Harold Nicolson Quotes
If I were the Germans, I shouldn't sign the treaty. It gives them no hope—either now or in the future.
Nicolson was an eyewitness to the proceedings.
Harold Nicolson, 1886-1968, British Diplomat and Historian, Statement when the Treaty of Versailles had been negotiated and was presented for signing
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The Germans pretended to maintain the treaty and when the French totally evacuated the Rhineland, Hitler started his preparation for WWII and a little later invaded France. Clemenceau had been snookered.
This illustrates one of the reasons that the Israeli Arab conflict has been unsolvable over the years. A thousand years ago, the Arabs were a leading intellectual and military power in the world. The rest of the world has moved ahead and they have actually retrogressed. So the Arabs seek dignity which is very elusive. They have never wanted to negotiate terms with Israel when they have been weak and feel defeated. So the pattern has been that they feel they cannot negotiate for justice as they are too week. So periodically they attack Israel which has always defeated them and hoped that after the Arab defeat, permanent negotiations for peace could take place. But the Arabs were feeling too weak. So they just repeated all their extreme demands. After a few years, they would try another attack, lose again and the cycle would repeat. The Israelis fear that if the Arabs every won a war, the Arab moderates might be willing to reasonably negotiate, the extremists would want to continue the fighting and “drive the Israelis into the sea” as they have so often threatened.
since the end of WWI The railroads were nationalized for WWI and he ran them all as a government official
The railroads were nationalized for WWI and he ran them all as a government official. There have been political situations like this one where public opinion was so intense and extreme that any action that satisfied public opinion would have very negative aspects and/or be unrealistic or impossible while realistic solutions are unacceptable to public opinion. Usually, the reaction of the politicians is to punt and simply not deal with the issue or problem but claim that they are seeking a solution.
Their fear was that wages in Germany would be greatly depressed by the requirement for reparations. And it was the capitalists of the world that had loaned money to the powers to finance the war. Most of the reparations they feared would go to repay those loans.
Germany had just attacked Russia with whom it had a treaty. For a while, Hitler paid little attention to Italy and just gave their “ally” orders and instructions. Italian public opinion was concerned about the same question. See {627973} .
Unlike many socialists who were pacifists and against WWI, Foster and the communists were supporters of the war against fascist Germany, This was one of the reasons that Nazi Germany was virulently anti-communist later.
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor
In the history of diplomacy and peace treaty negotiations, the various national representative would meet in secret, negotiate treaties and add secret clauses. Then the treaty was finally made public for approbal or ratification in the different countries no one would be told of the secret clauses. Each side would have a written secret copy of these clauses, but the publics of the country would never know. For example, the agreements about various WWII issues that were secret have not yet been made public in the United States or England. Wilson wanted to put an end to that diplomatic ploy and wanted all the peace treaty clauses to be public with nothing secret. He also wanted the deliberations to made in public woth press access. He had little support for the idea in most European nations.
He was exactly right. Two decades later Germany had started WWII.
After WWI, the Germans were reluctant to make the reparation payments that they had agreed to in the WWI peace treaty. The French, to “motivate” the Germans, occupied the German Ruhr Valley—an area that contained very important German heavy industry and coal mines that could not function under the occupation. See {640090}.
Sir Harold George Nicolson KCVO CMG was a British politician, diplomat, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, journalist, broadcaster and gardener. His wife was the writer Vita Sackville-West.
