If Only - Possibly

The other day I watched a 1960s interview with the mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell.

Imagine, if you will, that Britain had simply sat out the First World War. No four years of trench-bound slaughter, no millions dead for a few miles of churned-up mud, and no Versailles Treaty to sow the seeds of fascism. Imagine, instead, that Germany had won – the Kaiser triumphant, France humiliated, and Britain untouched. Horrifying? Bertrand Russell didn’t think so. And increasingly, it looks like he may have been right.

Now before the monocles pop out and the poppies start trembling, let’s be clear – Russell wasn’t championing Prussian militarism. He loathed authoritarianism in all its guises. But what he understood, unlike the cheerleaders for Empire who dragged us into that meat grinder, was that sometimes the cost of intervening is far higher than the cost of restraint.

Britain didn’t enter the war for Belgium’s sake, noble though that sounds in textbooks. We joined to preserve our imperial interests and to stop Germany becoming too powerful – not because we cared about small nations. The result? Catastrophe. A continent shattered, economies ruined, and an entire generation fed into the guns. And for what? The so-called "war to end all wars" ended in a fragile peace so lopsided it became the incubator of Hitler.

Had Germany won, there’d have been no Treaty of Versailles – that vindictive bit of paper that bled Germany dry and poisoned its politics. No Hitler, no Holocaust, no blitzkrieg. Perhaps a more centralised Europe, under the Kaiser’s thumb – but that’s still a far cry from the jackboots and gas chambers that followed the Allies' "victory."

Instead, what did we get? Bolshevism in Russia, fascism in Italy and Spain, Nazism in Germany – all rising from the ruins of liberal democracy trampled in the trenches. We won the war, only to lose the peace. Twice.

Russell’s point wasn’t that German victory would have been a good thing. It’s that British intervention made a bad situation catastrophic. We helped prolong the war, escalated its horrors, and ensured that the peace would be punitive and unstable. All in the name of preserving an imperial order that was already rotting at the core.

Had we stayed out, Europe might have ended up under German influence – but perhaps not under German jackboots. And the millions who died between 1914 and 1945 might have lived out quiet, uneventful lives.

Sometimes, doing nothing isn’t cowardice. It’s wisdom.

While mentioning Hitler, it's interesting to note that dictators have a slightly more than 50:50 chance of being deposed violently, committing suicide or fleeing, as the following chart shows.

A sobering thought for all the far right contenders at present.