Tag: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Iranians marching in Tehran cheer at an airstrike ahead of them.

1,530 words

In the run up to the 2026 Iran War, I described how the most straightforward and optimistic path to victory for the US was:

1. A flawless conventional military victory, followed by
2. A successful Persian insurrection, followed by
3. Pahlavi running a corruption free illiberal democracy.

I generously gave each of these conditions a 10% chance of happening, and thus a 1/1000 chance of success overall. (more…)

3,123 words

Kermit Roosevelt III
The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story
University of Chicago Press, 2022

On the first night of September of 2022, President Joe Biden delivered a speech in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, outside of Independence Hall, the building where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 and where the Constitutional Convention was held in 1787. (more…)

166 words

Ike is my shepherd. I shall live in want. He leadeth me beside still factories of the world. He restoreth my doubt in the Republican party.

He putteth bayonets in the backs of young school girls. He maketh them go to school with negroes against their wishes.

Yes, though I walk the breadlines daily, I am hungry. I fear evil cutteth my income, sure poverty and hardship shall follow me all the days of the Republican Administration, and I shall live in a rented house forever. (more…)

2,454 words

Robert B. Stinnett
Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
Free Press, 1999

You know how Copernicus began his study of the heavenly bodies not to refute Ptolemy’s geocentric paradigm, but to restore it? The reference might seem like it’s from left field, but it perfectly suits what Robert Stinnett was trying to do with his 1999 work, Day of Deceit. (more…)

George Moseley (right) testifies before the Dies Committee on May 31, 1939. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

3,716 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

The Crisis Years

The Roaring Twenties ended with a tremendous economic collapse which lasted for more than a decade. But all was not lost. Old-stock American patriots had been able to enact the 1924 Immigration Act, which cut off immigration and protected the demographic makeup of the country for the following 40 years. (more…)

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I enjoyed Fred Reed’s April 24 essay “Ignorance, Its Uses and Nurture,” which refers to universal suffrage in anything larger than a small town as a “crackpot” idea. In a mere thousand words, Reed painted the American public as entirely incapable and unqualified to understand United States foreign policy, let alone vote on it. Therefore, he concludes, the entire democratic system is a sham. Yes, the statistics he presents bolster his point admirably. But maybe not as much as epic burns such as this one: (more…)

The Fabian Window is a work of stained glass which portrays prominent socialists as religious figures. The goal of the Fabian Society was to achieve socialist principles through the Fabian Strategy — to achieve their aims by inches and through stealth. Their symbol was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

3,061 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Metapolitical action

America emerged from the Second World War as the premier superpower. The nations of Europe were starving and in ruins. Japan was likewise wrecked. Even the victorious British were reliant on American aid. But American society was beset with three different kinds of problems. The first was that the economy was shackled by the New Deal, although this was not yet fully understood at the time. (more…)

Captain Archibald Roosevelt during the First World War.

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt was born in 1894 to Theodore and Edith (Carow) Roosevelt in Washington, DC while Theodore was serving as the United States Civil Service Commissioner. Archibald was named for an ancestor who had been a hero of the Revolutionary War, Archibald Bulloch of South Carolina.

Archibald Roosevelt is an important man to remember. He was a man of the Right, but he was not a populist, nor is there any hint that he was wise to the Jewish Question. (more…)

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This was supposed to be a year-end book roundup, but I had a difficult end of year. So for the present I’ll pretend this is the 53rd or 54th week of 2023 (a nasty year altogether).

When my husband died a few weeks ago, I found a number of “overdue” library books in all manner of places. I stacked them by the door. That’s pretty much how we did things here. He’d take out a lot of books and then, when he saw me making an exit, he’d go, “Oh, if you’re going out, could you take those back to the library?” He’d say that even if I was just going out to the trash bay. (more…)

Hitler issuing his declaration of war against Poland in the Reichstag on September 1, 1939.

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Part 5 of 5 (Part 1 here, Part 4 here)

A German war with Poland was now a certainty, but a new continental war involving Britain and France was not. The most important obstacle to the widening of the conflict was that Britain quietly viewed French participation as an indispensable precondition of her own involvement, and the French had not committed themselves to action against Poland. (more…)

Winston Churchill and Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax

1,907 words

Part 4 of 5 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here, Part 5 here)

Hitler’s cancellation of military operations for August 26 left him with only five days before September 1, after which, according to his generals, a military campaign in Poland would no longer be feasible. If war was to be prevented, it had to be done within this time. (more…)

Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota.

3,351 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

North Dakota’s newspaperman

Understanding how Americans were duped into entering the First World War while preventing America entering a second war became the life’s work of a North Dakota isolationist and politician named Gerald Prentice Nye (1892-1971). (more…)

“Those who oppose Chairman Mao: We will crush their doghead.”–Red Guards poster

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In our country we wish to substitute morality for egotism, probity for honour, principles for conventions, duties for etiquette, the empire of reason for the tyranny of customs, contempt for vice for contempt for misfortune, pride for insolence, the love of honour for the love of money… that is to say, all the virtues and miracles of the Republic, for all the vices and snobbishness of the monarchy. — Maximilien Robespierre, “On Virtue and Terror” (1794) (more…)