan have that clause.
They gave them Shantung and the German Islands, but not a racial equality clause.
So Japan went away very embittered toward the West.
Let's look at what happened about Vietnam.
The French, of course, had already conquered Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, so they had
those as colonies.
And there was a young 19-year-old man that came to the conference and asked to speak
to the Council of Ten, and they said, what do you want to speak on?
He said, I'm a delegate from Vietnam, I want to read to the people the Rights of Man document
The 14 Points of the French Revolution
She said, paraphrasing the communist slogan that religion is the opiate of mankind, she said that communism is the opiate of the intellectuals.
The Mayo, being an intellectual, turned to communism, but he was very embittered by the promises that were made in the 14 points and then completely abandoned them.
Now let's get to the real bad part. You think you've heard bad things so far. Here's a book
I strongly recommend to you, A Peace to End All Peace. This is about the mid-east. I sort
of stumbled into this book. I had never heard of it before and I got another book by David
Fromkin, didn't like it, but when I saw the title of this, I said that's got to be good.
This goes into the secret treaty that had been entered into between France and England during
the war that at the end of the war they were going to divide up the Ottoman Empire.
The fact before World War I everyone realized the Ottoman Empire was sort of the sick man
of Europe.
Everybody saw it sort of like jackals coming around so they decided we're going to split
And that's what we want out of this war, one of the main things we want.
But the problem was also that Britain made three very contradictory promises.
They also made a promise to what they thought was the leader of the Arabs, Hussain, who
was the sheriff of Mecca.
They considered him sort of the leader of the Arab world.
And they promised that if the Arabs would join in the war with Great Britain and France,
that there would be an independent Arab nation, and the Arabs would have complete independence.
And then they made another contradictory promise to the Zionists, and that is that if you will
join with us and give us your support, we will promise you a homeland in Palestine.
So you've got these three contradictory promises that are made.
In regard to that, I recommend a movie to you.
This is a dangerous man about Lawrence of Arabia.
This is only about the Paris Peace Conference, where he comes to the Paris Peace Conference
with the son of Hussein who is Faisal, Prince Faisal.
And they began to try to negotiate and it's very interesting to me in the movie as well
as the book I just pointed out that Justice, the man who became Justice Frankfurter, but
Felix Frankfurter negotiated and got Prince Faisal to say that he had no real objection
and there's Arabs having a homeland for the Zionists in Palestine and that's in the movie
and in the book.
But the Zionist movement put pressure on Germany and on the British, they were playing both
sides, and the rumor came out that Germany was going to have a declaration that if they
1, that the Ottoman Empire was going to promise a homeland to the Zionists.
And so Justice Brandeis was asked to go to Wilson and ask him if he would approve of
the Balfour Declaration being given, that England would make that declaration.
That was before America was in it and he gave approval to it.
So he approved that before America was even in the war.
But what's interesting to me in this book is that it shows that Lord George brought Winston
Churchill back in to his post-war government to handle the Mideast.
So Churchill was in charge of Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, and the Iraq situation is very interesting.
They brought in a woman by the name of Gertrude Bell, who was a mid-east specialist, and she drew up a constitution for Iraq, and they held an election, and they put in a government, and then all hell broke loose, just like we're going through now.
This was tried in 1921 and it was pointed out that a man named Henry Wilson says that putting those three Ottoman provinces together is like creating a nation and putting the three worst enemies together and calling them a nation.
They simply drew a circle around the Kurds and the Shiites and the Sunnis and called them a nation.
Well, what the British had done is that they had discovered oil in Mosul, which was a town
they included in Iraq, and the British seemed to have recognized earlier than anyone else
about the significance of oil for war.
They had changed over the whole British fleet to be run by oil before World War I.
The French were not as aware of the discovery of oil, and so they didn't fight back the
the British getting all the oil at Mosul.
In regard to Palestine, Churchill started running the Palestinian situation with the
homeland and finally the British were getting, just like Americans in Iraq now, they were
shooting them, they were bombing them, the British were taking it on the chin and so
So Churchill goes to Lord George and he talks about it in this book and says we are suffering
tremendously here in Palestine and I really fail to see what this really does for England.
They're talking now that they want a state and we never promised them a state and Lord
George says yes we have.
He said we put homeland in there just to sell it at the time but we promised them a state
and we're going to stick with it no matter what happens.
And it turns out that Lord George, before being in politics, was the lawyer for Herzl,
the founder of Zionism, and represented him.
And he was more of a Zionist than Churchill.
And so the commitment was made and the British didn't give up until 1947.
And there was an interesting, this is not in any of these books, but there's an interesting
meeting in the White House in 1948 leading up to the election.
And it was called in George Marshall, who is Secretary of State to Handle Foreign Affairs
and Clark Clifford, who is simply an advisor to Truman on domestic policy.
And George Marshall objects to Clifford being there and says, I thought this was a foreign
policy meeting.
is, want to know whether we should endorse the creation of the State of Israel, and Marshall
says absolutely not. That will be trouble from now on. It's the worst possible decision
we can make, and Claude Clifford says, well, if you want to win the election, you've got
to do it. So the decision was made, and that's one of the few times I admire George Marshall
for Courage. He was such a sycophant during the Second World War with Roosevelt. But it
turns out that the only treaty that was actually negotiated was the treaty with Turkey, which
is what was left of the Ottoman Empire. They continued to fight to preserve that country,
and that ended up being the only negotiated treaty of the whole Paris Peace Conference.
I want to bring out something that you may not realize is a connection to Roosevelt here,
but in the book by Macmillan, she points out the adulation that Wilson got in leading up
to the Paris Peace Conference.
He toured England, he toured Europe, he toured Italy, and there's no man who's ever been
over this idea of the League of Nations.
So he ran for Vice President in 1920
and made 800 speeches in which every speech he proclaimed
support for the League of Nations.
Let me get this book.
This book is FDR and the Creation of the UN. It's a book fully supportive of Roosevelt
and praises him and praises the UN. But what this points out is that he was so upset about
the League of Nations not being endorsed by America that his psyche became that he wanted
to create a world organization and have America in it. And a lot of people I've seen recently
The way they've said that, well, poor Roosevelt, he was so sick and debilitated at the end
of his life that a communist named Al Juhis came in and spoofed him by creating the UN
that he didn't understand.
Well, if anything, Roosevelt was using Al Juhis because Roosevelt wanted the UN long
before ever since the League of Nations was turned down by America.
And in the Atlantic Charter meeting, this goes into in detail, in August of 1941, Roosevelt
met with Churchill and talked about America getting into the war, which occurred in Pearl
Harbor a few months later. And he said that the main thing he wanted as a result was the
creation of the United Nations, and he called it by that name. And he said it will be China,
Russia, America, and the British Empire.
And Churchill was very much against it.
He said, no, I can't agree to losing sovereignty.
I might agree to some sort of sphere of influence.
But in January of 1942, one month after Pearl Harbor, an agreement to creating the UN was
signed in New York, which included 22 nations.
and it talked about how it was going to be set up after the war and Roosevelt negotiated
all of this. Roosevelt spent the entire war asking Stalin for two things. He said, we're
sending you all this land lease, I want two things. I want you to come in and support
the UN and I want you to join with us against Japan. And it wasn't until Yalta that Stalin
agreed, they came into the war for six days and got all kinds of concessions for that,
and they agreed to the United Nations.
So that's another consequence of the ill-fated Paris Peace Talk and Wilson is that this eventually
led to Roosevelt's warning America into World War II and creating the United Nations.
So let me just conclude by saying this, that the 20th century to me is a train wreck. It's
all of the great promises of classical liberalism that we heard about in the 18th and 19th centuries
went down the drain in the 20th century due to war and due to strong nationalistic ambitions.
This is an interesting book that I'm very much against, but it's still interesting.
I want to read a thing to you because he says his analysis of history.
This is a book by John J. Mersheimer called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
He says this, quote, The 20th century was a period of great international violence.
In World War I, roughly 9 million people died on European battlefields.
About 50 million were killed in World War II and well over half of them were civilians.
This cycle of violence continued throughout the remainder of the 20th century and will continue far into the new millennium.
Hopes for peace will probably not be realized because the great powers that shaped the international system create each other and compete for power.
As a result, indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain positions of dominant power over others.
This is a very tragic situation. I agree with all that.
Then he says, so here's the solution.
There's no escaping it, unless, there's no escaping a bad result, unless the states that make up the system agree to form a world government.
So what we need is more collectivism, more centralization of power if we're going to stop this tragedy of the 20th century.
So what I hope that I've been able to do in talking about the Treaty of Versailles is to show you the unintended consequences of people that,
at least maybe Wilson, may have had some sort of a good motive, but behind the scene are people scrambling for loot.
and what war does, even wars that you win, you lose much of your freedom because it centralizes power and it diminishes the freedom of individuals and that's the reason for the book, The Cost of War, America's Period Victories, is to show you even in a victory you lose your freedom as we are doing now with the Patriots Act and we may be losing that war but even if we win it, we are losing our freedom through things like the Patriots Act and the security that you have to go through at an airport
and other things like that. So to me, there's not a better organization in the world that is advocating the intellectual renaissance and reformation that's needed in government and economics than the Mises Institute.
Mises' answer to all of this was, we need a free market economy to separate government and the economy. And we need a non-interventionist foreign policy.
And those are the ideas also of our founders.
So I hope that this talk has brought some things to like to you to show that war, even those
that you win, is a dangerous thing, and that unless you seek a just peace at the end of
the war, then you're more likely to create more problems than you started off with.
Thank you very much.
I don't know if I want to do any, you want to do some questions?
You all are welcome to come up and look at these books and thumb through them and see if there's any, I'm not selling them, but you may just want to look at them.
But I'd be glad to talk to any of you afterwards.
Thank you very much. Peter, how are you doing?
I didn't read that book. I read the one on World War I and he was here.
Oh, you're talking about Thomas Fleming, the one with the John Randolph Club?
The other one? Yeah, the one that was here? I hadn't read it.
The one on Roosevelt and then the one on Wilson.
Yeah. Yeah, I didn't read that one. Sorry. Anything else? I think Fleming's done a good job though.
He came here and spoke. Lew and I had dinner with him. And he's interesting. He's not as much of a libertarian as I had hoped.
John, can you tell us a little bit about Colonel House? About all I know about him is he wasn't a Colonel. I think he was from Texas. But how did he come to have so much influence over you?
and he wrote an interesting book that sort of sets out all of his ideas and that is to have a, Lew, what's the name of the book, do you remember?
Philip Drew Administrator.
Philip Drew Administrator and it's what he wanted out of Woodrow Wilson so that he sets up this government and has a dictator and so forth.
But his parents were from England and his father came here and made a lot of money in Texas and so he never worked or had a job but he loved power politics so he became very active in Texas politics and began to manage people's races for governor and when one of the governors was elected he made him an honorary colonel he was never in the army
It's just an honorary thing. And so he decided that he wanted to get larger than Texas. So he wanted to get into national politics.
And while Wilson was governor of New Jersey, he asked for a meeting with Wilson and told him that he would like to help him become president.
and so they formed a friendship that was absolutely amazing.
Wilson said that, talking about how I said, he knows what I'm thinking before I say it.
He said he's my alter ego.
And he would allow him, Wilson would allow House to speak for him without any restraints.
And all of that came to an end at the Paris Peace Talks.
When Wilson came back to America to meet with Congress while they were in session, he left
House in control.
And House was a political compromiser.
And so he started negotiating various parts of the Versailles Treaty.
And when Wilson came back and he blamed House for doing away with many of the things that
Wilson had wanted, and he quit speaking to House and they separated.
But House had a tremendous influence, and there's a very close parallel way Wilson had sent
House to England about how to get America into the war in about 1915. House was having
meetings with the British about America getting into the war in 1915. And the same thing Harry
Hopkins did with Roosevelt. Harry Hopkins went to England in 1940 and had many meetings
with the British government on how to get America into the war with Britain.
So Howson served sort of the same secretive thing that Harry Hopkins did for Roosevelt.
He's a very dangerous man, a very dangerous type individual that Wilson offered to give
him a cabinet position, offered to do all kinds of things.
He said, no, I want to stay behind the scenes.
And so he was a very, very powerful man and probably had the most influence on Wilson
than any other person around, maybe other than, close would be Justice Brandeis, but
House was a very bad influence on Wilson. That's sort of a quick thumbnail on him. Anything
else?
John, on behalf of the audience here and those who are watching on the World Wide Web, I'd
like to thank you very much.
All right. Thank you.