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Jul 26

Written by: Diana West
Sunday, July 26, 2015 6:49 AM 

As I have learned, and particularly since the publication of American Betrayal, history is far too important to be left to professional historians content (ordered?) to trudge along the familiar groove of false narrative (until roused to any-means-necessary search-and-destroy missions against those who venture off-road in search of buried truth).

This is a matter of more than academic import. It is of much wider concern than to students or buffs. History is, should be, the guidestar of our conduct as a nation.The fact that we founder so dangerously today is directly related to the continuous loop of falsehood and misunderstanding about exactly how we got this way.

Take the 1940s international war aid program for anti-Axis powers known as Lend Lease. This program, which passed into law in 1941, gutted Congress's powers of the purse and war-making, also advise-and-consent, and gave them to the executive branch.

No, I am not talking about Obama's Iran deal -- but because Lend Lease is glossed over or giossed up in our history lessons, the instructive precedents are lost to us. 

Lend-Lease is a subject of much scrutiny and analysis in American Betrayal -- and not only because Soviet agents and assets had so much to do with it -- which just might help explain why Lend Lease, among other things, surreptitiously sent Stalin military-embargoed uranium, heavy water and other materials essential for the creation and maintenance of an experimental atomic pile.

But Lend Lease is also examined as the statutory, revolutionary means of junking the US Constitution by effectively taking war-making and appropriations powers away from the Congress and giving them to the executive branch -- the Roosevelt White House. There, they resided in the hands of one man -- and not even the president! -- the unelected, unconfirmed, White-House-residing Harry Hopkins, FDR's top advisor and Lend Lease chief, who some experts believe was a conscious or "unconscious" Soviet agent.

But back to the Obama deal with Iran. While quite different from Lend Lease, it is expected also to enable another enemy of the USA to become a nuclear power. Even more striking are parallels to the Constitutional crisis between the executive and legislative branches created by Lend Lease -- a crisis that was not resolved but rather overtaken by world war, then forgotten or erased in the history of that war as written by the victors. 

In other words, the executive branch assault on the Constitution's balance of powers goes way back. 

I came across the (above) video of a 1941 speech opposing Lend Lease as a Constitutional matter by Rep. Hamilton Fish III. By itself, it is a fascinating history lesson about Lend Lease, but it also carries echoes of our modern-day crisis concerning the history of executive branch dictatorship.     

  

       

 

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