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| Two women sit on a park bench amid the ruins of Cologne, 1945. |
Some 117,000 Americans died in Europe during World War I serving in our armed forces. Another 250,000 died serving in Europe during World War II. Plus hundreds of thousands more wounded, very many quite severely. And what did we ordinary Americans benefit from all those deaths? Had we stayed out of those wars, remained strictly neutral, not gone abroad seeking monsters to slay, as John Quincy Adams said on July 4, 1821, how would we have been worse off? Wouldn't having all those hundreds of thousands of our men alive, living full lives, being productive and inventive, having children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren (essentially all of them white, by the way) been better for us?
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| German immigrants being expelled during WWI for being Germans. |
Adams, in his speech, termed Europe "Aceldama." Aceldama is the field Judas bought with the
money, his 30 pieces of silver, he was paid for betraying Christ. It literally means "the field
of blood"; that is, a field bought with blood money. See Acts 1:19.
That's a helluva way to describe Europe, ain't it? It's right up there
with dismissing Europeans as "the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells," as Adams also does. Two centuries ago, our noble statesmen saw Europe for what it was and called it out, urging we Americans to keep clear of it. Why has that changed? Who was to blame?
Here is Robinson Jeffers' poem "[President] Wilson in Hell." Written in 1942, it was excised from The Double Axe by Random House's Bennett Cerf.
Roosevelt died and met Wilson; who said “I
blundered into it
Through honest error, and conscience cut me so deep that
I died
In the vain effort to prevent future wars. But you
Blew on the coal-bed, and when it kindled you deliberately
Sabotaged every fire-wall that even the men who denied
My hope had built. You have too much murder on your
hands. I will not
Speak of the lies and connivings. I cannot understand the
Mercy
That permits us to meet in the same heaven.—Or is this
my hell?”
Another suppressed Jeffers poem is “So Many Blood-Lakes” written a few days after Germany surrendered in 1945:
We have now won two world-wars, neither of
which concerned us, we were slipped in.
We have leveled the powers
Of Europe, that were the powers of the world, into rubble
and dependence. We have won two wars and a
third is coming…
—As for me: laugh at me. I agree with you. it is a foolish
business to see the future and screech at it.
One should watch and not speak. And patriotism has run
the world through so many blood-lakes: and we
always fall in.
The top photo shows an episode in 1945 during World War Two in Stendal, in northern Saxony-Anhal, Germany, at the corner of Sperlingsberg Street. The bottom photo is of the same intersection, taken last year. Why did an American have to die fighting for this inconsequential intersection thousands of miles away from his home? Why were Americans dying fighting in another stupid European war? Europeans are fighting each other today, killing each other at a clip of a thousand a week, despite the fact they are facing demographic collapse. Europeans have always fought each other and they will never stop fighting each other. They're crazy. What profit it us to jump in and die with them?
Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives on Foreign Policy, July 4, 1821.
John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State
"AND NOW, FRIENDS AND COUNTRYMEN, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation [wobbling] and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?
Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.
She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.
She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force....
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....America's glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice."
