World War, 1914-1918 -- Reparations; World War, 1914-1918 -- Treaties
This situation cannot but be the cause of great preoccupation; but
the greater preoccupation arises from the fact that the minor States,
especially those which took no part in the War, become every day more
exigent and display fresh aspirations.
The whole system of the Treaty of Versailles has been erected on the
error of Poland. Poland was not created as the noble manifestation
of the rights of nationality, ethnical Poland was not created, but a
great State which, as she is, cannot live long, because there are not
great foreign minorities, but a whole mass of populations which cannot
co-exist, Poland, which has already the experience of a too numerous
Israelitic population, has not the capacity to assimilate the Germans,
the Russians and the Ukranians which the Treaty of Versailles has
unjustly given to her against the very declarations of Wilson.
So that after, with the aid of the Entente, having had the strength
to resist the Bolshevik troops, Poland is now in a state of permanent
anarchy; consumes and does not produce; pays debts with a fantastic
bigness and does not know how to regulate the incomings. No country
in the world has ever more abused paper currency; her paper money is
probably the most greatly depreciated of any country on earth. She
has not succeeded in organizing her own production, and now tends to
dissolve the production of her neighbours.
The whole Treaty of Versailles is based on a vigorous and vital
Poland. A harmless Germany, unable to unite with an equally harmless
German-Austria, should be under the military control of France and
Belgium on the west, and of Poland on the east. Poland, separating
Germany from Russia, besides imposing on Germany the territorial
outrage of the Danzig corridor, cuts her off from any possibility of
expansion and development in the east. Poland has been conceived as a
great State. A Polish nation was not constituted; a Polish military
State was constituted, whose principal duty is that of disorganizing
Germany.
Poland, the result of a miracle of the War (no one could foretell the
simultaneous fall of the Central Empires and of the Russian Empire),
was formed not from a tenacious endeavour, but from an unforeseen
circumstance, which was the just reward for the long martyrdom of a
people. The borders of Poland will reach in time to the Baltic Sea in
the north, the Carpathians and the Dniester in the south, in the east
the country almost as far as Smolensk, in the west to the parts of
Germany, Brandenburg and Pomerania. The new patriots dream of an
immense Poland, the old Poland of tradition, and then to descend into
the countries of the Ukraine and dominate new territories.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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