THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PEACE CONFERENCE
Villard, Oswald Garrison
The Truth About the Peace Conference Witness of Entire Proceedings Tells of Framing of the Document in Secret Sessions of Committees By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD (In The Nation) Oswald Garrison...
...Yet it is far more than a test of the real moral force and character of President Wilson which we are witnessing...
...Tell the average American that his representatives at Paris have been working with might and main to get food to the Central Powers as well as to Northern France, Belgium, Serbia, and Poland, and he mutters something about its being incredible and pro-German...
...The Big Four took from November until the end of March to lift the food blockade of Germany and meanwhile Hungary and Bavaria, and now Vienna have surrendered to communism or anarchy...
...A democratic peace, frankly, it can never be...
...These American officials who have conferred so much honor upon our country abroad, are to be suspected neither of pro-Germanism nor of undue sympathy with the enemy...
...When the Conference assembled, eleven wars were going on in which heavy cannon were being used...
...Wilson is now actually ready to agree to the giving of special guarantees to France by Great Britain and the United States, he has dealt the coup de grace to his own creation and it is no longer worth discussin by serious minded Americans...
...The struggle is ending at Paris with bitterness and hatred as well as with colossal hypocrisy...
...The fight which American officials have made at Paris to save Europe despite the Allies has been the one bright chapter in the dismal story of chicane, intrigue, selfish aggression, and naked imperialism which has given the lie to most of the high-sounding phrases with which the Allies carried on the war, and to which the secrecy of the whole proceedings has rendered staunch aid...
...They have simply had the prevision to see that the Central Powers were the key to the European revolutionary situation...
...The analysis made by him of the conference's work in the following article, is worthy of the closest reading and rereading by every subscriber.—Editor's Note...
...Moreover, even if the Ebert government accepts, there is the gravest question whether it will not collapse at once, and give way to an extremist Government ready to make common cause with Lenine and Trotsky and to denounce the treaty...
...Hard to Take Interest WHEN sober men of long political experience are face to face with the possibility of a Europe relapsing into another Dark Age, they find it hard to take interest in a League of Nations which is foredoomed to failure by the insincerity of many of those who have accepted it, by the exclusion from it of the representatives of two-thirds of Europe and all of the black races, and which holds out few attractions to the small and neutral nations...
...The chances are against their doing so, but that coes not mitigate the danger of their refusal, for if they decline to sign, the League of Nations is dead and most of the work done at Paris goes for naught...
...Such a peace, to which the immediate signature of Germany could have been obtained might have been drawn up in twenty-four hours...
...Lloyd George, at least,-sees this is at last apparent...
...Part of Wilson AS FOR Mr...
...And while the Big Four have wrangled, argued, reargued, and fought, Europe has come to the very edge of the abyss...
...Lloyd George Sees It...
...Further the safety of the Allies would have been guarded...
...hypocrisy of clothing his acts in language to charm—and to be discarded at will...
...So far as the word is concerned, it is a palpable fraud upon the world...
...He has been the only one of the Big Four who has really desired to create a better world...
...A small executive committee, first of ten men, then of five, then of four, has been parcelling out the globe in sessions so secret that their closest associates, the members of their own delegations have not known what was going on...
...a lasting peace it can only be if heaven shows an unexampled favor...
...An acceptance of Mr...
...Wilson, it is not easy to describe exactly the part he has played...
...It will be a continuation of the present Entente with enormous power vested in the very men who are at present in the position of having brought Europe to the edge of the abyss while they talked and talked...
...In his speech last week in the House of Commons, he boldly declared that a new and more terrible enemy than the Germans has arisen in Europe, namely, hunger...
...A democratic peace, frankly, it can never be...
...As for the League of Nations, some of our foremost representatives in Paris have lost all interest in it, not merely because it has been the particular property of the President, or because it is a weak and dangerous proposal as it now stands, but also because they can really think seriously of nothing save the terrible plight in which all Europe finds itself...
...Try it," they say, "and out of it may come something worth while...
...It is quite as hard for him to see that our Lansings and Hoovers and Houses and McCormicks and Davises and Baruchs have been just and wise in insisting that the army must be fed, as it has been for Clem-enceau to realize the same necessity...
...It is the Big Four upon whom this terrible responsibility rests...
...THAT Mr...
...Something good may indeed come of it, but so may, and with more certainty, a good deal that is evil...
...Crux of Matter HERE lies the crux of the matter...
...It is civilization itself that is now One of the ablest American correspondents, with twenty years of international service to his credit, arrived in Paris three weeks ago from Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and Italy...
...For many years he was the owner of the New York Evening Post...
...When Mr...
...least the great Emperor spared the world the trembling in the balance...
...This denger would not have arisen had such a peace as is outlined above been submitted by the Allies early in the year, before the Bolshevist forces had gained headway, before starvation in Central Europe had become acute, and before the universal belief had become fixed that the Entente intends nothing else than the deliberate destruction of Germany and of the former Dual Monarchy...
...that if Bolshevism was to be checked it must be checked at the boundaries of the Central Powers...
...They are only in the same category with all the various Allied delegates to the "Conference," except four...
...Never was there a greater falsehood uttered...
...HOW is it possible to produce a democratic peace or a lasting one under such conditions...
...But if the wars have multiplied, the fourteen peace terms have steadily grown less...
...Actually, we seem to have progressed but little since Napoleon...
...How Is It Possible...
...It is a far-reaching test of the value of war as the creator of moral values...
...Already by an autocratic counting of votes the League is to come into being without recognizing the equality of the citizens of all of its members...
...He is now the editor and owner of the "Nation...
...They are to bow to the superior knowledge of the Big Four with the same obedience, the same abnegation of their reasoning faculties and of their consciences, as if they were the willing tools of a Tammany Hall...
...One by one they have been abandoned by their originator until their very names are almost forgotten...
...but he forgot to explain why the menace of hunger, communism, and anarchy is so terrifying today as to overshadow everything else, or who is responsible for its growth to such vast proportions...
...One by one they have been abandoned by their originator until their very names are almost forgotten...
...Who hears today in Paris of the freedom of the seas...
...Statesmen like Venizelos— and there are few statesmen in Paris whatever the appearance to the contrary—have been graciously permitted to appear as expert witnesses whenever the question of the boundaries of their countries was to be considered, but not otherwise...
...With normal intercourse restored throughout Europe, rapsed nerves would have been soothed, immediate needs of food supplied, the militant and vengeful revolutionary spirit checked if not entirely banished...
...It would have included an agreement to form a league of nations, the cession of Alsace-Lorraine, the taking over of the German colonies on joint account pending a detailed settlement, the seizure of the entire German war fleet, the reduction of the German army to a gendarmerie for the preservation of order, the immediate razing of the fortifications on the Rhine, and a pledge by Germany to make good the destruction in France and Belgium...
...His idealism has been the saving grace if such saving grace there be...
...Who, when he reads of the Saar basin, recalls the fine phrase about "no punitive indemnities or annexations...
...There is in the League the possibility of a world dictatorship so odious as to make a revolution in Russian style seem almost tolerable...
...Wilson's original terms would have permitted the Allies to go at their leisure, into the questions of new nations and new boundaries...
...Without him the Peace "Conference" would have degenerated into an orgy of land grabbing and imperialism...
...IT HAS, of course, been everything but a peace conference...
...While the indefensible delay at Paris has raised everywhere the spectres of revolution and famine, it has also placed the Germans in a position where they can trump any move the Allies may wish to make by simply refusing to sign the peace treaty...
...The very existence of this committee is the result of an arrogant, unauthorized assumption of power, for never and nowhere did the conference endow Messrs...
...But if the wars have multiplied, the fourteen peace terms have steadily grown less...
...Who, when he reads of the Saar basin, recalls the fine phrase about "no punitive indemnities or annexations...
...The strongest advocates of the League in Paris, men who have worked for a real league with all their strength, offer no argument for the Paris plan save that it is a half or a third of a loaf...
...at the beginning of April, it was jestingly said at the Hotel Cril-lon (the American headquarters) that it was quite fitting that the wars had grown to fourteen, because there was thus one to each of the fourteen peace terms...
...If there are today four Napoleons setting up new governments and re-drawing the map, at HOW is it possible to produce a democratic peace or a lasting one under such conditions...
...Actually, we seem to have progressed but little since Napoleon...
...Of all the groups of unemployed workers in France, none is so deserving of sympathy as the lesser delegates...
...The Allied delegates, too will be told, in the language of one of our captains of industry to his stockholders, to "vote first and discuss afterwards...
...If the League is actually formed under the present draft, it will be in fact only another Holy Alliance...
...A quick and satisfactory peace could have been obtained by the fifteenth of January or earlier, had there been no travelling about, had there been a real desire for a quick settlement or a sincere adherence to the fourteen peace terms...
...Of what use will a League of Nations be if Europe is to flare up in a revolution in which all the states east of the Rhine will be joined in a veritable league to impose their extreme social policies upon the rest of the world...
...It took them until April to decide that Russia should have food, thus trying a pacifist policy where the policy of imposing their will by bayonets had utterly and deservedly failed...
...But the old defects of his public character—his unwillingness to take counsel, his colossal egotism, his inability to hold at any cost to a principle which he has laid down, his readiness to compromise—together with his inability to translate beliefs into fact and action, and his refusal to take either the press or the public into his confidence, have forced him into the position of playing a lone and secret hand, and have already cost him the wondrous and all but overpowering confidence of the plain people of Eu-ope which at first was his...
...at the beginning of April, it was jestingly said at the Hotel Cril-lon (the American headquarters) that it was quite fitting that the wars had grown to fourteen, because there was thus ole to each of the fourteen peace terms...
...With this preliminary treaty out of the way, the blockades could then have been lifted forthwith...
...and this at once will kill all Japanese interest in it...
...But others did not see this, despite ample warnings, and so Bavaria and Hungary have been communized, and a mischievous and vacillating Russian policy has been followed under which Lenine has won one victory after another in the field of diplomacy and in that of arms...
...Wilson, Orlando, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George with the authority to transact all the business and come to all the decisions...
...Who hears today in Paris of the freedom of the seas...
...Peace, he declared, could have come sooner, and his excuse is the magnitude and the multiplicity of the problems involved...
...a lasting peace it can only be if heaven shows an unexampled favor...
...Nevertheless the barriers remain, and Lloyd George would have us believe that there was no other way...
...He has been attending the peace conference since the beginning and has a view of the situation which the American public has known little about...
...But there is more to the case than that...
...The Truth About the Peace Conference Witness of Entire Proceedings Tells of Framing of the Document in Secret Sessions of Committees By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD (In The Nation) Oswald Garrison Villard is one of the best known journalists in the United States...
...When asked his opinion of the situation in those countries he shook his head...
...They are now informed that the treaty willbe published on April 24, and that a complete copy will be handed to the Germans on April 28...
...Entered into on the part of the American public with the highest idealism, and with the confident belief that it was to be a war to end war and to make the world safe for democracy, the war thus far has made the world less safe for democracy than it had been at any previous period in modern times, and in addition has brought a brood of actual wars and the threat of others in its train...
...Food would have flowed into Bavaria, Austria, and Hungary, and perhaps even Italy could have been saved...
...and if Mr...
...Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Rumania, Italy, these are a few of the allied states that are on the verge of revolution or collapse, either because they are hemmed in by the blockade of Germany on the one hand and of Russia on the other, or because they are in such desperate need of a reestablishment of normal conditions in social and industrial life...
...Between those dates the puppets who are officially styled delegates will be given a chance to ratify the treaty, but that is all...
...When the Conference assembled, eleven wars were going on in which heavy cannon were being used...
...Even a third of a loaf may be of no value to a starving man if its ingredients are uneatable or poisonous...
...The Germans need not complain if they are arbitrarily summoned to Versailles and told to take the treaty and sign it without discussion...
...What is needed even more than food is the mail, the uncensored telegraph, the cable, the commercial traveller, the through express, the breaking down of all the barriers that war erects between states," he said emphatically...
...Wilson goes so far as to overrule a majority vote because it does not result as he wished, he need expect only criticism commensurate with the adoration which was his, beyond any other man's, a few months ago...
...He is the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist leader...
Vol. 11 • May 1919 • No. 5
