Anglo Guilt for Hitler’s Power – Part One

By Gwydion M. Williams

A War to Reverse Previous Wars

Russia shall have Constantinople

The Necessity of a Mixed Economy

Unusual German Guilt?

That Germany became fascist and that Britain’s imperial elite helped the anti-fascist cause was an accident of history. An accident that also wounded the British Empire; hurt it so badly that it lost its substance over the next few decades. That was not at all what the elite had been intending.

Churchill became a hero of anti-fascism, because he was behind the times. He failed to realise how much weaker the British Empire had become. That rather than the British Empire lasting a thousand years, the strain of a second world war would doom it.

Nazism was an extreme within a much larger centre-right imperial aberration. An aberration that the USA and the British Empire were very much part of. Britain had a National Government, though it later became essentially Tory. The USA had Roosevelt as a Left Authoritarian, and needing to tolerate racist Democrats from the south in order to govern. Churchill himself was more openly an admirer of Mussolini than most Tories,^[1] though most approved of him until he joined Hitler’s war against them.^[2]

Genocide did not begin with Hitler, nor end with him. His power was possible only because everything had been thrown into doubt by the First World War. Few would dispute this if the question were put directly, though many evade it.

The First World War was a war produced by just the mix that the New Right claim as a guarantor of peace.

Note also that all of those countries were committed to the spread of capitalism. All except Tsarist Russia had a press free to criticise the government, though the rich dominated the papers that most people read. They also had open elections for multi-party parliaments, though not all adult males had a vote in the British Isles, and no women in most countries.^[3]

Many saw the war as a failure of Christian civilisation. Or at least the forms of Christianity that actually dominated. And it’s always seemed significant to me that both the Nazi swastika and the Soviet hammer-and-sickle could be seen as modified versions of the Christian cross.

People recently have been stretching the facts to claim that Stalin was 100% responsible for World War Two – though no one has yet repudiated the common belief that Hitler was also 100% guilty. The reality is that the British Empire had allowed Hitler to turn Germany into a great military power. They made German aggression possible, when it was impossible in 1933.

Stalin making a non-aggression pact helped make it a war that began against France and Britain, whereas British diplomacy looks very much like it was aimed at enabling or even encouraging a German war just against the Soviet Union.

British public opinion wanted some sort of agreement with the Soviet Union that would make both Britain and the Soviets safe from a German attack. My reading of the politics of the time is that the British government covertly made sure it would not happen.

And for the First World War, the root cause of later disasters: whose fault was it that such a brutal war occurred at all?

The consensus now is that it was a tragic accident, and that consensus is wrong. Wars within Europe had happened continuously since the end of the French-Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. But the First World War was destructive in a way Europe had not seen since Germany’s Thirty Years War.

As a Briton, it took me some time to accept that the main guilt for the destructiveness of the Great War lay with the British ruling class. Surely the general militarism was at fault? But you have to ask why the war continued when it had frozen into the horrors of Trench Warfare in the West. And where the ding-dong battles on the Eastern Front looked unlikely to reach any quick conclusion.

It’s an awkward truth that Imperial Germany by 1915 was ready to call the war a stalemate. Have everyone go back to the borders they’d had when the war started.

An awkward truth that Britain’s rulers would not accept any peace that failed to criminalise Germany for what had been a very ordinary power-political war.

An awkward truth that they also rejected France’s wish at Versailles to break up United Germany, which had only existed since the 1870s. Which included strong regional differences. So though they insisted that Germany be treated as criminal, our rulers did not behave as if they believed this to be so.

They behaved as if they wanted Germany kept as a potential foe. That meant that France could only dominate Continental Europe for as long as the British Empire supported them.

None of this got through to the British public. We ordinary Britons might have accepted moderation for Germany. The Christmas Truce showed that the men on the Western Front did not hate each other. That they would have been happy to go home to a world much like the world before the war.

It was the elite who wanted Germany broken, after Germany had replaced France and Russia as the biggest rivals to Britain’s global empire.

Drastic punishment of Germany with the Versailles Treaty is a contrast to the moderate treatment of France after the defeat of Napoleon. Moderation that caused a period of relative peace, which at the time suited Britain.

It also reversed many of Napoleon’s populist and democratic reforms, but Britain’s own parliament was not even loosely democratic until the 1880s.^[4] It had a House of Commons in which a majority of MPs could be freely chosen by a couple of hundred rich families till the reform of 1832. That reform gave voting power to the upper middle classes. It actually took away the right to vote in those few constituencies where it had been ‘potwallopers’, men with a home large enough to boil a pot of their own fire.

Moderation for France under a restored monarchy worked for peace, though not as a long-term curb on democracy. France democratised rather faster than Britain, but had no wish for another major war. Not until Napoleon 3^rd, who was Britain’s ally in the Crimean War. Who helped Italian unification, which Britain also approved of.

Similar moderation worked in the aftermath of World War Two. Forgiveness for West Germany and Japan, and US support for Franco’s Spain. In those days, the Soviet Union was a formidable rival, so any ally was forgivable. Many on the Anglo centre-right thought it regrettable that circumstances had forced them to destroy Nazi Germany and allow the Soviet Union to become much stronger. But at that time, no one could cover up the awkward fact that more than half of the German army had been destroyed on the Eastern Front.^[5] Only slowly did the media managed to shift credit by showing only the Western contribution.

Also covering up Western guilt. After the German surrender, the West helped Germans with varying degrees of guilt to escape. To South America mostly, but some to Canada, where Jews were less influential and the courts more under establishment control. Ukrainians who had been on Hitler’s side for at least part of the war were mostly stashed in Canada.^[6] They were later used to polarise Ukraine, when Putin proved less friendly to US interests than Yeltsin had been.

A War to Reverse Previous Wars

Who in 1914 had a positive wish to have a war, rather than another diplomatic settlement?

France wanted the portions of Alsace and Loraine that Bismarck had taken in 1871, even though almost all of them had a German-speaking majority.^[7] Note that Woodrow Wilson broke his own principle of national self-determination by demanding that France get the entire territory.^[8]
Tsarist Russia wanted Istanbul, originally Constantinople. This too ignored self-determination: the Tsars wanted it as heirs of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Republican France and Tsarist Russia became allies in 1892.^[9] This made no sense except to make it plausible that France could recover the German-speaking portions of Alsace and Loraine. To make it easier for Russia and its allies to expand further at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, with Istanbul / Constantinople as the grand prize.

Serbia was a convenient excuse. One of a series of diplomatic crises in which war had seemed possible.

In 1914, had the British Empire stayed out of it, it would have been a Great European War. Almost certain to have been short, and it would have made Germany dominant within Continental Europe.

Britons were led to believe that the German violation of Belgian neutrality obliged the British Empire to join the war. There was also talk of ‘gallant little Serbia’: talk that remained normal in Britain until history was abruptly re-written after the Cold War ended.

Serbia was the immediate cause, but mostly a convenient excuse. And it has been left out of most recent Western summaries of causes, because the Serb claim to what was then known as Bosnia- Herzegovina was suddenly redefined as wicked. It wasn’t only in the Soviet Union that ‘you never knew what was going to happen yesterday’. History was revised when Yugoslavia began to break up, and the Serbian government was slow to abandon Tito’s moderate socialism. Peaceful and prosperous Yugoslavia stopped being useful to either Upper London or the Mahon USA.

Upper London? I use an unfamiliar term, to avoid the confusion caused by the common habit of saying Britain for the elite’s foreign policies. Very little that happens is the spontaneous wish of ordinary Britons. But from 1688, the British monarchy had to share power with an independent-minded elite who meshed together as a social group in the upper-class and governmental parts of London. Most of the elite have their main homes somewhere other than London, and most ordinary Londoners are pulled along with whatever Upper London decides. But it is mostly in London that elite wishes mesh into coherent politics.

The USA never has had such a connected elite. Regional elites meet and argue in the Washington-based Federal Government. They had a civil war when the Federal government under Lincoln promised to keep slavery out of the lands that the Federal government ruled directly. But both sides solidly supported White Racism,^[10] which is why it stayed solid till the 1960s, and still lingers. And they both wanted to dominate the New World: the continents of North and South America. But dreams of a World Hegemony came slowly, becoming more tempting when US wealth and power became comparable to Europe’s Great Powers.

With the Monroe Doctrine, the USA tried to keep European powers out of their ‘patch’. Intended to stay out of whatever Europe might be doing. In a previous article, I detailed how Admiral Mahan helped the USA switch from Isolationism to Global Imperialism.^[11]

Without the US intervention, Germany would definitely have won World War One. They would have been a restraining force on Lenin, but also would not have encouraged a vicious civil war as the victorious allies did. They would have made a separate Ukraine, but also prevented the massacres of Jews and Poles that historically occurred whenever Ukrainian Nationalists were not dependent on outside support. And they would have kept intact Austria-Hungary, a state in which rival nationalities mostly kept the peace. Where Jews had a secure large share of middle-class jobs. Franz Kafka might have remained reasonably content in his career as a German Jew in the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. He was fluent in Czech, but culturally it was alien to him.

The USA in 1918 chose not to use its power to get a settlement fair to Germany. They went along with the continued starvation of Germany after the Armistice, to intimidate them into accepting the grossly unfair Versailles Treaty.

Russia shall have Constantinople

Upper London from the 1870s came to see Imperial Germany as a worse threat to British hegemony than long-standing rivals France and Russia.

“Great Britain saw nothing wrong with the strengthening of Prussia on the European continent, viewing France as its traditional rival in international affairs. Lord Palmerston, the head of the British cabinet in 1865, wrote: ‘The current Prussia is too weak to be honest and independent in its actions. And, taking into account the interests of the future, it is highly desirable for Germany as a whole became strong, so she was able to keep the ambitious and warlike nation, France, and Russia, which compress it from the West and the East’.”^[12]

This still left it uncertain who, if anyone, the British Empire should help. And actual policies don’t even look intelligently amoral, in the light of later events. With the most intensely White Racist empire, Upper London undermined the racial hierarchy when they helped Japan humiliate Russia in their 1904-5 war. There may be a connection with the 1903-4 invasion of Tibet, a territory under loose Chinese rule that they thought could be added to make British India more secure. Selfish imperialism might have been better served by letting China be partitioned, which Germany was keen on, and by keeping Japan weak.

Upper London played a weak hand rather badly. Did not expect the length and destructiveness of the war that actually happened, but decided to stick with it anyway. They hoped to cripple Imperial Germany by giving France and Russia territories they wanted in Europe. Upper London secretly planned the Great War on just that basis.^[13]

Note that Istanbul / Constantinople is in Europe, though the modern city has an extension into Anatolia. It and Eastern Thrace are the heritage of an Ottoman Turk expansion that took over from the older Seljuk Turk expansion into Anatolia. Tsarist Russia also wanted to give a chunk of Anatolia to the Armenians, who were claiming a Greater Armenia over territories where other mostly-Muslim peoples were the majority.

The British Empire had helped save the Ottoman Empire when it might have been conveniently partitioned, as Poland had been partitioned at the end of the 18^th century. But in World War One, they picked a quarrel with the Ottoman Empire, which had been reforming itself and tried to be friendly to Upper London.

Securing Palestine for Zionism was not a motive in 1914. That came later, when the war had bogged down.^[14]

The promise of ‘Tsargrad’, Constantinople, was the motivation for Tsarist Russia to undertake a risky war against Imperial Germany. They anyway wanted to continue its long series of wars against the Ottomans. Wars that had reclaimed what’s now Eastern Ukraine: a place settled by a mix of Ukrainians and Russians. And took over Crimea, which had been the base for Muslim slave raiders who had made much of that territory uninhabitable.

In the 1870s, when Russia seemed the main rival, Jingoism had included the refrain:

We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople!

But the public were conveniently shifted to the new viewpoint. Much like the sheep in Animal Farm, and much of what Orwell condemns was as much British as Soviet. A point Orwell himself evaded, having never entirely lost the imperial outlook that had led him to volunteer for the paramilitary police in what was then British Burma.

That wasn’t the only shift. Upper London decided well before 1914 that wars in Europe could be waged against the entire population. It had never stopped happening in the wider world beyond Europe, viewed as inhabited by inferior races unfit to govern themselves. People they genuinely supposed they were being kind to, even if the conquest itself was brutal. Or so viewed unless Britons might clear away the inferiors and farm the land itself, driving out or killing the natives. But for Europe, home of the superior White Race, things were supposed to be different.

Blockading a city and starving it out is probably as old as cities themselves. But for a wider region that normally fed itself, blockade could only hamper commerce. Sadly, both Britain and Germany became dependent on imported food when they industrialised. When the population grew massively.

It was Upper London, the rulers of the British Empire, who decided to apply starvation against whole countries rather than just a city. Eamon Dyas has done a series of books detailing just how this was done.^[15] And done subtly, so that a policy aimed at attacking the ordinary citizens of the enemy country was not seen as such by most of the British public.

The issue became unclear because Germany in both world wars used its submarines as a counter. Those submarines were re-labelled U-boats by British media: it made them seem even more foreign than they were. In the same spirit, the German Emperor was re-labelled Kaiser, and the German Realm renamed the Reich. Part of clever control of public opinion.

The British public saw only that Germany was trying to starve them, and sinking non-military vessels. It was overlooked that it only happened so because no merchant ship would challenge even a small surface warship.

Few Britons actually died as a result of the incomplete German blockade.

Vast numbers of Germans and other continental Europeans died because of the vastly more effective British blockade.

The Necessity of a Mixed Economy

I speak of Upper London. It is not physically upper, obviously. But it dominates socially. We suffered from the wars it started, though far less than Jews or Russians or Germans or many other peoples.

Britons were guilty – but not my sort of Britons. Not left-wing Britons, obviously. But also few in my social and cultural group. Technical and academic, and in my working life as a computer analyst I was part of a broader category of skilled workers who are often labelled middle class. They had to be tricked into an enthusiasm for wars they gained nothing from.

And it got worse under Thatcher, and her Tory and Labour heirs.

Upper London used to be a genuine ruling class. It took responsibility for the entire society, and felt that the ‘lower orders’ should be comfortable in their lesser lives. In the mid-19^th century, it was Tories who did much of the basic welfare. This shifted, with the Liberals doing most of the social

Reform could not have been avoided. Industrialisation produced appalling conditions in British cities. Engels reported this to other Germans in an 1845 book, and probably influenced how industry was allowed to develop in Germany.

When an English translation was prepared decades later, Engels said:

“The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which capitalistic production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages.

“Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous.

“But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it. France, Germany and especially America, are the formidable competitors who, at this moment – as foreseen by me in 1844 – are more and more breaking up England’s industrial monopoly. Their manufactures are young as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more rapid rate than the latter; and, curious enough, they have at this moment arrived at about the same phase of development as English manufacture in 1844.”^[16]

I don’t think Engels was entirely right on this. Germany was indeed overtaking Britain, but it was in part doing so with an early version of the Mixed Economy. It had never let capitalism rampage in the way that Britain did. It preserved mediaeval Guilds, rather than rooting them out as Britain’s rulers did.

As I explained earlier, the British Empire supported the French-Russian war against Germany because German industry was advancing in global trade.

Germany gets unfairly blamed for the First World War, which began because Serbia wanted to take Bosnia away from Austria-Hungary. And more widely, because France wanted territory with a German-speaking majority, while Russia was keen to grab Constantinople and chunks of Anatolia.

The entire structure of global imperialism was damaged by the war lasting as long as it did. Both Bolshevism and various versions of fascism emerged as major forces, which was against previous trends.

It was also the victorious powers that made a political settlement that made a second World War almost unavoidable.

And they made a mess of the economy. Opposition by liberals to economic controls caused a 1930s slump much bigger than any previous slump. Liberal Europe failed to find a cure before the Second World War forced them to expand the spending and power of the state. A process the Neo-liberals have tried to reverse, but not genuinely reversed.

Germany has remade its political traditions. The USA, Britain, and France never did, even though Britain and France gradually gave up their undemocratic empires and switched to the US pattern of indirect control and the occasional invasion. They expanded the same follies after the Soviet collapse, believing that pre-1914 capitalism had been correct all along.

But it has proved impossible to get back even to the Classical Capitalism that existed in the 1920s. What we have is a twisted version of the Mixed Economy. And a global Overclass that lacks the power to be a ruling class, but twists politics for its own selfish advantage.

^[1] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/why-churchill-admired-mussolini/

^[2] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/mussolinis-links-to-the-british-centre-right/

^[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women%27s_suffrage#1910s

^[4] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/40-britain/665-2/

^[5] https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams/Nazi-Germany-Was-Defeated-in-Russia

^[6] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Nazis-in-Canada-a-Previously-Neglected-Truth

^[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Frankfurt_(1871)

^[8] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/woodrow-wilsons-deceptive-14-points/

^[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Russian_Alliance

^[10] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/52-usa/both-sides-were-racist-in-the-us-civil-war/

^[11] https://labouraffairs.com/2024/07/06/britains-immoral-foreign-policy/

^[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War#Aftermath