‘The Good War’ taken apart

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V

Taking opposing sides gentlemen John Zmirak and Eunomia’s Daniel Larison (and Richard Spencer in Part IV) at Taki take on one of my favourite subjects, World War II revisionism (and its preamble, WWI revisionism) or as Larison and I agree (with LRC, which has an article today on the subject) John Flynn was right

...my [Zmirak’s] own reasons for celebrating the utter and complete extirpation of the satanic National Socialist regime, and the presence of U.S. forces to prevent an equally evil Stalin from swallowing the Mother Continent, were not those that motivated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I’m not a Roosevelt biographer, or even an admirer. His own bias toward mild socialism no doubt made him found the Soviet system less repulsive than the Nazi. (His vice president, after all was Henry Wallace, not Joseph Kennedy.)

Fr. [Charles] Coughlin told [Farley] Clinton that the Vatican order which scaled back his activities had nothing to do with Roosevelt. Cardinal Pacelli had brought this agenda with him from Rome, and wanted Coughlin off the air at the urgent request of Germany’s [Roman] Catholic bishops — who’d observed first hand the barbarism that had been unleashed in their country. (It was only the intervention of bishops such as Cardinal Clemens von Galen which brought a temporary halt to the mass murder of handicapped children.)

His condemnations of Hitler’s ideology were sterner and more explicit than even Allied propaganda broadcasts. Pius XII assisted the conspirators (many of them devout Lutherans) attempting to assassinate Adolph Hitler, even passing messages between them and an uninterested British intelligence.

Germany and Austria-Hungary were powerhouses culturally and scientifically; I think destroying them was simply eliminating competition to Anglo/US interest.

Of course, as the war wound down, Stalin’s propaganda machine did its best to spread the outrageous lie that Pius XII had been Hitler’s pope. This lie was popularized by a German Communist named Rolf Hockhuth.

A commenter with the unvarnished truth of how the American élite thought and thus why they supported the British before WWII:

...why we buried the hatchet with the British, our traditional enemy since the Revolution not long after they finished crushing the Boers over gold and diamonds.

It suited the United States to have a declining, non-threatening “free trade” British Empire ruling the world. In the nineteenth century, at least until 1898, we had a similar view of decrepit Spain. The British kept the sea lanes and markets of the world open to American business. They took up the “white man’s burden” of policing the natives in places like India, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia; the Antipodes they colonized with their own sons. They kept the Russians in check in Central Asia, the Chinese addicted to heroin and “open,” and swaggering Prussian upstarts on the Continent in line. Basically, the British were doing all the hard work, and American industry, which was a free rider, had a lot to lose (a gigantic subsidy) by having the likes of Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo “revising” the liberal international system which was the status quo in those days, especially when domestic markets for American production were becoming saturated and new outlets would soon be needed. There was also that thorny problem of what to do about all those millions of angry, unemployed people mired in the Great Depression which had taken a fresh turn for the worse in 1937.

Irish and German Catholics were not all that interested in suiting up to get shot at for England (they wanted peace and employment).

George Washington was right. Americans have no business dying in Europe’s stupid wars.

Germany, Italy, Hungary, Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria were hardly ever in a position to be threat to us — none had a blue-water navy.

The ONLY winners of World War II were Stalin and Communism, and a triumphant Left in the West that has been busy ever since imposing its paradigm across Europe and the United States.

Some of which is now called (neo-) ‘conservative’.

...while you attach some sort of Crusader ‘mother land’ ideology to it, people like you would have been perfectly OK to sign up for the Commonwealth forces if you felt that strongly about it. No sir, I am afraid they (Taft and Lucky Lindy) were right.

My late rector was a teen-aged fire-watcher atop the dome of St Paul’s during the Blitz and later a Royal Navy rating; I’ve also known (among many Russian refugees who fled after WWII) two Ukrainians who wore German grey to try and drive Stalin out of their homeland.