In the great debate before Pearl Harbor, Charles Lindberg was the leading opponent of American entry into World War II. In 1941 `he became an immensely popular speaker at
America First rallies. Building on his knowledge of the strength of the major European air forces he attacked the Roosevelt administration’s policies, which he was convinced would drag America into a war in which we had no national interest and for which we were unprepared.
For his heartfelt and honest criticism of Roosevelt’s policies he was excoriated by those who wanted the United States to intervene on the side of Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Many in the war party charged him with being a “fifth columnist” or even a Nazi. Lindberg persisted in his opposition to war right up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
When the Japanese attacked, Lindberg promptly volunteered but was denied the opportunity to serve by vindictive members of the Roosevelt military establishment.
Undeterred, Charles Lindberg served as a civilian aircraft consultant spending five months in the Pacific theater evaluating aircraft. Although he was a civilian Lindberg flew fifty combat missions, half in the twin-engine Lockheed P-38 Lightening and half in the Marine Corps single-engine Vought Corsair. On July 28, 1944, in an encounter in which he narrowly missed a head-on crash with his adversary he shot down a Japanese aircraft while flying a P-38.*
The point of this recitation of Lindberg’s war record is to make it clear that his opposition to early intervention in WWII didn’t make Lindberg a Nazi or provide evidence of a lack of patriotism. Rather, Lindberg and the other America Firsters of the 1930s saw themselves as the inheritors of the principles set forth in President George Washington’s Farewell Address.
As the writers at History.com put it:
Washington believed, partisanship would open the door to “foreign influence and corruption.” While he advocated for the United States to be on good terms with all nations, especially commercial relations, he argued that “inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.”
Europe had its own, very complicated, set of interests, and the United States should keep its distance from European affairs, Washington believed. A foreign policy based on neutrality was the safest way to maintain national unity, and stability, in the United States. Although Washington saw the need for the nation to involve itself in foreign affairs in the case of war or other emergency, he argued that it must “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”
Today, it appears we have come full circle with Lindberg and Washington on one side and warmongers, such as the Rep. Liz Cheney – Sen. Mitt Romney faction of the Republican Party and the Clinton – Biden faction of the Democratic Party joined on the other side.
The partisanship of the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the failure of Joe Biden, Obama’s 2014 “point man” on Ukraine, to do anything other than allow his son Hunter to loot the prostrate Ukrainians and the failure of the two George Bushes and Bill Clinton to seize the fall of the Soviet Union as the opportunity to normalize relations and bring Russia into full participation in western economic and political institutions have all contributed to the present disaster for the Ukrainian people and for the present loss of world economic and political stability.
But they would like Americans to forget all their failures of the past 30-years and join the war party.
“Former President Trump’s adulation of Putin today — including calling him a ‘genius’ — aids our enemies. Trump’s interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States of America,” Rep. Liz Cheney tweeted late Tuesday.
So, somehow those who oppose a confrontation with Russia over Ukraine are unpatriotic and “Putin’s puppets” and “nauseating pigs”?
Spare us.
In attacking former President Donald Trump for acknowledging how deftly and strongly Putin has played his hand against the feckless dotard Joe Biden, Liz Cheney and Biden’s shills are simply running the same playbook the globalists and interventionists of the 1930s ran against Lindberg and his generation of America First noninterventionists.
When the Soviet Union broke up it was not a foregone conclusion that Russia would turn into an anti-Western authoritarian state, that it did is in large measure the work of those globalists – Cheney, Bush, Clinton, Biden, etc. – who now demand that the United States engage in a military confrontation with the Russians in Ukraine. Americans should not succumb to their follies twice.
*Summarized from Charles A. Lindberg and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II by Wayne S. Cole, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (1974)
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