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It seems fashionable to equate civility with political correctness these days. Too bad. One would think that civility and interest in double guns might be strongly correlated - but no.





Talk about damnation by faint praise! I cannot imagine attempting to justify his actions with such a comparison.

Brent

Larry, re inadvertent assistance, many of the American and Canadian intelligentsia and plain Joes disillusioned by the Crash and seeking something better during the Depression joined the Communist Party. Anyone who wasn't at least thinking along those lines at that time wasn't thinking at all.

Some saw through it over time as another totalitarian system and got out. My father left early because of the Party's anti-semitism and went on to distinguished service in war and journalism. Lindbergh and The Bund favoured fascism, Germany over Great Britain, and over time saw through it and left it.

"Dupes," for seeking neither riches or gold but something as intangible as an ideal? Many of those idealists reside in the pantheon of illustrious contributers to our respective societies today. We're all dupes, on your terms, for changing our minds and looking for an improvement because of deception.

Regards, King

In the U.S., we still deport old men who sided with the Nazis but Bolshevik sympathizers like you get a pass. I'm not buying your romantic crap.

King, the ones here in the States--can't speak for the Party in Canada, but I rather expect it was the same deal--were indeed dupes, because they failed to see the hand of the KGB pulling the strings of their puppet party, all the way from Moscow. The Soviets liked to pretend that the various foreign CP's were independent, but the opening of the KGB files has proven otherwise. Those of us that worked against the KGB during the Cold War were well aware of it, but those on the left with some remaining sympathy for former party stalwarts still refused to believe the degree of Soviet penetration of the Western democracies, both through the puppet parties and through American and Canadian KGB recruits who distanced themselves from the party for cover purposes. A number of trials at the end of WWII showed the extent to which our Soviet "allies" were working against us at the time--but some still refused to believe. Some, like Kim Philby in Great Britain, remained true to "the cause" even through the crushing of the revolt in Hungary and the Prague spring.

And Lindbergh never favored fascism. Sorry to see you bought into that old wive's tale. FDR, for all his other qualities, was an extremely vain man. Lindy was the only American more popular than FDR. FDR actually sent Lindy to Germany to assess their air power. Lindy returned and reported that we'd better get busy building up our own. The majority of Americans at the time (including Lindbergh) were basically isolationists. Just because they didn't want to enter WWII prior to Pearl Harbor didn't make them fascists. But it was convenient for FDR to make Lindbergh look like a fan of Hitler, even when Lindy brought back a very valuable assessment on the buildup of the Luftwaffe. And if he could make Lindy less popular by making him appear to be pro-German, so much the better for his own ego.

And Brent, I'd say that being smarter than the man who invented the Internet (and maybe global warming too!) is no small achievement.

Larry, I did think that at least you were smarter than that...

Oh well.
Brent

With Thanksgiving Day coming up, I want to express my thanks to all here who have stood up for civility on this board. You have reassured me that the wingnuts on either side have not yet succeeded in demolishing the center, and that reasonable political discourse is still possible.

Also, a tip o' the hat to post #67371 above, for reminding us that even on the best-run board, someone's likely to post moronic graffiti more appropriate to public toilet stalls. Way to go, Jagermeister!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Larry, no quarrel from me with your points of view of the situation 50 years or so ago; I was referring to decades before that, before the war, when no one needed directions from anywhere to want food and jobs at home.

We'll have to disagree on Lindbergh, who advocated more than U.S. neutrality. Either way, the US didn't need Lindbergh's word on Germany's military capacity and prowess. Intelligence knew and Hitler later displayed it to the world.

(My late friend Bill Greenaway, British motorcycle and spin- and fly-casting champion, hung out on Goring's estate and with his hunting and angling crowd before the war. He was a major in British intelligence.)

We may agree that the isolationists were duped, using your term, until that other powerful modern military machine struck in the Pacific and they realized that only mobilization could save the US goose from being cooked.

The isolationists were not bad Americans. They dissented and they changed their minds as circumstances changed, as persons usually do, and as our countries are doing now concerning our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They were not then and are not now providing inadvertent assistance to our opponents. The US was made from dissent. Remove dissent and we're lost.

Enough already!

King, the isolationists didn't join a political party that was controlled by a foreign power, the goal of which was to overthrow the Western democracies and put the entire world under their totalitarian system. That is, other than those that joined the Bund--and I'm certainly not apologizing for them like you are for the Commies. You don't dissent by allowing yourself to be used as the tool of a foreign power that's plotting to destroy democracy.

As for prewar intelligence in the United States, I highly recommend to you a book called "Roosevelt's Secret War", by Joseph Persico. Unlike Great Britain, the United States had no national intelligence organization prior to the creation of the Office of Strategic Services, which did not come into being until after WWII. Much of FDR's foreign intelligence gathering consisted of his sending private citizens--like Donovan (who eventually headed OSS) and Lindbergh--on "unofficial" missions abroad. He even had his friend Vincent Astor, who headed an unofficial intelligence-gathering network called "the Room", go snooping around in the Pacific on his yacht to gather intelligence on the Japanese. Such was the sad state of American intelligence prior to WWII.

But we certainly haven't silenced dissent nor stifled discourse here. Seven pages worth of relatively reasoned exchanges between posters. I've seen much more heated debates on the merits, or lack thereof, of this or that double.

I'm fairly certain that this whole thing started on another post because Jim didn't like my tag. He then put his own tag in and I do believe it was in jest like he stated later to get a reaction. Now, hopefully it is DONE and we get get back to what the forum is all about DOUBLE GUNS.
So enough of the chiding and leave the politics to another site.

One more thing Happy Thanksgiving to all.