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In light of President Bushs recent trip to Russia to celebrate victory over Germany in World War II, or the Great Patriotic War as the Soviets called it, it is useful to ask: why do historians, pundits, journalists, politicians the world over, and even Hollywood, celebrate World War II as the last Good War in American history?
How does that conflict distinguish itself from Korea and Vietnam, wherein we faced anti-war opposition both at home and abroad? Why do we currently face such vicious resistance to the Global War on Terror from many of these same sources?
The disunity of our war effort today seems inexplicable given the unity that existed during World War II, but the similarities between the two are striking.
In both wars, we joined with global allies to fight fascistic fanatics who committed mass genocide. In both cases, we were attacked by surprise, completely without warning, in a strike that killed thousands. In fact, 9-11 can be seen as the more barbaric, since the attackers chose defenseless civilian targets. In both cases, Western civilization itself was targeted.
The stock answer is that during WW II we were all united in a common cause: to counter an imminent threat from a barbaric enemy and defeat the only genuine Axis of Evil that ever existed.
The truth is, as always, a little messier. For most of the period prior to our entry into World War II, there was a strongly expressed public sentiment against the war. We had declared ourselves a neutral country and a policy of isolationism was advocated among both the Right and Left.
One of the loudest of these voices came from the America First Committee (AFC), and its prominent spokesman, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. Despite accusations to the contrary, the AFC was a genuinely patriotic organization at its inception and was guided by the following principles:
1. The United States must build an impregnable defense for America;
2. No foreign powers, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America;
3. American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European war;
4. "Aid short of war" weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad [1].
A Yale University student named R. Douglas Stewart, who feared the consequences of another catastrophic war like World War I, first organized the AFC in 1940 with the assistance of other students, including Gerald R. Ford (yes, later to become President Ford) and Potter Stewart (later to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court). It quickly gained supporters on Capitol Hill and the financial backing of Sears & Roebuck Chairman, General Robert E. Wood. Before it was dissolved little more than one year later, the AFC had 450 local chapters and over 800,000 members. [2]
However, despite its charter specifically excluding Nazis, Fascists, Communists, or members of other groups that place the interests of any other nation above those of our own, AFC was unable to completely prevent such groups from infiltrating it. Charles Lindbergs inflammatory speeches didnt help, nor did certain other endorsements, such as a 1941 German Radio broadcast, which called AFC truly American and truly patriotic. [3] However it was given the Nazi sympathizer brand when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The group disbanded four days later, claiming in its final statement: The time for military action is here.
Meanwhile, the Left couldnt make up its mind. Consider the following passage from the Encyclopedia of the American Left:
Under the leadership of Communist and Socialist undergraduates, the campus activists of the 1930s built the first mass student protest movement in American history. During its peak years, from spring 1936 to spring 1939, the movement mobilized at least 500,000 collegians (about half of the American student body, emphasis mine) in annual one-hour strikes against war. The movement also organized students on behalf of an extensive reform agenda, which included federal aid to education, government job programs for youth, abolition of the compulsory Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), academic freedom, racial equality, and collective bargaining rights. [4]
Sound familiar? During this period, the communist Left was also finding its way into the news media, Hollywood and government in what is sometimes considered its most influential period in U.S. history. [5] Out of a need to hide their overt links to the Soviet Comintern, communist movements around the world stopped publicly identifying themselves, instead adopting Popular Front labels. Communists began referring to themselves simply as liberals in a hurry. [6]
However, the Left was forced to rethink its anti-war stance. Communist student organizations were horrified, for example, when the Neutrality laws they had supported in the early 1930s prevented U.S. aid from going to Spanish Republicans (primarily Stalin-supported communists) fighting Francos fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. [7]
In fact, about 2,800 American communists and fellow travelers abandoned the pacifist role altogether to fight alongside Spanish communists as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. [8] Their contribution to the Republican cause was even lionized by the famous American novelist and fellow traveler, Ernest Hemingway who said of them: No man ever entered the earth more honorably than those who died in Spain. [9]
Then came the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which pushed the American communists firmly back on the anti-war track and squarely behind the America Firsters. Their renewed commitment to pacifism didnt last long however. They flipped again on June 22, 1941the day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
With each new flip-flop, the American Communist Party lost more of its naïve, idealistic members and sympathizers, for it became painfully obvious that the Party had no principled attachment to any concepts, philosophies or ideals, only loyalty to the Soviet Union.
After Pearl Harbor, the entire country got behind the war effort, and the time is heralded as one of the most unifying periods in our history. But for the Left, support for the war had nothing to do whatever with support for the United States. The American Left got behind the war effort solely because they correctly saw Hitlers Germany as a clear and present danger to the Soviet Union specifically and the world communist movement in general. Hitlers invasion of the Soviet Union was a call to arms for communists everywhere.
In short, the celebrated unity of the war years was actually the result of a marriage of convenience between the virulently anti-American, American communist party and its unwitting partner, the rest of America. Following the war, Leftists quickly donned the anti-war mantle again
