“when a nation has definitely committed itself to a foreign war,” insisted legal scholar John Henry Wigmore during WWI, “all principles of normal internal order may be suspended.”
In an August 7, 1918 speech, War Industries board Chairman Bernard Baruch was astonishingly frank in expressing the same view. “Every man’s life is at the call of the nation and so much be every man’s property,” insisted Baruch. “We are living today in a highly organized state of socialism. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state.”
Similar totalitarian cadences worked their way into the July 19, 1940 speech of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s acceptance speech for the Democratic party’s nomination to seek an unprecendented third term. “Today all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger,” declared Roosevelt. “In the face of that public danger all those who can be of service to the Republic have no choice but to offer themselves for services in those capacities for which they may be fitted.”
These pointed endorsements of the total state represent a complete repudiation of our nation’s republican premises. The recently concluded Republican National Convention in NYC offered overwhelming proof that the GOp has embraced the vision of building the total state through perpetual war.
In his keynote address to the Republican National Convention on September 1, Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georiga quoted FDR’s pronouncement that all private plans and interests are “repealed” during wartime, and enrolled President Bush as a man to whom we could entrust our lives, property and children.
Referring to his grandchildren, Senator Miller posed the rhetorical question, “I ask which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower and yes, the backbone to best protect my family?”….”There is but one man to whom I’m willing to entrust their future that man’s name is George Bush.”
“I admire this man,” gushed Miller, “I have knocked on the door of this man’s soul and found someone home, a God fearing man with a good heart and spine of tempered steel. The man I trust to protect my most precious possession: my family.”
Miller’s tribute to the president offers a stark contrast with Thomas Jefferson’s wise counsel: “In questions of power….let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” And Miller, by his own admission, is a less than reliable judge of a politician’s character.
Twelve years ago, as the keynote public speaker at the Democratic National Convention, Miller delivered a similarly evangelistic speech describing Bill Clinton as the messianic embodiment of political goodness. But this irony was lost on Miller’s audience, who eagerly surrendered to raptures of indignation over the impudence of any candidate who would think of supplanting our Dear Leader.
Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of Miller’s address was a section implying that there was something seditious about having a contested election in “wartime”. Referring to 1940 Republican candidate Wendell Willkie, Miller declared that “there is no better example of something repealing their “private plans” than this good man…[H]e made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.”
“Where are such statesmen today?” conditioned Miller, his face contorted into a mask of theatrical indignation. “Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most? Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief.”
Implicit but unmistakable in Miller’s address were the following assumptions:
- Since our nation is at war, our lives, liberty and property belong to the state.
- George W. Bush is not simply an elected official with specific, limited powers, but a holy personage in whom we can entrust all we hold dear (something not found in the Constitution’s presidential job description)
- Seeking to replace President Bush through the constitutionally appointed means is at best divisive and at worst treasonous.
Taken together, those assumptions amount to fuhrerprinzip–the “leadership principle” common to all variants of totalitarianism, but most openly embraced by the German National Socialist (Nazi) party.
As it has often been said, people go mad in groups, and come to their senses one at a time. The nastiest trick of collectivist politics of every variety is to manipulate people into remaining part of the mob, rather than engaging in critical thought as individuals. And nothing accomplishes this design better than a state of perpetual war.
Another nasty trick frequently employed by collectivists is to control all “respectable” political alternatives in order to ensure that any electoral outcome will abet the growth of the total state.
“The argument that the two parties should represent opposite ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea,” commented Georgetown history professor Carroll Quigley, who was both a capable analysis of, and cheerleader for, the drive to create the total state. “Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the radicals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”
Senator Miller’s address illustrated the extent to which contemporary partisan politics follow quigley’s prescription.
In addition to exalting President Bush as the distillate of political virtue, Miller’s address also hymned the supposed virtues of two liberal Democratic presidents–FDR and Harry Truman–and that of a losing Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie. These figures, along with George W. Bush, were commended for embracing an interventionist foreign policy “to fight for freedom over tyranny.” “Freedom,” in this view, is a product of our central government, with our military acting as a glorified delivery service.
“Never in the history of the world has any soldier sacrificed more for the freedom and liberty of total strangers than the American soldier,” observed Miller. “And, our soldiers don’t just give freedom abroad, they perserve it for us here at home.” Of course, Miller didn’t explain how our freedoms are being “preserved” if at the same time we re required to permit Washington to “repeal” our private plans when necessary.
The choice of Willkie as symbolic of bipartisan patriotism is incredibly significant, since there is abundant evidence that Willkie–a lifelong Democrat who allegedly changed his affiliations just months before being nominated by the Republicans in 1940–conspired with both FDR and a froeign intelligence service to “fix” the election.
In Desperate Deception, a 1998 study of pre-WWII efforts by British Intelligence to maneuver the US into the war, historian Dr. Thomas Mahl records:
In June, 1940, the Republicans in convention in Philadelphia nominated Willkie. He was a man who had never held public office–a man who had been a bona fide registered Democrat as late as September 1939 and whose switch to the Republican Party is difficult, perhaps impossible, to document. His nomination exempted his Democratic opponent, President Franklin Roosevelt, from the normal pressures of an election campaign.
Willkie’s nomination defined widespread and well-organized anti-interventionist sentiment at the Philadelphia convention, leading some–including noted agnotstic HI Mencken-to speculate that iwas the product of something akin to divine intervention. But soon after the convention, Communist leader Earl Browder (whose party was tactically allied with Hitler’s regime at the time) and anti-intevention conservative Nelson Sparks claimed “that the nomination of Wendell Willkie had been concocted by British Ambassador Lord Lothian, in connivance with Frank Roosevelt, Thomas W. Lamont of JP Morgan and columnist Walter Lippmann.
It’s worth noting that, decades earlier, Roosevelt, Lamont and Lippmann had all been involved in the intrigue that led to US entry into the first World War.
More importantly, notes Dr. Mahl:
There are now a number of facts available that support the accusations of Browder and Sprks. First, the people who created the Willkie candidacy were working closely with Frankllin Roosevelt. Second, those who created the Willkie candidacy were working closely with British intelligence and its fronts. Third, Willkie was working closely with British intelligence and its fronts, especially Fight for Freedom, on whose executive board he sat. Fourth, Willkie’s close work with his ostensible opponent, Frnaklin Roosevelt, particularly their joint effort to eliminate members of Willkie’s newly adopted Republican Party from office, is a collaboration rare, perhaps even unique, in American political history. Last, the secrecy and compartmentalization of the scheme to promote Willkie are a fundamental attribute of intelligence tradecraft; none of the individual toilers working for Willkie’s nomination ever knew enough to be able to see the big picture of the operation.
Among the British intelligence assets who promoted Willkie’s candidacy were attorney Grenville Clark, a prominent member of the British front Fight for Freedom who went on to prominence as an exponent of UN-enforced “global law”; journalist Walter Lippman, the Fabian Socialist, founding editor of The New Republic, charter member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and key figure in the secretive post WWI “Inquiry” group that drafted the League of Nations covenant, and journalist Dorothy Thompson, who was active in several British Intelligence fronts. Willkie himself secretly collaborated with British Ambassador Lord Lothian.
Willkie backed FDR’s “Destoyer Deal” with Britain in 1940, which amounted to delivering part of our naval fleet to that government. The deal was patently illegal. He also supported the first peacetime conscription law in our nation’s history, a measure tha made sense only as preparation for US involvement in the war. Both of those betrayals followed Willkie’s nomination in a national convention carefully stage-managed by FDR’s allies. That convention was rife with dirty tricks-such as using a defective microphone to prevent former President Herbert Hoover from delivering an anti-intervention speech.
In a despairing letter to his son, California Republican Senator Hiram Johnson lamented that Willkie “had raised hell with us here by adopting the Roosevelt foreign policy, and being for conscription, etc. He really broke the back of the opposition to the conscription law.” That betrayal was described in strikingly different terms by interventionists, particularly those formally aligned wih the British fifth column.
“If the Republicans had launched an all out attack on the president for doing this [giving away part of the fleet to Britain] their candidate would have attracted hundreds of thousands of America First isolationist voters who otherwise might not go to the polls,” reflected Francis Pickens Miller, who was involved in the British fronts Century Group and Fight for Freedom. “Our chairman, Lewis Douglas, was one of Willkie’s most ardent supporters and trusted advisors.”
Lippmann described Willkie’s seizure of the Republican nomination as “providential”: “Under any other leadership than his, the Republican party would in 1940 have turned its back on Great Britain.” Which is another way of saying that any genuine Republican candidate of that era would have sought to defend American interests, rather than those of some foreign power.
Shortly after his “loss” to FDR, Willkie was appointed by Roosevelt as a presidential emissary. This was done at the suggestion of William Stephenson, the notorious British Spy known as “intrepid” who helped coordinate British Intelligence efforts in the US (particularly those directed at harassing and defaming the America First movement). With ironic wit, Stephenson’s letter to FDR referred to Willkie as “your opponent in the recent bitter elections…”
Willkie’s true relationship with FDR was no secret in the White House Correspondents Association. At the group’s March 1941 dinner a mock newsreel was shown entitled All We Know Is What They Let Us Write In The Papers, or It Ain’t Necessarily So. One scene in that film entitled “Bundling for Britain” depicted Roosevelt and Willkie as bed-mates. In 1944, Willkie was approached by key Roosevelt advisers to run as Vice President on the Democratic ticket. Willkie, in failing health, declined the offer and expired form a heart attack that October.
The choice of Democratic Senator Zell Miller to nominate President Bush for re-election illustrates that the two “mainstream” parties are entirely fungible. Miller’s choice of Wendell Willkie to embody “bipartisanship” is even more telling. But most revealing of all was the spectacle of supposedly conservative Republican delegates engaged in an orchestrated orgy of enthusiasm on behalf of the welfare-warfare state.
“The [GOP Convention] began with a series of speeches trumpeting vast increases in federal spending: on education, healthcare, AIDS, medical research and on and on,” approvingly wrote liberal Republican columnist Andrew Sullivan. “No, these were not Democrats. They were Bush Republicans, extolling the capacity of government to help people to cure the sick, educate the young, save Africans from HIV, subsidize religious charities, prevent or cure breast cancer, and any other number of worthy causes. The speakers were designed to target certain demographic and interest groups, just as the Democrats used to. The notion that these things are best left to the private sector, or that spending needs to be slashed in the wake of rising debts, or that the race of a speaker is irrelevant: all these are now Republican heterodoxy.”
As commentator Eric Margolis pointed out, the Republican Party’s embrace of sanctified totalitarianism took place in a city tranformed into a mini-garrison state. With the streets patrolled by a security force larger than Canada’s army, and residents and visitors subjected to roadblocks, checkpoints, and the like, New York resembled “Damascus during a military coup”, wrote Margolis.
Both the rhetoric issuing from the lectern at Madison Square Garden, and the police state measures maintaining order outside, demonstrated beyond dispute that -at the leadership level-freedom has no friend in either the Republican or Democrat branch of the Ruling Party.
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