“The War Was Over…”

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by David Stockman

“In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet – a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles – let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word “mother” and the word “Kaiser” was assured of a tremendous success. At last every one had something to talk about and almost every one fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, 

“The Beautiful and the Damned” (1922)

“It’s Veterans Day in the United States of America, Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth states, Armistice Day in France and Belgium. With respect for members of the armed forces who died in the line of duty, perhaps we’re best served contemplating what ace fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker saw as he piloted his plane just 500 feet over the fog-shrouded battlefield slightly before 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918:

“And then it was 11:00 A.M., the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I was the only audience for the greatest show ever presented. On both sides of no-man’s-land, the trenches erupted. Brown-uniformed men poured out of the American trenches, gray-green uniforms out of the German.

From my observer’s seat overhead, I watched them throw their helmets in the air, discard their guns, wave their hands. Then all up and down the front, the two groups of men began edging toward each other across no-man’s-land. Seconds before they had been willing to shoot each other; now they came forward. Hesitantly at first, then more quickly, each group approached the other.

Suddenly gray uniforms mixed with brown. I could see them hugging each other, dancing, jumping. Americans were passing out cigarettes and chocolate. I flew up to the French sector. There it was even more incredible. After four years of slaughter and hatred, they were not only hugging each other but kissing each other on both cheeks as well.

Star shells, rockets and flares began to go up, and I turned my ship toward the field. The war was over.”

Except it wasn’t, and it isn’t. Yet even back then soldiers on both sides knew the war was pointless, that there was no victory to be had – just an end to the insane brutality of the whole enterprise. Better that they had all gone home after the politicians on both sides finally threw in the towel.

Today, we should remember that World War I and the Carthaginian Peace that followed was the incubator for almost all the ills of the next 100 years. That includes the Stalinist nightmare in Russia, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and the long, gray night of Cold War during which the nuclear extinction hung like Damocles’ sword over the whole planet.

It began the devolution of the Federal Reserve from decentralized “bankers’ bank” into omnipotent monetary central planner. It gave rise to the interventionist state in America. Most insidiously, it generated the baleful notion of America as the Indispensable Nation.

A year ago, as we observed the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, John Kerry stepped up to criticize the Donald for the president’s failure to lay a wreath at a ceremony commemorating the event at Belleau Wood. I remember a John Kerry who so poignantly echoed the words of Rickenbacker – the words of a soldier – when he spoke against the insanity of America’s role in a needless war in Southeast Asia back in 1971.

The only war of the 20th century more senseless than Vietnam was the so-called Great War, most especially America’s intervention in an old-world tragedy for no good reason whatsoever. Indeed, the heroic Marines at the bloody battle of Belleau Wood did not die “in the trenches for the cause of freedom.” They died there owing to the fanatical megalomania of President Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson maneuvered America to arms in April 1917 when the war was nearly over. He wanted a grand seat at the peace conference to follow so he could shape the world in accordance with his messianic vision. That, in and of itself, was a horrible reason for the deaths of 116,000 Americans during the less than 12 months they were actually engaged in battle.

The real tragedy of their sacrifice – the real crime of Wilson’s pointless intervention – is that it snatched victory for the allies, who didn’t deserve it, from the jaws of stalemate among the militarily exhausted, financially bankrupt, and politically demoralized combatants on both sides of the conflict.

Save for Wilson’s intervention, the war would have been over in 1917. There would have been a peace of the exhausted. There would not have been the vindictive, destructive peace of the “victors” at Versailles that paved the way for Lenin and Stalin in Russia and Hitler and the totalitarian mobilizations that fostered World War II and the Cold War and even the increasingly fraught destabilizations of the 21st century.

It would become Imperial Washington if it took the time to honestly reflect upon its own derelict and bloody hands and their role in creating more and more reasons for remembrances.”

- http://deepstatedeclassified.com/