The Debacle!

How Democracies Die

Mike Lofgren at Truthout blames the French collapse of 1940 on the treasonous selfishness of the French rich.

I posted this comment.

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Consider the alternative explanation that while the French people failed to opt out of WW1 in the mutinies of 1916 they successfully opted out of WW2 in the collapse of 1940.

Lofgren’s account simply leaves out the very large role of French defeatism, popular and elite, in this, their second debacle (the first was in 1870).

Yet the French collapse is far from the only case in the 20th Century in which a nation's government quite stubbornly wanted to fight while its people in large part did not.

Think of the American people, previously determinedly pacifist, dragged into war first by Wilson and then by Roosevelt.

Think of the American people and Vietnam.

Think of the Russian people and Kerensky's stupid decision to continue fighting in 1917 at the behest of the foundering allies.

Throws a different light on things, doesn't it?

Kerensky could have got better terms than the Bolsheviks finally accepted at Brest-Litovsk, and not only Russia but the whole world would have been the better for it.

I am not saying Lofgren is entirely wrong or denying that a good part of the French right were thinking and acting just as he says.

But there is far more to the story than that.

And how is it he did not mention the attitude of the very powerful and wholly disloyal French Communist Party and its fellow travelers who, in 1940, vigorously opposed war against Nazi Germany at Stalin's behest?

Shirer certainly didn't omit the role of the Communists.

But, as I recall, Shirer was committed to the view that the French should have fought and that France, Europe, democracy, and lots of other important things and people were let down when France collapsed.

Not much has changed since he wrote, in that regard.

American history is still far from affording the least hint of legitimacy to French defeatism before the war, at the collapse in 1940, during the time of Vichy, or after the war when the Communists and the non-Communist Free French equated it with treason and built up the post-war myth that “the real France” had been betrayed by the surrender and had always resisted.

Talk about a cover-up.

But then American history is still devoutly pro-war about American participation in both world wars and unsympathetic to defeatism anywhere, at any time.

And the response of the American left to Pat Buchanan’s book questioning England’s decision to go to war for Poland in 1939 has simply been to call him a Nazi sympathizer.

Ditto for his and others’ defense of the America First movement.

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Did you know that Bertrand Russell was a defeatist in WW1, publicly urging that the best outcome would be a quick German victory?

He was very much a man of the left, though neither then nor later in any particularly conventional way.

He was a defeatist in the Cold War, too, publicly arguing that surrender of the West to the Russians would have far less awful consequences than full-scale nuclear war.

He was by no means alone in thinking this, or in condemning the Western strategy of massive retaliation as committing the Western powers to the most massive war crime and the most horrific crime against humanity imaginable in response to a prior Russian nuclear attack.

Rather like Hillary's promise to turn Iran into a vast, radioactive ash tray in response to any Iranian nuclear attack on Israel.

Update, 11082012 at 0821 EST.

The above comment is nowhere to be found at Truthout.

Imagine that.