History Chanel's World Wars

            “World Wars”, the new miniseries on History Channel is a good tale.  It’s a look at famous people and how they were affected by the two world wars.  FDR, McArthur, Patton, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini are each followed in how they came to be major players.  The first episode takes us through WW I.  Of course the sketches are brief and things are left out.  For example, no mention of George Patton killing Pancho Villa and throwing the body over a fender like a deer-kill to bring it back to headquarters.  General Blackjack Pershing came out and Patton was not around his car.  Pershing reportedly said, “I don’t know this guy at all but I love his style.” (see Ladislas Farago’s biography of Patton)

            More to the point of missing info, however is the matter of Hitler and Mussolini.  There was no note of how fascism came about, nor how Hitler came to hate Jews.  Jonah Goldberg in “Liberal Fascism” has a good synopsis of details.  Mussolini was an ambitious patriotic journalist who took over Italy, as the series showed.  But they didn’t mention that he was a Marxist atheist and best friends with Vladymir Illyrich Ulayanov, otherwise known as Lenin, during the time that Benito was in Milan and Lenin was in Switzerland.  Mussolini was Europe’s leading writer of communist articles, books and papers from 1910 to 1914.  Just as the series shows, through war experiences, he became patriotic to Italy rather than the international ideal of “workers of the world unite.”  Thereupon, he told Lenin good luck with the Revolution, but I don’t think it will work.  Italian workers will surely not join arms with Austrian workers after what has happened in this war.  Mussolini then proposed”the middle way” (between capitalism and communism) based on group politics and government simply owning part of the economy while controlling most of the rest of it through crony capitalism.  He called this “Fascism” from the Italian fasci, meaning “union”.  Finally he renamed his philosophy, National Socialism, to distinguish it from International socialism.

            So how did Hitler become so anti-Semitic? His parents were dead, and Adolph wanted to be an artist or an architect in beautiful Wien (Vienna).  But being a penniless orphan, he couldn’t pay his way or get accepted into the art and architecture schools.  So he had to paint starving artist paintings in Vienna.  He was part Jewish and was forced to watch other Jewish rich kids get into art school, while he suffered.  He was a misfit, a loner and dreamer, and when he volunteered for the Austrian Army patriotically, they turned him down.  But Austrians are Germans too, so he applied to the German army and was accepted.  Here Hitler found acceptance, a patriotism for German-ness and rejected the rich and the Jews back home in Austria.  The war ended with Hitler in a military hospital.  The Allies signed an armistice, temporary truce, but dishonestly kept a blockade in place, starving the Germans into submission.  A year and a half later, when the treaty was finally signed, the German delegation at Versailles was primarily Jewish bankers—they being the ones most desperate for peace and an improved economy.  Hitler’s disgust for the Jewish bankers was complete contempt.  Like many Germans he felt they had sold the country down the river.  And since he thereupon turned to Mussolini’s admiration and writings, the first order of fascism is to take control of the banks.  This played perfectly with Hitler’s hatred for the Jews and for the Rich since 90% of Germany’s bankers were Jewish.  Hence Hitler’s adoption of fascism was a warped version overprinted with a hatred of Jews. 

            Neither were Christians. Mussolini was an atheist like his father and a Marxist.  Hitler was raised Catholic but rejected that faith for it’s gilded cathedrals and vestments.  He detested the rich.  Nazism developed a kind of occultism with Christian symbolism for poltical acceptability.  How could two non-believers hold sway over the most Christian countries in Europe? They devised what is called the Complete Separation of Church and State.  That is, no faith talk was allowed outside the walls of the church and no politics was allowed within.  Bonhoeffer violated both these standards.  Both Lutheran and Catholic churches were cowed, however, and to this day, disaffection with the churches that did nothing to protest the disaster of fascist dictatorship has ruined the faith in the minds of many Germans and Italians. 

            So why did these key details get left out of World Wars?  Despite being well known, I think an admission bothers many historians who are quite a left-leaning bunch.  Fascism is still falsely declared “right-wing”, even though it is just one step away from Marxism.  (The “right” label can be traced to Goebbels’ propaganda where he and Hitler were trying to make a sharp division with communists.)  That Jews get associated with hatred of the rich, one of the cherished tenants of the left, is an embarrassment.  Many historians perhaps wish another explanation might come along.

            We shall see how this series goes.  Will they note how FDR gushed over “uncle Joe” Stalin, fellow reformer, while Stalin was killing 20 million of his own people in 1930’s purges?  Will they tell about how Billy Mitchell and Patton were in the doghouse because they championed airplanes and tanks to the disdain of other generals? 

“World Wars” portrayed Wilson as a reluctant warrior but we now know that he was secretly, enormously pro-British and had all sorts of clandestine groups charged with the goal of “talking up war” even though the American people were not in favor. And thereafter, he cranked up a marshal law/propaganda machine that USA had never seen. Nor is it noted, as just about every European historian claims, that Wilson was so preachy and insufferable, it ruined and prolonged Versailles.  Eventually Austria was divided into balkanized nations of genocided minorities when central authority was banished (because Wilson insisted on nationalism).  The Ottoman Empire became colonialized.  Germans were removed from Germany  to satisfy territory lust of victor nations. The German people, thinking they would get applause from the West for getting rid of their disliked king, found retribution instead.  It collapsed their governance and the table was set for a rematch.