Why Stalin and Hitler Should Never Have Happened
David Stockman

Herewith is a capsulized dissection which attempts to explain why Stalin and Hitler should have never happened. Accordingly, the hot, cold and Forever Wars wars that followed thereafter condemn the case for the American Empire, not make it; and they show that Trump’s America First is a far more appropriate lodestone for national security policy than Imperial Washington’s specious claim that America is the Indispensable Nation.

The Great War had been destined to end in 1917 by mutual exhaustion, bankruptcy and withdrawal from the utterly stalemated trenches of the Western Front. In the end, upwards of 3.3 million combatants had been killed and 8.3 million wounded over four years for movement along blood-drenched front-lines that could be measured in mere miles and yards.

Still, had America stayed on its side of the great Atlantic moat, the ultimate outcomes everywhere would have been far different. Foremostly, the infant democracy that came to power in February 1917 in Russia would not have been so easily smothered in its crib.

There surely would have been no disastrous summer offensive by the Kerensky government to rollback Germany on the eastern front where the czarist armies had earlier been humiliated and dismembered. In turn, an early end to Russia’s bloody and bankrupting impalement on the eastern front would also likely have precluded the return of Lenin to Russia in a German boxcar and the subsequent armed insurrection in Petrograd in November 1917. The flukish seizure of power by Lenin and his small band of fanatical Bolsheviks, in turn, would most certainly never have happened.

That is, the 20th century would not have been saddled with what inexorably morphed into the Stalinist nightmare. Nor would a garrisoned Soviet state have poisoned the peace of nations for 74 years thereafter, while causing the nuclear sword of Damocles to hang precariously over the planet.

Likewise, there would have been no abomination known as the Versailles peace treaty because it was a toxic peace of victors. But without America’s billions of aid and munitions and two million fresh dough-boys there would have been no Allied victors, as we demonstrate below.

Without Versailles, in turn, there would have been no “stab in the back” legends owing to the Weimar government’s forced signing of the “war guilt” clause; no continuance of England’s brutal post-armistice blockade that delivered hundreds of thousands of Germany’s women and children into starvation and death; and no demobilized 3-million man German army left humiliated, destitute, bitter and on a permanent political rampage of vengeance.

So, too, there would have been no acquiescence in the dismemberment of Germany at the Versailles “peace” table.

As it happened nearly one-fifth of Germany’s pre-war territory and population was spread in parts and pieces to Poland (the Danzig Corridor and Upper Silesia), Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), Denmark (Schleswig), France (the Saar, Alsace-Lorraine and the neutralized Rhineland) and Belgium (Eupen and Malmedy).

This sweeping loss of territory also meant Germany lost 50% of its iron production capacity, 16% of its coal output and 100% of its far flung colonies in Africa and East Asia to England and France.

Needless to say, God did not create the map of Europe on the 6th day of his labors. But it is absolutely the case that it was the vast German territories and peoples “stolen” at Versailles that provided the fuel for Hitler’s revanchist agitation during the years before his seizure of power; and it was that campaign to regain the lost territories which nourished the Nazis with patriotic public support in the rump of the fatherland.

Likewise, the French-Belgium occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 would not have happened because the justification for that invasion of German lands was that the latter had not paid its oppressive war reparations–a staggering sum that would amount to more than $500 billion in today’s purchasing power.

As it happened, it was the reparations crisis that led to Germany’s insane printing press monetary spree and the destruction of the German middle class in the 1923 hyperinflation. And without that society-crushing development along with all of the above, the history books would have never recorded the Hitlerian ascent to power and all the evils that flowed thereupon.

Former Congressman David A. Stockman was Reagan's OMB director, which he wrote about in his best-selling book, The Triumph of Politics. His latest books are The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp And The Fantasy Of MAGA. He's the editor and publisher of the new David Stockman's Contra Corner. He was an original partner in the Blackstone Group, and reads LRC the first thing every morning.

www.davidstockmanscontracorner.com