Posted on 07/05/2015 9:30:41 AM PDT by No One Special
If July 4, 1776, is our Independence Day, March 11, 1941, is our Interdependence Day.
A revolutionary thing happened on the way to World War II. It was called "Lend Lease." This was the legislation, approved on March 11, 1941, by which the neutral USA began to supply aid to countries at war with Hitler. It was spun by President Roosevelt and Democrats in Congress as a means of keeping America out of World War II, although it was recognized by many Republicans at the time as a war bill.
But that's not all. Lend Lease granted extraordinary powers to the executive. Indeed, it transferred war-making power from the Congress, where the Constitution placed it, to the president, where it has pretty much remained ever since.
There was something else that was revolutionary about the bill -- something revolutionary in a deeply ideological way:
From American Betrayal, Chapter 5:
Lend-Lease did more than transform the power structure of the U.S. government. It also introduced a revolutionary principle into our foreign policy. I’ll just put it out there in the words of “Junior Stettinius,” the Hopkins prote´ge´ whom we just saw putting the heat on Kravchenko in 1944—or at least conducting it, since Stettinius was, by all accounts, the emptiest of well-tailored suits.94 As [Secretary of State] Stettinius wrote—or, perhaps better, in words attributed to Stettinius:
The principle was contained in the words defining eligibility for Lend-Lease aid—“any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” The word “vital” was the heart of the matter. To favor limited aid to the allies as an expedient device for saving friendly nations from conquest was one thing. To declare that the defense of those nations was “vital” to our own national security was quite another. If we adopted the bill with those words, we would, in effect, declare the interdependence of the American people with the other freedom-loving nations of the world in the face of Axis aggression [emphasis added].The principle was contained in the words defining eligibility for Lend-Lease aid—“any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” The word “vital” was the heart of the matter. To favor limited aid to the allies as an expedient device for saving friendly nations from conquest was one thing. To declare that the defense of those nations was “vital” to our own national security was quite another. If we adopted the bill with those words, we would, in effect, declare the interdependence of the American people with the other freedom-loving nations of the world in the face of Axis aggression [emphasis added].
We did indeed adopt the Lend-Lease bill with those words.96 This makes March 11, 1941, the day the Lend-Lease bill passed after three months of raucous congressional debate, America’s Interdependence Day. It was the first day of a new global order under which all manner of international intervention is automatically declared “vital”—i.e., essential to life—to U.S. interests. It no longer even draws comment when American presidents routinely declare the destinies of far-flung peoples “vital” to that of the United States, whether in Saudi Arabia (Roosevelt), Iraq (Bush), or Afghanistan (Obama).97
So how did Lend-Lease, this de facto American declaration of global interdependence—this de facto reversal of nonbelligerence if not also this de facto declaration of war—come about?
Therein lies a tale told in American Betrayal.
For now, suffice it to say that three of the most important people to lay hands on Lend Lease, from conception to crafting the bill to the administration of the massive industrial program, were three of the most pro-Hammer-and-Sickle Americans of the day, men with Soviet interests at heart, men whose once-secret dossiers reveal them to have acted as conduits, if not also agents of Stalin's influence: Armand Hammer, Harry Hopkins, and Harry Dexter White.
And why is that relevant? Through Lend Lease, the USSR received the aid that helped destroy Hitler but also made the Evil Empire possible. This is literally true when you realize that without the 500,000 trucks and jeeps that the US delivered to the Soviet Union, the Red Army could never have advanced across Eastern Europe to the heart of Europe, seizing and communizing the nations later known as the Eastern Bloc.
With American betrayal like that -- and there is so much more -- is it really so surprising that the global project is upon us?
We weren’t always a nation of wimps and sexual misfits.
You don’t build the most powerful and wealthy nation in recorded history with men who prance around in camisoles and wet their panties when the bad guys go BOO!
This has come about because liberals have taken over the education system.
Bull crap. The President can make a declaration of war and often that is all it takes. However, Congress, if they have the energy to get off their collectives asses, has the power to revoke the declaration of war. The interpretation the author cited is just that: One person's interpretation.
Too much government and incompetent politicians and a brainwashed public.
Answer here (Fredoneverything.net from about 15 years ago):
The Suicide Of Marlboro Man
The Price Of Freedom Is Slavery. Sort Of. A Little Anyway
The other days I was reading G. Gordon Liddy’s book of conservative nostalgia, When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. He paints a sunset picture of former times when America was free, farmers could fill in swamps without violating wetland laws, and guns were just guns. People were independent and had character, and made their own economic decisions. The market ruled as it ought, and governmental intrusion was minimal.
The picture is accurate. I lived it. I wish it would come back, which it won’t. It was a world certain to kill itself.
What happens is that, in an independent-minded rural county full of hardy yeomen, the density of population grows, either nearby or at distant points on each side. A highway comes through because the truckers lobby in Washington wants it. Building a highway is A Good Thing, because it represents Progress, and provides jobs for a year.
It also makes the country accessible to the big city fifty miles away. A real-estate developer buys 500 acres along the river from the self-reliant character-filled owner. He does this by offering sums of money that water the farmer’s eyes.
First, 500 houses go up in a bedroom suburb called Brook Dale Manor. A year later, 500 more go up at Dale View Estates. This is A Good Thing, because the character-filled independent now-former farmer is exercising his property rights, and because building the suburb creates jobs. The river now looks ugly as the devil, but this is a wacko issue.
At Safeway corporate headquarters, way off God knows where, the new population shows up as a denser shade of green on a computer screen. A new Safeway goes in along the highway. This is A Good Thing, exemplifying free enterprise in action and creating jobs in construction. Further, Safeway sells cheaper, more varied and, truth be known, better food than the half-dozen mom-and-pop stores in the county, which go out of business.
Soon the mall men in the big city hear of the county. A billion-dollar company has no difficulty in buying out a character-filled, self-reliant farmer who makes less than forty thousand dollars a year. A shopping center arrives with a Wal-Mart. This is A Good Thing, etc. Wal-Mart sells almost everything cheaply.
It also puts most of the stores in the country seat out of business. With them go the restaurants, which no longer have the walk-by traffic previously generated by the stores. With the restaurants goes the sense of community that flourishes in a town with eateries and stores and a town square. But this is granola philosophy, appealing only to meddlesome lefties.
K-Mart arrives, along with, beside the highway, McDonald’s, Arby’s, Roy Rogers, and the other way stations on route to coronary occlusion. Strip development is A Good Thing because it represents the exercise of economic freedom. The county’s commerce is now controlled by distant behemoths to whom the place is the equivalent of a pin on a map.
This is A Good Thing. The jobs in these outlets are secure and comfortable. The independent, character-filled frontiersmen are now low-level chain employees, no longer independent because they can be fired.
A third suburb, Brook Manor View Downs, appears. The displaced urbanites in these eyesores now outnumber the character-filled etcs. They are also smarter, have lawyers among their ranks, and co-operate. They quickly come to control the government of the county.
They want city sewerage, more roads, schools, and zoning. The latter isn’t unreasonable. In a sparsely settled county, a few hogs penned out back and a crumbling Merc on blocks don’t matter. In a quarter-acre yuppie ghetto, they do. Next come leash laws and dog licenses. The boisterous clouds of floppy-eared hounds turn illegal.
Prices go up, as do taxes. The profits of farming and commercial crabbing in the river do not go up. The farmers and fishermen are gradually forced to sell their land to developers, and to go into eight-to-fiving. Unfortunately you cannot simultaneously be character-filled and independent and be afraid of your boss. A hardy self-reliant farmer, when he becomes a security guard at the Gap, is a rented peon. The difference between an independent yeoman and a second-rate handyman is independence.
People make more money, and buy houses in Manor Dale Mews, but have less control over their time, and so no longer build their own barns, wire their houses, and change their own clutch-plates. Prosperity is A Good Thing. Its effect is that the children of the hardy yeoman become dependent on others to change their oil, fix their furnaces, and repair their boats.
The new urban majority are frightened by guns. They don’t hunt, knowing that food comes from Safeway and its newly-arrived competitor, Giant. They do not like independent countrymen, whom they refer to as rednecks, grits, and hillbillies. Hunting makes no sense to them anyway, since the migratory flocks are vanishing with the wetlands.
Truth be told, it isn’t safe to have people firing rifles and shotguns in what is increasingly an appendage of the city. The clout of the newcomers makes it harder for the independent whatevers to let their weapons even be seen in public. The dump is closed to rat-shooting.
The children of the hardy rustics do not do as well in school as the offspring of the commuting infestation, and are slowly marginalized. Crime goes up as social bonds break down. Before, everyone pretty much knew everyone and what his car looked like. Strangers stood out. Teenagers raised hell, but there were limits. Now the anonymity of numbers sets in and, anyway, there’s no community any longer.
And so the rural character-filled county becomes another squishy suburb of pallid yups who can’t put air in their own tires. The rugged rural individualists become cogs in somebody else’s wheel. Their children grow up as libidinous mall monkeys drugging themselves to escape boredom. The county itself is a hideous expanse of garish low-end development . People’s lives are run from afar.
What it comes to is that the self-reliant yeoman’s inalienable right to dispose of his property as he sees fit (which I do not dispute) will generally lead to a developer’s possession of it. The inalienable right to reproduce will result in crowding, which leads to dependency, intrusive government, and loss of local control.
I’d like to live again in Mr. Liddy’s world. Unfortunately it is self-eliminating. Freedom is in the long run inconsistent with freedom, because it is inevitable exercised in ways that engender control. As a species, we just can’t keep our pants up. But it was nice for a while.
Every great republic since the ancient Greeks knew that once the people can vote themselves money from the treasury the republic is finished. We are way past prime for our demise.
Interesting article. I’ll have to ponder it. Freedom is self defeating?
Just curious, you really don’t know that Article 1, section 8, clause 11 states that Congress shall have the power: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water? The ignorance contained in your declaration is truly breath taking, nowhere does the US Constitution give the executive such power.
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