On Apr 22, 6:19 pm, Mike Murray wrote:

Just compare that slim volume with the quality of his masterpiece to
see the enormous influence of GM Larry Evans on Bobby's path to the
world championship.

The hype was that BF did it "all by himself", with
no help from anybody. The real question is, who
helped him more-- Larry Evans, John Collins, Ed
Edmondson, or his mother?


The fact that Fischer wrote the first book when he was 15 and the
second when he was 26 might also have something to do with it. :-)

What a tragedy that Fischer and Evans never collaborated on subsequent
volumes of Fischer's later memorable games.

Bobby Fischer did not peak until the brief period,
say, 1970-1972, so his prior works not only missed
the best part of his career, they also focused on
"the wrong games", so to speak, and all those
annotations were written by a somewhat weaker
BF.

Larry Evans did a great job with MSMG, but BF
himself nixed so many things that could have, and
most likely would have, been even bigger and better.
He was afraid of being caught making an analytical
error; afraid of being human.

But, back to the stories about WWI; I was stunned
to see that, like me, Larry Parr remembered that in
our day, this war was called "The Great War". That
is, it was called that until an even better one
eventually along... .


-- help bot

On Apr 22, 7:25 pm, help bot wrote:

But, back to the stories about WWI; I was stunned
to see that, like me, Larry Parr remembered that in
our day, this war was called "The Great War". That
is, it was called that until an even better one
eventually along... .

-- help bot

Good joke. I had never heard that one before.

My next book will be about the man who started World War I.

The President's Daughter is moving along. Figure on it being out in a
week.

Sam

TAYLOR KINGSTON"S FABRICATIONS

The level of Taylor Kingston's advocacy, which we
have preserved in what follows, speaks and adjusts for
itself. Our comments in what follows will be placed
in multiple brackets.

Here is the Kingston approach to discussion:
he equates our evidently jocose allusions to the
personal, specific fates of three individuals --
Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin -- in the event World War I had
not continued until a totalitarian coup d'etat swept
them to power in Russia, with a broader, inherently
more productive discussion of how WWI was the
fountainhead for the mass annihilation policies of the
20th century.

Another typical bit of our Kingston's rhetoric is
the bit about this writer not being able to read
because we mistakenly attributed to him a comment
written by Sam Sloan. As noted before, this writer
does not receive every posting in Malaysia that
apparently appears on screens Stateside. Sometimes,
earlier messages arrive after later ones. We must
occasionally guess the identity of a poster of a given
paragraph. Our track record is excellent in this
regard, though not perfect. When we stumble, there
is a Kingston to guffaw.

In what follows we examine the analytical, if
that is quite the word, technique of Mr. Kingston and
note either his discouraging lack of background
in the subject under discussion or his rank venality.

This writer has previously explained that World
War I unhinged the Western world, leading directly to
the Bolshevik uprising and to the unsettled society of
Weimar Germany after the abdication of Wilhelm II.

It has been famously said that "war is the
health of the state," and the Great War was viewed by
statists everywhere as a Satansend. In Germany and
England, the respective laborite lefts supported the
war in the spirit of what was then called "field grey
socialism." Namely, rich and poor are on far more
equal terms in military trenches, with walls formed
from human bones and offal, than in civil society with
its ivy-covered walls of educational sanctuaries for
the rich and genial that exclude the poor and dim.

Trench warfare corporate bodies, generally
called armies, are equal opportunity employers.
Executives, the officers and especially leftenants,
are expected to lead by example, which is to say,
first over the top into streams of 50-calibre
machine-gun bullets. Yet private soldiers will also
get their chance soon thereafter. Such is not,
perhaps, perfect equality -- the ultimate stated
goal of all left political movements -- but certainly
imbued with more social justice than peacetime civil
society.

Once again, this writer's comments appear in
multiple brackets in what follows.


[[[[[TAYLOR KINGSTON]]]]]:
As usual, our Larry distorts and misrepresents. Also
demonstrates his inability to read. A few comments below:

[[[[[LARRY PARR: The "proof" of our inability to read
will be this writer misattributing a statement to
Taylor Kingston that was written by Sam Sloan. Please
note our explanation above. We respond by noting
Kingston's claim that this writer lends an
intellectual patina to his argumentation, which
suggests that Kingston judges us as a vast natural
talent, since to lend such a sheen, though no great
shakes for those who can read and who have written, is
quite a coup for those of us whom Taylor Kingston
would have you believe cannot read.]]]]]

[[[[[FROM THIS WRITER'S EARLIER "DEED OF SHAME"
POSTING THAT WAS ATTACKED BY KINGSTON.]]]]]:

A DEED OF SHAME

Hmmm, so Larry would have preferred that Germany
won World War I. Interesting. -- Taylor Kingston

Trust Taylor Kingston to offer the argument of a
jackanapes. I wrote that if Germany had won WW1
in 1917, the world would have been saved many of
the the central horrors of the 20th century.

[[[[[KINGSTON NOW RESPONDS TO THE ABOVE AND DOES NOT
DENY MISCHARACTERIZING OUR VIEWS. INSTEAD, HE CHANGES
THE SUBJECT]]]]]:

Thinking up horrors, and actually creating them, has
long been one of man's great skills. I think a more
plausible guess is that had Germany won WW I in some
alternate universe's 1917, there would still have been
an ample supply of "central horrors" not significantly
different from those our history records.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: Kingston's point is puerile. With
the exception of the relatively brief period of the
Napoleonic wars and the French Revolution, Europe had
been largely at political and social peace since 1648,
when the Treaty of Westphalia ended the 30 Years' War.
There had been no people's wars, only limited wars
with aims that did not deny the right of sister
European nations to exist. In the famous "century of
peace" from 1815-1914, human progress was phenomenal.
Both Russia and Germany were modernizing and
democratizing under royal houses, the Romanoffs and
the Hohenzollerns, that were understood by most men of
thought to be declining forces. NOTHING LIKE
totalitarianism existed in mainstream political
thought until after the Great War dissolved the moral
glue holding together Western Civilization. The
crucial year was 1918 because if the Great War had
ended in victory for either side -- most likely, the
German side, if Wilson, contrary to his campaign
pledges in 1916, had not led the United States into
that conflagration -- then the Kasier would not have
had to abdicate, and in Russia, the Whites would
eventually have triumphed in a civil war against the Reds.]]]]]

[[[[[KINGSTON NOW OFFERS A FORM OF INTELLECTUAL
NIHILISM PRESENTED WEAKMINDEDLY]]]]]:

And I say "guess" quite honestly, because that's all
this "alternate history" fantasizing is. Larry's
vision of a post-WWI world free of totalitarianism
strikes me as naive. I would agee with him that such a
world might not have "Hitlerism, Stalinism, or
Maoism," but it would very likely have had evil
dictators with other names.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: Notice Kingston's use of "guess" and
"fantasizing," especially the latter word to describe
hypothesizing about alternate outcomes. That's his
trick to denigrate the very possibility of serious
intellectual investigation and discussion.

Notice the man's conflation of "evil dictators"
with the "totalitarianism" of "'Hitlerism, Stalinism,
or Maoism.'" There are plenty of "evil dictators" who
are not totalitarians and who did not run totalitarian
states. To understand the distinctions between
totalitarianism and autocracy (a vast majority of evil
and not-quite-so-evil dictators in human history have
run autocratic rather than totalitarian regimes), the
works to consult are, first, Carl Friedrich and
Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Totalitarian Dictatorship and
Autocracy" and only then, Hannah Arendt's seminal and
sensationally demanding "Origins of Totalitarianism."

World War I brought totalitarianism to the fore,
and it came to the fore precisely because social
revolution overtook two European great powers, Germany
and Russia. Kingston's weakminded evocation of "evil
dictators with other names" does not mean that such
men would have been totalitarian dictators. They
would have been what evil dictators of the past had
always been: autocrats abusing power.]]]]]


[[[[[TAYLOR KINGSTON CONTINUES]]]]]:

And in that alternate universe, Larry Parr, or someone
like him, would probably be here arguing that
if only the Allies had shown more determination, and
if only America had entered the war in 1917, the
world would have been spared all those evils, and
would have been made safe for democracy.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: The Kingston ploy here is to
belittle what is a major historical topic of
discussion among all historians in the field -- the
shape of the world influenced by World War I as
that war ACTUALLY DEVELOPED and what would have
occurred had the war come to a decision in 1917 with a
likely German victory in the event that the United
States had stayed out (as Wilson had pledged).

The idea that totalitarianism would have sprung
and become empowered from nowhere is unhistorical. It
sprang first from the visionary minds of some men, and
was empowered by the conduct and outcome of the Great War.]]]]]


[[[[[THE FOLLOWING IS A QUOTATION FROM OUR ORIGINAL
POSTING THAT WAS THEN ATTACKED BY TAYLOR KINGSTON]]]]]:

So Kingston then infers that I preferred a German
victory. My preference was for an allied victory in
1915 or 1916 -- and then the victory of either side in
1917. Anything, in short, to avoid the fatal year of 1918.

[[[[[IN THE FOLLOWING KINGSTON DOES NOT DENY
MISCHARACTERIZING THIS WRITER'S POINT. ONCE AGAIN, HE
CHANGES THE SUBJECT BY TELLING US ABOUT HIS OWN (SEE
BELOW) BLOODTHIRSTY PREFERENCE]]]]]:

I would have preferred that, having won on the Western
Front in 1918, the Allies had marched into Germany
itself. By clearly demonstrating to the German people,
on their own soil, that they had in fact been
militarily defeated, there would have been no myth
that "the army had been betrayed" for agitators like
Hitler to use later.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: So, then, this is the level of
Kingston's analysis. The German army was indeed
betrayed. It was no myth. The other side of the
betrayal coin is that it was not Jewish financiers or
a backdoor man such as, say, Walter Rathenau who did
the betraying. The chief betraitor, to employ a
neologism, was none other than Erich von Ludendorff,
the de facto leader of the German war effort by 1917.
Ludendorff suffered a celebrated nervous breakdown in
August-September 1917, urging the Kaiser to sue for an
armistice, when the German army was certainly capable
of withdrawing to the German border and erecting
defenses with crucially shortened supply lines at
numerous rivers and hills that would have cost the
allies millions of men to breach, given the limited
mobility of both sides during WWI. There would have
been no question in that period of crossing the Rhine.

Kingston's "preference" might easily have been a
retrospective realization of non-interventionist
Senator Burton K. Wheeler's charge, some 20 years
later, that Franklin Roosevelt planned "to plow under
every third American boy." Give this guy Kingston
some power and push backwards his birthdate to the
proper period, and he might have fulfilled Wheeler's
prognostication.]]]]]


[[[[[THIS COMMENT OF OURS IS FROM THE ORIGINAL POSTING]]]]]:

If you want to understand Kingston's approach to
historical thought, his response is exemplary.
Perhaps the two of us can agree on that much.

[[[[[TAYLOR KINGSTON]]]]]:

If you want to understand Larry Parr's approach to
argument, keep in mind that he will say pretty much
anything, no matter how absurd, to support Sam Sloan.
He may make it sound all pretty and intellectual, but
the basic aim is to make Sloan look good, or at least
less ridiculous, no matter what the facts may be.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: Taylor Kingston banks on most of you
being unfamiliar with the many past battles that Sam
Sloan and we have had, some of which (for example, a
struggle regarding Carol Jarecki) went on for months.
As the reader will see below, we have no problem
whatsoever in disagreeing with Sam.]]]]]


[[[[[THE COMMENT BELOW BY US COMES FROM OUR ORIGINAL POSTING]]]]]:

Kingston's next attempt at an argument is to reduce
the observation that WWI resulted in the
decivilization of world politics to a silly reference
to Queen Victoria and haemophilia.

[[[[[TAYLOR KINGSTON]]]]]:

Ahem, Larry -- that statement was made by Sam Sloan,
Not by me.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: As noted earlier, we do not receive
every posting over here in Malaysia and apologize to
Kingston for misattributing to him a silly statement
by Sam. We certainly do not always agree with Sam and
say so. We await Kingston to condemn Edward Winter
for evident lies in his screed "Truth about Larry Evans."]]]]]


[[[[[WHAT FOLLOWS IS FROM OUR ORIGINAL POSTING]]]]]:

What our Kingston creature would have the readers of
this forum imagine is that the idea of WWI as a
disaster leading to the horrors of totalitarianism is
a farfetched historical construct.

[[[[[KINGSTON]]]]]:

See, there you go misrepresenting again, Larry. I
never said any such thing. World War I was indeed a
terrible disaster, and yes, it certainly did contribute
heavily to the rise of totalitarianism. My point here
has never been to say otherwise. My point
here is that what you "would have readers of this
forum imagine" that German victory in WW I would have
led somehow to a wonderful alternate world, is just
castles in the air.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: This writer never posited German
victory in 1917 leading "to a wonderful alternate
world." The ploy here by our Kingston is to portray
yours truly as a Utopian. Our tired globe, creaking
about its axis, would have continued to be
problem-plagued, though there is every reason to
imagine that the 20th century would not have been the
bloodiest in human history, given the enormous
peaceful progress of Europe during the preceding three
centuries. Once again, totalitarianism sprang from
the brains of men and was empowered by the
prolongation of World War I. To suggest that
totalitarianism would have become empowered on its own
or under Romanoff and Hohenzollern autocratic rule is
nonsense. Wilson's decision to seek a declaration of
war provided the soil for the evil seed to germinate,
thence to send up sturdy shoots.]]]]]


[[[[[KINGSTON]]]]]:

Speaking of "farfetched historical constructs," I find
especially farfetched your statement that with a
German victory "Stalin would have ended up as a
zookeeper in the Central Caucasus, Trotsky a radical
editor in NYC and Lenin a fairly well-off, if frustrated,
French tutor for advantaged children in Zurich."

[[[[[LARRY PARR: We reckon that most of you will twig
to our Taylor's essential dishonesty in the above
debating point.Of course, our specific posited careers
for the Messrs. Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin are farfetched
in the sense that one is divining a pinpoint specific from
a broad deductive premise. Most of you realize that we
were endeavouring to raise a smile and, yes, stereotyping
Stalinist with the Trotskyist tarbrush of being
intellectually slow, which he was not. Too, we
accepted Trotsky's literary presumptions and fell in
with Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Lenin in Zurich. Our
point was obviously this: the trio would have been
doing something radically other than leading a great nation.]]]]]

[[[[[KINGSTON]]]]]:

Since it was, in large part, the Germans who put the
Bolsheviks in power in 1917, bankrolling their
movement and shipping Lenin back to Russia, and since
Lenin so blithely gave them everything they wanted
at Brest-Litovsk, I tend to think the Germans would
have been quite happy to leave him in power.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: The Germans did not put the
Bolsheviks in power in 1917. The Reds did that,
assisted by Alexander Kerensky's decision to continue
the war. The Germans created necessary but by no
means sufficient conditions for the Bolshies to seize
power. As for Brest-Litovsk, the Russo-German peace
treaty of March 1918, Lenin conceded points to the
Germans precisely because he and his movement never
intended to honor the treaty -- a point understood by
General Hoffman and the other Germans who sealed Lenin
and his human bacillae in the famous train.]]]]]


[[[[[WE WROTE THE FOLLOWING IN OUR ORIGINAL POSTING]]]]]:

And what did Kingston's hero Woodrow Wilson

[[[[[KINGSTON]]]]]:

Eh? You're fabricating again, Larry. I have never
referred here to Wilson as any hero of mine.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: Nor did we say that Kingston
"referred" to Wilson as his hero. We obviously
inferred based on his defense of Wilson's indefensible
decision to seek a war against Germany in 1917.]]]]]




wrote:
As usual, our Larry distorts and misrepresents. Also demonstrates
his inability to read. A few comments below:

On Apr 22, 12:19?am, " wrote:
A DEED OF SHAME

? Hmmm, so Larry would have preferred that Germany
won World War I. Interesting. -- Taylor Kingston

? ?Trust Taylor Kingston to offer the argument of a
jackanapes. I wrote that if Germany had won WW1
in 1917, the world would have been saved many of the
the central horrors of the 20th century.

Thinking up horrors, and actually creating them, has long been one
of man's great skills. I think a more plausible guess is that had
Germany won WW I in some alternate universe's 1917, there would still
have been an ample supply of "central horrors" not significantly
different from those our history records.
And I say "guess" quite honestly, because that's all this "alternate
history" fantasizing is. Larry's vision of a post-WWI world free of
totalitarianism strikes me as naive. I would agee with him that such a
world might not have "Hitlerism, Stalinism, or Maoism," but it would
very likely have had evil dictators with other names.
And in that alternate universe, Larry Parr, or someone like him,
would probably be here arguing that if only the Allies had shown more
determination, and if only America had entered the war in 1917, the
world would have been spared all those evils, and would have been made
safe for democracy.

? ?So ?Kingston then infers that I preferred a German victory.
My preference was for an allied victory in 1915 or 1916 -- and
then the victory of either side in 1917. ?Anything, in short,
to avoid the fatal year of 1918.

I would have preferred that, having won on the Western Front in
1918, the Allies had marched into Germany itself. By clearly
demonstrating to the German people, on their own soil, that they had
in fact been militarily defeated, there would have been no myth that
"the army had been betrayed" for agitators like Hitler to use
later.

? ? ?If you want to understand Kingston's approach
to historical thought, his response is exemplary.
Perhaps the two of us can agree on that much.

If you want to understand Larry Parr's approach to argument, keep in
mind that he will say pretty much anything, no matter how absurd, to
support Sam Sloan. He may make it sound all pretty and intellectual,
but the basic aim is to make Sloan look good, or at least less
ridiculous, no matter what the facts may be.

? ? ?Kingston's next attempt at an argument is to
reduce the observation that WWI resulted in
the decivilization of world politics to a silly reference
to Queen Victoria and haemophilia.

Ahem, Larry -- that statement was made by Sam Sloan, not by me.

? ? ? What our Kingston creature would have the
readers of this forum imagine is that the idea of WWI
as a disaster leading to the horrors of totalitarianism
is a farfetched historical construct.

See, there you go misrepresenting again, Larry. I never said any
such thing. World War I was indeed a terrible disaster, and yes, it
certainly did contribute heavily to the rise of totalitarianism. My
point here has never been to say otherwise.
My point here is that what you "would have readers of this forum
imagine," that German victory in WW I would have led somehow to a
wonderful alternate world, is just castles in the air.

It is not.

Speaking of "farfetched historical constructs," I find especially
farfetched your statement that with a German victory "Stalin would
have ended up as a zookeeper in the Central Caucasus, Trotsky a
radical editor in NYC and Lenin a fairly well-off, if frustrated,
French tutor for advantaged children in Zurich."
Since it was, in large part, the Germans who put the Bolsheviks in
power in 1917, bankrolling their movement and shipping Lenin back to
Russia, and since Lenin so blithely gave them everything they wanted
at Brest-Litovsk, I tend to think the Germans would have been quite
happy to leave him in power.

? ? ? And what did Kingston's hero Woodrow Wilson

Eh? You're fabricating again, Larry. I have never referred here to
Wilson as any hero of mine.

Just in passing; as a Netizen I would request that posters use Usenet
protocols in identifying their own posts [not Google] - or at least not
complain about innocent mistakes - this would avoid missatribution of their
own remarks, but as a European there are a few things to say on what follows
about 'the other war'.

Thinking up horrors, and actually creating them, has
long been one of man's great skills. I think a more
plausible guess is that had Germany won WW I in some
alternate universe's 1917, there would still have been
an ample supply of "central horrors" not significantly
different from those our history records.

[[[[[LARRY PARR: Kingston's point is puerile. With
the exception of the relatively brief period of the
Napoleonic wars and the French Revolution, Europe had
been largely at political and social peace since 1648,
when the Treaty of Westphalia ended the 30 Years' War.
There had been no people's wars, only limited wars
with aims that did not deny the right of sister
European nations to exist. In the famous "century of
peace" from 1815-1914, human progress was phenomenal.
Both Russia and Germany were modernizing and
democratizing under royal houses, the Romanoffs and
the Hohenzollerns, that were understood by most men of
thought to be declining forces. NOTHING LIKE
totalitarianism existed in mainstream political
thought until after the Great War dissolved the moral
glue holding together Western Civilization.

Okay, and 'in the smoke' mischievous men roamed the landscape.

I would have preferred that, having won on the Western
Front in 1918, the Allies had marched into Germany
itself. By clearly demonstrating to the German people,
on their own soil, that they had in fact been
militarily defeated, there would have been no myth
that "the army had been betrayed" for agitators like
Hitler to use later.

Mr. Kingston should understand 2 factors - vast economic hardship was the
'clear demonstration', but the fear in Europe was that there would be
revolutions in England and in Germany. Certainly any continuance of the war
was likely to bring it about. Even those people who agitated for a Socialist
revolution were afraid of a communist one - and after all, Marx was a
Londoner and had had his influnce there before moving to Germany.

From Buchan to Lawrence there was dismay at the destabilization in the
mid-east, largely a British betrayal of ratifying and consolidating the
newly emerged Arabic sense of themselves as nations - but the real fear was
of a British revolution, since no one in Britain can have felt 'victorious'
any more than people in Germany. Economies and polities in both countries
were undermined, indeed, practically exhausted.

To a starving man, bread is reality. And Marxism was about bread, and little
else.

Phil Innes

On Apr 25, 4:03*am, " wrote:

* * *Another typical bit of our Kingston's rhetoric is
the bit about this writer not being able to read
because we mistakenly attributed to him a comment
written by Sam Sloan. *As noted before, this writer
does not receive every posting in Malaysia that
apparently appears on screens Stateside. *Sometimes,
earlier messages arrive after later ones. We must
occasionally guess the identity of a poster of a given
paragraph. *

Really now, Larry -- you had to *_guess_* who wrote that? I
reproduce below, in its entirety, the post in question, made by Sam
Sloan on April 21:

**************** begin 4/21 post **********************

On Apr 21, 7:53 am, wrote:

Hmmm, so Larry would have preferred that Germany won World War I.
Interesting.

Larry Parr has a valid and interesting point. If Germany had won
World
War I, Hitler would never have risen to power and World War II might
not have happened.

If all those Americans had not died fighting in France, Sam Sloan
might never have risen to power.

If Queen Victoria had not carried the gene for hemophilia, which she
spread to all the Royal Families of Europe by marrying all her
children into those families, the Royal Families might still rule
Europe.

Anyway, I have just ordered one copy of FATEFUL YEARS 1909-1916 (The
Reminiscences of Serge Sazonov G.C.B., G.C.V.O. Russian Minister for
Foreign Affairs: 1914)

If the book turns out to be in good condition (not fuzzy) I will
reprint it.

Sam Sloan

******************* end 4/21 post ****************************

So, even though it clearly began with a quote from me, and then
argued against that quote, you thought it was me?

And even though it said "Larry Parr has a valid and interesting
point," something I very seldom say, you guessed it was me??

And even though it talked about "Sam Sloan rising to power," you
thought it was someone *_besides_* Sam Sloan???

And even though Sam *_clearly signed his name_*, you had to guess,
and guessed it was me????

C'mon Larry, you can think up a better lie than that.

On Apr 25, 7:28 am, "Chess One" wrote:
Just in passing; as a Netizen I would request that posters use Usenet
protocols in identifying their own posts [not Google]

So speaks the most prominent top-poster on the chess groups.

At various points in this thread, Larry Parr has put forth opinions
about what effect different outcomes in World War I might have had on
later history. Some of these struck me as plausible, others less so.
They at least stirred up my interest enough to check what relevant
sources I had on hand. Based on that research, but with no pretension
of infallibility, I comment below on some of Parr’s posts. Where I
question or disagree, my intent is to advance the discussion in a
civil manner, not to belittle Parr. One hopes that if Parr responds,
he will do so in that spirit.

PARR: If the Great War had ended in German victory in 1917, there
would never have been the accumulated mass horrors of Stalinism,
Maoism and Hitlerism. Stalin would have ended up as a zookeeper in
the Central Caucasus, Trotsky a radical editor in NYC and Lenin a
fairly well-off, if frustrated, French tutor for advantaged children
in Zurich.

TK: Some of this seems rather implausible. It’s very difficult to
analyze how a different WWI outcome would have affected far-off China,
so I would not feel confident saying anything about Mao. Clearly a
German victory would have precluded Hitler rising to power, at least
in the way the Nazis did, but it’s hard to see the same applying to
Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.
Firstly, unless we abandon all practical considerations and invoke
some magical means, it’s almost impossible to conceive of a way for
Germany to win in 1917 without first knocking Russia out of the war.
To this end, they employed the Bolsheviks, financing their activities
and finally shipping Lenin and other exiled revolutionaries back to
Russia in April 1917. This strategy finally bore fruit with the
October Revolution, after which Russia largely ceased fighting
Germany. Even this was too late to have much effect in 1917; it was
not until spring 1918 that Germany was ready to use the forces freed
from the Eastern Front in a major assault in the west.
Considering how compliant Lenin was with German terms at Brest-
Litovsk, and how Lenin later even agreed to *_aid Germany_* in the war
(per agreements of August 1918), it seems unlikely that a victorious
Germany would be in any hurry to remove him. Germany might even have
aided Lenin in repulsing the various counter-revolutionary expeditions
sent by Western nations after the war, or else the defeated Western
powers might well never have sent them to begin with.
And this not-very-alternate scenario has nothing to make any less
likely Stalin’s rise after Lenin died. Thus it seems likely that
Bolshevism would have been left to evolve its way toward totalitarian
socialism, and we would have had the mass horrors of Stalinism
anyway.

PARR: The crucial year was 1918 because if the Great War had ended
in victory for either side -- most likely, the German side, if Wilson,
contrary to his campaign pledges in 1916, had not led the United
States into that conflagration -- then the Kasier [sic] would not have
had to abdicate, and in Russia, the Whites would eventually have
triumphed in a civil war against the Reds.

TK: Again, I wonder on what basis you reach that last conclusion.
Having in effect brought the Bolsheviks to power to take Russia out of
the war, why would a victorious Germany sit idly by and let them be
overthrown by the Whites? White ranks included many right-wing
military men who had fought against Germany. Whites who might well
start a revanchist campaign to regain what Lenin had so casually given
Ludendorff at Brest-Litovsk. Why would Germany tolerate a counter-
revolution so contrary to its interests?

PARR: The German army was indeed betrayed. It was no myth. The
other side of the betrayal coin is that it was not Jewish financiers
or a backdoor man such as, say, Walter Rathenau who did the
betraying. The chief betraitor, to employ a neologism, was none other
than Erich von Ludendorff, the de facto leader of the German war
effort by 1917.

TK: Strange, most historians I’ve read _do_ regard the “betrayal” as
a myth, and they regard Ludendorff as the main propagator of the myth,
through his post-war memoirs. Can you provide references for your
claim?

PARR: Ludendorff suffered a celebrated nervous breakdown in August-
September 1917, urging the Kaiser to sue for an armistice …

TK: I can find no record of this “celebrated nervous breakdown in
1917.” What is your source for this claim? All my sources seem to
indicate Ludendorff was on the job steadily though that year. There is
mention of him being in “a completely inert mood” in the diary of
German Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim, but this was on August 7 *_1918_*,
not 1917. By then the loss of morale and nerve that was affecting
Ludendorff and the German High Command was a rather rational reaction,
a recognition of the fact that Germany was busted.

PARR: … when the German army was certainly capable of withdrawing to
the German border and erecting defenses with crucially shortened
supply lines at numerous rivers and hills that would have cost the
allies millions of men to breach, given the limited mobility of both
sides during WWI.

TK: It’s hard to imagine _why_ Germany would do this in September
1917, with its strategy in Russia just about to bear fruit. And it’s
hard to imagine _how_ they would do this in September 1918, by which
time “limited mobility” was becoming much less limited, and the Allies
were making significant advances.

PARR: There would have been no question in that period of crossing
the Rhine.

TK: On a military question, I am more inclined to heed a
professional military man. In this case, the commander of the American
Expeditionary Force in Europe, General John Pershing, who urged the
Allied leaders to take the war onto German soil in 1918. After the
armistice, Pershing remarked ruefully “[W]hat an enormous difference a
few more days would have made … What I dread is that Germany doesn’t
know that she was licked. Had they given us another week, we’d have
taught them.” Prescient words – had they been heeded, I think Hitler’s
rise might have been precluded as effectively as by a German victory.

BTW, Larry, where do you get the idea that a German victory was at
all feasible in 1917? How do you envision it happening? They spent the
early part of 1917 actually withdrawing back to the Hindenburg Line,
not advancing. The abdication of the Tsar did not have the effect the
Germans would have liked, as the provisional Russian government
rejected German armistice offers in mid-1917 and continued their war
effort. About the same time the Russians were rejecting an armistice,
German allies Austria and Bulgaria were talking about asking the
Allies for one. Through most of the latter half of the year, the
Western Front remained in stalemate or saw limited Allied success, and
this without meaningful American involvement yet. And the attitude of
the Western leaders was irrevocably adamant; as Clemenceau said in
November 1917, “My policy is war, nothing but war.” Even had the US
stayed out it was very unlikely Germany could have won in the west
until mid-1918, which you have already described as “the fatal year.”

And how can you be so sure that German victory at some point in 1917
would have all the wonderful effects you envision? The war-induced
desensitization and brutalization that later lent itself to
totalitarian movements was already well advanced. Casualties were
already in the millions.
I have an interesting book, “What If?” (Berkeley Books 1999), edited
by Robert Cowley, and featuring essays by such historians as John
Keegan and Stephen Ambrose, discussing alternate scenarios for about
20 major turning points in military history ranging from Salamis in
480 BC to Manchuria in 1946.
World War I gets a lot of attention, but all the German victory
scenarios deal with *_1914_* only, not 1917. Had Germany stuck more
closely to the Schlieffen Plan in 1914, a quick victory was indeed
possible, and in that case Cowley quite agrees with you that World War
II and the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism would never have
come to pass; as Dennis Showalter puts it, it would have resulted in
“a Europe safe for men with briefcases and potbellies.” Cowley writes:

“Without the events of 1914, we would have skipped a more sinister
legacy, and one that has permanently scarred our lives: the
brutalization that trench warfare, with its mass killings, visited on
an entire generation. What men like Adolf Hitler learned in that first
Holocaust, they would, as John Keegan has written, “repeat twenty
years later in every corner of Europe.”

But, it seems to me, by 1917 things had gone too far for a return to
pot-bellied tranquility. That brutalization wrought by trench warfare
was by then well advanced, and it was not likely to disappear soon, no
matter who won the war.

On Apr 22, 8:31 pm, samsloan wrote:

But, back to the stories about WWI; I was stunned
to see that, like me, Larry Parr remembered that in
our day, this war was called "The Great War". That
is, it was called that until an even better one
eventually along... .

Good joke. I had never heard that one before.

My next book will be about the man who started World War I.


Did you know him well?


-- help bot

On Apr 25, 8:28 am, "Chess One" wrote:

Just in passing; as a Netizen I would request that posters use Usenet
protocols in identifying their own posts [not Google] - or at least not
complain about innocent mistakes - this would avoid missatribution of their
own remarks, but as a European there are a few things to say on what follows
about 'the other war'.

Good job Mr. IMnes. You're always "right there"
when needed, like a good apologist. The transfer-
the-blame ploy may be worn out and tattered, but
it's about the best anyone could do, under the
circumstances.

Too bad Mr. Kingston noticed that the posting by
Sam Sloan had his name right at the bottom! That
sort of lets the air out of the balloon, doesn't it. As
I recall, Mr. Parr went on quite a rant, correcting
"jackanapes" Sloan/Kingston over several pages of
rantificationals, as Mr. Bush might say. The poor
fellow can't seem to keep who's who straight in his
mind-- not even his syntax checker could save him.
It reminds me of an old article by Edward Winter on
on Larry Evans.

But let me just say this: I found the off-topic
rantings of *Nick Bourbaki* to be far more interes-
ting, even though he did have severe issues with
paranoia and delusions of grandeur. The trouble
with Mr. Parr's rants is that he is always -- and I do
mean always -- too busy with his ad hominem ploys
to write truly captivating stories. This stuff about
WWI for instance, is rather boring, except perhaps
when LP pontificates on what the world might be
like if the Great War had ended differently.

I long for the good old days, back when LP and
NB would argue about which interpretation of war
was more ludicrous. In one of those discussions,
NB said he had done a comprehensive survey --
a secret one, I suppose, since nobody but him
knew about it -- in which all the world's many
academics agreed with NB (shocking) and LP's
favorite writer was wrong. But that was the one
time where I liked Larry Parr's story better... .


-- help bot

SAZOMOV'S MEMOIRS



I have just ordered two copies of FATEFUL YEARS 1909-1916 (The
Reminiscences of SergeSazonov G.C.B., G.C.V.O. Russian Minister for
Foreign Affairs: 1914)


Sam Sloan

The Sazonov Book Project is moving along. I have already designed the
cover and assigned an ISBN Number to it. When it is published, it will
appear at:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0923891323

That eminent, distinguished and renowned historian Larry Parr will be
writing the introduction.

Meanwhile, The President's Daughter by Nan Britton is out. It is
listed on Amazon but they have not put up the price or the picture
yet. They should have completed that within a few hours.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0923891234

Sam Sloan