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Posted May 21, 2001
EU Complex
I am a former wartime artilleryman. I have been disgusted to see the RAF bombing Yugoslavia in the company of a revived Luftwaffe. …[The Pentagon's] favourite ideologist was George Kennan, a young diplomat educated in Germany. He argued that West Germany must be rearmed for the defense of Western Europe against a Soviet Union which lost 27 million dead and who knows how many maimed, blinded or driven mad. In his memoirs, he claims that he was misunderstood, and that he did not mean that the USSR was planning to invade the West, but that Communism was a political and ideological threat.
…Why did the presumably intelligent people in charge accept [Kennan's assumptions] so unquestioningly? …I think that President Eisenhower gave the answer, when…he warned against the domination of the "military-industrial complex", which has profited hugely out of the frenzied arms race…
The "European Union" is creating a massive "political-industrial complex", with mergers of arms companies and a European Army. It has an arrogance to match that of the US interventionists, which could lead to a catastrophic collision between both these monsters. It is dominated by a resurgent Germany, whose former Chancellor, Kohl, now awaiting trial on corruption charges, boasted, "When we build the house of Europe, the future will belong to the Germans". Is that why British, American and Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen gave their lives?
~ Eric Clements
Trade and War Dialog
[Regarding Jude Wanniski's offsite article, "Remember Pearl Harbor?"]:
The US action in cutting off the Japanese oil from Indonesia…was the cause of the Japanese animus. But to suggest that there is some kind of automatic right of foreign countries to the US market, the judgment of the people of the US reflected by their legislators notwithstanding, because we dare not displease whatever foreign power feels it has the right to demand access to the US market, is absurd. …The Japanese were resentful of the US colonialism in the region - and Britain's too. They were about to fashion their version of manifest destiny in the region, and ran into the US and its posture as a Pacific mercantile power. So you think it was the price of silk that caused the ill will? …Japan was not thirsting for western trade. They were thirsting to be let alone.
~ L. Hickey
Jude Wanniski replies:
I did not editorialize that Japan had a right to our market. I said the US political establishment got greedy and caused a Depression and a war. Japan's decision to become imperialist took place after Smoot-Hawley, not before…
…Our sin had nothing to do with greed. …It had nothing to do with silk prices in Japan. Sell them their scrap steel, stop being the moral police of the world, don't step in the way of their supply of Indonesian oil, and we would have had peace, silk prices notwithstanding.
If you are a mercantile power, with few natural resources, and committed to world trade to attain your place in the world, like Britain or Japan, you become either obsequious, like Hong Kong, or dangerous like Britain and Japan in the 30's and 40's…
The lesson here is not that a great power, which becomes reliant on free trade, makes the world more safe. On the contrary, a powerful nation that becomes dependent on trade for things it will go to war to get, is very dangerous… The destiny of a great nation is to become self sufficient enough, so that everybody's problem is not their problem…
~ L. Hickey