As hard as it is to believe now, there were a lot of Americans who strongly thought that the United States should not fight Nazi Germany to prevent Hitler from taking over all of Europe. Some were actual American Nazis, some were old-school Germans with family members that were likely going to be fighting the Allies. But the largest contingent was the 800-thousand member America First Committee.
America First held huge rallies in 1940 and 1941 as President Franklin Roosevelt spoke more about the threat the entire world faced from war in Europe and Asia. A prominent speaker at many of those rallies was famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh had in the years prior been wined and dined by members of the Nazi party in Germany. His German heritage–along with his anti-semitic and racists beliefs–fit right in with the Nazi propaganda of Aryan superiority. Lindbergh and his wife were all set to move their family to Germany until the Nazi atrocities started against their own people–and they instead re-located to Paris.
But even getting a first glimpse into what Hitler wanted to unleash on the rest of Europe wasn’t enough to convince Lindbergh that all efforts should be made to stop him. Returning to the US, he spoke at every opportunity to defend German expansion, to claim only the Jews wanted all out world war, and that whites fighting each other would only allow Asians and Blacks to gain greater power. Amazingly, Lindbergh was still a consultant on American military air strategy–and infamously told the generals that no Asian country would ever develop the aviation capability to attack American territories. The most-infamous of Lindbergh’s speeches for America First came in Iowa in September of 1941–less that three months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor (as he had predicted was impossible for Asian people).
I thought of Charles Lindbergh last night as I saw political pundits live-tweeting the content on Fox News Channel. Apparently Tucker Carlson was calling Ukraine a puppet of the US State Department–and Laura Ingraham had former President Trump on to provide real-time analysis supporting his good buddy Vladimir Putin as missiles struck Ukrainian cities and tanks rolled across the border. I trust videotape from last night’s shows will become the equal of the grainy newsreel footage of Lindbergh addressing his America First acolytes from the 1940’s–a shocking reminder of what happens when evil despots find high-profile useful idiots to do their bidding.
It should be noted that after Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh re-entered the military and trained pilots that would eventually fight against the Luftwaffe members that he had befriended before the war. Henry Ford–another America First member–would build Jeeps and tanks that would be key components in the Allies’ victory. But what will Carlson and Ingraham do to atone for their misguided allegiance to Vladimir Putin? Or more accurately, their allegiance to the former American President that was in the pocket of Putin?
My guess is that Ukraine is about to become a non-issue on the country’s most-watched “news” network. Canadian trucker protests, Hillary Clinton’s emails, inflation and gas prices, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and trans-gender college swimmers are about to push any mention of conflict in Europe almost entirely off the channel.
And the talk show hosts will engage in a whole lot of ‘whataboutism”. Expect to hear plenty about how NBC, Disney, the NBA, and Hollywood studios kowtow to China and the coverup of their atrocities and threats to global peace. They will have you believing the more immediate concern is China moving on Taiwan (of course without tying it to the naked aggression of Putin against Ukraine, the tepid response from the West, or their own cheerleading for him to do it). To add some more Russian influence, when the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and explosion (in Ukraine) was finally admitted to by Soviet officials, the few sentences detailing the extent of the disaster on their TV network were followed by more lengthy recaps of the small radiation release at Three Mile Island seven years earlier in the US.
Apparently, when history repeats itself in Europe, history repeats itself in America First.
