11 Novembro 1918, nascimento do nazismo

"The policies pursued by Churchill could not be further from this clear demand of jus in bello. As First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I, he supervised the British hunger blockade of Germany. By endeavoring to starve the German population, Churchill hoped to undermine the German war machine from within.

"The British blockade," Churchill later wrote, "treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission." (p. 2)

The armistice of November 11, 1918 did not bring the blockade to an end. Churchill continued it until the Germans signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. He said on March 3, 1919,

"We are enforcing the blockade with rigour… It is repugnant to the British nation to use this weapon of starvation, which falls mainly on the women and children, upon the old and the weak and the poor, after all the fighting has stopped, one moment longer than is necessary to secure the just terms for which we have fought." (pp. 5–6)

Such inhumanity has not even the excuse of military necessity. Had the Germans refused to sign, they would have been helpless against an English and French attempt to compel them to do so.

Baker does not mention this, but the young generation that grew up under these dire conditions had a strong affinity for Nazism. The UCLA historian Peter Loewenberg, in his important article, "Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort" (American Historical Review, December 1971, pp. 1457–1502) has documented this to the hilt. Churchill's policy thus helped to bring about the Nazi regime he later determined to destroy. (Unfortunately, Loewenberg characteristically includes in the piece substantial psychobabble as well, but the interested reader can readily disregard it).[1]

Churchill might have said of the laws of war what Jonathan Swift said of promises, that, along with piecrust, they are "made to be broken." Baker points out that in The Aftermath, published in 1929, Churchill said that had Germany not capitulated in 1918, a massive campaign against the German people would have brought the war to an end.

But what had happened was nothing compared to what would have happened if the Germans had kept fighting into 1919, he [Churchill] said. Poison gases of "incredible malignity" would have ended all resistance. "Thousands of aeroplanes would have shattered their cities." (p. 17)

Given this sorry record, it is hardly surprising that the renewed outbreak of world war in September 1939, which returned Churchill to the British cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, brought a new hunger blockade of Germany."

Inconvenient Facts about World War II, David Gordon [Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. By Nicholson Baker. Simon & Schuster, 2008. 566 pages.]