Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"
British blunders led to World War II, Buchanan argues.
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- Human Smoke
http://books.google.com/books?id=8HKQEJlAl9gC&printsec=f...
Churchill, Hitler, and "the unnecessary war": how Britain lost its empire and the West lost the world
http://books.google.com/books?id=PYESsQRyIIMC&printsec=f...
Both books are iconoclastic looks at how WWII came to be, and whether it was truly a "just" war. The second is by Pat Buchanan, but neither book is crazy or racist. Both are extremely well-researched and documented. Pat Buchanan's book is explicitly in response to the "just war" trope which was used to justify the US occupation of Iraq, but I think I see the same motivation in Human Smoke.
The most interesting single tidbit I learned from the two books was that Roosevelt was an anti-semite:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8HKQEJlAl9gC&lpg=PP1...
(I looked that vignette up in Morgenthau's memoirs. The story he tells there was meant to justify to the younger Morgenthau Roosevelt's policy of restricting emigration to the US by Jewish refugees.)
- If you like this kind of thing, you will enjoy Pat Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War" and Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke
- Many of these lunatic dictators were elected ( Mussolini, Hitler) and the others came to power from revolutions that promised a "people's democracy" ( the Bolsheviks, Mao, Pol Pot).
My take on the origins of World War I is quite different than yours. From my readings, the monarchs were much less willing to go to war than the politicians, and the politicians were less rabid than the mob. Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Russia all had elected parliaments with universal manhood suffrage that voted for the war. The rise of universal suffrage in the late 1800's gave rise to a number of jingoistic newspapers and politicians. Imagine five powerful countries and all the sources of news were like Fox News - no NYTimes or NPR. That's the recipe for one of the worst wars in human history. Pre-democracy, the kings would fight a few battles and call it a day ( see the Franco-Prussian war of 1871). With a democracy, calling a truce was "giving in to the aggressor" and the war lasted four terrible years.
Some good books/articles on the subject: Liberty Or Equality ( http://blog.mises.org/archives/006326.asp ), The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, Once an ArchDuke by Archduke Ferdinand, "Churchill on the Great War" - http://themonarchist.blogspot.com/2008/08/churchill-on-great..., Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"
