ZGram - 1/12/2002 - "Sobran: Hurrah for Isolationists"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

January 12, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Another sane little essay from one of America's finest columnists, Joseph
Sobran:

[START]

Hurrah for Isolationists

 Sixty years after Pearl Harbor, we are at war again, and comparisons with
1941 are inevitable. Some people think the country ain't what it used to
be. And they're right: it ain't. But there are interesting parallels.

Writing in The Weekly Standard, David Brooks notes that America in 1941 was
far more upbeat than today:

"Everybody had a patriotic duty, it seems, to be optimistic. Being happy
was a sign of success. It wasn't yet cool be thoughtfully gloomy or
alienated." This spirit was reflected in the American press, which was much
more eager for war then than now.

Brooks supports this portrait of 1941 with many citations from the press of
that time. Unfortunately, he overlooks a crucial fact: many of those
"patriots" who boosted war were driven by foreign sympathies.

Brooks quotes disproportionately from two magazines:

The Nation and Life. The Nation was hardly a mainstream publication: it was
the leading pro-Soviet magazine of its day. Even before Pearl Harbor, it
had called for U.S. intervention into World War II on the Soviet side. No
wonder it rejoiced when the United States was pulled into the war. As one
of its writers exulted, "Here is the time when a man can be what an
American means, can fight for what America has always meant - an audacious,
adventurous seeking for a decent earth."

But Brooks fails to mention that Joseph Stalin had a substantial "amen
corner" in this country, and especially in the press. It was hardly pure
patriotism that made such people pro-war; when Stalin turned openly
anti-American after the war, they became anti-American too.

Life magazine was the creature of Henry Luce, a globalist who had his own
reasons for supporting war. Born in China, the son of Protestant
missionaries, Luce deeply loved China and hated its Japanese conquerors. He
hoped America would rescue China and establish a benign hegemony over the
whole world.

Another foreign country had its partisans here:

Great Britain. Many Americans, especially people of English stock in the
East, wanted the United States to save the "mother country" from Germany.
But this too was a minority sentiment. Before Pearl Harbor, most Americans
strongly opposed going to war, especially if it meant sacrificing their
sons to foreign interests. Arthur Schlesinger (again The Nation) argued
that the Republican Party must, in Brooks's words, "jettison its heartland
isolationism and embrace the East Coast establishment's internationalism."

  As Brooks notes, "The belligerent voices were on the left; the doves were
on the far right, and Pearl Harbor delivered a crushing blow to those
isolationists." Well, it was hardly "the far right." It was indeed the
"heartland" of the United States. At least 80 per cent of the country had
been "isolationists," if that's what you call wanting to spare your sons'
lives. The shock of Pearl Harbor changed everything in a flash.

Since World War I, American enthusiasts for war have featured "amen
corners" for several foreign countries:

Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and, today, Israel. All these groups have
agitated for war and, through the press and other media, deluged the public
with propaganda. Britain even produced movies designed to influence
American opinion its way; Winston Churchill himself helped write the script
for That Hamilton Woman, starring Laurence Olivier as Lord Nelson and
Vivien Leigh as his mistress. It portrayed Nelson's heroism against
Napoleon, in implied analogy to Britain's struggle against Hitler.

So the relation between America in 1941 and America in 2001 is a little
more complicated, the contrast less stark, than Brooks would have us
believe. In fact The Weekly Standard illustrates the point. Just as the
earlier pro-war press wanted America to fight the enemies of Britain,
China, and the Soviet Union, the Standard wants America to fight the
enemies of Israel. It won't settle for defeating Osama bin Laden and his
Taliban allies; it insists that America must also make war on Iraq and
other countries opposed to Israel.

So when we hear patriotic-sounding voices calling for war, we ought to ask
who really wants war, who stands to benefit from it, and why. Time and
again the most genuinely patriotic people - derided by the elites as
"heartland isolationists" - have had the real interests of America at
heart.

December 28, 2001

[END]

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Thought for the Day:

"There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted."

(Henry David Thoreau)