HKB
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Often appears with: treaties, truces, and peacemaking · the problem of evil and theodicy · self-deception · george washington escape · fourteen points contract · contracts, oaths, and obligation
Usually: argument (1) · deception discovered (1) · censure (1) · skepticism (1)
“Thus, without any abatement of the verbal inspiration of the Fourteen Points, they became a document for gloss and interpretation and for all the intellectual apparatus of self-deception, by which, I daresay, the President's forefathers had persuaded themselves that the course they thought it necessary to take was consistent with every syllable of the Pentateuch.” John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace · insight
Keynes claims Wilson countermanded the George Washington escape but then became dangerous in compromise because he remained bound by the Fourteen Points, using “web of sophistry” to justify the resulting Treaty.
born in due course by the slow gestation of the League. Clemenceau had been clever enough to let it be seen that he would swallow the League at a price. At the crisis of his fortunes the President was a lonely man. Caught up in the toils of the Old World, he stood in great need of sympathy, of moral support, of the enthusiasm of masses. But buried in the Conference, stifled in the hot and poisoned atmosphere of Pari…