I will try and keep it short, as it is late for me just now, and contemplating the wretch angries up my blood.
Most of the harm he did flows from the United States decision (his decision) to enter the Great War. Had the United States not done this, it is quite likely the European powers would have come to a peace of exhaustion by the end of 1917. The French Army and the Russian Army both had come to the point of widespread mutiny. The English and German Armies were not far behind, and the Italians and Austrian were in wretched shape. The promise of fresh American troops kept France and England upright and moved Germany to send Lenin to Russia as a sort of human missile, to clear their eastern theater so troops could be amassed for a last effort in France to finish things before fresh manpower from the U.S. arrived. Had Kerensky taken Russia out of the war in the summer of 1917, which without much Allied pressure he may well have done, or been forced to do by the soldiery, Lenin could not have contrived the Bolshevik revolution in the autumn. There would never have been a variety things, far too extensive to summarize here, which ensured the Great War, fought past the point of exhaustion, would spawn a second world war, and directly fed the terrible form in which it did come. Also omitted are social consequences of the prolongation of the Great War, such as the starvation in Germany under the blockade, and the consequences of carving up the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires.
The man's racism fed into all this. He accepted without reservation the idea that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot, aimed at punishing the Czar for pogroms and ensuring victory for Germany, and guided by this view he sent U.S. soldiers to intervene in the Russian Civil War, at Archangel and in Siberia. This was a man who famously said 'Birth of a Nation' was history written in lightning, and who insisted negro employees of the Federal government be sacked, and no more hired. That should do to be going on at this late hour. Not a man to be remembered fondly, in my view.
= new reply since forum marked as read
