Kindle Notes & Highlights
But perhaps the most important aspect of the American philosophy during the nineteenth century was the American people’s refusal to permit their government officials to engage in foreign wars. Our ancestors had learned the lessons of history — that war is the greatest enemy of liberty and the best friend to omnipotent government.
The abandonment also took place in foreign affairs. If the government could plan and provide welfare for millions of Americans, why stop there? Why not do the same for Europeans as well as for people all over the world?
The twentieth century has been the era of the social engineer. Regardless of the labels the social engineer has chosen to use at various times and in different places — communism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, social liberalism, welfare statism, interventionism, one-worldism — they all have added up to the same thing: individuals and society are to be reshaped and designed according to the specifications of the social engineer.
The social engineers thrust America into the global bonfires of the insanities. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sacrificed on the altar of two world wars and several regional conflicts in the name of world peace.
It is time to commit the social engineer and his meddling mentality to the dustbin of history. Social engineering at home has long shown its moral and practical bankruptcy.
The fundamental delusion of the social engineer is his unswerving confidence that he knows how to set the world right, regardless of the expense to others or the consequences for society as a whole. The twentieth century has demonstrated what a fantasy his belief really is.
The essays in the present volume, The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars, critically evaluate the path the United States has followed over the last century. They explain the ideas that have drawn America into numerous wars and conflicts around the world and analyze the disastrous consequences that have resulted from these foreign adventures. And they articulate an alternative vision of a foreign policy more consistent with the premises of a free society.
With the fall of communism, Americans have a unique opportunity: not simply to reduce their government’s military budget but to fully and completely dismantle their nation’s military-industrial complex.
But the communist threat gave new life to the military-industrial complex at the end of World War II. For in order to avoid conquest by the communists, they said, it was necessary to use their same tactics — including the continual and constant buildup of military forces.
But taxation, conscription, and foreign wars are not the biggest threats arising from a huge, standing military force. The real threat — as our American and British ancestors understood so well — is that, at some point, the guns might be pointed not at foreigners, but at us — the American people.
Most Americans innocently believe that the Congress would meekly obey and call the constitutional convention, as required by the Constitution. But Americans might well discover what foreigners have discovered: that when politicians, bureaucrats and bureaucracies are attacked, they fight back.
One of these days, the American people might very well discover that American politicians and bureaucrats will violently resist losing their parasitic grip on the citizenry. And one can only wonder where the proponents of gun control will be standing (or hiding) then.
Our government was founded to protect the United States from attack, not to rule the world through force of arms. The possibility of any nation attacking our country in the foreseeable future is virtually nonexistent. Windows of opportunity do not often repeat themselves. Americans should “seize the day” by dismantling not only their welfare state but their military empire as well.
The answer lies in the ideology of the welfare state. First, in the years preceding World War I, and then again in the 1930s, American intellectuals and politicians undertook grand experiments in social engineering. The Progressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and the New Deal days of Franklin D. Roosevelt were the crucial decades for the implementation of the politics of government intervention and economic regulation. It was the duty and responsibility of the state to manage, oversee, and control the social and economic affairs of the citizenry.
Americans, however, were repulsed in the years following World War I, when instead of democracy, they saw that all that came out of our participation in that noble crusade was communism in Russia, fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, and imperialist spoils for the victorious European allies.
But World War II seemed to offer the opportunity for a second chance. The American “arsenal of democracy” would free the world of Hitler and Imperial Japan and then pursue an international course of permanent foreign intervention to create “a better world.” What the world got was the Cold War, with the Soviet Union gaining an Eastern European empire, and with China being lost behind what became known as the communist “Bamboo Curtain.”
If it is undesirable for the United States government to intervene in the economic and social affairs of its citizenry — as the advocate of individual freedom steadfastly believes — then it is equally undesirable for the United States government to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations or the conflicts that sometimes arise among nations.
In short, both sides deserve censure. As Sen. Joseph Biden, an opponent of the Gulf War but enthusiastic proponent of intervention in Bosnia, has cracked, “The Republicans have found God.” But the Democrats have proved to be no more consistent, and at least it is better to have found God, as have the Republicans, than whatever partisan idol the Democrats are now worshipping.
The point is, the Founders vested the power to declare in Congress because they feared presidents would do precisely what they are doing today — regularly taking the nation into overseas conflicts that have only the most tangential interest to the security of the United States. The result has been hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed, hundreds of billions of dollars squandered, numerous civil liberties lost, and a host of government bureaucracies spawned. In short, even if the Constitution was not clear, the issue of war and peace is too important to leave to the president. “International
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But, in order to forestall high taxes, debt, and the centralization of power, we had to steer clear of war. That is why the advice of the Founders was: if you want to preserve the system we have established, keep out of wars except when required to defend the United States, and avoid political entanglements overseas, since these are likely to lead us into war.
American civilization and the American economy flourished, as we abstained from meddling overseas.
But, in fact, each move away from America First and towards globalism was the result of political choice and struggle. It didn’t have to happen that way.
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America’s heart, her benedictions, and her prayers. But she does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
The fact is that, regardless of how evil Hitler and the Japanese leaders were, the people of the United States were manipulated and maneuvered into a war which the great majority of them did not want.
War-Entry Plans Laid to Roosevelt. Britain releases Her Data on Talks with Churchill. London. AP. Formerly top-secret British government papers made public today said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Prime Minister Churchill in August, 1941, that he was looking for an incident to justify opening hostilities against Nazi Germany. Churchill reported to the War Cabinet [that] “he [Roosevelt] was obviously determined that they should come in.… The President had said that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces.
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Afterwards the truth — known to Roosevelt at the time — came out: a British warplane had informed the Greer that a German submarine was in the area. The Greer located the submarine and kept tracking it, meanwhile broadcasting its location to any and all British planes and ships in the area. One British plane dropped depth charges, but missed; finally, after hours of being tracked by the Greer, the submarine turned and fired a torpedo, which also missed. The Greer answered with eight depth charges, then, a few hours later, more depth charges. Finally, both ships broke off the engagement.
Now imagine for a moment that Herbert Hoover or Robert Taft or another conservative leader had said, in 1941, that the Jews enjoyed full freedom in Nazi Germany. Do you think that we might have heard of such a ridiculous and shameful statement? Is it not likely, in fact, that it would have been drummed into our heads from the time we were in high school? Yet here is Roosevelt making a precisely analogous defense of Stalinist Russia, and his outrageous statement has disappeared down an Orwellian memory hole.
Franklin Roosevelt was, above all else, a liar. His name should be linked in the history books to lying as the name of Genghis Khan is to cruelty and Romeo’s to romance. And it was at Roosevelt’s school that all of our leaders have studied. Republican or Democrat, liberal or “conservative,” they all love and revere Franklin Roosevelt. From Roosevelt they all learned to lie to us for our own good: to lie about the Soviet “threat” in 1947, about Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, and Bosch in the Dominican Republic; to lie about those Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin attacked “without
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Yet, if a nation can be maneuvered into war through such systematic deception by its leader, in what sense is there still government by the people?
If it is proper under your inherent powers to seize the steel mills, can you, in your opinion, seize the newspapers and the radio stations? Mr. Truman replied that under similar circumstances the President had to do whatever he believed was best for the country. The President refused to elaborate. But White House sources said the President’s point was that he had the power in an emergency, to take over “any portion of the business community acting to jeopardize all the people.” This is the Harry Truman who is today acclaimed and honored by all American politicians, from Bill Clinton to Newt
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Inevitably, therefore, a globalist foreign policy will be determined, not by the American people themselves, but by small groups and cliques which do care — and care a lot.
One thing America First does not imply is protectionism. Rather, our rule should be free trade between America and the world — unilateral free trade, not government-managed trade, which our leaders are currently promoting.
It is their pleasing duty to free us of the delusion, which we have fondly cherished, that we are the subjects of a mild, free and limited Government, and to demonstrate by a regular chain of premises and conclusions, that Government possesses over us a power more tyrannical, more arbitrary, more dangerous, more allied to blood and murder, more full of every form of mischief, more productive of every sort and degree of misery, than has been exercised by any civilized Government, with a single exception, in modern times.…
Expansionism and imperialism are nothing but the old philosophies of national prosperity which have brought Spain to where she now is. Those philosophies appeal to national vanity and national cupidity. They are seductive, especially upon the first view and the most superficial judgment, and therefore it cannot be denied that they are very strong for popular effect. They are delusions, and they will lead us to ruin unless we are hard-headed enough to resist them.
Justice and law were to reign in the midst of simplicity, and a government which had little to do was to offer little field for ambition. In a society where industry, frugality, and prudence were honored, it was believed that the vices of wealth would never flourish.…
Franklin Roosevelt’s actions in pressuring Japan — FDR also was insistent that Japan fire the first shot, so noninterventionists could not accuse him of starting the conflict — made war almost inevitable. But the Pearl Harbor fiasco did more than just destroy the careers of Kimmel and Short; it set the United States on a course of global war that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of young American lives.
The result of their life with the lie is that Americans, like the Germans, continue to relinquish more and more of their lives and fortunes to public officials in order to solve the problems of “freedom.”
Moreover, adult children of dysfunctional families do as Hitler did — they gravitate toward political power.
Lord Acton was right — power does tend to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
