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Thursday, December 07, 2023
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Feb
3
Written by:
Diana West
Tuesday, February 03, 2015 10:48 AM

There is much that is existentially threatening to the rah-rah conventional wisdom about FDR, World War II, the Cold War and more in American Betrayal, all of which serves to strip the cover off the riddling rot of Communist infiltrators and fellow travelers who worked covertly to expand the reach and power of Stalin's regime under cover of Allied "victory" in the "Good War."
In my last post from the audiobook recording sessions, I noted that Lend Lease served to supply the evil empire with not only war materiel, but also post-war materiel including all manner of atomic materiel -- even embargoed uranium -- which was, as Richard Rhodes, author of Dark Sun, put it, "useful in constructing and controlling a nuclear reactor."
There's even more to Lend Lease than that.
1) The law revolutionized the powers of the executive branch by permitting the president to by-pass Congress in vital matters of foreign and war-making policy. This set a tradition that persists to this day. Under Harry Hopkins, FDR's top aide, Lend Lease superceded if not replaced the authority of such departments as State and War.
2) The law introduced a similarly revolutionary (globalist) principle into US foreign policy, which persists to this day.
3) The law was fostered by known Communist agents and a possible Communist agent.
From pp. 134-136:
Certainly [Lend Lease] sailed into law in March 1941 under false colors, sold by FDR to the American public as a means to keep the United States out of war in Europe—as a substitute for U.S. military involvement, not a means by which to enter the war. Supposedly circumventing neutrality laws (but in reality breaking them), Lend-Lease “gave the president exclusive power to sell, transfer, lend, or lease such war matériel” to Great Britain and China, writes Albert L. Weeks ...
The legislation endowed the president with unprecedented powers to bypass the Senate and other checks and balances. For example, Lend-Lease allowed FDR to set the terms of the most massive U.S. expenditures in foreign aid in history and their repayment, or nonrepayment. Who, then, needed a Senate to advise and consent on related treaties? Who needed treaties? The State Department, too, took on attributes of a governmental fifth wheel as Hopkins helmed Lend-Lease and U.S. foreign policy from the White House. With the passage of Lend-Lease, “Hopkins became identified as ‘Roosevelt’s own personal Foreign Office,’” Sherwood writes, and “more violently controversial than ever.” The real-life and official Foreign Office—a.k.a. the State Department—was in many ways knocked out of power for the duration. It’s astonishing to learn, with the exception of interpreters and note takers, neither Secretary of State Cordell Hull nor any other State officials ever attended any of the wartime conferences with Churchill and Stalin.90 The British sent Anthony Eden, foreign secretary; the Soviets sent Vyacheslav Molotov, foreign minister; and the Americans sent Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s own per- sonal Foreign Office. Only at Yalta in February 1945 did the brand-new U.S. secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, attend—Hopkins’s “loyal protégé”—ably assisted by top aide Alger Hiss.
With the creation of FDR’s “Map Room”—the White House military infor- mation center and communications office that would morph into the White House Situation Room—the consolidation of powers at the White House was complete. Only the president, Harry Hopkins, and the president’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy (as noted earlier, another Hopkins selection), had ac- cess. Churchill, too, when he was in town. Now, all presidential communica- tions with the major wartime allies (Britain, the USSR, and China) entirely by- passed the State Department, which—don’t fall out of your chair—in those days included a roster of knowledgeable anti-Communist analysts. (These anti- Communists would be successively purged under direct Soviet pressure in what M. Stanton Evans has referred to as a “rolling coup d’etat.”) The Joint Chiefs, too, were often “kept in the dark . . . until the die was cast,” said Maj. Gen. John R. Deane, former secretary to the Joint Chiefs, who would become the Moscow-based administrator of Lend-Lease and write an important book about the experience called The Strange Alliance.
Lend-Lease did more than transform the power structure of the U.S. government. It also introduced a revolutionary principle into our foreign policy. I’ll just put it out there in the words of “Junior Stettinius,” the Hopkins protégé whom we just saw putting the heat on Kravchenko in 1944—or at least conducting it, since Stettinius was, by all accounts, the emptiest of well-tailored suits.94 As Stettinius wrote—or, perhaps better, in words attributed to Stettinius:
The principle was contained in the words defining eligibility for Lend-Lease aid—“any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” The word “vital” was the heart of the matter. To favor limited aid to the allies as an expedient device for saving friendly nations from conquest was one thing. To declare that the defense of those nations was “vital” to our own national security was quite another. If we adopted the bill with those words, we would, in effect, declare the interdependence of the American people with the other freedom-loving nations of the world in the face of Axis aggression [emphasis added].
We did indeed adopt the Lend-Lease bill with those words. This makes March 11, 1941, the day the Lend-Lease bill passed after three months of rau- cous congressional debate, America’s Interdependence Day. It was the first day of a new global order under which all manner of international intervention is automatically declared “vital”—i.e., essential to life—to U.S. interests. It no longer even draws comment when American presidents routinely declare the destinies of far-flung peoples “vital” to that of the United States, whether in Saudi Arabia (Roosevelt), Iraq (Bush), or Afghanistan (Obama).
So how did Lend-Lease, this de facto American declaration of global interdependence—this de facto reversal of nonbelligerence if not also this de facto declaration of war—come about? Notably, the dispensers of conventional wisdom draw a stunning blank on its origins. Roosevelt biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin’s explanation is typical: “How Roosevelt arrived at this ingenious idea, which cut through all the stale debates in Washington about loans and gifts, is unclear,” she writes in her 1995 Pulitzer Prize–winning book No Ordinary Time.
Goodwin goes on to quote Robert Sherwood, who, citing Harry Hopkins, described Roosevelt’s unseen, supposedly creative mode by which policy was hatched—a mysterious “refueling process,” as Sherwood described it. “Then one evening,” Hopkins told Sherwood, recalling a two-week postelection fish- ing trip he accompanied FDR on in December 1940, “he suddenly came out with it [Lend-Lease]—the whole programme.”
Sounds like a fish story, but Sherwood happily took the bait from Hopkins’s hook: “One can only say that Roosevelt, a creative artist in politics, had put in his time on this cruise evolving the pattern of a masterpiece.” Then again, according to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the “masterpiece” didn’t take any time at all. She wrote that Lend-Lease was a “flash of almost clairvoyant knowledge and understanding,” describing FDR’s quasi-divine policy revelation as being akin to when a musical genius suddenly perceives “the structure of an entire symphony or opera.”
In fact, the evidence suggests Lend-Lease was a con job, and a really big one, put over by another Soviet tool: Soviet go-between, Soviet money-launderer, Soviet hobnobber Armand Hammer. So reports Edward Jay Epstein, who, in his groundbreaking 1996 biography of Hammer, assembled a convincing record indicating that Hammer was the person who floated the original Lend-Lease notion back in 1940. As Epstein discovered, Hammer had transformed himself “virtually overnight . . . from a businessman specializing in importing art and barrel staves from Stalin’s Russia to a geopolitical strategist concerned with helping Great Britain get immediate aid from the United States.” Before Dossier, incidentally, Epstein’s Hammer biography, which establishes Hammer as a traitor with revelations of Hammer’s pro-Soviet activities, the “international businessman” was generally billed as a nice old philanthropic “man of peace.”
That quick transformation of Hammer’s back in 1940 is odd on its face. Given that Hammer had Soviet interests at heart (and in the bank), why would he start beating the drum—taking out newspaper ads urging British aid, contributing money to pro-British funds—for Britain? Meanwhile, given the only marginal profitability of Hammer’s businesses at that time, Epstein notes “it was not clear where he was getting the funds for his campaign.” While Hammer wrote of his concerns as a Jew regarding Nazi Germany, Epstein notes Hammer was simultaneously helping to facilitate oil trade into Germany— scoring a 10 on the hypocrisy meter. The fact is, helping Britain at this early stage in hostilities helped the Kremlin, and was in fact the Communist Party line du jour. “The longer the British pursued the war” against Hitler, Epstein explains, “the more time Stalin would have to prepare the Red Army” for what he considered to be an inevitable war with Hitler. After all, they had read Hitler’s plans for them in Mein Kampf, and even had plans of their own.
Epstein tells us Hammer not only launched a PR campaign on Britain’s behalf but also lobbied the British Embassy in Washington with an idea that re-sembled the initial Lend-Lease policy, under which the United States “lent” destroyers for the “lease” of British bases, which famously eliminated the need for money to procure aid. The British were cool to Hammer’s query, already having established that he was part of the Soviet “secret regime” in the West. Too bad they didn’t mention that to us. Then again, maybe they did and the intelligence somehow found its way to that nice, quiet bureaucratic dead end where all too much anti-Soviet intelligence disappeared. Undeterred, Hammer tried the U.S. Senate, where he convinced a friendly Senator William H. King (D-UT) to present, unsuccessfully, aid legislation that Hammer himself had drafted in September 1940. Finally, Hammer briefly met with FDR himself at the White House on November 28, 1940. Epstein calls this meeting the “five minute summit.” It seems to have done the trick. FDR and Hopkins embarked on that postelection two-week “refueling” cruise in December, which Sherwood mentioned above, immediately after which FDR announced the plan for Lend-Lease in a press conference. He followed up in a Fireside Chat with the Hopkins-crafted declaration that the United States must now become “the arsenal for democracy.” Epstein further notes that FDR dispatched “deputy President” Hopkins to New York City at least two times to confer with Hammer further on this aid idea. Like a cuckoo’s egg, then, Lend-Lease was laid inside the White House nest by Hammer the Soviet tool, where Stalin’s best friend Hopkins had only to keep it in place so the president could hatch and crow about it.
Still, there were details to work out. Who better to work them out than Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White? Albert Weeks tells us that White was “one of the main drafters of the administration’s side of the Lend-Lease particulars, especially as Lend-Lease was to be extended to the Russians.” Harry Dexter White was also signed, sealed, and delivered by copious documentation a Soviet spy.
From Hammer to Hopkins to White and back again to Hopkins: The question now becomes, How could Lend-Lease not have been a rogue operation?
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