Charles Lindberg Resurrected

Written by Voltaire

Tuesday, 04 December 2007

Patrick Buchanan's new book Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War is, in a very real sense, simply another version of Charles Lindberg was right. Naturally, this thesis is no more acceptable to the political establishment now than it was when Lindberg first promoted it - with the overwhelming sympathy and support of 90% of the American people.

Before delving further into Buchanan's thesis it would be well to dispose of two points-(1) the myth of Adolf Hitler's inherent untrustworthiness and (2) the irrelevancy of the so-called 'Holocaust'.

Hitler undoubtedly broke his word on many occasions, as Germany's interests required. But so did his opponents. It was not Hitler who promised the same territory, over and over again, to different allies in a multiplicity of secret treaties during the First World War. It was the French, and especially the British, who did that.

It was not Hitler who offered a negotiated peace with no territorial annexations and the right of self-determination guaranteed to all nations in November, 1918 - and then proceeded to violate it in every particular. That, once again, was done by the British and French at Versailles, Trianon and Saint Germain. Nor was it Adolf Hitler who contracted that famous correspondence with the Sheriff Hussein in October, 1915 - and then proceeded to sell out the Arabs of Palestine on November 2, 1917. Political duplicity did not begin at Munich in September, 1938.

Whatever one thinks of Adolf Hitler's fast ones - and he pulled more than a few-he did not preach world revolution and lying for communism as a matter of principle. Lenin and Stalin did - and their every order was faithfully executed by a 'tribe' of commissars whose Talmudic devotion to dishonesty has been documented for centuries.

The myth of the Nazi 'gas chambers' and the fictional 'six million' likewise has no bearing on the issue. World War Two did not rescue the Jews from expropriation and expulsion. And, when one reviews the excuses for entry into the war, one finds such things as a president's desire to use war as a substitute for a failed New Deal, the desire of the British to smash a resurgent Germany, the desire of the political left to save communism from impending attack and the desire of the Jews to protect their own, but nowhere does one find as an excuse a fake 'gassing' program which had not even begun.

What, then, were the real consequences of World War Two? The first consequence was precisely the one against which the isolationists had warned - the expansion of communism all over the world-east and west. Eastern Europe fell under the heel of Joseph Stalin. China and the Far East fell under the control of Mao Tse-Tung. It seems highly unlikely that Adolf Hitler, even had he won in Russia, would have been able to spread his clutches as widely as the communists all over the planet. More likely, he would have been tied up in Russia for decades trying to absorb his conquests.

In short, even if every charge which his opponents lay at his door were true, the net result could hardly have been worse than what actually occurred. World War Two also destroyed the European colonial empires world wide, something which Adolf Hitler was never interested in doing. As David Irving, John Charmley and other English revisionist historians have demonstrated, Hitler had no aggressive intentions against the European colonial empires and against the British Empire in particular. Indeed, Adolf Hitler regarded the British Empire as an essential force for stability in the world.

When the Japanese took Singapore, Hitler commented: 'How strange that we are using the Japanese to destroy the power of the white race in Asia!' The destruction of the European colonial powers had drastic consequences for America - because it was America which stepped into the shoes of the defunct empires. The Korean and Vietnam wars are the two best examples of America picking up other peoples problems.

Before Pearl Harbor the Japanese had policed the threat of communism in Asia. Once the war had driven the Japanese out of Manchuria, the door was open for red expansion into the Korean peninsula. It came in 1950-1953. Had the Japanese been left in control of Manchuria, 50,000 Americans would not have died useless deaths in an inconclusive war. Had either the British, French, Dutch or Japanese been left in control of Indochina, Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam would never have entered American political vocabulary. Korea and Vietnam, then, were real estate problems from a Pacific war provoked by a president who deliberately sacrificed a fleet to an attack which he knew was coming.

America also suffered in the Near East from its intervention in World War Two. The Second World War left the British, who had been in control of the area, exhausted. When the British withdrew from the area in May, 1948, it was the United States which stepped into the shoes of the British as the sponsor and guarantor of Zionism. That mistake has led, step-by-step, to the present disastrous situation in Iraq.

There is a direct line of causation back to the Second World War. Indeed, it is much worse than that. It was the Second World War which generated a huge exodus of very much alive, non-exterminated Jews from behind the Iron Curtain on their way to Palestine to invade the Arabs and terrorize them from their land. It was the camouflage of 'The Holocaust', the myth of Jewish extermination by the Nazis, which allowed this to take place under a curtain of media suppression. The British had made themselves odious to the Arabs by betraying their pledge of Arab independence after the First World War. America, by taking over 'Britain's Moment In The Middle East' (to use the title of Elizabeth Monroe's classic work) has made herself equally odious.

The disasters bestowed on the United States through her intervention in World War Two are not yet ended. When America intervened in World War One, she made a serious blunder, but not an irretrievable one. America stayed out of the League of Nations. She did not set up an immense string of military bases all over the world. She demobilized her army, slashed spending and returned to 'normalcy'. The fatal break in tradition had not yet occurred.

When America intervened in the second European conflict there was no turning back. America had abandoned her policies of neutrality and non-intervention. America had become an empire, no longer a republic. Like all empires, America practices the black arts of intrigue, deception and power politics. In innumerable instances, America has propped up shady regimes all over the world. The names of the Shah of Iran, Ngo Dinh Diem and Ferdinand Marcos come immediately to mind. Arguably the struggle against communism made them necessary, but the struggle against communism was the consequence of an unnecessary war against Hitler.

Vast sums of money, better left in the pockets of the taxpayers or spent on domestic improvements, were wasted because of the Cold War. The Cold War could have been avoided by supporting Hitler's 'hot war' against communism. But worse still than all the evils so far described has been the effect of World War Two on the American mind. World War Two, in a real sense, marked the birth of the 'New America'. When America defeated Nazism in World War Two, she repudiated, by implication, 'Nazi' ideas. Since World War Two, America has steadily moved against nationalism, patriarchy and white supremacy. Any value in which Americans once believed has been trashed by analogizing those ideas to similar ideas in German National Socialism.

Finally, World War Two has given Americans a false sense of their moral superiority and hubris. Because America supposedly saved the world in 1941-1945, every foreign adventure in which America now engages must be similarly so described. It is this presumption which, more than anything else, turns the rest of the world against America.

Many wise and far sighted Americans knew what lay ahead for America if she crossed the fatal line between Republic and Empire. Charles Lindberg was the most famous of these spokesmen, but there were many others. Senators Burton Wheeler, Gerald Nye, Hiram Johnson and William Borah also warned of the dangers of empire. Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, the journalist John T. Flynn, Colonel Robert Wood, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company, the novelist Gore Vidal and the future President Gerald Ford all aligned on the principle of 'America First'.

Today, the principle of 'America First' has been perverted into phony worship of a phony 'Good War'. Americans were not always so enamored of their World War Two crusade. As Thomas Fleming and other authors have shown, Americans in the immediate aftermath of World War Two were largely convinced that their second great crusade had been a mistake. The dread figure of Joseph Stalin stood astride Europe, Mao Tse-Tung was replacing Chiang Kai -Shek in China and the disastrous Korean War was competing with atom treason and Senator Joseph McCarthy for headlines. It had all arisen out of the war. Had not the isolationists been right? It was a common thought in those days.

If times have changed, if the passing of Stalinist communism and the illusions of Steven Spielberg Hollywood history now comfort with Private Ryan bravado, it is still worth recalling the realities of the past. For if reality is replaced by illusion, if myth and bravado are substituted for an informed understanding of cause and effect, then reality shall once again come calling - and a harsh and unforgiving reality it shall be.