When President Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack and kill the Quds Force commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, near Baghdad airport, he demonstrated as graphically as possible what non-intervention means. Trump has yet to find the words to fully and easily explain the concept to the citizenry. He should read and rhetorically exploit the potent ideas located in the 1939-1941 speeches of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh. (1) The components of non-intervention are presented there by Lindbergh perhaps better than by anyone else in republic’s history, save by the Founders in their era, and during the long congressional career of Virginia’s splendid non-interventionist John Randolph of Roanoke.
In 1919, U.S. Senators William E. Borah (R-Idaho) and Robert M. LaFollette (R-Wisconsin) successfully led a small bipartisan group of senators that preserved the republic by blocking U.S. ratification of and adherence to the League of Nations and the Versailles Treaty. The senators thereby halted for most of the next two decades the continuation of the interventionist foreign policy born of Woodrow Wilson’s delusional crusade for democracy and world government.
But then along came the republic’s master deceiver, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, in the late 1930s and in 1940, casually reneged on his solemn and oft-given pledge to American parents: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” (2) Thereafter, FDR authored a long series of provocations that he and his advisers knew would leave Japan with no choice but war. This provocation campaign also was carried out in the Atlantic, where Roosevelt and his gang eventually wore out the Fueher’s willingness to ignore Roosevelt’s much-denied but always blatantly anti-German policy of diverting badly needed arms from the U.S. military, and ordering the neutral republic to arm the British military and protect Britain’s supply convoys. “Have you ever stopped to think,” Lindbergh intended to asked listeners to a speech set for delivery on 12 December 1941,” how ridiculous it is that this democratic nation has twice, within a generation, been carried to war by presidents who were elected because they promised peace.”(3) (NB: Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor caused Lindbergh to cancel the speech. He then began a war-long personal effort to aid the republic along the path to victory. He voluntarily served as a human guinea-pig to test and improve masks for the use of air-crews flying at high-altitudes, and, later in the war, flew 50 combat missions in the South Pacific.)
The U.S. bipartisan governing elite –under the direction of Roosevelt, his conniving, acid-tongued Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and the foreign intervention they welcomed from Churchill and Britain’s intelligence services — slandered Lindbergh and ultimately ruined his reputation, thereby almost entirely blotting out the history of his pivotal political role in trying to preserve the American republic.
Why was Colonel Lindbergh the top target of these war-wanters, or, as he called them, the “war agitators”? Simply because he had the nerve and grit to tell the absolute truth as he and most Americans saw it; namely, that Roosevelt and most of the East Coast’s governing elite, Jewish-Americans and their media and political organizations, and the British government were pushing to involve the United States in a war that much of the U.S. citizenry wanted no part of. Lindbergh’s words were true in 1939-41, and they are more clearly true today.
Speaking of today, all three of the groups Lindbergh called out — and especially Jewish-Americans — are still “war agitators”, although the war they currently are waging is a covert and overt war that is meant to destroy the legitimately elected Trump administration, as well as the American republic and its Constitution.
Since the vicious and dastardly destruction of Lindbergh’s reputation, the U.S. governing elite, including presidents, generals, admirals, senators, congressmen, professors, clerics, mainstream journalists, major Jewish-American leaders and their organizations, and senior civil servants, has consistently hurled hatred at their fellow citizens, clothing it in such epithets as “isolationist” and/or “non-interventionist”. This hatred is aimed at any and every American citizen who (a) respects the Founders’ foreign-policy guidance; (b) accepts, as did the Founders, the truism that humans are unalterably hard-wired for war; (c) opposes the idea that the United States must participate in other peoples’ wars that have no impact on genuine U.S. interests; (d) dismisses the insane contention that America must join wars waged by other states in the name of spreading war-causing abstract ideas, such as democracy, women’s rights, the glories of sexual deviance and fluid genders, secularism, diversity, multiculturalism, etc.; and (e) believes that the republic’s security and survival is dependent on adhering as closely as possible to the concept embodied in the two words “America First”.
Trump’s marvelous, Americans-protecting attack on Suliemani is a perfect example of the role that military force always must play in a forthright non-interventionist foreign policy. Our republic can never be neutral and non-interventionist unless it is well-armed and the world knows American leaders are ready to unilaterally use it — with catastrophic impact — against anyone unwise enough to attack us. Suliemani commanded forces that have killed or wounded many hundreds of Americans, and he was on his way from the Baghdad Airport to do more damage to Americans when he was wonderfully shredded and presumably splattered by a Hell-fire missile’s shrapnel.
Thus, President Trump ordered the unilateral application of U.S. military force in the only cause it should ever be applied; namely, when Americans or the republic’s interests are imminently threatened or attacked by foreign foes. If Iran responds militarily to Suliemani’s long overdue demise, Trump must drop any pretense of proportionality, which is a murderous, always war-prolonging-and-expanding doctrine that war-wanters, arms-makers, and prating clerics adore, and which has kept America at war with Iran since 1979, and in Afghanistan and Iraq for 18 and 16 years, respectively. The only mercies in war, after all, are a speedy conclusion and a clear and irrefutable victory.
An Iranian military attack, must prompt President Trump to unleash U.S. military power to destroy Iran’s oil-production facilities, or its navy, or its merchant fleet, or, better yet, all three. No U.S. troops on the ground, no occupation forces led by an imperial pro consul, no U.S. demands for changes in Iran’s government or its political and social systems, and no U.S.-taxpayer-funded reconstruction assistance. Simply let the Iranians lick their wounds, work out their post-catastrophe future, and reflect on the fact that, hereafter, it would be terribly unwise to again fuck with the Americans.(4)
It is important to add, that, in addition to perpetually accusing non-interventionists (American Firsters) of anti-Semitism and isolation, the internationalists, now globalists, hate non-elite Americans and routinely claim that non-interventionists are cowards, pacifists, and odorous rubes who are unable to understand that “the world has changed”. The truth, of course, is that none of this is true, but those who claim it to be fact command the political parties, the mainstream media, including FOX, the general officer corps (which always demands as many wars as possible), and innumerable Protestant and Catholic pulpits.
Thankfully, Trump’s action against Suliemani starts to expose the fact that the foregoing accusations are lies which have been, since at least 1939, ingrained in the minds of generations of Americans by the media and the schools. The truth is that there are endless numbers of non-interventionist Americans who will fight to the death to defend genuine U.S. national interests, resist tyranny in their own country, save endangered U.S. citizens, and annihilate attackers of the republic — precisely the forms of warfare that are undeniably intrinsic to the concept of America First and the Founders’ guidance.
There is never an adequate justification for the republic to enter other peoples’ wars; a region-wide Sunni-Shia war, for example, would be no skin off the republic’ nose. There also is never a justifiable role for the U.S. military in any foreign war fought for spreading democracy, for any other abstraction, or for the favorite foreign nation of any American clique of politicians, clerics, or citizens.
For now, let us pray that the Iraqi parliament responds to the killing of Suliemani by ordering the United States military to leave Iraq, thereby ending the governing elite’s worst post-1945 foreign policy decision. Now that would be one tremendous victory for the republic-protecting doctrine of non-intervention.
Endnotes:
–1.) Colonel Lindbergh’s America First speeches can be found at the fine website, http://www.charleslindbergh.com/
–2.) Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Speech at Boston, 30 October 1940.” See, Public Papers of Franklin Roosevelt, Vol. 9, p. 261
–3.) Charles A. Lindbergh, “What Do We Mean by Democracy and Freedom?,” (Undelivered Speech intended for an America First rally at Boston on 12 December 1941). See, http://www.charleslindbergh.com/pdf/dec121941.pdf
–4.) This idea was broached this weekend by the polymath Michael Lebron (AKA: Lionel) on his YouTube channel. His idea is to make a hashtag go viral that consists of the letters DWFU, meaning “Don’t Fuck With Us”. See, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35pKwDCQenA
