Bill O column:
Ninety years is a long time. In 1936, Americans were suffering during the Great Depression, and life was generally hard. My parents were deeply affected by what they saw as teenagers. Vast unemployment, hunger, fear. The United States was in trouble.
Therefore, many Americans did not care about the tremendous evil that was gathering strength thousands of miles away. Adolf Hitler had become the dictator of Germany and was ramping up his war machine.
In addition, the Gestapo and the SS were violating human rights on a mass scale within the Third Reich. Jews, in particular, were targeted for destruction.
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The governments of Europe, as well as the USA, knew what was unfolding. But the nations all looked away. Hitler had violated the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, so Allied armies could have invaded Germany and destroyed the Reich. Hitler’s forces were not yet strong enough to prevent that.
But Britain, France, and other European countries did nothing. Hitler became bolder; he saw the weakness.
In the United States, a movement called “America First” emerged, led by aviator Charles Lindbergh, who actually travelled to Germany at the invitation of the odious Hermann Goring, Hitler’s second in command. Millions of Americans supported Lindbergh. Perhaps half of the voting public was content with allowing Hitler to kill at will, according to polls taken back then.
Today, Iran has replaced Germany as a frightening threat, and, incredibly,
Europe still looks away, apparently not absorbing the fact that at least 50 million human beings died because evil was ignored in 1936. As George Santayana wrote in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Senator Lindsey Graham told me last week that before the U.S.-Israel bombing campaign began, the Mullahs were within weeks of developing a nuclear weapon. Yes, the Senator is a hawk, but his assessment coincides with UN nuclear authorities.
Every American should watch that interview, which is posted on BillOReilly.com. But they won’t. The left-wing Trump haters and the right-wing isolationists condemn the military action against Iran. They don’t really care that an evil regime might develop a bomb that could kill millions; they simply believe what they want to believe.
The ridiculous newspaper “Newsday” editorializes, “What are we fighting for?” Yes, the paper is ardently left-wing, but even it knows the action is to prevent Iran from acquiring nukes. But Newsday does not want to confront that possibility. Adolf Hitler would have loved the paper.
And it’s not just the treacherous media dissenting. Regular folks don’t want to pay more for gas and food. Iran is far away. So what if the Mullahs murder thousands of their own people and sponsor terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah? That’s way over there!
This is not a pro-war column. The Iraq quagmire was a disaster. The Bush administration totally miscalculated. Vietnam was a crime in my opinion. The master of deceit, Lyndon Johnson, the perpetrator.
But today, the hard evidence is that evil men are close to achieving nuclear mass murder potential in Iran. Newsday and others might want to look away from that for their own delusional reasons.
But I won’t.
