John
Griffey of
Texas takes issue, November 30, 2003, with some of Mr
Irving’s judgments heard in a talk in Alvin, Texas.
Mr
Irving talks: a Texan critique
DO you recall the beer drinking beard to your left in
Alvin, Texas this past Saturday evening? I’m he. I teach government at Houston Community College. It’s a humble job that allows leisurely reading.
Several of your judgments astonished me.
You admire Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Franklin
Roosevelt of Michael Beschloss‘s The
Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman & the Conquest of
Germany, was not a great man. Although Beschloss is too astute an academic politician directly to denounce the still-popular Roosevelt, he proves that Roosevelt’s political leadership was ignorant, bigoted, and very weak. (As a man he was cold and faithless.)
A moral Allied policy would have demanded of Germany the arrest of the top hundred-or-so German war criminals, the removal of German forces from all occupied lands, and some compensation for Germany’s victims, especially
Russia and the Low Countries. Were this the Allied policy, the war would very likely have ended in a military coup d’etat against the Nazis, as early as 1943.
Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender” policy, adopted at
Casabalanca, yielded eighteen months of unnecessary war, millions of unnecessary deaths, devastation and ruin for
Europe.
The evil Morgenthau Plan, which Roosevelt adopted in
September 1944, stiffened German resistance, and caused much suffering and thousands of needless deaths, both during and after the war. Roosevelt was pathetically naive about Soviet intentions, and so immensely strengthened the Soviet Union, setting up forty-two years of very risky and expensive Cold War.
One consequence, little noted, of the Cold War was the spread of ruinous socialistic and anti-white thought all over the world. Without going into any detail, I judge that Roosevelt’s domestic policy was just as disastrous as his foreign policy. Please think again about Mr.
Roosevelt.
You’re correct that the current Bush War is folly and is the product of the usual relentless Jewish lobbying, but let’s not let the Arabs off too easily, or think that
9-11 was justified in any way.
The Arabs have only themselves to blame for their own social, political, economic, and military weakness. We
Americans are only their scape goat. (The same truth holds for most of the anti-American world.) Israel whipped the Arabs thrice, in 1948, 1956, and 1967, without any direct direct military support from the
American government.
Absent the support Israel began to receive from the U.S. government in 1973, Israel would probably have been more, not less rough in its handling of its pugnacious Arab neighbors.
The United States has benefited the Arabs immensely, especially through the development of the petroleum resources of the Persian Gulf region. The United States admits and educates thousands of largely ungrateful Arab immigrants. We could and should do more to pressure
Israel to make a magnanimous peace; the fact that we don’t hardly justified 9-11. American policy is unfair to the Palestinians, but we are not the principal cause of
Palestinian or Arab suffering.
Arab (and Moslem) hatred for the USA is all out of proportion to any real offense.
You said that you find that the political climate in the
USA frightening, but you are able to speak here without fear of arrest for your ideas. The same is not true in
Great Britain or in Europe. Here, opposition to the war in Iraq is still lively.
The voters will have their say on Shrub, as we in Texas call George W Bush Jr., in November 2004.
The prospect in Europe and Great Britain is far more frightening.
Europe has no true political liberty, and suffers a despotic socialist political elite which is determined to concentrate power in a non-democratric Euro Council.
Meanwhile, Europe’s masters have imposed on Europe’s debauched and demoralized people policies of cultural and racial suicide.
The elite won’t even acknowledge in the Euro
Constitution the historical role of Christianity in making Europe. The death of Europe is far more frightening than Shrub and his team of flaks, who are temporarily misdirecting American foreign policy.