{"id":432,"date":"2022-02-23T22:14:23","date_gmt":"2022-02-24T03:14:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/?p=432"},"modified":"2022-02-23T23:03:31","modified_gmt":"2022-02-24T04:03:31","slug":"i-stick-my-neck-out-for-nobody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/i-stick-my-neck-out-for-nobody\/","title":{"rendered":"I STICK MY NECK OUT FOR NOBODY"},"content":{"rendered":"

The West’s—and the Right’s—shame<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

World War II ended less than two decades before I was born, yet I’ve always felt that it belonged to much more distant age—set off from modern existence by its different ways of thinking and doing, different patterns of speech and dress, grander scale of horrors and heroism, even the monochrome of its newsreels. The bad things, especially, seemed mostly unrepeatable in the world where I grew up.<\/p>\n

American isolationism is a good example. Conservative Americans, for the longest time, didn’t want to help Britain, or Western Europe, with their struggles against Hitler and Mussolini. The USA had helped out Britain and France in 1917-18, and felt that they shouldn’t have to do anything like that again. Let Europeans sort out their own problems, they said.<\/p>\n

That was part<\/em> of their public reasoning, anyway. Another part of it seemed much more instinctive and tribal, much more driven by the false logic of “the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend”—their enemy being FDR, of course, their new friends being the Axis dictators.<\/p>\n

It might seem facile to criticize the American isolationists of 1939-41 from our postwar perspective, but really they should have known better just from the information available at the time. In any case, it’s always striking now to read and hear the things they said. Here, for example, is aviator Charles Lindbergh, on September 11, 1941 (Europe conquered, Britain under siege, Wehrmacht nearing Moscow etc.), blaming the British, Roosevelt, and “the Jewish,” for pushing America towards war:<\/p>\n