Are We France?

One of the painful consequences of studying history is that it makes you realize how long people have been doing the same foolish things with the same disastrous results.

Crowds cheer when Barack Obama declares dramatically that he is going to “bring down the cost of health care,” as if price controls were some bright new idea.

There were price controls back in Roman times—and in ancient Babylon before that.

Price controls have had the same bad effects for literally thousands of years. But now they are suddenly the latest “new” formula for salvation.

International “negotiations” are likewise the latest “new” alternative to the use of force. This clever notion has also been tried out before—and with even more disastrous results.

World War II, with tens of millions of people killed, was the result of that clever notion.

After the unprecedented carnage and destruction of the First World War, people could be forgiven for being willing to try anything in hopes of avoiding a repetition.

France was especially hard hit. More Frenchmen were killed in that war than all the Americans ever killed in all our wars put together.

So it is understandable that French foreign minister Aristide Briand was one of the architects of the 1928 international treaty renouncing war—as if renouncing force will do anything other than make you a sitting duck for countries that do not renounce force.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact was just one of the many disarmament treaties and non-aggression pacts that sprang up like mushrooms throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Nothing is easier than to disarm peaceful people, whether domestically or internationally. But the aggressor nations paid no attention to the agreements they had signed.

For example, one of the consequences of international naval agreements limiting the size of battleships was that Germany and Japan began the Second World War with bigger battleships than either the British or American navies.

We can be charitable toward those who had suffered so much in the First World War that they hoped against hope to avoid going through that again.

But now we know that Utopian, feel-good policies led to even worse horrors in the Second World War. So we have no excuse in our own time—not with nuclear terrorism as a danger looming ahead for ourselves and for generations yet to come.

Even more dangerous than the physical disarmament on which so many pinned their hopes after the First World War was the moral disarmament that took place, especially in France.

History books depicting the heroic French soldiers who had given their lives defending their country against the German invaders were attacked by the French teachers’ union as “bellicose” books that had to be removed from the schools.

Publishers were forced to change their textbooks to reflect the pacifism pervading the teachers’ unions, as well as other parts of French society.

Patriotism was out. Internationalism was in, in the name of world peace.

Where previous history books had depicted the epic story of the French soldiers stopping the German invaders at Verdun, despite massive casualties and terrible conditions, the new textbooks depicted Verdun as a scene of horror for all soldiers.

“Imagine the suffering of these combatants—French, allies, or enemies,” the revisionist history said. French military heroes were reduced to the status of victims—and no better than other victims among the invaders.

A whole generation of Frenchmen raised in the spirit of “moral disarmament” faced a new German invasion in 1940. France, which had held out for four long years in the First World War, collapsed and surrendered after just six weeks of fighting in 1940.

It is something to think about, the next time someone talks about “honoring the troops” when what they are really doing is depicting the troops as victims, and the country they are fighting for as no better than any other.