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Guest Post: If Only The U.S. Had Stayed Out Of World War I
Submitted by David Stockman via The Japan Times,
The first big wave of embracing a liberal international economic order - relatively free trade, rising international capital flows and rapidly growing global economic integration - resulted in something remarkable.
Between 1870 and 1914, there was a 45-year span of rising living standards, stable prices, massive capital investment and prolific technological progress. In terms of overall progress, these four-plus decades have never been equaled — either before or since.
Then came the Great War. It involved a scale of total industrial mobilization and financial mayhem that was unlike any that had gone before. In the case of Great Britain, for example, its national debt increased 14-fold.
In addition, England’s price level doubled, its capital stock was depleted, most offshore investments were liquidated and universal wartime conscription left it with a massive overhang of human and financial liabilities.
Despite all that, England still stood out as the least devastated of the major European countries. In France, the price level inflated by 300 percent, its extensive Russian investments were confiscated by the Bolsheviks and its debts in New York and London catapulted to more than 100 percent of GDP.
Among the defeated powers, currencies emerged nearly worthless. The German mark was only worth five cents on the prewar dollar, while the country’s wartime debts — especially after the Carthaginian peace of Versailles which John Maynard Keynes skewered so brilliantly — soared to crushing, unrepayable heights. In short, the wave of debt, currency inflation and financial disorder from the Great War was immense and unprecedented.
With all that in mind, one important question only rises in importance: Was the United States’ intervention in April 1917 warranted or not?
And did it only end up prolonging the European slaughter?
Never mind that it resulted in a cockamamie peace, which gave rise to totalitarianism among the defeated powers. Even conventional historians like Niall Ferguson admit as much.
Had President Woodrow Wilson not misled the U.S. on a messianic crusade, Europe’s Great War would have ended in mutual exhaustion in 1917.
Both sides would have gone home battered and bankrupt — but would not have presented any danger to the rest of mankind.
Indeed, absent Wilson’s crusade, there would have been no allied victory, no punitive peace — and no war reparations. Nor would there have been a Leninist coup in Petrograd — or later on, the emergence of Stalin’s barbaric regime.
Likewise, there would have been no Hitler, no Nazi dystopia, no Munich, no Sudetenland and Danzig corridor crises, no need for a British war to save Poland, no final solution and Holocaust, no global war against Germany and Japan — and, finally, no incineration of 200,000 civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nor would all of these events have been followed by a Cold War with the Soviets or CIA-sponsored coups and assassinations in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile and the Congo, to name just a few.
Surely, there would have been no CIA plot to assassinate Castro, or Russian missiles in Cuba or a crisis that took the world to the brink of annihilation.
There would have been no Dulles brothers, no domino theory and no Vietnam slaughter, either. Nor would the U.S. have launched a war in Afghanistan’s mountain valleys to arouse the mujaheddin from their slumber — and hence train the future al-Qaida.
Likewise, in Iran there would have been no shah and his Savak terror, no Khomeini-led Islamic counter-revolution, no U.S. aid to enable Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks on Iranian boy soldiers in the 1980s.
Nor would there have been an American invasion of Arabia in 1991 to stop our erstwhile ally Saddam from looting the equally contemptible emir of Kuwait’s ill-gotten oil plunder — or, alas, the horrific 9/11 blow-back a decade later.
Most surely, the axis of evil — that is, the Washington-based Cheney-Rumsfeld-neocon axis — would not have arisen, nor would it have foisted a near-$1 trillion warfare state budget on the 21st-century U.S.
The real point of that Great War, in terms of the annals of U.S. economic history, is that it enabled the already-rising U.S. economy to boom for the better part of 15 years after the onset of the war.
In the first stage, the U.S. became the granary and arsenal to the European allies. This triggered an eruption of domestic investment and production that transformed the nation into a massive global creditor and powerhouse exporter, virtually overnight.
U.S. farm exports quadrupled and farm income surged from $3 billion to $9 billion. Land prices soared, country banks proliferated and the same was true of industry. For example, steel production rose from 30 million tons annually to nearly 50 million tons.
Altogether, in six short years from 1914 to 1920, $40 billion of U.S. GDP turned into $92 billion — a sizzling 15 percent annual rate of gain.
The depression that could have been avoided
Needless to say, these figures reflected an inflationary, war-swollen economy. After all, the U.S. had loaned the Allies massive amounts of money — all to purchase grain, pork, wool, steel, munitions and ships from the U.S.
This transfer amounted to nearly 15 percent of GDP, or an equivalent of $2 trillion in today’s economy. It also represented a form of vendor finance that was destined to vanish at war’s end. As it happened, the U.S. did experience a brief but deep recession in 1920. But it was not a thoroughgoing end-of-war one that would “detox” the economy.
The day of reckoning was merely postponed. It finally arrived in 1933 when the depression hit with full force. The U.S. economy was cratering — and Germany embarked on its disastrous “recovery” experience under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.
These two events — along with so many of the above-listed offenses later on — could have been avoided if only the U.S. had shown the wisdom of staying out of World War I.
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Anything that fits the 'american' taste for fantasy...
If it is time for thoughts experiments, why not try the thought experiment of the non emergence of 'americanism'?
No 'america', no countries later on embracing 'americanism'...
When this article ponders on the fantasical consequences of the US non involvement in WW1, the same little thought experiment based on the absence of 'americanism' in the world would give no WW1 as it was known.
European states went at each other's throat because of the line of business they adopted with the US that had been for some time an inflationary promise.
When it did not deliver as expected, they went against each other.
No 'america', no world war one as it was known.
Even better.
Well. . . on one side, if we didn't fight WWI, WWII probably would of never happened and Hitler would of never existed.... so.... ultimately the USA created Hitler.
Things should not be stopped at that.
With no 'americanism',no 'america' and no WW1.
WW2 came with a large number of casualties. So did WW1. Why wish to get rid of WW2 when you can get rid of both wars?
For what reason?
An 'american' reason, maybe?
This graph explains the increase in wealth!
http://www.dirkdijksma.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Government-Debt-an...
"In the case of Great Britain, for example, its national debt increased 14-fold."
Q: War, what is good for?
A: The banking mafia.
If the US had stayed out we would be neutral like Switzerland and better located.
"do gooders", lord protect us from these evil bastards..think of the children, or is it protect the mud sucking carp, or women are not equal, lust is a constituional right, guns kill people, man made global warming think of the children, safty belts, helmets and remember the coffee is hot...while the elite do as they wish, abuse who they wish, and avoid common man courts..do gooders do thier dirty work in the name of good, planned parenthood kills more than any gang in chicago, and thats not a joke, what about reproductive rights for the unborn? do gooders do it to us all. until we are left with metro sexual self mutalating freeks blindly focused on iphones and smart this or that, but always with eyes wide shut.
Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor have shown in their sensational book Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War that the war was not an accident, but planned by certain forces in the background. If America would have not entered the World War 1 I doubt that these forces would have disappeared. Why?
Maybe Wilson's lie of 14 points would have not existed, but would that have changed anything, that at that time USA und UK were already Plutocracies and ruled by the money trust?
Would it have changed anything about the power of City of London? That Wall St. was ruling the USA?
Would it have changed the lie people in deomcracies have been believing in, that they would have free media?
Would the international banking cabal have disappeared?
If they would have not succeded with the Lusitania-lie, or Wilsons 14-point lie, then there would have been something else. I'm thinking about the more centent lies of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the lies about Lybia, Syria, 9/11, the Golf of Tonkin.
The globalist forces are reality, in fact even have been very actively involved already from the beginning of the USA and they follow their plan of a world government.
again, perhaps I am an idealist, but how about some poor souls son who died in your prolonged war? not historic enough for you?
Do Doherty and MacGregor cite Harry Elmer Barnes, In Quest of Truth and Justice: Debunking the War-Guilt Myth, originally published 1928 by National Historical Society, republished 1973 by Ralph Myles.
If not, they're either morons or dishonest.
If you don't understand that WWI was the result of intrigue and deceptions mostly by Poincaré in France and Novolski in Russia (greatly helped along by Winston Churchill as head of the British Admiralty), then you probably don't also don't understand that WWII was the inevitable result of the war-guilt-clause, Article 321 of the Treaty of Versailles, and you probably don't know that FDR lied us into WWII to overcome the public's overwheming opposition to involvement and his Navy covered up the fact that they deliberately used the Pacific Fleet in Peall Harbor as bair to lure the Japanes attack, then you won't understand that the armistice or WWI didn't ever really stop the fighting, which has been going on for a hundred years now and with G.W. Bush's absurd GWOT where we send JSOC and CIA drones to fight forces that are at least partially financed if not traineed and directly armed with U.S. weaponry and GM vehicles (used by ISIS like a movie brand placement) by our very own CIA, then you don't understand anything, much less the fact that with the absurd AUMF of 2001 waging war against the very forces we create and help operate means that the U.S. will be in a permanent state of war until it ceases to exist, which will not come from military defeat (because the "enemy" is US) but from either economic collapse or a public uprising such as happened to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s (helped along by the great expenses in doing a much better job of cleaning up the mess at Chernobyl than the Japanese will ever do in the NE part of the island, which would be interdicted for at least food production (and all costal fishing banned) under the Russian 15 Ci/sq-km stand for Cesium-134+137 (and the 600 Bq/kg EU food standard).
I've learned more history in the last six months by reading Barnes than most "historians" learn in an entire lifetime.
Perhaps what would have happened instead would have been worse. Who knows?
If only frogs had wings.....they wouldn't bump their @ss so much!
Bankers saw the opportunity to get bigger off of war.China's coming to America now,starting with real estate.Financing America is the key.Holding debt you contol people.Will you need a Union/Pay Card one day?They'll come and restore but you'll just have new owners.Washington politicians sold out America.
Stockman is turning out to be one of the biggest revisionists. The period of 1870-1914 is probably one the worst economic periods in recorded human history.
The whole of mankind was being enslaved by robber-Barrons, and industrialists. Whole continents were being colonized. The whole of Europe were emigrating because of poverty, filth, disease and violent repressions. The Depressions of that time were the cruelest and longest on record. This all culminated with WWI, collapse of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and the Russian Revolution which is the single most important factor that lead to real economic improvement in the West between 1920-1980, but this was historical aberration as global economic inequality is rising just like it did during 1870-1914.
Between 1870 and 1914, there was a 45-year span of rising living standards, stable prices ... Stockman is turning out to be one of the biggest revisionists. The period of 1870-1914 is probably one the worst economic periods in recorded human history.
Ahem. Historical Revisionists are historians (or any writers) who replace lies with truth, not vice-versa as you have it. Very odd to see doubethink applied to doublethink, but the opposite of a falsehood is not necessarily true.
Putting it backwards probably means that you're in the (large herd) "Liar School" of academic history, or "mainstream"... as opposed to being one of the (very few and brave) truth-telling revisionists such as Barnes, who devoted his life to explicating all the hows, whys, and theretofors of the age-old maxim: Truth is always the first casualty of war.
So. By you saying that Stockman has it ass-backwards, you're actually telling me that Stockman probably has it right.
http://revblog.codoh.com/2014/06/remembering-harry-elmer-barnes-15-june-1889-25-august-1968/
Harry Elmer Barnes, Revisionism: Key to Peace and Other Essays, Foreword by James J. Martin, Cato Paper 12, 1980.
... Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Caxton Press, 1953.
Empire is a bloody business. How else does it come about, not like those of fairy tales with gleaming ivory towers.
Interesting perspective.
If Lee defeated Meade at Gettysburg and the USA broke into pieces the same arguments could be made. Perhaps WW1 would have had a northern state versus southern state war in North America. Who knows what would have happened. These what ifs are fun to contemplate but they lead nowhere.
Wilson was a disasterous President but he wanted to stay out of the war. He wanted us to be neutral in thought as well as deed. Yet, the US continued to trade with the belligerents just as it tried during the Napoleonic wars. Back then they almost had war against both France and Great Britain as a result! Enter a disasterous policy by The First Quartermaster Ludendorff, Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare policy and his reach out to Mexico were a double folly. Wilson was never a warrior like Teddy Roosevelt. He was a preachy academic college president that had no clue how the real world operated.
No one will ever know what would have happened if the US did not enter WW1. One thing is likely, the US would have grown economically into the preminent nation albeit without ever hitting the near 50% of world manufacturing it hit in '45 after WW2.
Harry Elmer Barnes
http://revblog.codoh.com/2014/06/remembering-harry-elmer-barnes-15-june-1889-25-august-1968/
http://mises.org/daily/4119/Revisionism-and-the-Historical-Blackout
"Revisionism and the Historical Blackout"
[essay by H.E. Barnes also included in Revisionism: Key to Peace and Other Essays, Cato Paper 12, 1980.] [Essay probably also republished with several other essays and pamphlets in Rampart Journal early 1970s.]
Mises Daily: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 by Harry Elmer Barnes
[Chapter 1 of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 1953] [Caxton Press]
The First World War and American intervention therein marked an ominous turning point in the history of the United States and of the world. Those who can remember "the good old days" before 1914 inevitably look back to those times with a very definite and justifiable feeling of nostalgia. There was no income tax before 1913, and that levied in the early days after the amendment was adopted was little more than nominal. All kinds of taxes were relatively low. We had only a token national debt of around a billion dollars, which could have been paid off in a year without causing even a ripple in national finance. The total federal budget in 1913 was $724,512,000, just about 1 percent of the present astronomical budget.
Ours was a libertarian country in which there was little or no witch-hunting and few of the symptoms and operations of the police state which have been developing here so drastically during the last decade. Not until our intervention in the First World War had there been sufficient invasions of individual liberties to call forth the formation of special groups and organizations to protect our civil rights. The Supreme Court could still be relied on to uphold the Constitution and safeguard the civil liberties of individual citizens.
Libertarianism was also dominant in Western Europe. The Liberal Party governed England from 1905 to 1914. France had risen above the reactionary coup of the Dreyfus affair, had separated church and state, and had seemingly established the Third Republic with reasonable permanence on a democratic and liberal basis. Even Hohenzollern Germany enjoyed the usual civil liberties, had strong constitutional restraints on executive tyranny, and had established a workable system of parliamentary government. Experts on the history of Austria-Hungary have recently been proclaiming that life in the Dual Monarchy after the turn of the century marked the happiest period in the experience of the peoples encompassed therein.
Enlightened citizens of the Western world were then filled with buoyant hope for a bright future for humanity. It was believed that the theory of progress had been thoroughly vindicated by historical events. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888, was the prophetic bible of that era.[1] People were confident that the amazing developments in technology would soon produce abundance, security, and leisure for the multitude.
In this optimism in regard to the future no item was more evident and potent than the assumption that war was an outmoded nightmare. Not only did idealism and humanity repudiate war but Norman Angell and others were assuring us that war could not be justified, even on the basis of the most sordid material interest.
In our own country, the traditional American foreign policy of benign neutrality and the wise exhortations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay to avoid entangling alliances and to shun foreign quarrels were still accorded respect in the highest councils of state.
Unfortunately, there are relatively few persons today who can recall those happy times. In his devastatingly prophetic book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell points out that one reason why it is possible for those in authority to maintain the barbarities of the police state is that nobody is able to recall the many blessings of the period which preceded that type of society.[2]
A significant and illuminating report on this situation came to me recently in a letter from one of the most distinguished social scientists in the country, a resolute revisionist. He wrote,
While the First World War headed the United States and the world toward international disaster, the Second World War was an even more calamitous turning point in the history of mankind. It may, indeed, have brought us — and the whole world — into the terminal episode of human experience.
It certainly marked the transition from social optimism and technological rationalism into the Nineteen Eighty-Four pattern of life, in which aggressive international policies and war scares have become the guiding factor, not only in world affairs but also in the domestic, political, and economic strategy of every leading country of the world. The police state has emerged as the dominant political pattern of our times, and military state capitalism is engulfing both democracy and liberty in countries which have not succumbed to Communism.
The manner and extent to which American culture has been impaired and our well-being undermined by our entry into two world wars has been brilliantly and succinctly stated by Professor Mario A. Pei, of Columbia University, in an article on "The America We Lost" in the Saturday Evening Post, May 3, 1952, and has been developed more at length by Caret Garrett in his trenchant book, The People's Pottage.Perhaps, by the mid-century, all this is now water under the bridge and little can be done about it. But we can surely learn how we got into this unhappy condition of life and society — at least until the police-state system continues its current rapid development sufficiently to obliterate all that remains of integrity and accuracy in historical writing and political reporting.
The readjustment of historical writing to historical facts relative to the background and causes of the First World War — what is popularly known in the historical craft as "revisionism" — was the most important development in historiography during the decade of the 1920s. While those historians at all receptive to the facts admitted that revisionism readily won out in the conflict with the previously accepted wartime lore, many of the traditionalists in the profession remained true to the mythology of the war decade. In any event, the revisionist controversy was the outstanding intellectual adventure in the historical field in the 20th century down to Pearl Harbor.
Revisionism, when applied to the First World War, showed that the actual causes and merits of that conflict were very close to the reverse of the picture presented in the political propaganda and historical writings of the war decade. Revisionism would also produce similar results with respect to the Second World War if it were allowed to develop unimpeded. But a determined effort is being made to stifle or silence revelations which would establish the truth with regard to the causes and issues of the late world conflict.
While the wartime mythology endured for years after 1918, nevertheless leading editors and publishers soon began to crave contributions which set forth the facts with respect to the responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, our entry into the war, and the basic issues involved in this great conflict.
Sidney B. Fay began to publish his revolutionary articles on the background of the First World War in the American Historical Review in July, 1920. My own efforts along the same line began in the New Republic, the Nation, the New York Times Current History Magazine, and the Christian Century in 1924 and 1925. Without exception, the requests for my contributions came from the editors of these periodicals, and these requests were ardent and urgent. I had no difficulty whatever in securing the publication of my Genesis of the World War in 1926, and the publisher thereof subsequently brought forth a veritable library of illuminating revisionist literature.
By 1928, when Fay's Origins of the World War[3] was published, almost everyone except the die-hards and bitter-enders in the historical profession had come to accept revisionism, and even the general public had begun to think straight in the premises.
Quite a different situation faces the rise of any substantial revisionism after the Second World War. The question of war responsibility in relation to 1939 and 1941 is taken for granted as completely and forever settled. It is widely held that there can be no controversy this time. Since it is admitted by all reasonable persons that Hitler was a dangerous neurotic, who, with supreme folly, launched a war when he had everything to gain by peace, it is assumed that this takes care of the European aspects of the war-guilt controversy. With respect to the Far East, this is supposed to be settled with equal finality by asking the question, "Japan attacked us, didn't she?"
About as frequent as either of these ways of settling war responsibility for 1939 or 1941 is the vague but highly dogmatic statement that "we had to fight." This judgment is usually rendered as a sort of ineffable categorical imperative which requires no further explanation. But some who are pressed for an explanation will allege that we had to fight to save the world from domination by Hitler, forgetting General George C. Marshall's report that Hitler, far from having any plan for world domination, did not even have any well-worked-out plan for collaborating with his Axis allies in limited wars, to say nothing of the gigantic task of conquering Russia. Surely, after June 22, 1941, nearly six months before Pearl Harbor, there was no further need to fear any world conquest by Hitler.
The mythology which followed the outbreak of war in 1914 helped to produce the Treaty of Versailles and the Second World War. If world policy today cannot be divorced from the mythology of the 1940s, a third world war is inevitable, and its impact will be many times more horrible and devastating than that of the second. The lessons learned from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials have made it certain that the third world war will be waged with unprecedented savagery.
Vigorous as was the resistance of many, including powerful vested historical interests, to the revisionism of the 1920s, it was as nothing compared to that which has been organized to frustrate and smother the truth relative to the Second World War. History has been the chief intellectual casualty of the Second World War and the cold war which followed.
It may be said, with great restraint, that never since the Middle Ages have there been so many powerful forces organized and alerted against the assertion and acceptance of historical truth as are active today to prevent the facts about the responsibility for the Second World War and its results from being made generally accessible to the American public.
Even the great Rockefeller Foundation frankly admits the subsidizing of historians to anticipate and frustrate the development of any neorevisionism in our time.[4] And the only difference between this foundation and several others is that it has been more candid and forthright about its policies. The Sloan Foundation later supplemented this Rockefeller grant. Charles Austin Beard summarized the implications of such efforts with characteristic vigor:
As is the case with nearly all book publishers and periodicals, the resources of the great majority of the foundations are available only to scholars and writers who seek to perpetuate wartime legends and oppose revisionism. A good illustration is afforded by my experience with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation which helped to subsidize the book by Professors Langer and Gleason. I mentioned this fact in the first edition of my brochure on The Court Historians versus Revisionism. Thereupon I received a courteous letter from Mr. Alfred J. Zurcher, director of the Sloan Foundation, assuring me that the Sloan Foundation wished to be absolutely impartial and to support historical scholarship on both sides of the issue. He wrote in part
In the light of this statement, I decided to take Mr. Zurcher at his word. I had projected and encouraged a study of the foreign policy of President Hoover, which appeared to me a very important and much needed enterprise, since it was during his administration that our foreign policy had last been conducted in behalf of peace and in the true public interest of the United States rather than in behalf of some political party, foreign government, or dubious ideology. One of the most competent of American specialists in diplomatic history had consented to undertake the project, and he was a man not previously identified in any way with revisionist writing.
A state of abject terror and intimidation exists among the majority of professional American historians whose views accord with the facts on the question of responsibility for the Second World War. Several leading historians and publicists who have read my brochure on The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout have written me stating that, on the basis of their own personal experience, it is an understatement of the facts. Yet the majority of those historians to whom it has been sent privately have feared even to acknowledge that they have received it or possess it. Only a handful have dared to express approval and encouragement.
Moreover, the gullibility of many "educated" Americans has been as notable as the mendacity of the "educators." In Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, as well as in Fascist Italy, and in China, the tyrannical rulers found it necessary to suppress all opposition thought in order to induce the majority of the people to accept the material fed them by official propaganda. But, in the United States, with almost complete freedom of the press, speech, and information down to the end of 1941, great numbers of Americans followed the official propaganda line with no compulsion whatever.In many essential features, the United States has moved along into the Nineteen Eighty-Four pattern of intellectual life. But there is one important and depressing difference. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Orwell shows that historians in that regime have to be hired by the government and forced to falsify facts. In this country today, and it is also true of most other nations, many professional historians gladly falsify history quite voluntarily.
Harry Elmer Barnes (1889–1968) was a pioneer of historical revisionism, meaning the use of historical scholarship to challenge and refute the narratives of history promulgated by the state and the political class, or as Barnes himself termed it, "court history." Long regarded as a progressive intellectual leader of the American Left, Barnes became associated with the Old Right for his opposition to the New Deal and to American entry into World War II. His work has had a profound influence on New Left historians such as William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko, as well as on the historical writings of Murray Rothbard and other libertarians. See Murray Rothbard's editorial in Left & Right, "Harry Elmer Barnes, RIP." See Harry Elmer Barnes's article archives.
This article is excerpted from chapter 1 of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 1953.
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Notes[1] New edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941.
[2] New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1949. See especially pp. 86–93.
[3] New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928.
[4] Annual Report, 1946, pp. 188–89.
[5] Saturday Evening Post, October 4, 1947, p. 172.
You can receive the Mises Dailies in your inbox. http://mises.org/daily/4119/Revisionism-and-the-Historical-BlackoutStockman's analysis is very persuasive. But he has told us only what probably would NOT have happened if the war had ended in a draw in 1917. He does not suggest what WOULD happen in that event. The Austro-Hungarian empire would have survived and Slavic nationalism would continue to disrupt it. The Tsarist empire of Russa would have survived a little longer, and protected its Serbian and Bulgarian clients against the Ottomans. The Hungarians and Romanians, being neither Slavic nor Germanic would not know whom to turn to. World Zionism was already well under way, and probably would have been tolerated by the weakened Turks.
As we contemplate the effects of supression of dissent which began during WWI in the US, an interesting side-bar to that policy was the jailing of a variety of dissenters, including Socialists, Communists, Pacifists and Anarchists. Cleverly, the feds sent them all to the same place - the Atlanta Penitentiary - where they would spend all their energy arguing with each other, rather than influencing the wider prison population.
One of the great failures of the European leadership was its inability to grasp the meaning of total war, already demonstrated to them by the American Civil War, leaving decades of decline in the areas most ravaged by that conflict.
While WW1 was significant, the founding of the Fed and the income tax was far more significant in that America was now fully captured and controlled - enabling the funding of WW1. Later House banking chairman Louis McFadden 1922-32 called on congress in the congressional record to arrest the Federal reserve for treason for shipping America's gold to Europe at a time when Hitler mysteriously received massive funding for his campaign and arms preparation for WW2.
Few to this day understand that the Great Depression was a massive gold theft by the Fed to recapitalize Europe and prepare for WW2 and the organized crime - high level Jesuit banker Wall St financed Russian revolution.
And BTW, 9-11 was not blowback for previous CIA overthrows, but an inside job by the Neocons who 9 months earlier called for a "new Pearl Harbor" in order to stand down our liberties. All you need to do is watch the obvious controlled demolition at free fall speed of World Trade Center 7 on utube that was suppressed in the controlled media.
Semi-mainstream pundits like Ron Paul and David Stockman won't state this publically for fear of being tarred as a conspiracy theorist and the sheeple masses are ready to pounce on those subversives as the sheeple can be counted on to do what they are told and display a blind allegiance to the establishment.