So I don't think it's terrible to say, well, Frederick the Great is conquering land, so therefore George Washington must declare war.

He didn't when Audio von Bismarck was invading countries and killing innocent people in the Franco Prussian War.

Ulysses S Graham did not declare war.

We didn't even really get involved in the Napoleonic battles and.

America is not a is not an international nation.

So do you think Britain should have declared war against the Soviet Union on September 17th 1939 when the Soviets invaded Poland?

That's an interesting question.

It is a really interesting question possibly.

Right, gentlemen, I never thought I'd be talking about World War 2 in 2025, but it's just getting a lot of traction now.

A lot of people are debating it and the deeper I went into the topic, the more fascinated I became.

So instead of starting where I want to start, I'm actually going to give you the my keys to kick it off.

Maybe give us your thoughts on on the war in general, but also what you think is most misunderstood when it comes to World War 2.

Because everyone, I'm going to give you my position earlier is that, you know, World War 2, Hitler was bad.

Allied forces were good, good had to fight bad.

They had no choice.

Appeasement did not work.

And you know, Hitler lost, Europe became a better place.

That's what I learned as I as I was a kid and that was it, full stop.

But now a lot of questions are being asked about different aspects of the war.

So, Keith, I'd love you to to kick it off for us.

To briefly summarize the anti war position, first, the cost of war are extremely high to the costs are often imposed on unwilling participants 3 the outcomes of warfare are highly uncertain and four, the primary decision makers.

Politicians face little incentive to produce beneficial results since they often have access to the involuntary labor of conscripts and can fund their operations involuntarily through taxation.

With these general metrics in mind, I want to make the case that Britain and the United States should not have entered into the Second World War.

Consider this war from the German point of view.

Their eastern enemy, the Bolshevik regime, kept engaging in acts of aggression.

In 1917, they staged A coup against Tsar Nicholas the 2nd and conquered Russia, leading to a four year civil war, killing millions of people.

In 1918, the Bolsheviks assisted Rosa Luxembourg in the November Revolution, attempting to annex Germany.

In 1919, the Bolsheviks invaded Poland, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and set up a puppet state in Hungary with Belikoun in 1920.

The Bolsheviks occupied Azerbaijan the same year.

They occupied Armenia in 1921.

They invaded Georgia in 1932.

They starved millions of Ukrainians to death in the Hall of d'amour.

In 1934, the Bolsheviks invaded Xinjiang, China.

In 1935, Germany found themselves encircled by the Franco Soviet Pact, followed by the Czech Soviet Treaty of Alliance.

In 1939 the Bolsheviks invaded Finland and Poland, and by 1940 the Bolshevik regime occupied an annexed Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Bessarabia and Bukovina.

By 1941, the German National Socialists fought the Russian International Socialists under the guise of opposing the Bolshevik International Worldwide Conspiracy, as Hitler called it in June 22nd, 1941.

In his speech.

Churchill understood the Soviet menace, saying in a 1920 article titled Zionism versus Bolshevism that Bolshevism is a system of morals and philosophy as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, and a worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of Arrested Development and envious malevolence and impossible equality.

On Germany's western border, they had the British Empire, which comprised nearly one quarter of the world's land surface and more than 1/4 of the world's population.

Yet it is Germany who is accused of wanting to take over the world.

In the case of Japan, the Chinese Communists had been fighting the Chinese nationalists since 1927.

America fought a war 6000 miles away in Korea and 8000 miles away in Vietnam under the guise of stopping the spread of communism.

We can see why Japan, separated from China only by the East China Sea, saw a Chinese Communist victory as a potential security threat.

Just as you can't rationally analyze a trial only by looking at the prosecution's arguments, you must consider the defense, so too should we consider the point of view of the Axis powers.

This nuanced view at least takes us away from the thesis that the Germans were pure, unprovoked evil doers hell bent on conquering the world, thus could not be negotiated with and must be bombed into unconditional surrender.

Under the case of the British Empire, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French President Albert Lebrun declared war on Germany September 3rd, 1939, with the explicit reasoning that Germany violated Polish independence on September 1st when Hitler invaded Poland seeking to reunite Danzig with Germany, a town that was 95% German and was part of the Kingdom of Prussia as far back as 1793.

Two weeks later, on September 17th, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and no such declaration of war was issued against them by France or Britain.

This implies that the original justification for the Allies entrance into World War 2 was completely fraudulent and simply an excuse to declare war against Britain's biggest competitor on the continent.

By 1945, this war for Polish independence had resulted in roughly 5 million dead Poles and all of Poland, not just dancing, occupied by the Lublin Soviet government.

In the preface to Churchill's 1948 memoir, The gathering Storm, Churchill says the human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and the victory of the righteous, 'cause we have still not found peace or security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.

Churchill's other memoir, Triumph and Tragedy, he summarizes the post war state of Europe, saying the territories under Russian control would include the Baltic provinces, all of Germany to the occupational line, all Czechoslovakia, a large part of Austria, the whole of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

This was not a state of affairs worth killing and conscripting millions of mostly innocent people over.

Consider the many atrocities committed by the British Empire during the war.

JM Spate, the principal Assistant Secretary at Air Ministry in his 1944 book Bombing Vindicated, says in May 1940 Churchill sent the first bombers against the German civilian population.

Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany.

Yet because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 1940 the publicity which it deserved.

The German Blitz didn't begin until September 7th, 1940.

Does this sound like a country hell bent on war with the British?

Britain declares war against Germany over dancing in September of 39.

Germany waits a year to start bombing British cities.

The atrocities continue.

On July 3rd, 1940, Churchill authorized Operation Catapult where he intentionally killed 1297 French servicemen, claiming he feared the Germans would capture the ship off the coast of Algeria.

On February 14th, 1942, Vice Air Marshall Norman Bottomley memoed Air Officer Marshall Baldwin riding.

It has been decided that the primary object of your operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers.

March 30th 1942 Frederick Lindeman, head of the Statistical Branch appointed by Winston Churchill, wrote the dehousing memo saying if even half the total load of 10,000 bombers were dropped on built up areas of these 58 German towns, a great majority of their inhabitants, about 1/3 of the German population, would be turned out of the house and home on October 19th 1943, a report by the Ministry of Home Security reads.

Table 4 summarizes the effects of damage to housing people's whose houses are uninhabitable, 931,000 other people whose houses have been damaged, 1.15 million.

Marshall of the Royal Air Force, Arthur Harris wrote a book Dispatch on War Operations saying the aim of the attacks on town areas had already been defined in an Air Staff paper as follows.

The ultimate aim of the attack on a town area is to break the morale of the population which occupies it.

To ensure this we must achieve 2 things.

First, we must make the town physically uninhabitable and secondly we must make the people conscious of constant personal danger.

The dehousing and killing of civilians was official British policy when it comes to American involvement.

This too, was not only unjustifiable, but the cost exceeded the benefits.

The attack on Hawaii, which was not a state until 1959, was intentionally provoked so Roosevelt could engage in diversionary foreign policy after his New Deal led to the double dip possession of 1937.

A document from Captain Arthur McCollum dated October 7th, 1940 states eight ways the United States can provoke Japan.

The memo ends as follows.

If by this means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.

End Quote.

Roosevelt supported the policy of provoking the Axis powers.

An article from the New York Times published January 2nd, 1972 titled War Entry Plans Laid to Roosevelt describes Churchill and Roosevelt meeting in August 1941.

The article quotes Churchill saying he, Roosevelt obviously was determined they should come in.

The President had said he would wage war but not declare it and that he would become more and more provocative.

If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces.

Everything was to be done to force an incident.

And quote, on November 25th of 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary, quote, the President brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked, perhaps as soon as next Monday.

The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.

War with Japan was not inevitable due to the evils of Hirohito, but an intentional policy pursued by the Roosevelt administration.

The results of this war of choice were summarized by Robert S McNamara, A statistician at the time under General Curtis Lemay in his documentary The Fog of War.

McNamara says proportionality should be a guideline in war.

Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional in the minds of some people to the objectives we were trying to achieve.

He then summarizes Operation Meetinghouse.

Quote I was on the island of Guam in March 1945 and that single night we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo, men, women and children.

And quote the unconditional of surrendering tender of Japan meant the US no longer had a bulwark against Mao's China.

Japan also withdrew forces from Korea, which it had occupied since 1910, and Vietnam, which it had occupied since September of 1940.

This caused communist power vacuums to fill the void, causing the US to go on and fight wars in Korea and Vietnam, resulting in millions of deaths and communist victories in North Korea and Vietnam.

One lesson from history is that even dictators can be negotiated with.

Ask yourself, why is it that slave owners fed, clothed, and housed their slaves?

If slave owners were so evil, why didn't they just torture all their slaves to death?

The answer is the most evil option is not always the most profitable option.

Evil as the National Socialist regime was, it was not.

It would not have been profitable for them to conquer and subjugate the world even if they did conquer territory.

Sometimes colonialism benefits the colonized population.

Since 1865, the southern American states have not been independent from the American Union, and local towns have no recognized right to resist the federal government in Washington DC.

Winston Churchill justified British rule in India, claiming the Indians were the primary beneficiary, and in his book A History of the English Speaking Peoples mentions how modern Britain benefited from being conquered by the Roman Empire in 43 ADA.

Common Claim is that dictators cannot be negotiated with.

First of all the allies side Stalin was not elected.

Francis Charles de Gaulle was not elected.

Churchill was appointed by King George.

FDR was a tyrant who put 100,000 Americans in internment camps and wrote a letter to Francisco Franco on November 8th 1942 assuring his friendship with Spain.

Second, since the Franco American Treaty of 1778 with King Louis the 16th, the US has been friends with dictators.

Britain allied with Tsar Nicholas the Second in the First World War NATO welcomed Portugal's dictator Antonio Salazar into the alliance in 1949.

Kennedy negotiated with Khrushchev during the Cuban missile Crisis.

Nixon shook hands with Chairman Mao.

Reagan negotiated with Gorbachev at Reykovic.

Today our government is friendly with the King of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Syria, led by former Al Qaeda soldier Abu Muhammad al Jilani.

We can and have negotiated with dictators.

They often are more rational than elected politicians who tend to be demagogues attempting to appeal to ill informed voters.

In closing, on page 466 of Churchill's memoir Closing the Ring, he describes a discussion with Stalin at Tehran where Churchill quotes himself saying in wartime I said truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Stalin and his comrades greatly appreciated this remark.

Almost all wars are based on lies, cherry picked events out of context and sensationalism.

It's the only way the masses can be duped into sending their sons to risk getting killed.

The Second World War is no exception.

Thank you.

Jim Goodness.

I think we'll give you 15 minutes.

A lot of a lot of points made.

I like the nuanced take on the wall.

So I'll give you the same time as Keith.

If 15 minutes to respond to as many points as you can, but also trying to break it down for the audience to to be able to separate all the various arguments being made because there's a lot of them made at once just for people that are not too deep into the history of the war.

But the mic is yours for 15 minutes and then we can have a back and forth, Jim.

Right.

Well, I mean, Keith is coming at this from an obviously a very different perspective.

What hasn't been noted there is, is obviously the oppression of the Nazi regime, the ideology Holocaust, of course, which hadn't been articulated in 1939 when we went to war, but by goodness, it certainly had by 1945 and before that.

And for the point, I mean, I, I don't accept at all that that Roosevelt was a a dictator.

I, I, you know, Churchill is an imperialist.

We all know that.

But but he is also a Democrat.

He was put in position by the by the King, but but the British doc parliamentary democratic system is such that you have elections, a leader is is elected and and he the leader of that party that is elected becomes Prime Minister and for the duration of that parliament which has been voted by the public.

If the leader resigns, then in within that parliament, then you get appointed.

So it is true that during the war Britain wasn't quite as democratic as it might speak because elections were suspended, just as they are in Ukraine.

At the same time, and as is so often the case, because people aren't in a position to canvas and in a position to go on the campaign trail, a lot of people aren't able to vote, which is why they're often suspended.

And clearly there's more important things going on than having a general election.

It is also true that when he did come into power, he came into power with the agreement of a cross party new nationalist governments that have been the Conservatives, which I suppose is roughly speaking to the American Republicans.

And he came in with a cross party nationalist government which included the three major parties, Conservatives, the Liberals and the Labour Party.

So.

You know.

OK, so he's appointed by the King, but, but, but he, that is entirely in keeping with the democratic parliamentary system that Britain adheres to.

So I don't think anyone's complaining about that.

No one was up in arms about it.

You know, that was following the due processes of a democratic nation.

In terms of, of Roosevelt, Roosevelt's really interesting because when he when he canvases for the presidency in 1932, it does so on the, on the promise of all sorts of different things.

And obviously America is in the mire of the Great Depression, which obviously had been kick started by the Wall Street crash of October 1929, which in turn have been kick started by massive overspending and by unlicensed banking, which was borrowing more than they had.

So when people started calling it in, they bankers were going bust and, and all the rest of it.

The situation was compounded, of course, by the May 19, 1930, Smoot Hawley Tariff Act, which kicked off a global trading war and didn't help things at all.

And obviously the, the the reason for doing that was benign in in its instance and trying to protect American workers.

But, but America by that point was the richest nation in the world, whether it liked it or not.

It might have wanted to go back to a kind of folksy, isolationist, insular looking situation, but it couldn't because it is now the richest nation in the world.

And being the richest nation in the world comes with international commitments you just can't get out of, unfortunately.

And when Rizzo comes in, one of the things he does do is he tries to overturn some.

Of the more imperialist views of previous administrations and previous presidents, For example, one first thing he instigates in his inauguration speech March 1933 is the Good Neighbor policy, which basically says we've been very aggressive to our neighbors in Latin America and Central America.

But from now on we're going to be really friendly with them.

We're going to be coming with them, we're going to help with them.

We might end up with a trade deficit, but overall we're going to get richer on this because what's going to happen is the Central American countries are going to become more prosperous.

They're going to be better off.

They're then going to trade with us.

So we're going to be able to export more, we're going to be import more and the and the whirly gig of global finance is going to is going to work better and we're better placed to exploit that.

So overall, America is going to be richer and that is frankly kind of inarguable.

And out of that then comes and he starts instigating the policy right for the right go.

And he does start to realize, though, in in the second-half of the 1930s.

And he's been watching Hitler with with with mounting concern and.

And and.

Interest.

He worries.

That totalitarianism is going to have a greater grip.

And he is very much an advocate of the new Sonian view of self determination, which in other words is he believes profoundly that people should have the right to choose what government that they they want rather than being told what to do.

Is anti dictator.

Is anti authoritarian.

And.

What he worries about is that the Atlantic is no longer the Great Barrier that it once had been, nor indeed the Pacific and.

As if to prove the point.

The arch isolationist Charles Lindbergh, of course, was the first person to solo make a flight across the Atlantic.

And Roosevelt was very convinced that the world was becoming a much smaller place and that everyone was our neighbors.

What he wanted to do was create a kind of global democracy.

So he was distinctively anti dictator, anti authoritarian.

And it's pretty interesting that that suddenly you have the great strategic earthquake of 1940, which is.

The loss of France.

France is is by today's standards, a superpower.

In 19/30/1940 and gets crushed by by Germany in six weeks.

And this is the big thing that no one had been expecting.

Because it was expected that Britain, with his world's largest Navy, world's largest merchant fleet, combined with a burgeoning air power and an air defense system, and with the might of France, which had the largest army in the world at that time, would be able to stop any efforts of the Germans.

Truth is that French.

Was still fighting the First World War.

They imagined it would be largely static, immobile and and a sort of slow.

A slow burner.

And they thought that their superior numbers of artillery pieces, matching numbers of aircraft, their superior numbers of tanks and infantry would be enough to stop the stop the German Blitzkrieg combined, particularly when you added on the British Army, which was very, very tiny in 1940.

And of course the the Belgium and the Dutch as well.

But it wasn't to be.

And one of the reasons was because they vaguely misunderstood the importance of communication.

The Germans have mastered radio.

They had the widest radio network of any nation in the world by 1939.

Those radios were getting smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper and you could of course put those in in military vehicles as well, which meant that all your component parts of a of a leading unit, say a Panzer division, a tank division, armored division would have reconnaissance troops.

It would have infantry artillery and tank artillery, anti aircraft artillery, etcetera.

And of course tanks as well panzers.

They could all communicate with one another.

The French didn't really have any answers to this.

So so I mean this is this is a very complete version of why they lost.

But but it was 50% German skill, 50% French failure, I would say.

But this was.

Nonetheless.

A massive strategic earthquake.

So Roosevelt's point of view, Roosevelt was thinking, well, it'd be great because what we can do is we can, we can rearm.

And we can get ourselves.

Out of the mire of of the lingering mire of the Great Depression.

We've got all the infrastructure to do this because we are the most consumerist society and modern society in the world, despite the great pressure so.

We've got the infrastructure.

We've got the workforce, we've got the scale, we've got the scope to go to do this.

We can make weapons for other people so that our young men won't have to do it.

But there is no question, I think that one France fell that Roosevelt felt eventually America would get drawn into the war inevitably, because pumping these to another, you know, if you're pending your shipping lanes and suddenly, you know, U boat comes along and shoots, you know, sinks of a ship and there's another one, then it's another one for, you know, where you are.

You're kind of down that route.

But but he was definitely trying to.

Hold off as long as he.

Possibly could, and one of the reasons why he wanted to hold off as long as he could was because he didn't want to put his own man of young American the lives of young Americans in the borrowing line before he had to.

And one of the ways of getting around this, of course, is becoming the the concept then lease because Britain was running out of money and couldn't afford to pay for arms anymore.

So you have the whole cup garden hose analogy and one of the famous.

Press conferences, he.

Had in the middle of December 1940.

And out of that came then lease, but basically they would build it and loan it.

But the point about.

You know, learning it overseas is that you are creating, you're creating jobs, you're creating wealth.

And America was able to get very, very wealthy on on the back of it.

But I'm, I don't take the cynical view.

I think I think Roosevelt had a world mission.

I think his world mission was to try and create a better, fairer world, a more prosperous world.

Famously for his inauguration in for his second, his third term in January 19, 3341.

Rather, Roosevelt first talked about the four freedoms, freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, freedom of fear and the freedom of want.

So in other words, you know, trying to abolish poverty.

And these were ideals.

I think he truly believed it.

And it's really interesting.

He was saying, you know, he's he actually wrote that inauguration speech didn't have one of his advisors said, you know, what are people going to care about the people of Java if you live in Arkansas?

And Roosevelt said, well, the people in Arkansas also care about the people in Java because the world is getting a smaller place and the people of Java are our neighbors now.

And I think you truly believe that and.

What he was fighting.

For what he was fighting for in the Second World War, which was the same thing that British were fighting for was they were fighting for a global order that was not one built on repression, on warped ideology, on what became the Holocaust.

It was one of democracy and freedom.

I think where Roosevelt was slightly naive and where Churchill was less so was in leaving or hoping, I should say that by massively supporting the Soviet Union with material might that would ease Soviet Union post war into a kind of partnership and the.

Rough edges.

The worst crimes of Bolshevism, which you very, very explicitly and carefully outlined in your talk, he came to the fore and actually the Soviet Union sort of merged into a kind of sort of post war socialist more.

Democratic State.

Well, obviously, you know, that was idealistic and it didn't happen and frankly, it was never going to happen.

And so you get this world order.

But but I I think the allies were correct to try and stop fascism and particularly Nazism.

There's a famous speech that Churchill makes in June 1940 where he says, you know, if we prevail, we can return to the sunlit uplands and the whole of Europe and.

Once again, be free.

Choose where they go, choose who they vote for, choose what they do not have the Gestapo, not have the forces of repression, not have the forces of warped ideology, not have the kind of us and them this idea that that, you know, we're living in this sort of bipolar world, but if we fail.

We.

Will descend into a new Dark World may perhaps more sinister by the versions of modern science.

Of course, you know at that point those like company and gas that chambers, but I thought that's pretty impressive frankly and obviously when you are on the side of the kind of sort of the moral, right.

It starts to get murky.

When you're bombing cities and flattening cities and making very difficult choices and ultimately when you're dropping bombs and.

This is one of the.

Things that this, this scale of this level of nuance is one of the things that I think makes the Second World War enduringly fascinating.

How much?

How much bad do you have to do to do good but the truth?

Of the matter is.

The moment those ultra nationalistic totalitarian states surrendered.

The moment the bombing.

Dropped.

Whereas had the Allies stopped and pulled back, the Holocaust would not have stopped and repression would not have stopped.

And.

I would not.

Have betted against Hitler just cozily having carving out his own little sphere of influence in the whole of Asia and Europe.

I think he would have wanted to go.

Across the Atlantic, eventually I think he would have wanted to absorb the whole of, of Britain and Britain's influences and the Commonwealth and the Dominions for the rest.

So I you know, and and.

I I don't think he was trustworthy.

And yes, you can communicate with dictators, but Hitler had repeatedly proved himself to be completely untrustworthy.

Yeah, I think that that last point.

Is probably one I'm going to start with because Thor started by Hitler invading Austria welcome with open arms and then later it made a deal with Germany and France.

I'll oversimplify it to invade the German part of Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic.

That was an agreement with Italy, France and Great Britain and the goal was not to go beyond that territory.

So that was appeasement there.

And that's what the argument that the appeasement strategy didn't work with a not with any dictator, but with Hitler specifically.

And then there was the Munich agreement.

And then right afterwards, Hitler invades the rest of the Czech Republic and invades Poland.

And that's where the UK and France, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany.

So on that point, Keith and Keith, just to, to be clear, I like nuanced takes on any topic.

And I think being very binary, black and white and anything just is, is ignorance in my opinion.

And I think you and Jim have shown that as well.

The, the, the nuanced take on, on the war.

My, my question to you is something that Jim said is that do you believe that France, Great Britain, the US were at least, even though they've committed atrocities, we're fighting for a moral right.

Jim talked about the speech by Churchill about Europe being free again.

That's a very different vision for Europe than what Hitler would have had.

So would you agree before we go into the details on whether that war could have prevent been prevented, more lives could have been saved?

Was France, the UK and and and the US fighting for what me and Jim consider the moral right?

I believe so, yes.

The example that would come to mind of how this war could have been avoided.

Churchill refers to this as the unnecessary war, meaning that if France had just sent soldiers to the Rhineland in 1936, then this war could have been avoided.

If the League of Nations had just enforced sanctions on Italy after the Abyssinia Ethiopia crisis, then this war could have been avoided.

So yes, I do think the Allies overall, I guess the test that I would use is if the Allies had all the power, what would they do?

Verse if the Axis had all the power, what would they do?

Which of those two worlds would you rather live in?

I would much rather live in the Allied world.

But it still is important that the first initial justification for the war, Polish independence was not only not protected, Stalin had told Churchill that Polish independence for the British is a matter of honor, but for the Russians it's a matter of honor and security.

So we're not going to allow free elections in Poland after 5 million Poles had died during this war.

So the public justification was completely fraudulent.

Obviously, as I mentioned afterwards, that that.

That came at Yalta that he said that correct.

Yes.

So we're not so.

The war becomes.

Breaks out.

On the 1st of September 1939, so that's six years earlier.

So do you think?

Britain should have declared war against the Soviet Union on September 17th, 1939, when the Soviets invaded Poland.

That's an interesting question, possibly.

It is a really interesting.

Question.

Possibly, but but but by that point, kind of real politics coming into it.

The whole point about declaring war against Germany was to try and persuade them not to invade to invade Poland, and the Soviet Union wasn't going to invade Poland until Germany did.

It might have done a few years down the line, but it certainly wasn't going to do in in the winter of 1939.

So by that.

Point kind of real politic.

Comes in the the the whole point about threatening to go to war was to try and stop him from doing that is to say OK, we caved.

In on the sedate.

And land we stood by and watched you do Czechoslovakia.

That is a line in the.

Sand from now on, if you, if you do any more expansionism, if you go into any other countries which, who don't haven't invited you to do so, that will be it.

And that point comes on the 3rd of September 1939, two days after the, after the, after the German invasion.

That point, you know, then they're thinking, oh crikey, you know, now we are now we're in it.

What, what does that mean?

Well, the policy of France and Britain is not.

So they.

Are they are allies?

They are formal allies and they are not agreed, you know, they are not as one on what they should do really, you know, and France and Britain are in very, very different situations.

France is a continentalist power, has fought the First World War largely on French territory or certainly, you know, on the on the Western Front, of course, and suffered huge numbers of casualties, huge amount of devastation, doesn't really want to go there at all.

The politics of the 1930s in France are incredibly fractious.

I think there's something like 19 different governments and 14 different prime ministers in the 1930s alone in France.

And all the part all the governments say that that they have are coalitions.

And what that means is that no one's, it's really, really hard to make a single decision because you've got people on the right, you've got people presenting, you've got people on the left, you know, and, and it's just so no one can decide.

And suddenly you've got Britain and, and France working together as formal allies.

Well, Britain can do the whole naval bit and France has got pretty strong Navy as well.

But Britain can really do the Navy bit, protect the sea lanes, compose an economic blockade on, on Germany and, and can sort of, you know, exert a huge amount of naval pressure.

It's got a burgeoning Air Force.

But the deal is that France will do the land bit.

But the problem is is when your military isn't supported by strong political.

Vision and.

Unity of purpose.

The military also kind of struggles as well.

So, you know, the sore offensive in in in October 1939 is really half cock.

I mean, had the French properly gone into western Germany, that would have probably overruled, you know, that would have overcome the whole thing.

But they but they don't.

So yeah, go on.

Go on Mario, I want to.

So on that.

Point though, so Keith, where would you draw the line?

So Jim said the point that France and Britain had to draw the line that hey, you know, if you invade Poland, we will declare war on on you and there has to be a line drawn otherwise it will continue if you continue appeasing him.

In your opinion, what could have or what should have Britain and France have done when Hitler invaded Poland?

Hitler and and the Soviet Union?

So.

Looking at the specific aims I think are important.

If it's reunification of Danzig or if it's taking over all of Poland, that is important to consider specifying an exact red line for each instance.

It is extremely difficult to come up with a metric like that.

I think Sir Edward Gray's the original position was France is who we could give our war guarantee to.

Anything east of that we're just not able to fulfill in the First World War.

I think a more productive answer than saying exactly what geographical area the line should be at is to assume what process should be engaged in if people feel that their freedoms are being threatened or their independence is violated.

The two metrics that I think are that governments should use to make sure that the population is actually on board with what their government is committing them to is 1.

Immediately outlaw all conscription.

Conscription is an indicator that the people who you're claiming to represent don't actually think something is worth fighting for.

And 2nd, taxation and central banking.

You should not be allowed to fund wars through any of those involuntary means.

Government should have to sell war bonds and get soldiers voluntarily.

So if you can get people to buy war bonds and voluntarily sign up to fight because they want to protect Paris, absolutely.

But to just give war guarantees, essentially what you're doing is you're depriving your own population.

Of their independence.

You're saying Britain no longer is going to determine whether or not we go to war?

March 31st 1939 we're giving our independence to Poland and Poland is now going to decide how they behave towards Germany and whether or not they will provoke an invasion, whether or not they will negotiate.

So you're depriving your own people of independence when you give a war guarantee to another?

Nation it changes the incentives and constraints that those people face.

Well, I don't think.

That's the case in I don't.

Go ahead, Jim, That's not really so in, in the case of Britain.

So, so, So what happens is one of the, you know, the big thing is, is why did Chamberlain kowtow to the bullying of Hitler in September and October 1938 at the time of the Munich crisis?

And, and the reason is, is yes, because why should we go to war with the, the countries in a far off, you know, a far off place that we know very little about?

It's partly that, but, but it's because he is democratically elected and 90 / 90% of the population were against going to war.

And, but, but there is a balance to strike because if you, if you give too much fuel to this bully, he's only going to get stronger.

And there's a point where the political metric is that you've got to kind of stand up to this.

And, and if you've clearly disagree with the Hitlerian way of doing things, you don't like what is what's going to happen to the rest of Europe and you don't like his, his his military ambition, let alone his ideology, you got to do something about it.

So conscription comes in for the first time ever in peacetime in the last 200 years or something, when that's the first time ever, I think in March 1939.

And there is not a public outcry.

Chamberlain, who is the Prime Minister, by the way, not not Churchill at the start of the war.

Chamberlain is is really nervous about suggesting conscription and there is not a public outcry at all.

There is an acceptance amongst the British public that this is something that needs to happen.

And Ditto with the war.

There is a, there is a resignation that this is something that we have to stand up.

We have to stand up to people like Hitler and, and that is widely accepted.

And by the way, that is also the case in the United States, which goes from very, very strongly isolationist to, to more and more in favour of, of massive rearming in the summer of 1940 into the 1941.

And when conscription comes in when, when the when, when?

Ruizva.

Imposes conscription.

There's fairly a flutter of violence now, of course there is by the America first organization, but the American first organization is basically being defeated by the 1940 election and resource got his mandate.

You know, he just has.

And and I, I, I absolutely applaud your ideals on this.

But you know, we all agree that we should have perfect choice to do whatever we want whenever we want.

But but the whole point about the Second World War is, is, is, is democratic nations are standing up against this authoritarianism and this.

Taking away of personal.

Freedoms, I mean, that's the whole point of, of narcissism.

It is and indeed fascism and and of course Bolshevism as well is, is that it is a massive state.

The state runs everything that the, the, the totemic figure of the Fuhrer, the leader, the single figure, the one man, everyone bounce, bounce to him.

Personal freedoms are, are are taken away, choices taken away, etcetera, etcetera, which I think you and I, Keith, so Jim, can be opposed to.

Yeah, I think, I think that's that's a.

Point of agreement Now, what Keith is arguing is that there are other ways to be able to stop Hitler over time, maybe without starting a World War, without having seventy 80 million people dying.

Was there anything in hindsight, Jim, that could have been done differently by Roosevelt and FDR by by Churchill?

Well, I think overall there's lots.

There's lots of, you know, you, you constantly see missed opportunities throughout the Second World War, although actually the, the, the major missed opportunities come on the point of the Germans making really bad decisions rather than the other way around.

But, but yes, there are, there is, there's certain instances where think, you know, people make the wrong call for what, for whatever reason.

I, I think, I think, you know, the, the point about the strategic air campaign, for example, is to try and avoid the huge amount of casualties that took place on their own side in the First World War.

I mean, Britain lost, you know, over 1,000,000.

If you clear, clear British and Commonwealth troops dead in the First World War, you know, it felt like a whole generation of being wiped out.

No one wanted to go through that again.

So that the idea was to use mechanization, modernity technology to do a lot of the hard yards for you.

So you're using, you're, you're adopting a strategy and this is adopted by the Americans as well, by the way, and indeed the dominion forces, such as the Canadians who who played a, a disproportionately large part in the Second World War to, to, to use steel, not our flesh.

The, the, the job of the political leaders is to look after the people of which they are leading first and foremost.

Now, obviously, you know, you want to be a humane man and you want to avoid as many casualties as possible, but you know, we don't live in the world that we Live Today.

We live in a different world and the, the principles behind strategic air, air warfare was so that you limited the number of people in the coalface of war.

And it's really interesting, you know, the, the British and the, the Western Allies were incredibly successful at this.

You know, if you think, think when we think about armies in the Second World War, you know, we're thinking about the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan.

You're thinking about the slaughter of, of people on the beaches or, or in the hedgerows of Normandy or wherever it might be, or in the jungles or on Pacific islands.

But actually the numbers of infantry were comparatively small.

And in an army, it would be about 14% of the makeup would be, would be infantry.

About 8% would be be armor, of which only 48% of that would actually be in tanks.

You know, 22% would be artillery, about 18% would be engineers, well over 40% would be service troops.

So nearly 50% service troops driving trucks and what have you.

The whole point about the air campaign is to send, you know, but because you're still talking about comparatively small numbers in the big scheme of things.

And, and the idea is, is to damage your enemy's infrastructure, encourage them to surrender, disrupt their own war effort, make life as difficult as possible and get them to surrender as quickly as possible.

That's the point of it.

And at the moment they.

Used and moving from the at the point.

Was.

There political but was there a political off France like the the Hitler's 1940 speech where he offered Britain full independence and and no disarmament if he allowed them if he allowed, you know, Hitler to keep Europe, but but he he proved he.

He was a.

He was a systemic liar and couldn't be trusted at all.

I mean, no one believed that at all.

And, and also the point was, is, you know, Britain's situation in Europe historically is that you don't have a dominant power, you don't have a dominant power dominating the whole of mainland Europe.

That's, that's incredibly dangerous.

So there is a, there is a practical point of view.

There's the real politic coming into play as well as the moral one.

It's, it's, it's, it's not, it's not one or the other.

It's not an evil or kind of choice.

It's it's a, it's a, it's a thing combined.

And this is the point that suddenly in the summer of 1940, you've got the whole of the, of the coastline of Europe all the way from northern Norway in the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of Spain in either fluttering the swastika or in in the hands of fascists.

And you know, that's not a good position for, for, for Germany with the exception.

Yeah, I think, yeah.

Exactly.

I think, Keith, on that point, what does it make strategic sense for for Great Britain to accept a peace deal with with Nazi Germany in 1940 and give someone like Hitler control of Europe and allow him to prepare for potentially another war and break the deal again like he did in in in the Munich agreement that.

Very well could happen as far.

As Jim's challenge to when did Hitler follow through with anything he said, the only thing that comes to mind is the chapter of Churchill's memoir, I think it's titled The Rape of Austria in 1938, where Hitler says if Mussolini promises not to intervene on behalf of Austria, I will forever remember it.

And then he rescues Mussolini from the Italian provisional government in 1943.

On that one, he did keep his word to his ally.

I would have to go back in Mussolini.

I don't know why it's just you.

Know Mussolini is the first dictator.

He's the 1st.

Fascist of and and he.

Was very struck.

By his visits, Hitler's visits to, to Rome and to Florence and to Italy and, and the kind of the whole showmanship of, of, of fascist Italy.

And he was always very loyal to to to Mussolini, but he certainly wasn't.

Loyal to the rest of his.

Allies, which he treated like dirt and of course he treated the Italians like dirt as well.

I mean so so Mussolini is is an exception within within all that.

But you know, we don't know about the Holocaust in in 1940, but we do know about about systemic anti-Semitism and a whole host of other horrors.

And obviously that develops into the Holocaust.

You know, the 6,000,000 Jews that were, that were murdered.

And you know what, what is amazing about that is, is in May 1940, the moment that, you know, Germany can't possibly win the war by this point, they accelerate the extermination of the Jews by going into Hungary and, and, and pulling out all the, the, the Hungarian Jews and, and hurrying them to Auschwitz as quickly as possible.

The famous railway track that goes under the, under the main arch in, in, in Auschwitz, Birkenau.

The, the, the, the death camp was built specifically to speed up the execution of Hungary's Jews.

You know, so it's it's.

You know that ideology.

Had they been successful, would have just got worse and worse and worse.

And there'd be more people.

There wouldn't just be Jews.

There'd be other people that they've decided to isolate.

You know, it it, it would progress and progress and progress until the only people around are are Northern European Aryan types.

I mean, you can see how this would escalate.

And OK, so you could argue and say, well, maybe it wouldn't.

Maybe Hitler would have halted.

Well, you know, who would bet against it?

That's the point, yes.

What?

Kind of question.

So then what do you do?

What?

Would you keep what?

Would you let it happen exactly?

That would be the question.

What could have been done differently?

I would would have led to a better outcome.

I would have.

Appointed Charles Lindbergh.

To negotiate with the German Zionist Federation of 1897, who was still active in 1933, Hitler's Germany and I would have accelerated the Havara agreement, which was the transfer of Jews 1800 miles away from Germany, which the National Socialist government did approve of, to get them into Palestine.

Form an alliance with the Zionists and the National Socialist.

Well, not like a military alliance, but there could have been a transfer program that was referred to as the Havara Agreement that could have gotten Jews away from this very hostile situation without leading to mass death.

Wow.

But.

That wouldn't have prevented World War 2.

That I don't know how that relates.

Your question was about your question.

Was.

His question was about what to do with the Jews who were victims of the Holocaust.

So I was saying accelerate an alliance with the.

German.

That's what I'll refresh if I apologize.

So what would you have done?

As a final question, what would you have done differently to avoid the, you know, a World War to end it in, in, let's say Poland or France in?

Poland or France?

You know, pretending that I would have the knowledge to answer something as specific as that.

I think Churchill brings up very good points when it comes to France responding to the violation of the Versailles Treaty when it comes to reoccupying the Rhineland.

That was a very good potential show of force because Churchill's reasoning is that at the time, France could have mobilized 70 divisions, whereas the Germans only would have had roughly a dozen.

I think that is very important, he says.

If we had strongly enforced sanctions against Italy, that would have shown that the League of Nations is not just something on paper that we discuss.

That was an off ramp.

So I am designating to a high authority Winston Churchill on this, but he does say that the declaration of war over Poland was an extremely weak justification at the most unfavorable of Times Now that Germany had gotten so much stronger.

However, you also have to consider that the more war guarantees you give, the more claims you make on the earth.

Those are all potential assets for your empire.

Also, those are liabilities, and you have to spend a great deal of resources subjugating people, printing money to pay for the soldiers, to generate the equipment that the soldiers have.

So you end up spreading yourself so thin.

That's how after the First World War, you saw the fall of the Tsarist empire, the Austro Hungarian Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm's empire.

They spread themselves too thin.

So I don't think it's terrible to say, well, Frederick the Great is conquering land, so therefore George Washington must declare war.

He didn't when Audubon Bismarck was invading countries and killing innocent people in the Franco Prussian War.

Ulysses S Grant did not declare war over this.

We didn't even really get involved in the Napoleonic battles to a significant degree.

And America is not a is not an.

International nation in the way that it is by the middle of the OR the by the third third of the of the 20th century.

That's, that's the point.

And the threat is contained to the United States in Europe in, in the 1860s and 1870s in a way that it isn't by the 8, by the 1940s.

I mean, that's the point, you know, that, that's the point that resource making is that the world is getting a smaller place.

It's shrinking.

The technology's advancing at such a rate.

You know, the barriers of the Pacific and the Atlantic are not what they were.

So that's why they have to get involved or else the, the, the, the fear is that this becomes a, a global cancer that spreads across the entire planet.

And said, you know, Roosevelt's ideology is, is one that the, of self determination, of democracy, of, of the four freedoms and, and all the rest of it.

And he wants a fair and prosperous, better, freer world.

And and that's to be applauded.

I mean, I think, you know, where you are absolutely correct is had the France French put up a little bit more muscle and a bit more of a show and indeed the British in the mid 1930s and, and, and absolutely stamped on on Germany very, very hard, then, you know, that would have stopped the Second World War.

But, you know, similarly, you know, had the Americans not imposed the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, that would have also probably prevented the Second World War because then he wouldn't have had a global tribal war.

You wouldn't have had the collapse of banks in Vienna and in Berlin.

You wouldn't have had a political vacuum at the end of end of the Weimar period.

And into that vacuum comes Hitler.

If you haven't got Hitler, you wouldn't have the Second World War.

So, you know, it depends how far you want to go back.

But but the point is, is in 1939, you're in the situation you're in.

You have appeased Hitler.

You have allowed him to get a get a get a take a March.

He is clearly dangerous.

He is clearly a threat to goble peace.

His ideology is, is disgusting and and needs to be stopped.

And you have to stand up to these people or else you're threatening the peace and and prosperity and of not just Central Europe, but the entire planet.

And that's why they do it.

And you can only do what you can do with the means that you have to your at your disposal with the minimum amount of casualties, which is, and there's still not flesh approach.

By the way, is, is is tough on the Japanese and it's tough on, on the, on the folk of of Germany, but you know, in Germany.

That.

Hitler got into power.

They could have done something about it if they if they didn't like what he was doing.

So they had a they did have a voice, they did have a say and they chose not to voice that.

So they were colluding with the Nazi regime and.

And you know the whole point.

Was to try and save the number of lives of of of Americans and Canadians and Brits.

And and they did that because by the by 1945, the number of war dead in those leading competent nations was considerably less than some of the other major competent nations who weren't as efficient and pragmatic and sensible in their approach to global war.

Well, I was going to ask.

Couldn't the concept?

Of self determination be Hitler's justification for the 2.5 million Sudeten Germans who did not, who were not given self determination in Czechoslovakia, or the 400,000 people in Danzig who faced high customs against the Polish government even though they called it a free city well, yes, I.

Mean to to a certain extent, but but they didn't have choice because, well, they did have choice in Czechoslovakia, I suppose, but they certainly didn't have choice in Germany because by that point Hitler was a dictator and he was just deciding what happened.

So he wasn't putting it to a vote.

That's the point.

He was just, he was just stating it as a fact.

This is what's going to happen.

We're going to do this.

We're going to make Germany great again.

We're going to reclaim all our lands.

I mean, you know, border disputes in Eastern Europe are very complicated.

I mean I don't think Poland have been Poland between 1795 if I remember rightly and 1919 and up until 19/19 it had been well 19.

During the First World War it changed hands of course, but it had been split between between Prussia up until 187071, Austria and Russia.

And so it was only reunited as Poland again in in 1919 at the Treaty of Versailles.

But.

The Polish people.

Wanted to be Poland again.

Gentlemen, Keith, Jim, appreciate it.

Thanks for joining Zero Hedge for the debate and I will hope to do another round again soon.

Thanks a lot guys.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, good fun.