If Ron Paul Had Been President in 1917, the Holocaust Would Never Have Happened

I often encounter articles attempting to support America’s worldwide military interventionism by asking non-interventionists like Republican Presidential Frontrunner Dr. Ron Paul “What would you have done about Hitler?!” The question is usually a thinly veiled accusation designed to cast peacemakers as cowards and/or weaklings and/or heartless SOBs, and, perversely, war-mongers as the champions of the weak and oppressed. It often comes packaged with the spurious notions that

1. our foreign “aid” is used or intended for humanitarian purposes. (It’s not – it’s there to bribe governments into compliance and feed the US arms industry. Much or most of it get’s funneled into the Swiss bank accounts of dictators)
2. our military interventions are undertaken for charitable ends, as if bombings and mass-starvation-inducing embargoes are the geopolitical equivalents of hugs from Mother Teresa.

Before we go any further, let me state for the record, I have no qualms with anyone for asking this question sincerely, rather than purely as a cynical rhetorical device. They’re often helpless in the grip of fear; the fear that the whole world will be conquered by evil dictators if America does not step forever on it’s neck with the jack-boot of our intrinsic goodness. Enthralled by that fear, they become blind to the facts that

1. our Federal government routinely deals with, supports and even installs dictators whenever those actions suit it
2. there have always been those who sought world dominion for themselves through Government and “the greater good” has always been the most common whitewash for their psychopathic ego-trips
3. when you use military force to conquer other peoples’ countries and then stay there and extract their resources, they view you as an oppressor, no matter how vicious the regime you’ve toppled. THe thought process is “he may have been a devil, but at least he was our devil.” People like to work things out for themselves – we’d be no different.
4. We kill and maim OODLES of civilians including SCADS of cute little babies and kids and women, and grown men who once were cute little babies and kids, and who’s mothers will always remember and hold them in their hearts that way. And we kill plenty of them too. The mothers, that is. So I guess they won’t ALWAYS remember, just until we kill them. Or they die some other way. Or get amnesia… jeez, are you really going to make me qualify this with every possible permutation…?! 🙂 Anyway, when you do those things, people see you all the more as an oppressor, and might not mind risking death, or even blowing themselves up to get back at you, since you’ve already killed everything they had to live for anyway. Again, we would be no different.
5. When you clamp down on the world to protect it from all the evil dictators, you become the biggest evil dictator of all.

So for the few who ask this question sincerely, let me address it as such:

Ron Paul has always advocated fighting declared wars when necessary, against enemies who’ve attacked us. And in WWII that’s just what happened. Leaving aside the fact that FDR deceitfully allowed/engineered the attack on Pearl Harbor as a pretext to fight the Nazis, which Dr. Paul would never have done, once we were attacked by Japan and declared war upon by Germany, he would no doubt have proceeded more or less as it happened.  So all those who are afraid that Ron Paul’s non-interventionist America will hand the world to a future monolithic despot, take heart – it’s not so.

But I’ll go further and suggest that, not only would Ron Paul have dealt appropriately with Hitler, but if his approach had been followed in the WW1 era, the question about Hitler would have been moot from the outset. No, not moot… non-existent and virtually unimaginable, because there would never have been a Hitler, a WW2 (at least as we knew it), a Holocaust, etc. I admit that’s a pretty bold statement, but the thought-process behind it is straight forward, and, in my view iron clad – check it out:

We all know the accepted narrative behind the rise of Nazism and the causes of WW2. But let’s recap anyway, just to make sure everyone’s on the same page:

• The German people were ashamed and angry at their defeat in WW1
• They were bristling and strained under the punishing reparations imposed by the Versailles treaty
• They were hungry for someone to restore their national pride and resist what they perceived at the injustices visited upon them by the foreign powers.
• In comes Hitler, and it’s off the races (pun intended.)*

You’ll notice everything in this list hinges on Germany’s loss of WW1. So it’s only reasonable to conclude that if Germany had won, none of the rest would have happened, right?

And why did Germany lose? She had the French essentially defeated and Great Britain hanging on by a thread. Her victory was a foregone conclusion. The game changer? America came into the war.

It’s certain that, if America had minded her own business**, Germany and her allies would have won WW1.

Everything else dominoes from there:

No Versailles Treat, no wounded German pride, no tinderbox of German resentment to be fanned into an irate resurgent nationalism, no Hitler, no WW2 and no Holocaust.  So in this scenario, everyone’s a big winner except the French, British and their allies***.

WW2 was also the impetus for transoceanic militarism entering the American mass psyche. If we keep the dominoes falling along their logical trajectory, no WW2 means no NATO, no UN****, no Korean war, probably no Vietnam war, probably no cold war, no Iraqi, Afghani, Somali or Libyan wars, etc…

Moreover, no holocaust means no state of State of Israel, no Middle East conflict, no Palestinian/Arab refugee problem, no eternal wrangling over a “two state solution” etc.

The mind reels at the countless lives and vast resources that could have been spared and put toward enhancing human wellbeing, rather than destroying it, and at the general ramifications for our world, which branch off into infinity to form an alternate reality, populated by people who were never born, living in circumstances that never came to pass.

Now obviously, this kind of speculative history is in many respects inherently unprovable, and something I usually dismiss as mental masturbation. But in this case, I think it an appropriate and compelling counterpoint to the use of history to legitimize America’s tragic foreign policy of the last 100 years, when in fact a more logical examination of the past cries out for the exact opposite: stop all the wars, stop all the meddling, mind our own business, and heed the advice of our founders, as reflected in the remarkable and genuine wisdom of the only person in the Presidential arena who’s got the cures for what ails us: GOP frontrunner, Dr. Ron Paul.

* If you have any mods or additions etc…, by all means please tell me in the comments.

**Some will protest here, saying “It was our business – it became our business with the sinking of the Lusitania. And that is the official line. I would point out that many believe that attack happened under false pretenses, that the Lusitania was deliberately offered up as a sacrificial lamb by Woodrow Wilson, Edward Mandell House, and none-other than Sir Winston Churchill, then head of the British Navy, as a pretext to get America into the war. And given what is now known about Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin, that seems most plausible – par for our government’s course.

But whether or not that’s what happened, we needn’t have gone to war over it. Ships should be careful when sailing in war zones. Duh. Maybe they shouldn’t go – they might get sunk; that doesn’t mean the attacking nation has a policy of deliberately targeting the other nation’s ships, or the capacity or will to launch an invasion against her, which Germany clearly did not. The sinking of one ship in a hot zone does not mean a whole nation suddenly has a stake in, must, or should involve itself in, a war.

***As it happened, Germany had offered those nations quite a magnanimous peace settlement, but anyway, that’s not America’s problem. (And I say that having ½ French Ancestry, which was deeply scarred by WW1.) My father the history buff also points out that “a victorious Germany, still under Kaiser W II, would almost certainly have sought to expand according to Pan-Germanist views. Keep in mind that in 1914 Germany declared war on Russia and France, and invaded Belgium, knowing full well that would draw the UK into the fray. While not crazed like Hitler, the Kaiser was reckless and had grandiose views, the fulfillment of which would have redrawn the map of Europe and planted the seeds of another war – i.e. instead of Germany resenting France & the UK after WW1 it would have been the latter resenting Germany. Either way there would have been another explosive situation, but certainly very different from, and probably not quite as horrific as what did transpire.” To this I say – yes, but that would still not have been America’s concern; Europe’s wars belong to Europe.

****My Dad came to this country and met my mom through working for the UN, so it also means no me – but in this context I’m fine with that.