Lew Rockwell on Hitler's modest plans before 1939

The neocon efforts to demonize the enemy are nothing new, and in what follows, I’m going to discuss a number of examples to show how pervasive this pattern has been in involving America in unnecessary, destructive, and costly wars. 

Let’s begin with the most salient case of all.  For the neocons, it’s always Hitler.  The Munich Conference of 1938 shows what happens when we fail to stand up against evil.  The facts don’t bear out what they say.  Hitler was indeed an evil dictator, but America had no valid reason to go to war against him.  Hitler did not aim to attack the United States, and fighting against him helped Stalin, who killed more people than Hitler did, in taking control of Eastern Europe. 

Furthermore, Hitler’s policies during the 1930s aimed at the peaceful revision of the punitive and unjust Treaty of Versailles.  A European War resulted only after the unwise and unenforceable British and French guarantee of the Western boundary of Poland.  The eastern boundary against Russia was not guaranteed, and Poland lost territory to Russia after the Russians invaded Poland on September 17, 1939. 

The great Murray Rothbard notes that Hitler’s policy before 1939 was improvised, responding to particular circumstances.  He did not have a plan for “world conquest” as the neocons continue to allege today.  “Hitler was not bent on world conquest, for which he had armed Germany to the teeth and constructed a ‘timetable.’  Hitler, in brief, (in foreign affairs) was not a uniquely evil monster or daimon, who would continue to gobble up countries diabolically until stopped by superior force.  Hitler was a rational German statesman, pursuing — with considerable intuitive insight — a traditional, post-Versailles German policy (to which we might add intimations of desires to expand eastward in an attack on Bolshevism).  But basically, Hitler has no ‘master plan’; he was a German intent, like all Germans, on revising the intolerable and stupid Versailles-diktat, and on doing so by peaceful means, and in collaboration with the British and French.  One thing is sure: Hitler had no designs, no plans, not even vague intimations, to expand westward against Britain and France (let alone the United States).”

~ Lew Rockwell, "Good vs. Bad Nations," LewRockwell.com, May 22, 2024