Tag Archives: American empire

There’s no money or power in a non-interventionist foreign policy, which is why such a policy has been an ideological orphan since the 1930s. From Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., at lewrockwell.com:

Supporters of an aggressive American foreign policy like brain-dead Biden and the gang of neocons who control him reply to critics by playing the Hitler card. They say, “Imagine what would happened if the US stayed out of World War II. Hitler would have conquered the world! This shows why we have to fight against Russia and China now!”

Of course it doesn’t show that, and if we do fight Russia and China, we will destroy the world in a nuclear war. But we should look at their argument in its own terms. Should we have stayed out of World War II? The answer is clear. Yes, we should have, and in seeing why, our best guide is the great Murray Rothbard.

As Murray makes clear in his great book The Betrayal of the American Right, the left used the same tactics against those who wanted to stay out of World War II as the Trotskyite neocons do today. They called non-interventionists fascists, just the way they do today: “Still worse was the attitude of these new interventionists toward those erstwhile friends and allies who continued to persist in their old beliefs; these latter were now castigated and denounced day in and day out, with extreme bitterness and venom, as ‘reactionaries,’ ‘fascists,’ ‘anti-Semites,’ and ‘followers of the Goebbels line.’ Joining with great enthusiasm in this smear campaign was the Communist Party and its allies, from the ‘collective security’ campaign of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and again after the Nazi attack on Russia on June 22, 1941. . . The opponents of war were not only being shut out from liberal journals and organizations but from much of the mass media as well. As the Roosevelt administration moved inexorably toward war, much of the Establishment that had been repelled by the leftwing rhetoric of the New Deal eagerly made its peace with the government, and swiftly moved into positions of power. In Roosevelt’s own famous phrase, ‘Dr. New Deal’ had been replaced by ‘Dr. Win the War,’ and, as the armaments orders poured in, the conservative elements of Big Business were back in the fold: in particular, the Wall Street and Eastern Establishment, the bankers and industrialists, the Morgan interests, the Ivy League Entente, all happily returned to the good old days of World War I and the battle of the British Empire against Germany.”

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