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Jack Beatty, The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began (Walker & Co., 2012), vii + 392 pgs., hardcover, $30.
Page 322, Beatty notes that Churchill told an American journalist in 1936 that had the war ended in early 1917, “There would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany.”
Page 323, Beatty writes: “U.S. entry into the war renewed the lust for conquest (and revenge) on the Allied side.” This is another great evil of the United States getting involved in World War I. Wilson, of course, should have heeded the advice of earlier U.S. presidents Washington, Jefferson, and Madison to avoid entangling alliances and stay out of European wars.
Page 324, Beatty finishes the book with the truest thing that Wilson ever said about World War I: “An injury . . . to civilization . . . which can never be atoned for or repaired.”
Page 322, Beatty notes that Churchill told an American journalist in 1936 that had the war ended in early 1917, “There would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany.”
Page 323, Beatty writes: “U.S. entry into the war renewed the lust for conquest (and revenge) on the Allied side.” This is another great evil of the United States getting involved in World War I. Wilson, of course, should have heeded the advice of earlier U.S. presidents Washington, Jefferson, and Madison to avoid entangling alliances and stay out of European wars.
Page 324, Beatty finishes the book with the truest thing that Wilson ever said about World War I: “An injury . . . to civilization . . . which can never be atoned for or repaired.”
