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The history textbooks in our schools offer what constitutes barely a cartoon version of history. To obtain a realistic
view of tides and currents of our past, Buchanan's book is essential and vital to the understanding of our past, and an appreciation
of how we can avoid shedding the blood of our soldiers, salors, and airmen in wars which do not contribute to our safety and
the well-being of the rest of our world.
The In the words of President Washington: "The nation, which indulges toward another an habitual hatred, or an habitual
fondness, is in some degree a slave ... to its animosity or to it's affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray
from its duty and its interests."
During the age of Napoleon, neither Jefferson or Madison had any interest in becoming involved in Europe's problem.
In 1821, President Adams declared: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled,
there will (America's) heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own..."
By involvement in foreign wars "She might become the dictators of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her
own spirit."
Buchanan summarizes that "under William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson the we would eat of the
forbidden fruit of imperialism and go out into the world in search of monsters to destroy - leading to America's involvement
in all the great wars of the twentieth century."
"Theodore Roosevelt loved war. In 1897, he had told students at the Naval War College, 'No triumph of peace is quite
so great as the supreme triumphs of war'"
During World War I, Wilson could easily have responded to U-boat attacks on US merchant ships with a naval war, without
sending a single soldier to France. To avoid a clash with the United States, Germany offered that her submarines would follow
the rules of cruiser warfare, if the British would disarm their merchant ships. Britain refused, and Wilson put no pressure
on London to agree. Weaker at sea, the Germans were willing to abide by the rules of sea warfare as demanded by the president.
This got them nowhere with Woodrow Wilson.
The victors of the First World War succeeded in scattering the seeds of the Second on fertile ground, and followed this
folly up with abundant fertilization and watering. Croatia and Slovenia were stripped from Austria and forced into a new
kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes who still nursed ancient hatreds toward one another, as we have witnessed dring the
latter part of the twentieth century. A quarter of a million Austrians were forced into the Italian state, with which
they shared no ethnic ties or common language. Lithuania was given the German city of Memel, and 3.25 million Sudeten Germans
were forced into the newly created Czechoslovakian state, with a million Hungarians. A 130 kilometer zone was carved through
the middle of Germany and awarded to the Polish nation. When hostilites during that war ended, the Royal Navy and U.S. warships
maintained a blockade which achieved a casualty rate of 700,000 children, old people, and women. The German people, starved
and dying by hundreds of thousands, mostly from influenza, tuberculosis, and heart failure.
During World War II, American troops had to return to Europe, because Franklin D. Roosevelt had foolishly declared America's
war aim to be the unconditional surrender of Germany, gauranteeing that the Red Army would occupy Berlin, and Germany could
not play her traditional role in keeping Russia out of Europe.
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