Communism isn’t the only big problem in the world. The income tax and the Federal Reserve both happened on Wilson’s watch.
Yeah, sure. Maybe we should amend our views on Adolph Hitler as well. He didn’t like communists either.
So was Fidel Castro . . . until he declared himself to be one.
Yet he insisted the Kaiser turn over power to the German Social Democratic party. Not the Catholics. Not the conservatives. Only the socialists would do.
Hitler was stridently anti communist as well yet I still hold a strongly negative opinion of him. Imagine that.
He was a man of the progressive left who understood the destructiveness of the communist left. He observed how communists lied to and sought to manipulate his fellow progressives.The problem with this is that "the progressive left" are active enablers of communism.
So the above paragraph translates as follows:
He was an enabler of communism who understood the destructiveness of the communist left. He observed how communists lied to and sought to manipulate his fellow enablers of communism.
Doesn't make much sense, does it?
Kind of like LBJ's opposition to communism. He was willing to send hundreds of thousands of US soldiers thousands of miles away in a (noble) crusade against communism... while at the same time enacting colossal communist edifices at home.
The bottom line is progressives lay the ground work for communists... and are nowadays virtually all active communists themselves.
Sorry, Paul, I don't find Wilson's "anti-communism" very impressive. At the very least, it shows how stupid he was in his inability to connect the dots from progressiveness to communism. At worst (and most likely) he was just engaged in a kind of internecine warfare to see who would be the international leader of communism... himself or Lenin. He just didn't want the snot-nosed roosky to take top spot in the leadership of the global commintern.
Beck and Goldberg are wrong. Wilson was no villain. A fumbling idealist, yes, but not a monster.
I guess one can call Wilson one of Karl Marx “useful idiots”
He was stridently, vocally anti-constitutional nor did he "hold these truths to be self evident . . . " nor pledge his life, fortune and sacred honor to defend those principles.
He is rightly scorned.
I am reading through Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Facism right now and he writes about Wilson a good deal.
Progressivism is communism light, all the chains of regular communism, but with only half the murders.
Muslims fight amongst themselves all the time. Because one group doesn’t like another doesn’t make either one a paragon of virtue.
Oh, puh-leeze. Wilson “hated” Communists for one reason and one reason alone — all tyrants hate all other tyrants because they’re the competition.
To another stupid writer:
Wilson was anti-communist?
Really? And that is somehow deserving of respect?
The NAZIs (National Socialists) were also anti-communist.
And the parallel does not end there.
Wilson was a National Socialist, just like all the Progressives out there. They hated the communists because the communists were blatant regarding their end-goals.
Another parallel is that he bridged the Statist ideology of academe with politics. Hitler also bridged that gap. In fact, Hitler had his ass handed to him in his first elections. It wasn’t until academe decided the “evolution” approach to National Socialism wasn’t fast enough that they needed some military muscle. When they picked Hitler as their man, that’s when he one. And that is why academe even in England (who had been on their knees before German academe for over a century) approved of Hitler at first.
The socialists wanted to infect the body populace and brainwash them so that the people would demand to be controlled by the Ruling Elite.
This is why the socialists and communists fought so much, even though they have the same goal.
Socialists get to the intoxication of Statism one shot at a time. Communists chug the whole bottle.
But this is only one reason why Woodrow “the horse-faced” Wilson was a steaming pile of shit. He was an elitist, academic asshole and the damage he caused tens of millions to suffer unnecessarily should haunt him in hell for all eternity.
All very interesting, but the real question is: what did Edith Galt think about Communism? She was the President for much of Wilson’s post war term of office after all.
Woodrow Wilson was an anti-communist. He was also the 2nd most destructive statist in the history of the American presidency. There is no conflict, there is only a limitation on scope of terminology.
Hitler was an anti-communist, and a dedicated statist. Just like Woodrow Wilson.
So the rehabilitation of Woodrow Wilson is occurring. I never thought I’d live to see it.
But still, he was far from a Marxist or a Communist. And he never abandoned his racist views. So anywhere you put him on the political spectrum is bound to be an oversimplification.
Wilson's views were a hodgepodge. He'd call himself a liberal on the question of rights and liberties, but he was horrible on civil liberties. He saw himself -- or his supporters painted him -- as a decentralist Jeffersonian, but he brought in bureaucratic control of the economy like no one else.
Europeans have trouble understanding Wilson's moralism and utopianism, but I suspect he would have fit in better in one of the states he helped create than in the US. He supported national self-determination -- that's clear. It's one thing he really believed in during his later years. His confusions about other things are those that Poles or Czechs or Hungarians went through when they tried to figure out just what they wanted government to do and not to do.
The New York Times blog had a discussion of why Wilson is now such a bogeyman for Beck and other conservatives nowadays. People say what you'd expect them to say. I suspect the answer is that he has all the negatives and not many positives.
Wilson was the archetype of the professor in politics, the liberal intellectual, who has done so much mischief in government over the years. He wasn't a popular hero, like FDR, and didn't see the country through an economic crisis. He also can't claim to have decreased racial discrimination, as LBJ could.
He was a Commie. Period.
Regards, Doodle