No American Conservative: "A Factually Correct Guide for Max Boot" Thomas E. Woods Jr
"(...) Boot is particularly enraged at my World War I chapter (our reviewer being one of the seven or so people who still consider American entry into that war a good idea).
According to Boot, I am “sympathetic to German militarists” and I think it was “Woodrow Wilson’s fault that Germany began sinking American ships without warning, which led the United States into the war.” Boot is actually surprised that American merchant ships, outfitted on Wilson’s orders with Navy guns and staffed with Navy crews and instructed to fire upon any surfacing submarine, would be sunk by the Germans.
As for the Belgian atrocities, which I describe as “largely fabricated” (since they were), Boot also dissents. The point he misses is that although the Germans were indeed brutal in Belgium in suppressing a guerrilla uprising whose size they gravely overestimated, it was the tales of children having their hands cut off and corpses being made into margarine that outraged civilized opinion. And it was these sadistic and bizarre crimes, described in the Bryce Report, that were fabrications for propaganda purposes. When Clarence Darrow offered to pay $1,000 ($17,000 in today’s money) to anyone who could show him a Belgian boy whose hands had been cut off by a German soldier, no one took him up on it.
Boot continues: “The real atrocity, [Woods] thinks, was Britain’s naval blockade of Germany.” Well, yes, as a matter of fact that is what I think. Britain’s hunger blockade of Germany, which violated accepted norms of international law in more than one respect, resulted in 750,000 civilian deaths—about 150 times the number of Belgian civilians most scholars say were killed by the Germans.
Boot then proceeds to mischaracterize the Zimmerman telegram as “the document in which Germany’s foreign minister offered Mexico the return of the American Southwest if it would declare war on the United States.” Some might consider it relevant that the telegram began by noting that the Germans hoped to keep the U.S. neutral but that if they were unsuccessful and the United States entered the war against them, they wished to contract an alliance with Mexico.
Shortly after the Second World War, George Kennan wondered, “Today if one were offered the chance of having back again the Germany of 1913—a Germany run by conservative but relatively moderate people, no Nazis and no Communists—a vigorous Germany, full of energy and confidence, able to play a part again in the balancing-off of Russian power in Europe, in many ways it would not sound so bad.”
In other words, U.S. intervention in World War I, undertaken with the best of intentions, had been an exceedingly costly mistake. My point exactly.(...)"
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