UNLIKE THE AXIS blueprints for a New World Order, a sterile prisonhouse inhabited by robotlike heroes and faceless subject races, the Atlantic System is old, rational, and pragmatic. Growing organically out of strategic and political realities in a congenially free climate, its roots run deep and strong in the American tradition.
It was Henry Adams, endlessly seeking form and design in history, who first gave a name to the community of interest binding the self-governing peoples around the Atlantic basin. That was as recently as 1906. But back of Adams stood the great nineteenth-century forefathers of the Atlantic system.
In the Americas they were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe as well as that reluctant progenitor, John Quincy Adams, and the Venezuelan liberator Simon Bolivar, who brought independence to one-quarter of South America.
George Canning, the English Foreign Secretary who professed himself alternately fascinated and repelled by the "hard features of trans-Atlantic democracy," was likewise a forefather, although his parenthood had a cynical cast.
To all these wise gentlemen it was apparent -- as it is again today -- that the Atlantic world, pre-eminently the legatee of the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had a set of political institutions and interests essentially in conflict with those of Central and Eastern Europe.
The forefathers likewise were aware, as we are today, that the peaceful development of the Atlantic world depended upon sea power. Then the shield of the Americas was British sea power. Today it is the concert of Anglo-American power, an English-speaking entente that has grown to maturity within the last half-century.
-- from the Foreword to The Atlantic System, written by Forrest Davis and published late in the year of 1941 ( Reynal & Hitchcock ~ New York ).
NOTE: legatee = one to whom a legacy is bequeathed or a devise is given;
NOTE: devise = 1) the act of giving or disposing of real property by will, and 2) a will or clause of a will disposing of real property.
THE HISTORY OF THE PAST IS THE FUTURE OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER
"For the immediate future America's course is plainly charted. An all-out military partnership with Great Britain and her Allies is a minimum condition of our survival as a great, liberal Power. Should ignorance, indifference, or factionalism in this country contribute to an Axis victory," wrote Forrest Davis in 1941, "the United States -- the most advanced and powerful of nations -- will almost certainly be reduced to subordinate status, a position of tutelage in a world gripped by implacable reaction."
Davis was a writer and editor for the New York Daily News. His meticulously researched and detailed book, The Atlantic System: The Story of Anglo-American Control of the Seas, was finished in September of 1941 and published soon after by the same house that issued a blatantly pro-Soviet propaganda tome. That book was Walter Duranty's The Kremlin and the People ( Reynal and Hitchcock ), and it also hit the bookstores in late 1941.
In The Atlantic System, Davis combines academic thoroughness in research with a veteran journalist's felicity with wordsmithing. The result was predictably well-received by the pro-British social elite of New York and New York City, which included the scions of the major financial houses and the politically well-connected. This elite was curiously tolerant of the vicious intellectual disputes then on-going between pro-Stalinist American writers and editors, and the growing legions of disaffected socialists, fellow travellers and former communists. That made the years of 1940 and '41 a most extraordinary time for publishers, magazine and newspaper editors.
The Non-Aggression agreement struck between the National Socialist government of greater Germany and the Soviet Union -- shepherded by Stalin's most skilled operative, Molotov -- had thrown the Left in the United States into near-complete turmoil. The apologists for Soviet tyranny had been following the Communist Party line ( whether they were Bolsheviks or fellow travellers ), right up to the moment the Non-Aggression pact was announced. Suddenly all their sermonizing about how valuable the politics of anti-fascism and anti-Nazi activism were, crashed headlong into the brick wall of a defeated and divided and occupied Poland. By the spring of 1940 things on the "Soviet left" were a very pretty mess.
And then there was the founder and hero of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, cheering from exile in Mexico for this sudden collapse of the communist Left into turmoil. Cheering, at least, until a Stalinist operative buried an ice ax in his skull.
Born Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, Trotsy had survived Czarist prison camps and a wandering exile, which removed him from Russia during The Great War. In the summer of 1940 he was sixty-one years old, and enjoying his role as the thorn in Comrade Stalin's paw. A most prolific writer, Trotsy was influential in his second exile ( from Stalin's Soviet Union ), by association with the Socialist Workers Party of the United States. He was murdered on August 21st of that year.
With the radical left in disarray, the big political news of 1940 centered on the decision of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ignore the tradition established by George Washington and run for a third term as president. For many people west of the Alleghenies, Roosevelt was already a suspect character, being so closely identified with the New York "Plutocracy" and the financiers who lavished praise on writers like Forrest Davis.
Although Roosevelt's New Deal had been in place for many years, economic conditions were still entirely sluggish: people who had survived the "Dust Bowl" drought were still scratching out their livings from the midwestern farms and western ranches. The recession of 1937 had been almost as painful for many millions as were the darkest days of the Great Depression.
The political rebellion against Roosevelt had a most unlikely beginning, however. It brought together young men from wealthy and privileged families with working fellows and old-style populist political elders, and the cause was "isolationism."
Fearful of being dragged into yet another European war, brilliant young men like Kingman Brewster of Yale joined forces with "the hoi polloi."
The America First Committee was founded in July of 1940 to oppose American intervention in World War II. The committee soon built a considerable following, particularly in the Midwestern States. Some America Firsters were mostly anti-Wall Street in their ideology. Others, like the committee chairman, Gen. Robert E. Wood, head of Sears, Roebuck, were prominent businessmen who considered a strict neutrality to be the only way to keep America safe and prosperous.
Some also feared that organizing for war would give the federal government and their arch-enemy, President Roosevelt, even more power than the New Deal had already provided him. Among the 'elders,' were committee members who were old-line progressives, including Senators Gerald P. Nye and Burton K. Wheeler. These veteran politicians associated pressure for aid to Great Britain with the international financial interests that they believed had tricked the country into entering World War I.
Charles A. Lindbergh, America First's most noted spokesman, said flatly that U.S. intervention in Europe would be ill-starred. With the capitulation of France, and with Britain apparently close to defeat, a Nazi attack on the United States was not inconceivable. Lindbergh, the famous aviator and inventor, argued that the only way to save the country was to keep out of a hopeless battle in Europe, and to concentrate on defending the American way of life at home, in the States. The propaganda machine of the New York Plutocracy got its marching orders as soon as Roosevelt had won re-election.
"The isolationists offer Americans a dim and dreary world. In their hearts the appeasers ( not all isolationists are appeasers, but all appeasers are isolationists ) are indifferent to the question of who reorganizes the world", wrote Forrest Davis, "so long as their corner is left untouched. From Lindbergh, fatefully attracted to an alien primitivism, to such representatives of the negative tradition in American life as MacCracken the message is of defeat, despair, and submission.
"A complete specimen [of an isolationist] is at hand ... Henry Noble MacCracken, president of Vassar College. Dr. MacCracken spoke in Carnegie Hall, before a mass meeting of the America First Committee, an anti-war organization which seems intent on persuading the people that England, not Germany, is the enemy of this country.
"Owing to the necessity of minimizing the danger from [Nazi Germany], such speakers cannot stress the vicious dynamism of the conquerors of Europe. They are under no such inhibitions regarding England. So the president of Vassar warned his hearers against the evils of association with the British Empire. He intimated that that empire had not led a blameless existence. Ignoring the unmistakable implication in American national policy that England is fighting the war for the United States also, MacCracken hinted that the English were again striving to use America for their own purposes.
"He accomplished this innuendo by describing the Atlantic Declaration as the 'Churchill treaty' ...."
Davis, like many other propagandists laboring for the New York Plutocracy, used innuendo of his own. The common tactic was to insinuate that Charles "Lucky" Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer, when in reality the great aviator had toured Europe in the 1930s as a private citizen and a secret intelligence agent. Because he was Nordic in appearance ( being of Swedish origin ), Lindbergh was assumed to be "their boy," i.e. a Nazi hireling.
In truth, Lindbergh's social connections and his extraordinary popularity as a tireless promoter of commercial aviation were aggravations that Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not tolerate. Like many prominent men of business and academia in that time, Lindbergh was, indeed, suspicious of Jewish financial agents but at that time his service to Army intelligence was a well-guarded secret. It was Lindbergh who provided the key intelligence to the Army on the National Socialist military build up in aviation.
"Dr. MacCracken", wrote Davis in '41, "should know that many Americans are confident that Hitler would not need to land troops on American shores to subdue our country should England fall. The appeasers would invite him in. A good many of the appeasers know that also. It is too bad that Dr. MacCracken does not." Sixty-five years later we know that this was an insufferable slur on a great American patriot.
When war did come, Lindbergh teamed with Henry Ford, working on bomber production. He also served as a technical adviser and test pilot for United Aircraft ( now United Technologies ).
Early on in that war, he carried out high-altitude and lowered-body temperature experiments at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He also did wartime service as a high-altitude test pilot. Later, as a civilian adviser in the Pacific theatre, Lindbergh developed means to conserve fuel and increase the range of U.S. fighter planes, thus saving many lives.
Charles A. Lindbergh actually flew some fifty combat missions. After the end of the war he was a patron or godfather to Robert Goddard, the leading developer of rocketry in the United States. In the rocketry field he is well-remembered for believing in Goddard when others thought he was a peculiar and unreliable dreamer.
In 1954, Charles Lindbergh was re-commissioned in the Air Force Reserve ( he had been an Army Air Corps reservist ) and was appointed a brigadier general by President Dwight Eisenhower.
One hardly suspects that a leader of the caliber of Eisenhower, a German-American who despised the Nazi tyrants, would have so rewarded a true Nazi sympathizer. And if anyone would have known the truth, it would have been Ike. But the damage to Lindbergh was done by Davis and other propaganda artists working for the New York Plutocracy, and Lindbergh continues -- long after his death in 1974 -- to be the subject of attacks by neo-conservatives. Lindbergh was a brilliant and somewhat complicated man, and like many great leaders he had some unfortunate peccadilloes. But he was a great American.
It is one of the great peculiarities of modern American history that a blue-blood financial captain like Prescott S. Bush -- a member of a secretive fraternity known as Skull & Bones -- was actually punished for doing business with National Socialist Germany while a great patriot like Lindbergh was excoriated for not wanting to see American sons killed fighting for England. The awful truth is even more basic than that.
Charles August Lindbergh, father to "Lucky Lindy" was a member of the House of Representatives for ten years, from the sixth district of Minnesota. In his time at Washington he came to be one of the principal doubters, and then opponents, of the legislation which created the Federal Reserve Bank system. He served from 1907 to 1917 and constantly bedeviled the governors of the Federal Reserve after it was approved in 1913.
It seems clear enough, from the vantage point of 2006, that Charles the son of Charles Lindbergh was being punished by the Plutocracy not simply for opposing intervention in a general European war, but for being the son of the man who almost stopped the Federal Reserve Bank on his own.
Sixty-five years after Pearl Harbor, and after entering the war on the side of Great Britain, the United States has fully embraced the worst of what aristocratic England had to offer: in the few years since George H.W. Bush -- son of Prescott S. -- won his own election as president, the federal government has abandoned completely the concept of collecting revenue at the ports by means of tariffs on imports, and in the name of some mythical beast known as Global Free Trade, has shifted all of the government's tax-collecting directly to the shoulders of the working citizens and legal residents.
So, too, George the son of George H.W. Bush has slowly assumed all the airs of an Imperator -- the commander in chief or emperor of the ancient Romans -- while trying to hold fast to the shopworn homilies of 'a good ol' boy from west Texas.' He still slurs his words and stumbles artfully when speaking, and acts the part of a precious Pollyanna, talking about a robust economy when thousands of auto workers and defense industry workers have just been notified that they are now redundant.
Worse yet, the subtle and shadowy tyrannies of the arch-plutocrat Roosevelt are now practiced openly and without even a semblance of shame by the new imperial president. From the hills of Korea to the jungles of Viet Nam, from the tropical plantations of Panama to the improvised devices planted in the roads of Baghdad and Fallujah, these States united have been suborned by the winner-take-all mentality of the Plutocracy.
The President of the United States is, by definition, a Citizen. No Citizen is above the law, here, but an emperor is ... or thinks he is. And when that imperial leader behaves as if the laws of the land do not apply to him because he is 'the commander in chief' in the midst of a bogus and unconstitutional war .... then the worst ambitions of a craven King John are realized and the worst depradations of empire are going to be the nature of the situation, from now on. Remember, the fictional place called Iraq was a British invention, and yet it is our soldiers and airmen who are being used to keep the oil rich protectorate pumping out profits for Big Oil and the big liars who own the petrochemical monopolies.
We pay, we fight, our guys and our gals die or come home broken ....
That's probably not what Forrest Davis had in mind when writing his excellent study of why and how Anglo-American cooperation on the high seas developed, and why he thought it was a good idea to form a tight alliance with Great Britain. But it is the provable end result of adopting all the worst aspects of the bordello culture of 'Great Britain,' and jettisoning the tried and true principles of great Americans of the past.
The road to perdition passes through the City of London.
And this once-free country is rocketing down that road, windows open, engine sputtering and smoking. And the brakes are about gone ....
_____________________________ BELOW: CHARLES A. "Lucky" LINDBERGH __________________________
Serving Freedom
and Liberty
