Two weeks back the New York Times posted a video primer in which the defiantly unshaven writer Sam Tanenhaus cast the current antiwar debate as one of idealists versus isolationists. The argument over Syria calls on an ancient divide in the US polity.
Are we an isolationist country that doesn’t want to get involved in other nations’ problems or are we a global leader who must try to solve them?
Then Tanenhaus goes right to Charles Lindbergh opposing intervention in World War II, and puts everything in the isolationist blender. Opposition to the Cold War and Korean war and the Vietnam War. All isolationism.
Isolationism emerged again in the early 1950s when war broke out in Korea. Isolationists left and right opposed American intervention in that conflict and also the broader Cold War against the Soviet Union.
During Vietnam, liberals were labeled isolationists, he says. Were we? I remember that we called ourselves peaceniks, and antiwar. George McGovern an isolationist? He said, Come home America, Tanenhaus says, and there are more important battles to fight here than there.
Today after more than ten years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, isolationist sentiment is strong in both parties. Americans are tired of war.
As if war is the way you engage positively in the world. Says Annie Robbins, who pointed me to this: “Psychologically, this NYT piece said to me, Are you a Nazi sympathizing Lindbergh, or do you support intervention/bombing Syria?”
right on, annie. I made a similar comment on an earlier thread that didn’t survive the editors’ scalpel, but it’s a rhetorical tactic called heresthetics (sp?), wherein a complicated question is posed in a way so that only one reasonable answer is possible. this is primarily done (as annie ably points out) by reducing issues to cartoons bubbles. so the arguments for and against intervention in WWII are synonymous with an analysis of the instance of mass murder at Auschwitz, and that same mass murder event is then hypothetically relocated to 21st century Syria and Iran.
Great post Phil, with a perfect kicker, Annie. After all, what’s an isolationist? An isolationist is a anyone who is unenthusiastic about whatever war FOX or MSNBC happens to be serving up that day. The I-word has been a smear term for several generations now, it is historically illiterate nonsense. Thinking that launching Tomahawks at Damascus is a bad idea does not make you Charles Lindbergh. I got this all of my chest a few years ago in an essay for the paleocon American Conservative magazine, in which I draw heavily on the great New Left historian William Appleman Williams:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ostrich-america/
If you know what Irving Kristol knew, about what happened when Brooklyn rolled into Deutschland , you wouldnt buy into the greatest generation whitewash:
“My fellow soldiers were too easily inclined to loot, to rape, and to shoot prisoners of war. Only army vigilance kept them in check.” He felt sympathy for the civilian population of the enemy nation: “observing German women and young girls, living among the rubble and selling their bodies for a few packs of cigarettes … rid me of any anti-German feeling which, as a Jew, might otherwise have been present in me.” What’s more, “I was not so convinced that the American soldiers I knew were a different breed of humanity from their German counterparts.””
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/kristol-reflections/
Were the Americans who opposed entering World War One isolationists? Were the Americans who opposed supporting revolutionary France against Britain isolationists? That would make George Washington an isolationist.
Aren’t you isolationist Phil.
What role do you think US should play in the world and more importantly , How ?