← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · friedrich braun
Thread ID: 18220 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2005-05-13
2005-05-13 07:28 | User Profile
ROOSEVELT AND HIS CRITICS April 28, 2005
by Joe Sobran
I see that HBO is doing a movie honoring Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, who "brought us out of the Depression and through World War II." It stars Kenneth Branagh as Roosevelt, and anything that keeps Branagh too busy to make another of his wretched Shakespeare films is, to that extent, laudable.
But why this endless celebration of FDR? The Germans
are expected to repent the Hitler era everlastingly; the Japanese are supposed to apologize for their role in the same war, while they are also being hounded by the Chinese for their impenitence about invading the mainland. The Russians are repudiating the Soviet era. Everyone is issuing apologies for history these days.
I'm always a little leery of people who repent other
people's sins, because one suspects hypocrisy -- or what C.S. Lewis called the sin of detraction masquerading as the virtue of contrition. I can't honestly repent the massacres of the American Indian, because I didn't take part in them; they were largely crimes of the U.S. Government, which I can only helplessly deplore, as I deplore its current crimes at home and abroad.
Still, we can recognize crimes as crimes, which
brings me back to Roosevelt. Why are Americans still treating this monster as a hero?
I hardly know where to start. His contempt for the
U.S. Constitution he was sworn to defend, in everything from creating a national welfare state to putting U.S. citizens in concentration camps, is almost a minor item on his ledger. So are his deceits in getting the United States into World War II, while assuring the American public that he was doing everything he could to keep us at peace.
Long before that war began, he befriended Joseph
Stalin by granting diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union, shortly after it had deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians. During the war, he made an alliance with Stalin, not as a regrettable necessity, but with effusive praise for "Uncle Joe." He even urged Hollywood to make pro-Soviet films to dispel "prejudice" against Soviet Communism and lent a hand in the production of the egregious propaganda movie MISSION TO MOSCOW. (Jack Warner later called the film the worst mistake of his long career.)
As the war progressed, Roosevelt ordered the massive
bombing of Japanese and German cities for the express purpose of killing as many civilians as possible. His victims, from Tokyo to Berlin, numbered in the millions. He was uninhibited by the ancient principle of Christian civilization that warfare should spare noncombatants.
But that wasn't enough. Meanwhile Roosevelt launched
the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, which could obliterate whole cities in a flash. He thereby took the world into a dreadful new era in history, which concerned him not at all.
Long after Pearl Harbor is forgotten, the name of
Franklin Roosevelt should "live in infamy." Yet the United States still officially honors him when an official apology to the entire human race would be more fitting.
Despite his great popularity, many critics saw
through Roosevelt in his own time. He tarred them as fascist sympathizers, though their chief criticism of him, developed by John T. Flynn's book AS WE GO MARCHING, was that he himself was bringing a form of fascism to this country. His most eloquent critic was perhaps Garet Garrett of THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, whose trenchant anti-Roosevelt editorials cost him his job. FDR, always vindictive, also worked behind the scenes to ruin Flynn. The caustic H.L. Mencken, seeing the futility of opposing Roosevelt during the war, decided to keep a prudent silence.
When Roosevelt died of a stroke in 1945 (in the
company of his mistress), the war was pretty much won, even without atomic weapons. Yet those weapons, used by his successor Harry Truman, would be his chief legacy to the world. When Stalin acquired them too, the long Cold War became a global terror.
It's an interesting footnote to all this that Flynn,
though a principled anti-Communist, saw that American militarism had become a threat to American liberty. But Cold Warriors didn't want to hear this, and Flynn became persona non grata in the conservative circles which had loved his anti-Roosevelt polemics.
Flynn died forgotten. It's as if Roosevelt had
managed to take his critics with him.
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2005-05-13 12:59 | User Profile
The more writers like Sobran who write stinging articles like this one, the better for awakening the sheeple from a lifetime of lies.
Nothing pleases me more than seeing FDR (and Churchill & Stalin) and WWII ripped to shreds and exposed as colossal (and avoidable) disasters which nailed the coffin of Western civilization.
2005-05-13 14:28 | User Profile
Beautiful.
I'm inclined to believe that we should have sat back and simply let the bad guys fight. Hitler vs. Stalin? Great. We should not have taken sides. Just let them go at it. Japan vs. China? Likewise.
2005-05-13 14:49 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Robert]Beautiful.
I'm inclined to believe that we should have sat back and simply let the bad guys fight. Hitler vs. Stalin? Great. We should not have taken sides. Just let them go at it. Japan vs. China? Likewise.[/QUOTE]
That was what Senator Harry Truman proposed. Also Pope Pius XII. Let Hitler go east and the two monsters can kill each other. But Roosevelt needed a war...
2005-05-13 18:16 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Buster]That was what Senator Harry Truman proposed. Also Pope Pius XII. Let Hitler go east and the two monsters can kill each other. But Roosevelt needed a war...[/QUOTE]
The Jews needed us to fight Germany, for obvious reasons. That was a big part of the calculus. There were other factors, but that was the "necessary but not sufficient" cause of the thing.
I'm an isolationist. We should resolve to stay out of these things. Not that this was always easy, especially with the Canadians having their noses stuck firmly up England's butt. But I think we could have avoided the mess, and leave the rest of the world to its fate.
2005-05-13 18:21 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Robert] I'm inclined to believe that we should have sat back and simply let the bad guys fight. Hitler vs. Stalin? Great. We should not have taken sides. Just let them go at it. Japan vs. China? Likewise.[/QUOTE] Someone (I cannot recall who) called WWII 'The War of the Mustache'. It basically decided whether millions of Europeans would be killed by a megalomaniac with a big mustache (Stalin) or a little one (Hitler). Hardly seems worth the cost.
2005-05-13 21:30 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]I'm an isolationist. We should resolve to stay out of these things. Not that this was always easy, especially with the Canadians having their noses stuck firmly up England's butt. But I think we could have avoided the mess, and leave the rest of the world to its fate.[/QUOTE]
That's a nice fantasy. The question is, how do you keep us out? Our founders tried by refusing to create a standing army. Now that that is no longer possible, presidents are free to start wars whenever they want to to boost their popularity, e.g., Iraq I and Iraq II. Had our economy been stronger and the Bushs' polls ok, neither war would ever have happened.