Risen from the Ashes
David Hoggan’s The Forced War

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Despite nearly being lost following the destruction of its manuscript in a terrorist attack, David Hoggan’s The Forced War continues to be a relevant tome in our era. Hoggan details how the Second World War was certainly not inevitable, and how the propaganda machine that succeeded in pushing the nations of the West to war in the 1940s set a dangerous precedent that echoes in the foreign policy of nations to this very day.

The events leading up to the Second World War are important to truly understand since the War was as consequential to Western Civilization and the white race as the collapse of the Roman Empire. One impact of this vast calamity on the West is the prevailing narrative about the decisions leading to war. The mainstream consensus in the United States regarding the war’s causes and outcomes boil down the following:

1. The Axis Leaders in Europe were “tyrants” or “autocrats” and such styles of government always create geopolitical situations that lead to war.
2. “The Allies” should have moved to “check aggression” of “tyrants” quicker.
3. The actions of the allies, such as the British, French, and Poles were wise and principled.
4. The Jews were blameless victims of the war and the war was caused in no small part by the failure of others to protect them.

These mainstream views of the origins of the war are hallowed, but this quasi-religious outlook deserves considerable scrutiny. It could have all been contained as the Polish – German Border Conflict of 1939.

As a result of this mainstream understanding of the causes of World War II, many prominent politicians, especially in the United States, have sought to avoid a potential World War III by reacting in an overly aggressive way to geopolitical situations which appear to match the pattern of that in Europe during the 1930s. As a result, the United States has been involved in a series of conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Then there are a series of conflicts less traumatizing to Americans, but traumatic nonetheless to other people, that trace their philosophical origins to the “lessons of World War II” including the ongoing Ukrainian Civil War and the recently finished Syrian Civil War.

After Iraq fell apart in the late summer of 2003, American society should have had a national conversation regarding the flawed analogies which justified the debacle. Unfortunately, war is sacred. This is due to combination of Jewish cultural creators who keep these same 1930s analogies alive, and all-American, “thank you for your service” veteran-worship.

There is also a mailed fist which enforces the mainstream view. Shortly after midnight on July 4, 1984 the headquarters of The Institute for Historical Review, an organization that seeks to re-examine World War II and dispel the lingering propaganda related to it, was firebombed by Jewish terrorists in Torrance, California. Strangely, the perpetrators were never caught, despite the United States’ massive federal law enforcement bureaucracy whose purported purpose is finding perpetrators of such acts. Among the items destroyed in the holocaust of the IHR’s headquarters was a manuscript by David L. Hoggan for a book called The Forced War. Due to the bombing, the book’s publication was greatly delayed, though not halted; it can be found online today in a number of places.

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Hoggan’s view of World War II’s origins begin with the tripwire in Poland. While Poland was partitioned, Polish nationalism still existed, although this nationalism was divided by different schools of thought. There were pro-German, pro-Russian, and pro-Austrian factions, and most importantly, the view of Jozef Pilsudski (1867 – 1935). Pilsudski believed that Poland should not align itself with any of its more powerful neighbors, but seek to restore a modern version of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that was so powerful in the Fourteenth Century. Pilsudski advocated alliances with more distant powers, such as Great Britain, rather than accommodating nearby countries.

Pilsudski rose to prominence during World War I by acting based on his belief that Russia would be beaten by the Central Powers first, and then the Central Powers would then fall to Britain and France. He also commanded a pro-independence brigade allied with Germany, but was later gently placed on house arrest by the Germans – an act that proved his Polish Nationalist bona fides. The Germans granted Polish independence on November 5, 1916, and Germany’s World War I enemies created the boundaries of Poland during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 with a symbolically troublesome independence date for Poland of 11 November 1918. Hoggan writes: “The ultimate treaty terms gave Poland much more than she deserved, and much more than she should have requested.”

Once independent, Poland’s government antagonized its neighbors throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The Polish also turned back a Soviet invasion at the gates of Warsaw in 1920. For a time, Pilsudski’s vision for a revived Polish empire that could fend off its neighbors appeared to be working. Pilsudski effectively took over the Polish government in 1926 and when he died in 1935 of cancer he was a Polish national hero. Pilsudski’s string of successes and lucky breaks during his career put later Polish politicians in a corner as matters came to a head in 1939.

Hitler rose to power towards the end of Pilsudski’s life. Once in office, Hitler immediately sought to stabilize Germany. Hitler’s initial foreign policy dilemmas were the German populations in the areas of the former Austria-Hungarian Empire. To put it simply, he first united Germany with Austria in an event called the Anschluss. At the time, this unification was wildly popular; Austria’s economy and society began to recover from its post-war funk.

The victors of World War I allowed the Austro-Hungarian Empire to collapse and new empires in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to take its place. Neither polity, however, enjoyed the legitimacy of the former Habsburg realm. Czechoslovakia in particular was unstable; in the late 1930s it was ruled by Edvard Beneš, who was generally unfriendly to other groups in Czechoslovakia. By 1938, Beneš’s treatment of its non-Czech citizens had antagonized Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Slovaks. The polity was coming apart. As war clouds lowered due to the tensions over Czechoslovakia, Italy’s leader Mussolini proposed he mediate the conflict. Hitler jumped at the opportunity as well, hosting a conference at Munich. The end result was that the German areas of Bohemia were ceded to Germany. War was averted.

Beneš resigned following the Munich conference and Czechoslovakia fell apart over the next few months. Due to mounting disorder, Hitler sent his army to capture Prague. He encamped his troops in ethnically German areas of Bohemia to avoid antagonizing the Czechs. Afterwards, the Czech more or less enjoyed self-rule, reducing regional tension considerably. Hoggan writes:

“In 1938, Hitler liberated ten million Germans who had been denied self-determination by the peacemakers of 1919. Hitler gained for the German people the same rights enjoyed by the peoples of Great Britain, France, Italy, and Poland. He managed to achieve his victories without provoking an armed conflict. Nothing of the kind had happened in Europe before. There had been dynastic unions in which territories had been united without actual violence, but never had the leader of one nation triumphed over two hostile foreign Governments without shedding blood.”

Meanwhile, Poland and Hungary captured the respective Polish and Hungarian areas of Czechoslovakia.

Through the 1930s, Hitler’s empire building was not a conquest of foreign populations, only an incorporation of ethnically German areas into Germany proper. Hitler was also not threatening any vital interest of either Great Britain or the United States. And yet, Great Britain especially had an increasingly hostile attitude towards Germany. Why is this so?

The most likely reason is that the British ruling elite at the time viewed the situation in Europe through a paradigm that, in retrospect, was obviously outdated and flawed. That is to say, the British felt that it was in their interest to always support the second most powerful state on the European continent against the most powerful state. This was called the “balance of power” policy. It was first used by Thomas Cromwell and Cardinal Wolsey during the time of Henry VIII, but it was not consistently used by the British until the 1820s. According to Hoggan:

“The purpose of the policy was to give Great Britain a permanent position of control over the destinies of her neighbors. The policy was futile by the 1930’s, when outside Powers such as the Soviet Union and the United States were in a position to appear upon the scene with overwhelming forces and to share dominion over a crushed and divided Europe … The Soviet Union began to emerge as an industrial giant of incalculable power during the two decades after World War I. It was evident that there were at least four nations immediately or potentially far more powerful than Great Britain. These four nations were the United States, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan. This was different than in the old days when it had merely been a question of one preponderant Spain, or one preponderant France. The bankruptcy of the British balance of power policy should have been evident to everyone. It was as obsolete as Italian balance of power politics after the intervention, with overwhelming forces, of King Charles VIII of France in Italian affairs in 1494. The balance of power policy always had been an unhealthy and decadent basis from which to approach diplomatic relations. It substituted for a healthy pursuit of common interests among states the tortuous attempt to undermine or even destroy any state which attained a leading position. It took no regard of the attitude of such a state toward England. The policy was also extremely unstable. It demanded otherwise inexplicable shifts of position when it was evident that one state had been overestimated or another underestimated. It was particularly tragic when France abandoned an independent policy and became dependent on Great Britain. This meant that France was in danger, along with Great Britain, of contributing to the blunders of an obsolete British policy.”

Although the American public was not overwhelmingly hostile towards Germany, the Roosevelt administration was. Hoggan suggests that Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw the First World War as something of an exciting adventure that was worth a repeat, perhaps lending credence to historical speculation that FDR was a high-functioning psychopath. Additionally, the American media was entirely under the control of Jews. Indeed, the New York Times had been associating the number “six million” with Jews under some form of deadly threat since 1869. Jewish activists in the United States reacted to Hitler negatively and worked tirelessly to change American attitudes.

Older American liberals in the 1930s, such as Vice President Henry A. Wallace and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, were also often naive about Communism; Hoggan notes that “Communist propaganda victories were easy when the majority of Western ‘liberals’ were working as their allies. President Roosevelt, in a speech at Chicago in 1937, included the Soviet Union among the so-called peace-loving nations of the world in contrast to the allegedly evil and aggressive Germans, Italians, and Japanese.”

By the spring of 1939 the situation in Poland had become problematic. The Polish leadership should have been seeking to ally itself with Germany against the Soviet Union, whose aggressive designs on Poland were well understood by the Polish elite. However, the British, led by Lord Halifax, were playing the balance of power game and they gave what amounts to a “blank check” to Poland to encourage them to fight. Additionally, the Poles were carrying out a land reform scheme that dispossessed ethnic Germans from their property. After 1938, the Polish government allowed Polish nationalists to personally and physically attack ethnic Germans. In Germany, ethnic Poles were safe as law and order was very much in effect.

Hitler also hoped to build a superhighway from western Germany to East Prussia. Additionally, he wanted to reclaim the city of Danzig, the population of which also wished to be German again. The demands upon Poland were not heavy. Had the British not goaded them into war, and had they not been so constrained by the legacy of Pilsudski, they might have worked out a compromise. Germans and Poles are genetically similar, have a long history of peaceful co-existence, and were both under mortal threat from the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the British had no vital stake in the matter. Reading The Forced War is like watching a horror movie, where one wants to shout “Don’t open that coffin!” to the doomed actress on the screen. Needless to say, the coffin was opened and a Russian and Mongolian horde funded and supplied by the British and Americans to no limit came to Poland, Danzig, Prussia, and Berlin. This horde flattened everything, and not without cost; the British Empire started to collapse within months of World War II’s end.

Hoggan’s second look at World War II’s origins is necessary for countless reasons. The prevailing narrative and its power is so influential that multiple disasters have resulted from it, and some have been only narrowly avoided. Had the neoconservatives, like Hillary Clinton or the late John McCain, gotten their way years ago, there could have been a disastrous war between the United States and Russia over the situation in Ukraine – a situation that parallels the British blank check to Poland in numerous ways.

Additionally, the mainstream narrative regarding World War II aids in white dispossession. As a result of the conflict, Jews have become something of a sacred cow. They’ve used the tragedy to dispossess the Palestinians of all they have, they influence American foreign policy to suit their ends, and they have moved on to literally swindle Swiss banks. Recently, the United States government, obviously at the behest of Jewish activists, has sought to enact a “property restitution” policy where property in Poland is transferred to Jewish ownership. This proposal is ironic in that it is clear that the Polish government worked to dispossess Germans of their property prior to and after World War II far more than dispossessing Jews. Keeping these wounds open is not conducive to peace and harmony. Indeed, the political circumstances are quite novel in this day and age, and the mainstream World War II narrative is not helping anyone navigate through the problems.