John Robson: Once Again, Our Leaders Are Ignoring Lessons From History

Allied Soldiers climb out of trenches in this WWI photo. (CP Picture Archive/AP)

Commentary

On to Berlin! There’s the battle cry, and rightly so. But our leaders are too busy editing delusional press releases, so history passes them by. Or rolls over them… and us.

In the National Post on May 13, Joe Roberts wrote, “The allies could never have won the Second World War by making clear they would stop short of Berlin.” He was drawing a historical analogy with Israel pressing into Rafah, seeking “complete and uncompromising” victory over Hamas. And while historical counterfactuals are as tricky as they are vital, we know all too well he was right.

If you’re wondering how Berlin got in here, it’s one of those historical analogies useless to politicians who don’t know which side the Soviets were on in World War II, what happened in that conflict, or when. But here’s the deal. In the summer and fall of 1918… no wait, our leaders cry. That was World War I… wasn’t it?

Yes. Very good. And that spring the Allies barely halted the Kaiserschlacht that demolished the blood-soaked trenches and restored mobility in the “Great War.” Then our “Hundred Days” counterattack routed the Germans and defeated them, apparently decisively. But we did not go on to Berlin.

The Allies agreed to an armistice that became a peace. And it left many Germans convinced they had not lost the war but were betrayed by (wait for it) the Jews. Including the Kaiser, who later suggested an international effort to exterminate that people using poison gas. And Hitler, who undertook one.

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So come World War II, the Allies sought “unconditional surrender” to force Nazis, Fascists, Imperial Japanese, and their supporters to drain reality’s bitter cup. It wasn’t easy, and even took two atomic bombs before Japan’s militarists conceded that things weren’t going their way. Our enemies are more often maniacal than sensible, another historical lesson we determinedly overlook.

Unfortunately, Western leaders did not make beating the Soviets to Berlin in 1945 a priority. Instead, too many, including some in uniform, were already in appeasement mode, allowing Stalin to grab Eastern Europe while a great number of Russians concluded they’d won single-handedly and the West was weak and devious. (Yes, six of seven German soldiers killed were on the Eastern Front, but without massive Western aid the Soviets would have lost.)

Had we gone on to Berlin in 1918, it might well have prevented the Second World War and with it the Holocaust. Had we done so in 1945, it might have spared the Eastern European allies for whom we initially went to war four grim, hungry, dishonest decades behind the Iron Curtain. But did we learn? And can we?

History is replete with failures to deter aggression, fight resolutely, or exploit victory. And counter-analogies like Rome’s levelling of Carthage. But why cite them to politicians who neither know history nor try to? In “Yes Minister,” Sir Humphrey Appleby observes bitingly that “Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century – politics is about surviving until Friday afternoon.”

Ironically, in our leaders’ self-inflating rhetoric, they’re all statesmen focused on the long run. Hence Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pseudo-Churchillian defiance of Pierre Poilievre, who would “bring us back to ‘Drill, baby, drill,’ ignore climate change, bring us back to ‘Father is the head of the household.’ It’s that kind of thinking that is really putting at threat everything we’ve been able as a country to build over the past years.”

Noooooo! Not everything we’ve built. But yes. He must fight another election because “The choice that Canadians will make, in a year in the elections, will be so fundamental.” As the 2021 election was a “pivotal moment,” indeed “maybe the most important since 1945, and certainly in our lifetimes,” in which “the planet and our future are at stake.” Not just the planet. Also our future. What, did mass migration to a terraformed Mars also hang in the balance? Then he didn’t summon Parliament for months.

Such blather is common. Hence the joke about U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. “Q: Why does LBJ talk so slow? A: He thinks he’s dictating to a stonemason.” But at least Johnson was pushing through major civil-rights and social-welfare legislation while escalating the Vietnam War, so something significant was going on.

It often is. Including today. But it’s not Poilievre’s Diagolon-inspired plot to make “The Handmaid’s Tale” a reality in Canada. It’s the crumbling of the Pax Americana through loss of nerve, vision, and fiscal responsibility in Washington and other Western capitals. History is happening right now, and Canada is… abstaining.

Abstaining on a key U.N. vote on the Middle East. Abstaining on real military help to Ukraine. Abstaining on balanced budgets. Abstaining on virulent domestic anti-Semitism.

Berlin? So distant. So tedious. Now where’s that inspiring draft on diversity and inclusion?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.