Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference, in which the UK, US, and Soviet Union agreed on plans to force German civilians to work as slaves for years after the war. Clearing minefields was a popular assignment (popular with the assigners, that is) and also agricultural labor (i.e., American president FDR was carrying on in the rich American Democrat tradition of agricultural slave labor). This post looks at the question of whether the benefits of this slave labor justified, for the UK, the costs of going to war and staying at war.

I’ve been listening to When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, in which participants describe the heroism of the British and their Allies during the 1944 Normandy invasion (also the cheerful and willing collaboration of most people in France). It’s a worthwhile book, but it doesn’t explain why the British sacrifice was worth it other than “Nazis are bad.”

Let’s back up to 1900. Is it fair to say that the UK circa 1900 was the most successful and richest country in the history of humanity? The sun never set on the British Empire, which included India. The Royal Navy was the world’s most powerful. Compare to today. The UK is a predominantly Islamic society (measured by hours spent on religious activities) jammed with low-skill immigrants. Wages are absurdly low by U.S. standards. GDP per capita is lower than in the poorest U.S. states. After decades of open borders, the core English part of the UK lacks cultural cohesion. The main project of the UK seems to have been assembling humans from the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies and expecting that they and their descendants won’t behave in a violent or dysfunctional manner once parked in the UK. The result is the Southport stabbings (by a young UK-born Rwandan) and the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal and similar. The trajectory of the UK from 1900 to the present looks like that of a country that lost multiple wars, each one having drained away its resources and treasure and each one resulting in the country being occupied by millions of non-British people.

What if the UK had never fought World War I? (As the victors, we typically think of Germany as the aggressor but it was the UK, without ever having been attacked, that declared war on Germany in 1914.) Let’s assume that Germany would, therefore, have attained all of its war goals. Would that have been worse than what the UK has done to itself? Germany’s goals in WWI were to steal some territory from neighboring countries, especially ports, but certainly not to take anything from the UK other than perhaps a competitive edge in colonizing far-away places that the UK didn’t hold onto even after ostensibly “winning” WWI. By not entering the war, the UK would have avoided the death of 6 percent of its male population (nearly 1 million men, though let’s keep in mind Hillary Clinton’s trenchant observation that “Women have always been the primary victims of war.”) and preserved a huge amount of treasure that it could have applied to beefing up its home defense and Royal Navy. Perhaps even more important, would the German people have elected Adolf Hitler if Germany had won WWI? The Nazis represented a dramatic change from previous German governments and a big part of Hitler’s appeal was that he would turn around the downward trajectory of the loss of WWI and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Without the British stepping in to fight WWI, therefore, they wouldn’t have had to consider whether to fight WWII. The UK would have needed to coexist with a more powerful Germany, but not a Germany with a plan to dominate all of Europe. Maybe a more powerful Germany could have pushed the UK aside in some of its colonial ambitions, but the UK lost all of its colonies in the “fight WWI and WWII” case.

The “fight WWI, but leave the Nazis alone and don’t fight WWII” analysis is a little tougher. Hitler supposedly didn’t want to fight the English, whom he admired. He envisioned a German-dominated European union (not too different from today’s “European Union”, including the idea of Jew-/Israel-hatred in most parts of Europe) and, even after the British declared war (without having been attacked in any way), a negotiated peace with the UK (see the background section of Operation Sea Lion in Wokipedia). If the British had used their resources to turn Britain into an island fortress rather than into daily fights with the Germans maybe Germany would never have bothered to bomb or invade the UK (Ireland was neutral regarding the Nazis and Germany never bothered Ireland). The UK might have lost some of its worldwide influence to a more powerful Germany, but the UK has lost all of its worldwide influence in the “fight WWI and WWII” case. As bad as Nazi Germany was, it never did anything so bad that the French weren’t happy to collaborate with the Nazis. Given the huge cost in lives, money, and years of home-front sacrifice, it seems that the UK would be in a better place today if it had let the Germans have a free hand in Europe from 1939 onward.

We can’t even say that the British sacrifices in WWI and WWII defeated the Nazis because we are informed that Nazis today (“far right”) are more numerous than ever and live all over the US and UK. Who wants to explain how the UK’s involvement in WWI and WWII makes rational sense in the light of how things turned out for the UK (i.e., the spectacular decline of the nation).

Related:

• Proving that none of my ideas are original, the Journal of Diurnal Epistolary Communication (Daily Mail) published a scholarly work on this subject in 2009… “PETER HITCHENS: If we hadn’t fought World War 2, would we still have a British Empire?”: how come we look back on the Second World War from conditions we might normally associate with defeat and occupation? … We are a second-rate power, rapidly slipping into third-rate status. … We had then, as we have now, no substantial interests in Poland, the Czech lands, the Balkans or – come to that – France, Belgium or the Netherlands. … [regarding WWI] We had gained little and lost much to defend France, our historic enemy, against Germany. In a strange paradox, we had gone to war mainly to save our naval supremacy from a German threat – and ended it by conceding that supremacy to the United States, our ally. … What about the Holocaust? There seems to be a common belief that we went to war to save the Jews of Europe. This is not true. We went to war to save Poland, and then didn’t do so. … When, in 1942, the Germans began their ‘Final Solution’, reliable reports of the outrage were disbelieved or sat on. Later, when the information was beyond doubt, we turned down the opportunity to bomb the railway lines that led to Auschwitz. It is certainly hard to argue that the fate of Europe’s Jews would or could have been any worse than it was if we had stayed out of the war. [Maybe Jews would have been better off if the Nazis hadn’t been opposed in their efforts to dominate Europe. The Germans might have become so strong that they could have forced the UK to give up some of its colonial territory and then Germany would have forced Jews to move there, which was the original Nazi idea (get Jews out of Europe, not kill all Jews).]