Tag: fdr

Pearl Harbor and the Engineers of War

What gets me are the lies. Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” – Iran’s (nonexistent) nuclear weapons program – the Vietnamese “attack” in the Gulf of Tonkin – Germans bayoneting Belgium babies – the sinking of the USS Maine: over the long and bloody history of US imperialism, these are just a few of the fabrications US policymakers have seized on to justify Washington’s aggression. It’s quite a record, isn’t it? Not only that, but there’s been little if any acknowledgment by the American political elites that they’ve ever lied about anything: it’s all been thrown down the Memory Hole, along with whatever sense of shame these people ever had.

Indeed, if there is an award for sheer shamelessness then surely it must go to the court historians who preserve the myth of Pearl Harbor, insisting that the Japanese launched a “sneak attack” on the US fleet. The official version of the narrative is that the Americans, dewy-eyed innocents all, were simply minding their own business, not bothering anybody and certainly not aggressing against the predatory Japanese, who were fighting harmless “agrarian reformers” led by Mao Tse-Tung in China. Suddenly, totally without provocation, and out of the clear blue the Japs – to use the term routinely employed by the Roosevelt administration and its media minions at the time – crossed thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean to commit murder and mayhem for no good reason other than their own inherent evil.

What’s amazing is that even though this nonsense has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked over the years by historians concerned with discovering the truth – as opposed to getting tenure at some Ivy League university – the Big Lie is still not only believed by the hoi polloi but also stubbornly upheld by the “intellectuals.” As to whether they actually believe it or not, that’s largely irrelevant as far as they’re concerned. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the archetypal pointy-headed liberal intellectual – and idolator of FDR – put it: “If he [the President] was going to induce the people to move at all, he had no choice but to trick them.”

What do “the people” know? Only what our elites deign to tell them – and this was especially true in the run up to World War II. We didn’t have the Internet back then, nor did we have a group of people dedicated to defending truth-tellers against the government and its journalistic camarilla – the liberal-leftie ACLU wasn’t interested in defending “isolationists” against their hero FDR. Nor did they challenge the internment of Japanese-Americans. If a Snowden type had dared to come out and debunk the government’s lies the ACLU would’ve been in the front row of the hanging party.

So we didn’t learn the truth about Pearl Harbor until many years later. The facts are these: the Americans had broken the Japanese diplomatic and military codes and knew all about Tokyo’s war plans. As the Japanese made their way across the Pacific the Americans tracked their every move: they knew the timing and the tactics of the Japanese attack, and yet President Franklin Roosevelt did nothing – he let the fleet sit there, a sitting duck.

Then there is the story of Takeo Yoshikawa, the 27-year-old spy sent by the Japanese to scout out Pearl Harbor. He was discovered almost immediately after he arrived in Hawaii: he was, after all, very suspicious to begin with. The Japanese never sent youngsters abroad on diplomatic missions, and yet here was Yoshikawa – going under the name Morimura – being assigned as an attaché at the Japanese consulate in Honolulu. So they followed him around and intercepted every one of his messages to Tokyo: they knew exactly what he was there for and what he was up to.

Previous efforts by the Japanese government to reach an agreement with Washington had failed due to American intransigence. When Japan’s Prince Konoye offered to travel to Washington on a secret mission to prevent the conflict, FDR refused – and leaked the news to the pro-British pro-war Herald Tribune. Konoye’s government fell shortly afterward due in part to the leak. With the pro-war faction in Tokyo in charge, FDR’s longstanding efforts to get us into the war were finally bearing fruit.

All this is known: indeed, pro-Roosevelt historians make a major point of telling us how necessary it was for FDR to lie us into war – for our own good, and the good of the world, of course. After all, what do we plebeians know about running the world. Best to leave such weighty matters to our betters.

Nothing has really changed since Pearl Harbor: our officials are still lying, our “historians” are covering up the lies, and the whole rotten edifice is sitting on a foundation of lies, past and present.

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An Antidote to the FDR Cult

If there were any doubts that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of the greatest scoundrels of American political history, David Beito‘s new biography should settle the issue. Beito—whose previous book, The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, did yeoman’s work exposing Roosevelt’s depredations against civil liberties—has now written FDR: A New Political Life, and it should help FDR get the villainous reputation he deserves.

Treachery was the consistent theme of Roosevelt’s political life. During his 1932 presidential campaign, FDR signaled that he would not take the United States currency off the gold standard, but he wasted no time in betraying that pledge when he took office. On April 5, 1933, Roosevelt commanded all citizens to surrender their gold to the government. No citizen was permitted to own more than $100 in gold coins, except for rare coins with special value for collectors. Anyone who possessed more than 5 gold Double Eagle coins faced 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. If you distrusted the government and sought to retain your gold, Roosevelt condemned you as a “hoarder.” But after the confiscation, FDR announced that gold would be henceforth valued at $35 an ounce, not $20 an ounce—thereby providing a windfall for the government.

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FDR’s “Four Policemen”: The Globalist Blueprint for Endless War and American Subjugation

It is time to expose the truth about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s so-called Four Policemen plan — a sinister scheme concocted by the globalist cabal surrounding the 32nd president to permanently shackle the United States to a role of international enforcer in a world government order. Far from being a noble vision for peace, FDR’s “Four Policemen” was the original blueprint for what would become the United Nations — an unelected, unaccountable body of internationalists dedicated not to liberty, but to global control.

In the midst of the Second World War, even before the guns fell silent, Roosevelt and his cadre of globalist advisors — including Soviet sympathizers such as Alger Hiss — were laying the foundation for a postwar “New World Order.” The heart of this plan was what FDR euphemistically called the “Four Policemen”: the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. These four powers, according to Roosevelt, would act as the guardians of peace, responsible for policing the globe and suppressing any acts of aggression through military might.

Let that sink in: Roosevelt — hailed by modern progressives as a champion of democracy — openly proposed that a small clique of global superpowers should wield exclusive authority to intervene in the affairs of nations, impose sanctions, deploy military force, and determine which conflicts were worthy of attention. Sovereignty? An outdated relic. Consent of the governed? Irrelevant. In FDR’s globalist gospel, only the self-anointed “policemen” mattered.

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FDR’s Worst Perversion of Freedom: The “Four Freedoms” Speech

Franklin Roosevelt did more than any other modern president to corrupt Americans’ understanding of freedom. Last week was the 75th anniversary of his 1944 speech calling for a second Bill of Rights to guarantee economic freedom to Americans. Nation magazine whooped up the anniversary, proclaiming that Democrats now have a “unique—and likely fleeting—opportunity to deliver where FDR fell short” with vast new government programs.

The 1944 speech, given as the tide in World War Two was finally turning, was a followup of his 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech which exploited Americans’ rising apprehensions tosee far more power for the government. Roosevelt promised citizens freedom of speech and freedom of worship and then, as if he was merely enumerating other self-evident rights, declared: “The third [freedom] is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world.” Proclaiming a goal of freedom from fear meant that government should fill the role in daily life previously filled by God and religion. Politicians are the biggest fearmongers, and “freedom from fear” would justify seizing new power in response to every bogus federal alarm.

FDR’s list was clearly intended as a “replacement set” of freedoms, since otherwise there would have been no reason to mention freedom of speech and worship, already guaranteed by the First Amendment. The “four freedoms” offered citizens no security from the State, since it completely ignored the rights guaranteed in the original Bill of Rights that restricted government power, including the Second Amendment (to keep and bear firearms), the Fourth Amendment (freedom from unreasonable search and seizure), the Fifth Amendment (due process, property rights, the right against self-incrimination), the Sixth Amendment (the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury), and the Eighth Amendment (protection against excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments).

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FDR’s Other ‘Day of Infamy’: When the US Government Seized All Citizens’ Gold

December 7, 1941 will forever be remembered as, in the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “a date that will live in infamy.” Another infamous date is April 5, 1933—the day that FDR ordered the seizure of the private gold holdings of the American people. By attacking innocent citizens, he bombed the country’s gold standard just as surely as Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

On this 90th anniversary of the seizure, it behooves us to recall the details of it, for multiple reasons: It ranks as one of the most notorious abuses of power in a decade when there were almost too many to count. It’s an example of bad policy imposed on the guiltless by the government that created the conditions it used to justify it. And the very fact of compliance, however minimal, is a scary testimony to how fragile freedom is in the middle of a crisis.

Suddenly on April 5, 1933, FDR told Americans—in the form of Executive Order 6102—that they had less than a month to hand over their gold coins, bullion and gold certificates or face up to ten years in prison or a fine of $10,000, or both. After May 1, private ownership and possession of these things would be as illegal as Demon Rum. After Prohibition was repealed later the same year, the sober man with gold in his pocket was the criminal while the staggering drunk was no more than a nuisance.

Hoarding gold was preventing recovery from the Great Depression, FDR declared. Government (which caused the Depression in the first place) had no choice, if you can follow the logic, but to seize the gold and do the hoarding itself. But of course, the big difference was this: In the hands of the government, huge new gold supplies could be used by the Federal Reserve as the basis for expanding the paper money supply. The President who had promised a 25 percent reduction in federal spending during his 1932 campaign, could now double spending in his first term.

What evidence suggested Americans were “hoarding” gold? Roosevelt pointed to a run on banks that immediately preceded his April 5 seizure decree. Indeed, people were showing up at tellers’ windows with paper dollars demanding the gold that the paper notes promised. But Roosevelt had prompted the bank run himself!

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80 Years After Pearl Harbor, We Now Know the Govt Knew the Attack Was Coming

On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese planes, launched from aircraft carriers, attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking or heavily damaging 18 ships (including eight battleships), destroying 188 planes, and leaving over 2,000 servicemen killed.

The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced this “day of infamy” before Congress, from whom he secured an avid declaration of war.

Up until then, however, Americans had overwhelmingly opposed involvement in World War II. They had been thoroughly disillusioned by the First World War:

  • although they had been told they would be fighting for “democracy” in that previous war, taxpayers learned from the postwar Graham Committee of Congress that they’d been defrauded out of some $6 billion in armaments that were never manufactured or delivered1;
  • atrocity tales about German soldiers (such as cutting the hands off thousands of Belgian children) had turned out to be fabrications;
  • the sinking of the Lusitania – the central provocation that ultimately led to the U.S. declaration of war – had been committed by Germany not to kill women and children (as propaganda claimed), but to prevent tens of tons of war munitions from reaching the European front. (Click here for a debunking of the Lusitania myth.)

When the Maine sank, the proactive Assistant Secretary of the Navy had been Teddy Roosevelt. After the 1898 Spanish-American War he became governor of New York, and by 1901 was President of the United States. When the Lusitania sank, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy was his distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt – who likewise went on to become governor of New York and then President.

Just as coincident: during the Lusitania affair, the head of the British Admiralty was yet another cousin of Franklin D. – Winston Churchill. And in a chilling déjà vu, as Pearl Harbor approached, these two men were now heads of their respective states.

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