Posted on 09/11/2018 11:45:18 AM PDT by iowamark
Read it again:
Add to these the Communistic groups who were opposed to intervention until a few weeks ago, and I believe I have named the major war agitators in this country.
I didn't read it as particularly antisemitic, at least not openly and violently so. He does not seem to treat Jews any worse than "the British". I saw no particular hostility to Jews, just opposition to a cause favored by most Jews. Again, you citation, in more context:
It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.That last paragraph could be more clear. I didn't see it as threat, maybe a misdirected warning. I wasn't sure if it was intended to warn of consequences to German or American Jews. Pearl Harbor, or no Pearl Harbor, the brunt of the task of defeating Germany fell to Russia. Without Russian success, which was by no means assured in 1941, the War in Europe would have at best been a tie. If Japan had helped Germany finish off Russia, she could have had easy pickings in Siberia, and a strong ally against the United States.No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.
Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.
I find it interesting to read of so many Freepers condemning Lindbergh for his isolationism and his supposed hatred of Jews and of being a Nazi.
One has to remind Freepers that he was speaking about twenty years after the “Great War’ in which millions died, including Americans for, not to “Make the world safe for Democracy” but to gain colonies abroad and redrawn Continental Europe.
Democracy was “safe” for millions around the world under the thumb of either empires or dictatorship. Many of which were our most dearest allies.
Hypocrisy was abounding then just as it does today.
Lindbergh witnessed this and his greatest fear was being dragged into another war for ‘Democracy” abroad.
We have lost about 5,000 military there and untold billions in our foreign wars to “Make the world Safe for Democracy”
How many of us are willing to got back into the middle east to save Christians there from being exterminated? Yet be are soooo critical of Lindbergh who was only giving voice to what the majority of Americans were thinking prior to Dec 7.
So save your judgmentalism for your own generation.
German antisemitism incited opposition among American Jews, who like German Jews prior to 1933, held influence and wealth disproportionate to their numbers. This incites my admiration, in others, sadly, envy.
People may or may not have cared about the Jews - though obviously many actually did, including many Germans in Germany - but there was very little anyone could do for them by 1941, except perhaps, accept them as refugees. As Churchill put it, “The world is divided into two great camps. Those who want to get rid of the Jews, and those who do not want to accept them.”
Not exactly. Before the ambush that killed Yamamoto, Lindbergh had worked with engineers at Lockheed working out carburetor and throttle settings and altitude regimes for long range flights in the P-38. The length of the mission exceeded to official capability of Lightning. Then we went to South Pacific and personally worked with and trained the pilots who carried out the mission, participating in test and training flights in a combat zone. Flights during which he reported shot down a couple of Zeros. The pilots greatly appreciated Lindbergh's expertise and the benefit of his experience.
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/17/blogs/post-perspective/lindbergh-re-examined.html/2
......Unquestionably, Lindbergh himself was responsible for much of the controversy that arose in the postwar years over his isolationism. To the end of his life, he never admitted he was wrong about anything he had said or done. Unlike Anne, who acknowledged that “we were both very blind, especially in the beginning, to the worst evils of the Nazi system,” he uttered no word of remorse or apology for his uncritical attitude toward the horrors of Hitler’s regime. When his wartime journals were published in 1970, Lindbergh defiantly equated the Nazis’ wholesale murder of Jews with other war crimes, including the brutality of some American troops toward Japanese prisoners of war. He still insisted that the United States had made a mistake in entering the war.
“Like many civilized people in this country and abroad, he could not comprehend the radical evil of Nazism,” The New York Times wrote about Lindbergh and his journals. “Even in the retrospect of a quarter-century, he is unable to grasp it.…[T]here is simply no comparison between individual misdeeds of American soldiers toward dead or captured Japanese and the coldly planned, systematically executed German government policy of murdering or enslaving Jews, Slavs, and other ‘inferior’ people.…The world is admittedly not what Americans–or anyone else–would like, but it is decidedly better than it would have been if the United States had not helped to defeat German and Japanese militarism.…If any war can be said to be worth fighting and winning, it was World War II.”
(Also those wartime journals were edited to remove the worst Jew hating excesses, though there were still plenty in there.)
The paragraph after your last quoted paragraph reads:
Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.
That's a well-worn antisemitic slur.
Lindbergh was racist and anti-Semitic, although this was relatively common among Americans at the time. Of Swedish ancestry himself, he believed that northern Europeans were racially superior. His admiration for the Nazis was quite real. He developed a disgust for democracy after the chaos of the kidnapping-murder of his son, and the sensational Hauptmann trial.
That’s complete bull crap to say France didn’t fight. They lost a total of 360000 dead and wounded in that 6 week fight. They were completely outclassed by the modern German method of warfare, and let down by the British who abandon their flank and fled the battlefield at Dunkirk.
But they did Kill nearly 30,000 Germans, and wounded 111000. That’s hardly a refusal to fight.
That’s the half of it. For over 20 years he had another family I believe in Germany that Anne Lindbergh knew nothing about.
I don't know. It may be more a home truth than a slur. I look at the accomplishment of the Jews and am filled with admiration and gratitude. (Thank you, Dr. Salk!) Others with envy and resentment.
I would like to see where Lindbergh made overtly pro-Nazi statements. I haven't researched this deeply, but nothing in this post shows outright Nazi sympathies, more a realistic appreciation of German capabilities. Had the Russians collapsed, as they appeared to be in the process of doing in September 1941, the U.S. and Britain would never have been able to mount an invasion of the Continent prior to 1950, at the earliest. I doubt we would have persisted that long.
BTW, the Wansee Conference took place in January 1942, shortly after Lindbergh spoke and after the U.S. had entered the War against Germany. And after German reversals outside of Moscow. One could argue that Lindbergh was prescient, that the Wansee conference was at least in part a reaction to the U.S. entry into the War, when it became apparent to Nazis that they might not win the thing.
In the posted speech he just seemed ignorant while being complimentary to Jews. I'd like to see him in a youtube video doing the Nazi salute something more convincing. I'll have to search youtube for that.
He had at least three other families. But that was after the war.
The Holocaust, organized genocide and mass murder, began immediately with the invasion of the USSR in June 1941. The development of the death camps and gassing was not really related to the US entry into the war.
Lindbergh’s “Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations.” was a threat directed at US Jews. There was no tolerance in Nazi Germany.
Thanks babble-on. Having had a lot of older (b 19th c) relatives that I remember well, the everyday hostility toward Jews clearly displayed by Lindbergh (despite denials, including those in this topic) has always seemed unremarkable to me. I was, uh, surprised to see that retired comedian Robert Klein, in his appearance on Seinfeld's "Comedians In Cars" show, showed off his model of the Spirit of St Louis, and expressed admiration for the flying exploits of Lindbergh, but then joked, but we mustn't forget that he was 'very fond of Hitler'. Heh. Lindbergh was a patriot, but and served his country, but he also had an undying admiration for Hitler, much like (as someone mentioned up there) Henry Ford.
The fact is, FDR was a populist, and enjoyed the undying support of a large majority, even for US participation in WWII.
OTOH, I don't buy into the line of total innocence claimed by his still-rabid defenders -- he obviously knew that Pearl Harbor was likely to be attacked (I also agree with those who have written that he even knew the date, finding out barely in time, but at minimum, it was Pearl where the attack was going to come), which is the reason the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers were all kept out of Pearl and well out of the range of potential attacks by Japan. They were going to be crucial in the coming war. I also don't have any problem with that, the outcome of WWII was not ideal, but it was the best that could be managed, given the possibilities.
“Lindbergh was more right than he was wrong.
I find it interesting to read of so many Freepers condemning Lindbergh for his isolationism...Lindbergh who was only giving voice to what the majority of Americans were thinking prior to Dec 7.
So save your judgmentalism…” RedMonqey, post 62]
It isn’t “judgementalism” to point out the impossibility of pursuing a particular policy.
America was founded as a trading nation. Trading nations cannot be isolationist. These two statements were objectively true in 1780. And in 1812, 1860, 1914, 1939 - any date you care to mention. To pretend otherwise is to evaluate geopolitics, grand strategy, and world history from the viewpoint of a nine-year-old.
We Americans of today need to find the courage to re-examine what the Founders said about “entangling” alliances. We must confront the possibility they were wrong (they were mere mortals, not purveyors of Holy Writ). And we must summon the self-awareness to notice that almost a quarter of a millennium has passed since then. Reconsidering the admonitions of the Founders, in light of all that has happened since they left the scene, is not blasphemy; it’s prudence.
“Shining city on a hill” might make for inspiring rhetoric, but it cannot provide much useful input in crafting current policy.
“Making the world safe for democracy” was also rhetoric, not a fully-fledged policy. Those who wring their hands over T Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to honor this or that campaign promise have missed the point: the world situation had changed from the 1916 presidential campaign to early 1917. He requested a declaration of war from Congress because US trading partners were in peril, and because Imperial Germany had commenced unrestricted submarine warfare - after having committed a number of acts of war against the US already. Disappointment visited on voters was a lesser evil than Allied collapse, victory for the Central Powers, American economic collapse, and continued existence only as a German client state.
Charles Lindbergh made a quintessentially American mistake: he looked at the conduct of World War One, and decided that because it did not always go according to hopes & predictions, that the strategic goals and survival imperatives were not valid in the first place. In a word, the outcome wasn’t worth the effort, therefore we should have avoided it. Confusing the two is a grave error: the strategic worth of a particular policy cannot be evaluated in terms of how one goes about prosecuting that policy. They are measured along different axes.
Americans of 1970 proved we had learned nothing from 1940, or 1914. In concluding that the nation’s actions in Southeast Asia were flawed, therefore we should never have gotten involved to begin with, Americans proved to the world we were cowards bereft of honor. With short attention spans.
Facts don’t matter Ben
A multiple exodus freeper is having some fun
Forgot to say thank you! Is Peter Hitchens’ brother?
I was lazy, just looked him up. A less debauched, less hard li ing Hitchens, but definitely a Hitchens! I miss him.....
Living
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.