Posted on 11/13/2001 6:00:58 AM PST by sheltonmac
“When in doubt, don’t.” That has been called the world’s shortest sermon, and it’s generally good advice.
Until December 7, 1941, the American people, in their wisdom, were overwhelmingly opposed to getting into World War II. Then came Pearl Harbor, and the shock instantly changed everything. The country was consumed by a mixture of patriotism, revenge, and race-hatred, all of it diligently fanned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
For years Roosevelt had been trying, with all his devious skills, to get the country into war. To him Pearl Harbor came as a godsend. Unlike President George W. Bush, he encouraged indiscriminate hatred of the enemy populations. He didn’t say apologetically that our quarrel was not with the people of Japan and Germany, but only with the dictators who ruled them. On the contrary. He sponsored propaganda films vilifying the Japanese and German races, and ordered the bombing of their cities. He launched the development of nuclear weapons that would enable American bombers to kill as many civilians as possible.
Never particularly reverent toward the Constitution and the rule of law, Roosevelt also ordered the illegal and unconstitutional arrest and internment of American citizens of Japanese descent. Even J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, no civil libertarian himself, protested.
Those propaganda films are something to see. The series Why We Fight, directed by the great Frank Capra, was brilliantly calculated to stir the blood against “Japs” with their “grinning yellow faces.” Today’s multicultural sensitivities were still in the remote future; but even then, decent people should have recoiled. There isn’t much evidence that they did.
It all seemed like a good idea at the time. Even now Roosevelt is generally regarded as a hero, even, increasingly, by conservatives. His deceitful policies, condemned at the time by true patriots like Charles Lindbergh, are defended as necessary for the purpose of dragging a reluctant America into the war; so much for democracy and the people’s right to know. The atomic bomb itself is defended because it “shortened” the war. And as for Roosevelt’s dream of a postwar world benevolently dominated by an American-Soviet partnership, the less said the better.
Just as an individual should sometimes review his life and repent his sins, a country should reflect on its history and retrace its steps. At the end of the war, Americans were grateful for their monopoly of nuclear weapons. But Roosevelt’s pal, Joseph Stalin, soon became America’s open enemy and acquired his own nuclear arsenal. Doubts about the wisdom of creating such weapons in the first place began to haunt us.
Still, we assumed that nuclear weapons would remain what they originally were, complex, bulky things that only a few states could possess and deliver. Nobody foresaw that they might one day be miniaturized and fall into private hands, beyond the control of any state.
The peril we now face from stateless terrorists is one long-term result of World War II. Nobody, not even the most pessimistic and alarmist opponents of the war, could have predicted it. The “isolationists” gave cogent reasons for avoiding war, but the best reason of all lay hidden from them, dormant in the seeds of time, to be revealed only decades later. Now we know what it was.
When you go to war, you never really know what you’re getting into. The dangers you can specify may matter less than a nameless qualm about far worse evils that you can’t even imagine. Nobody in 1945, when the first A-bombs were dropped on Japan, asked: “But what if some Muslim fanatic is born in 1957 who will get hold of such weapons and use them against us?” Roosevelt’s ultimate legacy may turn out to be Osama bin Laden.
Though nobody could have dreamed it, Roosevelt was the last man to whom such a dark thought would occur. He plunged into the nuclear future with his famous sunny optimism. So here we are. As Ernest Hemingway jeered, in another context, “How do you like it now, gentlemen?”
Modern warfare keeps breeding new possibilities of violence. But like a gambler who thinks he can beat the house, our rulers have kept betting that they can win at this lethal game in which no man knows the real odds. And their lack of foresight is made worse by their faulty hindsight.
Not so. It required the input of Einstein to get Roosevelt to go for it, and he did it primarily because he was told the Germans could well do it. That's not the same as sunny optimism. No politician sinks that kind of money into something that might not work without great fear and trepedation about making himself look the fool.
Modern warfare keeps breeding new possibilities of violence. But like a gambler who thinks he can beat the house, our rulers have kept betting that they can win at this lethal game in which no man knows the real odds.
Here is the truth. Ultimately, all leaders run out of knowledge and wisdom and turn back to the coin toss for the fate of their nations. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but always they take the toss.
"I have always been a gambler." - Hitler on the invasion of Poland.
My suspicion is that Joe's family lost someone very close to them in the war and the loss was felt for years afterwards. Or perhaps a friend or relative was scarred by the war for years afterwards. One can understand that emotion and sympathize with the Sobran's. But those who fought in that war were tougher than we are. Many of them weighed the costs and felt that not fighting was more dangerous than fighting, even though their own lives were on the line.
Sobran and Bill Kauffman are right that the war changed our country in really fundamental ways. But not fighting and letting Hitler and Tojo or Stalin divide the world among themselves would also have wrought changes at home. In the 20th century, when drastic change was the rule, rather than the exception, it's unlikely that we could sit things out and remain unchanged and contented.
Perhaps the Latin American republics could have made such a choice, but only because North American power kept European wars at a distance. For us there was no protector or policeman or even a customary predator to keep invaders and enemies away.
In theory we tell ourselves that we could be an isolated fortress in a hostile world. In truth this would have had effects on our national character and way of life as great as becoming a superpower did. Would isolation in a world of enemies have been preferable to empire and world hegemony? Perhaps, but if we lived in that world rather than our own, we would long for what we'd lost and curse ourselves for having been unwilling to fight.
All the laws in the world cannot prevent crime, and all the wars in the world cannot prevent terrorism.
Furthermore, progress marches on. It is better to march along with it. Nothing in the world of science is taboo, but using that knowlege is another matter. In this case were were right to use it.
As for Capra and the propeganda... Americans don't hate the Japanese. We have forgiven them, and blessedly the Japanese have forgiven us. The Jews have forgiven the Germans. There are only a few cultures remaining that refuse to forgive the actions of the past century, and they are the people who are still causing destruction around the world. But then, they also still use propeganda unsparingly. Not suprisingly, none of these cultures have democracy or freedom of the press.
The creation of the National Security State by Truman in 1947, the initiation of the Cold War for economic purposes, and the simultaneous failure to enforce a world-wide peace in the late '40s when we alone had nuclear capability and the power to bully nations into refraining from war, is the foundation for our modern problems.
IMHO.
That's what it's there for!
Shameless plug: http://www.RooseveltMyth.com
FDR: "Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle." (NOTE: This is a paraphrase of Karl Marx's Communist maxim, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.")
Franklin D. Roosevelt (as president), in a letter to a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, urging a new law he wanted: "I hope your committee will not permit doubt as to Constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation."
Our "victory" in World War II was to defeat one totalitarian dictator (Hitler) ... only to hand over half of Europe to another to totalitarian dictator ("Uncle Joe" Stalin).
What kind of victory was that? Roosevelt and history revisionists since then have made WWII into some big win for the West, when all it really did was usher in another war (Cold War - Koren, Vietnam, etc.) ... just as WWI brought about WWII.
Interventionism breeds interventionism. That's how government grows. It creates problems (domestic and foreign) ... and then proposes to solve said problems ... which create yet more problems ... ad infinitum ... or until liberty is crushed under the burden of the Welfare (supported by liberals) and Warfare (supported by "conservatives") State.
Even Newt thinks FDR was one of the GREATEST presidents in our history. I don't get it, and never will..... FDR and AL, considered by many as the TWO best, trampled all over the US Constitution. Go Figure!
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