How The West Was Lost

The Past Is Prologue:

How The West Was Lost

by

R.E. Prindle

 

The following is a quote from Vo. V of Mark Sullivan’s great social history, Our Times.  The quote is a critique of Woodrow Wilson’s politics:

Of the effects of (WWI) on America, by far the most fundamental was our submission to autocracy in government.  Every male between 18 and 45 had been deprived of freedom of his body – for refusing or evading the surrender, 163,738 were apprehended and disciplined, many by jail sentences.  Every person had been deprived of freedom of his tongue, no one could utter dissent from the purpose or the method of war – for violating the sedition act, 1597 persons were arrested.  Every business man was shorn of dominion over his factory or store, every housewife surrendered control of her table, every farmer was forbidden to sell his wheat except at the price the government fixed.  Our institutions, the railroads, the telephones and telegraphs, the coal mines were taken under government control—the list was complete when, after the war and preceding the Peace Conference, Wilson took control of the trans-Atlantic cables.  The prohibition of individual liberty in the interest of the state could hardly be more complete.  “In the six months after our entry into the war the United States had been transformed from a highly individualistic system…into what was almost a great socialistic state in which the control of the whole industry, life and purpose of the nation was directed from Washington.  It was an amazing transformation, for nothing like it had ever been attempted before on any such scale, and the process was wholly antipathetic to our ordinary ways of doing things.”  It was the greatest submission by the individual to the state that had occurred in any country at any time.  It was an abrupt reversal of the evolution that had been under way for centuries.  Since the Magna Charta, substantially all political change had been in the direction of cumulative taking of power from the state for the benefit of the individual.  Now in six months, in America the state took back, the individual gave up, what had taken centuries of contest to win.

It was not merely that we had passed through the experience of enforced submission or voluntary surrender or both.  The results remained with us.  Government had learned that we could be led to do it, had learned the technique of bringing the individual to give up his liberty, the cunning of propaganda, the artfulness of slogans, and the other methods for inciting mass solidarity and mass action, for causing majorities to insist on conformance by minorities.

The purpose for which we did this, as described by the one who urged us to it and led us into it was “the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere,”  “ to make the world safe for democracy,”  a purpose to save the peoples of all nations, including and especially Germany, from autocratic government; a purpose to have the individualist ideal of society…triumph in a struggle against the ideal of regimentation….

That purpose reviewed fifteen years later in the light of what had meantime happened in the world, seemed very ironic indeed – Germany and Italy under dictators, Russia under a dictatorship called proletarian but more extreme in its deprivation of individual liberty than any personal dictator or absolute monarch attempted, American industry and social organization in the beginning of what was aimed toward regimentation. (Roosevelt administration.) End of quote’

 

Thus Wilson’s socialist politics violently wrenched Americans from a history of freedom into one of servitude.  The people who aided Wilson in his attempt at a dictatorship and socialist organization of society did not disappear when Harding was elected.  The Council On Foreign Affairs was set up in 1921 on Wilsonian principles.  They continued in their attempt to shape America into a socialist state hindered by the three Republican presidents of the twenties, finally getting their man FDR elected in 1932.  They then, the same Wilsonian crowd, returned to power setting about to complete what Wilson had begun.

Much of their program was achieved but hindered by the Second World War and Roosevelt’s death.  Then began a long clandestine effort to change American mores.  They seized moral control so that any who dissented from their program was labeled as anti-social, a racist or whatever.  Then, when Obama was elected their man was in the Office again.  Obama immediately set about to reestablish the Wilsonian dictatorship. He made great strides but the CFR wished to proceed more or less Constitutionally so they allowed an election fully expecting it to be between their two candidates Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.  A wild card, Donald Trump, unexpectedly ‘stole’ the election.  Had Hillary been elected she would have been able to complete the socialist revolution clamping the Wilsonian dictatorship on us.

Currently they are involved in discrediting Pres. Trump in preparation for forcing him to resign as they did Richard Nixon.  I’m sure they will succeed.