The Probability Broach, chapter 9
Having fended off his nighttime attacker, and with extra security in place, Win resumes mending from his injuries using the North American Confederacy’s advanced medical tech.
While he’s healing, he does some research on Ed’s computer, trying to understand why this world turned out so differently from his own:
Who can explain their own times and the past that created them? I don’t remember enough from high school and a junior college curriculum in police science. What little I can parrot is just a hodgepodge of other people’s opinions.
Hell, they revise it every year. I never did figure out what caused World War I, and with each decade World War II seems more FDR’s doing than Japan’s. If I didn’t understand my own world, how could I understand this one?
Ed and Clarissa didn’t have quite the same problem. For them, there’d never been a World War II; no Roosevelt I could discover had ever scored higher than dogcatcher.
This was one of those lines that made me raise my eyebrows. Blaming World War II on Roosevelt?
Arguably, you could blame World War II on the victors of World War I, including Woodrow Wilson, who imposed punitive terms on Germany that created a sense of national humiliation and fed a desire for revenge. But why FDR? How could he possibly be responsible when the U.S. didn’t join WWII until it had already been raging around the world for two years?
It turns out that this is a common opinion among libertarians. The Libertarian Institute published an essay, “Roosevelt’s Infamy“, which asserts that FDR wanted the U.S. to enter World War II and schemed to provoke Japan so as to create a casus belli:
FDR began his machinations by doing everything he could to provoke the Germans into attacking U.S. vessels in the Atlantic. In that way, he could exclaim, “We’ve been attacked! Now, give me my declaration of war!” But the Nazi regime knew what FDR was up to and refused to take the bait.
…That was when Roosevelt turned to the Pacific, in the hope that a Japanese attack on the United States would give him a “back door” to the war against Germany.
That’s what FDR’s oil embargo against Japan was all about. Japan had invaded China and was occupying the country. Its war machine necessarily depended on a continuous supply of oil. The purpose of FDR’s embargo was to prevent Japan from acquiring that badly needed oil.
FDR’s oil embargo was remarkably successful. It maneuvered Japan into a position of having to make a choice: Either invade the Dutch East Indies to secure its oil supplies or meekly withdraw its military forces from China.
…Not surprisingly, Japan decided to invade the Dutch East Indies rather than withdraw from China. But Japan knew that the invasion stood the risk of the U.S. Navy interfering with its operations in the Dutch East Indies. That was what the attack on Pearl Harbor was for—to knock out the U.S. Pacific fleet so that Japan would have a free hand in securing those oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
The Mises Institute agrees, in an article titled “How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor“:
When Germany began to rearm and to seek Lebensraum aggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British navy in attacks on German U-boats in the northern Atlantic, but Hitler refused to take the bait, thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged, declared belligerent—a belligerence that the great majority of Americans opposed.
…The Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, accordingly imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan… Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war.
This is an astonishing position for libertarians to take.
Libertarianism is supposed to be founded on the non-aggression principle, which says you can’t use violence against someone unless they start the fight. Then you can strike back to defend yourself.
There’s a patently obvious fact that’s missing from these analyses: Even if FDR wanted to involve the U.S. in WWII, he didn’t start the war. The Axis nations did that, by coming up with imperialist, supremacist ideologies that justified their desire to control the world, then followed through by invading neighboring states – Poland in Germany’s case, China in Japan’s – and treating the conquered populaces brutally.
Why doesn’t that count as use of force? Why didn’t it justify U.S. involvement, to assist in defense of the countries that were under attack?
In essence, these libertarians are arguing that Imperial Japan was entitled to whatever resources it needed to expand its empire, and that Roosevelt refusing to sell those resources to them was an act of violence that justified the attack on Pearl Harbor. It’s like saying, “I have the absolute right to trade with you, and if you won’t sell me what I want to buy, I can shoot you.”
This should be anathema to a principled libertarian. Somehow, it doesn’t bother them. These groups claim to be anti-aggression, but it seems that as long as someone other than the U.S. starts the war, it’s fine by them.
I was going to draw an equivalence to today’s conservatives pretending not to know who started the Russia-Ukraine war, but they make this comparison themselves:
As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that more recently, U.S. officials, operating through NATO, maneuvered Russia into having to make a similar choice: Either accept Ukraine’s membership in NATO, which would enable the Pentagon to station its nuclear missiles and troops along Russia’s border, or invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening.
Again, this is a bizarre stance for a professed libertarian to take. They’re saying that Ukraine wanting to join NATO as defense against a Russian invasion was an aggressive act that justified that very invasion. In black-is-white libertarian-land, if someone takes steps to defend themselves against you, that justifies you attacking them.
(Ironically, there are factions on the socialist left who make the same error as these right-wingers. They both assume that only the U.S. has agency, and that our choices determine how the rest of the world reacts, so anything that happens must be our fault.)
To be clear, I don’t think the U.S. is responsible for policing the world, or that we have a moral obligation to overthrow every oppressive regime. We don’t have the power to do that, and it often ends badly when we try, as our prolonged failure in Afghanistan made painfully clear.
However, a reasonable middle ground is that we can, at least, not support regimes that wage war on others or oppress their own people. We can peacefully express our disapproval and limit their power through trade embargos and sanctions. That position seems like it should be congenial to libertarian thinking. However, actual libertarians don’t agree.
Again, why Roosevelt in particular? What did he do to earn L. Neil Smith’s enmity?
The libertarian hatred of FDR is also on display in Ayn Rand’s writings, and that gives a better view of their reasoning. Libertarians will tell you they loathe FDR because his New Deal was a massive government imposition on the free market. That’s closer, but still not the truth.
The true reason for their hatred, I think, isn’t because the New Deal was a government imposition on the economy, but because it was an effective one. Most of the New Deal programs are still in existence today, and they’re so popular that even conservatives are reluctant to touch them.
In other words, they hate FDR because he showed that government can work well, which goes against their anti-state ideology. They want to tear down his record by proving that everything he did was driven by sinister motives. But in order to do that, they’re forced into siding with the most infamously evil regimes in history.
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Other posts in this series:
The “Blame FDR” trope, with its corollary “Exonerate Hitler“, continues to resurge on the right in the US, promoted by the likes of Pat Buchanan, Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Joe Rogan, Candace Owens…
Scratch off a layer of gloss and – surprise! – you’ll find a deep core of old-fashioned Jew-hatred, thoroughly alloyed with homo/trans-phobia.
One of the (few) things I’ll give Ayn Rand credit for is that, being ethnically Jewish, she understood antisemitism perfectly well and didn’t tolerate it when it appeared.
That may well be one of the reasons she’s fallen out of favor with the modern right.
Since when did Ayn Rand “fall out of favor with the modern right?” Aside from maybe some embarrassment at how juvenile and downright silly she turned out to be, I’ve never seen any sign of “falling out of favor.” There’s certainly no divergence on the subject of Israel, whom Rand had very explicitly praised as a beacon of White Enlightenment taming a raging sea of swarthy heathen savages, like all those White cowboys taming the Red Indians in those Western movies she got all her history from.
…That was when Roosevelt turned to the Pacific, in the hope that a Japanese attack on the United States would give him a “back door” to the war against Germany.
This is unbelievably stupid. FDR’s number-one foreign-policy priority, literally from day one, was EUROPE and HITLER (both came to power in 1933). The LAST thing he wanted was a whole ‘nother war diverting attention and resources all the way to the other side of the planet from where he felt he needed to fight.
(And no, America was NOT “number one” militarily back then, we were #19; and we were not at all confident in our ability to fight a two-front-two-ocean global war as our postwar military doctrine specifies.)
Either accept Ukraine’s membership in NATO, which would enable the Pentagon to station its nuclear missiles and troops along Russia’s border…
Here’s another news flash: NATO has absolutely no need to station nuclear missiles that close to Russia; and stationing troops in Ukraine is viewed as problematic too, both for political/optics and for tactical/overextension reasons. I don’t recall anyone advocating this BEFORE Russia invaded Ukraine.
(Also, remember that Ukraine explicitly GAVE BACK to Russia all the Soviet nukes on their turf, in return for Russia’s explicit recognition of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine as Ukrainian territory. No one in NATO had a problem with that.)
(Ironically, there are factions on the socialist left who make the same error as these right-wingers. They both assume that only the U.S. has agency, and that our choices determine how the rest of the world reacts, so anything that happens must be our fault.)
And libertarians have been aping and pandering to all that left-isolationist rhetoric at least since the 1970s. They’re a bit like little kids repeating and twisting everything they hear a grownup say.
Can confirm: I grew up hearing FD Roosevelt called “Jews-evelt” from a rightwing relative, who was also salty about the aid to the farmers and unemployed. He also imposed regulations on the financial organizations.
Of course Libertarians would hate him.
Wait till you hear what L. Neil Smith thinks of Lincoln…
But yeah, this blaming Roosevelt for the Second World War disgusts me. Shouldn’t the blame go to, I don’t know, Hitler? These “libertarians” claim to hate fascism but can never bring themselves to actually oppose their policies and only seem to dislike them in the sense that they can use the Reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy against their enemies. And that first quoted article claiming that Germany “didn’t take the bait” can’t explain, then, why Hitler DID declare war on the US the day after Pearl Harbor even though Congress had declared war on Japan only and not Germany. If Hitler really hadn’t wanted a war with the US, this was exactly what he would not have done. (That’s not even getting into the fact that Roosevelt did not, actually, know of the attack on Pearl Harbor ahead of time.)
It’s ironic. Socialists dislike that Roosevelt was “the man who saved capitalism” in the sense that the New Deal worked so well that it convinced people that capitalism could be reformed after all, but they aren’t the ones blaming him for Pearl Harbor. I don’t remember who said it, but socialists would still rather have a welfare state than no safety net at all even if they would prefer a society without capitalism at all in the end. The problem is when people think that a social safety net is all that is needed to fix things and ignore that billionaires still have power over us, which they used in the post-war decades to destroy all that Roosevelt built up.
Libertarian hatred of Lincoln is far easier to explain than Roosevelt without breaking their supposed principles: Lincoln actually did suspend habeus corpus during the Civil War, and his actions fundamentally made the U.S. much more of a single country than a federation of otherwise-independent states. The first is undisputed fact, and Libertarians love pointing it out. The second may be more truly why they hate him, but admitting to the first isn’t breaking any Libertarian principles.
Also, not only did Roosevelt not know of the attack on Pearl Harbor ahead of time (there were indications that the Japanese were planning something, but the actual time and location of the attack hadn’t been determined yet), but at the time of the attack, there were Japanese diplomats in Washington D.C. doing peace and trade negotiations. That last part is the real reason it was described as “a day that will live in infamy”: surprise attacks are one thing, but surprise attacks during peace negotiations while your own people are on the soil of the nation being attacked?
That’s certainly a plausible-sounding explanation, since libertarians do consistently pretend to give a shit about stuff like habeas corpus; but the REAL reason they hate Lincoln is that — like FDR — he had Big Gummint doing the right thing, and showed “private enterprise” (as in, Southern plantation-owners) up as being totally in the wrong. Also, Lincoln tended to sound way too much like Marx in saying that workers were more important than capital.
I’m well aware of Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, which is one of three things one can in good faith criticize the Union for (the other two are that most Unionists were still white supremacists and gladly betrayed the African-Americans after the war, and the other is that it strengthened capitalism in the long run.)
Smith, on the other hand, unironically calls Lincoln a tyrant on the same level as Lenin, and actually deluded himself into believing the Confederacy was a freer country. Some of his claims are so extreme and so pseudohistorical that the Lost Cause people now use them. (That is, he did not crib from the Lost Cause myth; the 21st-century Lost Causers cribbed from him!)
So, in other words, the Libertarian hatred of FDR is much like the Religious Right hatred of abortion. The stated reason for it isn’t the real reason; anybody with any knowledge of history and common sense should know that it’s not the real reason (up until the 1970s, abortion was considered primarily a Catholic issue and no righteous Protestant would make it the cornerstone of their identity); but it’s something they can say without engaging in the massive self-own that it would be to admit the real reason, and can get away with telling to the majority of people who don’t actually have any knowledge of history.
(Even just the timing makes it pretty clear that the core defining court case for the Religious Right wasn’t Roe v Wade, it was US v Bob Jones University, which was based on Brown v Board of Education. So, yeah, racism all the way down.)
@jenorafeuer: Yeah, Fred Clarke, the Slacktivist explains that history well.
* It = history as we understand it or specifically the junior college curriculum in police science it isn’t quite clear which.
Hmm.. I think the causes of WWI are pretty clear arent they? Namely the rivalry between the European “great” colonial powers and empires in their desire to control everything and intimidate each other and the chain of alliances where if one nation was attacked its allies were automatically oblied to go to war setting off a metaphorical dominos of “We must fight you because you attacked A and so we’ll attack you and because you are allied with B & C they’ll attack us and because we are allied with D & E they’re are on our team & must also fight you, B & C etc….” that meant the assassination of an otherwise pretty obscure royal in the Balkans would trigger a global conflageration.
I gather a few different scholars have differing opinions and there’s some debate on specifics and stuff but is it really that unclear and that regularly revised?
To be fair, Archduke Ferdinand was the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. He wasn’t exactly obscure. But the cause of the war is still quite clear.