By Paul Angel
I recently had another failed political discussion with a liberal friend of mine (yes, I have kept a few). He asked me what approach I would take to solving America’s problems in the Mideast. I told him that America really didn’t have a problem in the Mideast, Israel did, and that America should always take an America-first approach to every problem.
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“What does that mean,” he asked.
Knowing the attention span of highly educated liberals can sometimes be shockingly brief, I thought I’d synopsize what I consider to be the most important tenet of America-first war philosophy: “Any money spent or blood spilt should be for the direct benefit or defense of the American people.”
In short, don’t get our boys and girls killed, or waste American taxpayer dollars ensnaring us in the potentially dangerous squabbles of other nations.
Should a certain situation worsen, and U.S. national security were actually threatened (i.e., a hostile nation wanted to place nuclear weapons on our borders), then, obviously, America firsters would respond forcefully.
But, otherwise, butt out. War is too costly in multiple ways. A mountain could be made from the gravestones of U.S. soldiers who have died needlessly in America’s many overseas follies.
And this does not include those servicemen who’ve returned home irrevocably scarred, emotionally and physically. I doubt anyone who enlisted in the U.S. military ever imagined they’d end up living on the streets one day.
We only compound the grief when we consider the amount of gold Uncle Sam has purloined for these wars from our empty cupboards. Even Rover is shocked at how bare Sam’s cupboards are these days. Worse, Rover opened the cupboard and found not a bone but a $37 trillion IOU.
Certainly the money we waste on war could be better spent filling the cupboards of the American people.
By now, my liberal friend had nodded off, my diatribe punctuated not with exclamation points but by the sounds of snoring. You, being still awake (I hope), can read the rest here.
Wars are the biggest waste of money and lives there is, and my disdain for war was further colored by reading the anti-war statements of the America First Committee (AFC). At one time, the AFC had 800,000 members and 450 chapters. Members of that group included Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Mass), Gen. Hugh S. Johnson, Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr. (R-Wisc.), famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, and other peace-loving Americans.
Some of the anti-war “Principles of the America First Committee,” as stated in their literature, included:*
American democracy can only be preserved by keeping out of war. … “Aid short of war,” beyond the limitations of cash and carry, weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war [with Russia and/or Iran] abroad.
At every chance, members of the AFC would address their fellow Americans. At the time, these men were desperate to keep the United States out of what we call World War II, but what was then called the “European war.”
The arguments put forth in their addresses represented the thinking of an overwhelming majority of the American people at the time, and still does, especially among those who fully comprehend the true cost of war.
Ironically, although so many years have passed and times have changed so drastically, the warnings of these tried-and-true America firsters against U.S. meddling in foreign conflicts are as prudent today as they were over eight decades ago.
Here is what Gen. Johnson, for instance, had to say about war:
Modern war is not risked by any wise nation, as George Washington was careful to tell us, for any reason other than its own defense or some other absolutely compelling cause. … [A]ny nation [Israel/Ukraine] which must rely for its own peace and for its own defense on the strength of any other nation is lost.
Lodge must have had a crystal ball. His comments from 1940 could be describing today’s Zionist slaughter of Palestinian Muslims and Christians:
All Americans are horrified at the savage news from [Gaza]. The slaughter of innocents, the destruction of everything that makes civilization possible, the maiming of bodies and the shattering of the human spirit are terrible beyond description.
Frightful as these things are, in and of themselves, they become desperate when we realize that the motive for this holocaust is to establish an order which denies the dignity of the individual man, and thereby contradicts the chief purpose and aim of the American dream.
I am sure Lodge would be appalled his nation was sending weapons of mass destruction to a state that was then turning them on civilians.
Though he was, at the time, talking about England, Lindbergh’s words could just as well have been recounting the Ukraine war of today. He said:
It’s obvious [Ukraine] is losing the war. I believe this is realized even by the [Ukrainian] government. But they have one last desperate plan remaining. They hope that they may be able to persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force to Europe, and to share with [Ukraine] militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war.
Unfortunately, today, only a few conservatives in Congress understand the America-first take on war and foreign intervention. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia may be one. Another is Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.)
Read Greene’s comments about the cost of war to the American people, specifically the amount of money taxpayers waste on what she terms “nuclear-armed” Israel.
She also had the guts to mention an open secret: Israel has a large nuclear arsenal and is perfectly capable of defending itself. It needs us not.
Paul Angel is AFP’s Managing Editor. You can reach him at Angel@AmericanFreePress.net.
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