Why The American Media Supported The U.S. During World War II
By Margaret Snyder (11/17/03)
If we lose this war it will be to the fifth column: the intellectual elites of this country in the news media and elsewhere. The attacks on our troops in Iraq are aimed at the anti-war movement in this country in the hope that the President will lose political support for the war and call it all off. And so far the news media are performing as expected.
Coverage of the war leans to the gloom and doom, the soldiers interviewed are the ones whose morale is low and who are against the war. Good news for the U.S. is buried on the inside pages or not there at all. These people do not seem to want to win the war.
A talk show host said that if the media had behaved like this during World War II we would all be lampshades or bars of soap. Indeed, by all accounts, the media and the intelligentsia generally agreed during WWII that we ought to win the war and they supported the war effort.
Why was that? Maybe it was because the evil of the Nazi regime was so apparent to all. No, that doesn’t explain it because the evil of the Baathist regime and of the Taliban and of al Quaida is equally apparent.
Maybe it was because FDR was a Democrat. No, that can’t be it because Viet Nam was JFK’s and LBJ’s war and the intelligentsia opposed that.
Maybe it was because it wasn’t “unilateral”. No, that can’t be it because we were in the Korean conflict at the behest of the UN and they didn’t like that either.
Why did today’s America haters not hate America during World War II? I will tell you why. They did not hate America during World War II because we were on the good side. What made it the good side? Not the fact that we were against Germany and Japan but that we were ON THE SAME SIDE AS THE SOVIET UNION.
Consider: Starting in the 1920’s, the intellectual left in this country harbored warm fuzzies for the good ol’ USSR. Communism took hold among the intelligentsia in the news media, the entertainment industry and the elite universities. That is where most of the card-carrying Communists and fellow travelers were. To this day the myth persists that the Communist Party of the U.S.A. was an independent, American organization. It was not. It was entirely controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its members looked on the Soviet Union as the light of the world.
When Communist playwright Lillian Hellman learned that Hitler had invaded Russia, she wailed, “The Motherland has been invaded!” The dozens if not hundreds of Communists working in the U.S. government were working to advance the interests of the Soviet Union.
American Communists and fellow travelers shared the Utopian socialist vision and so they refused to see the evidence that this was an evil regime, was in fact a regime that surpassed even Hitler in evil, and that its evil was institutionally inevitable. They still could not see it when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an Evil Empire. They could hardly decide whether to be amused or outraged that he would make such a ludicrous, simplistic statement.
To them, the United States was evil because we are a nation that tolerates imperfection. Our Constitution is a constitution for an imperfect people. It guarantees freedom of speech, even when that speech is repugnant. It guarantees the rights of the accused, even though we know sometimes the guilty will go free. It guarantees us the right to bear arms, even though we know sometimes we’ll wish it weren’t so. It guarantees us freedom of religion, even though we know some will reject God.
We accept that some will have more money than others (and believe that this offers the best chance for all to have enough).
Comparing this imperfect nation with Utopia, they preferred Utopia, embodied for them in the USSR. Living here in the land of the free, which tolerated their repugnant ideas in the name of that freedom, they preferred the distant Utopia which conformed so nicely to their wishful thinking. (They had seen the Potemkin village to prove it!) And so, because we allied with the Soviet Union in World War II against Russia’s enemy, they could in good conscience support that war. And that is why the media and the Ivy League schools and the entertainment industry were so different in World War II than they have been since. We were on the side of “ultimate good” and it was the last time we were.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Margaret Snyder
