America ‘has lost the peace’

 
Don Surber has a must-read op-ed in the Charleston Daily Mail (the link is to his old blog, which is an archive for these pieces):

THE people in the Time-Life publishing empire dispatched one of America’s great novelists to the battlefield a year after the war ended. He found broken infrastructure, a huge black market and anti-Americanism at every corner. Oh, and the French press hated us. The year is 1946, not 2007. The place is Europe, not Iraq. But the same defeatist attitude prevailed... And the French press still hate us. Wrote John Dos Passos: “Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. People never tire of telling you of the ignorance and rowdyism of American troops, of our misunderstanding of European conditions... They say that the theft and sale of Army supplies by our troops is the basis of their black market. They blame us for the corruption and disorganization of UNRRA... They blame us for the fumbling timidity of our negotiations with the Soviet Union. They tell us that our mechanical de-nazification policy in Germany is producing results opposite to those we planned... ‘Have you no statesmen in America?’ they ask.” ...“The Russians at least are carrying out a logical plan for extending their system of control at whatever cost. The British show signs of recovering their good sense and their innate human decency... All we have brought to Europe so far is confusion backed up by a drumhead regime of military courts. We have swept away Hitlerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease.” Reading the piece gave me one of those head-clearing laughs. This unintentionally funny piece put in perspective just how predictable the Fifth Columnists are in America... Dos Passos died in 1970. But his words of 1946 reflect the left’s agenda of 2007..."

Read it all.

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