[Peace-discuss] Veterans' Day

[David Johnson]

Yes, and lets not forget the extensive propoganda / public relations 
campaign waged by the Wilson administration with the help of an army of 
government paid journalists, etc. with the help of Edward Bernais, to " 
convince " the American people of the need to enter World War I.
Prior to the propoganda campaign a vast majority were opposed to war. After 
only 6-months a slight majority were in favor and those who still opposed 
like Labor Leader Eugene Debs were persecuted and jailed.

David Johnson



Subject: [Peace-discuss] Veterans' Day


"American entry into the First World War had answered to no determinable 
national interest. A gratuitous decision by its president, enforced with 
sweeping ethnic persecution and political repression at home, it was the 
product of a massive excess of US power over any material goals procurable 
by it. "


PRESIDENT WILSON & WORLD WAR I

...With the arrival of Woodrow Wilson in the White House, however, a 
convulsive turn in the trajectory of American foreign policy was at hand. As 
no other President before or after him, Wilson gave voice to every chord of 
presumption in the imperial repertoire, at messianic pitch. Religion, 
capitalism, democracy, peace and the might of the United States were one. 
‘Lift your eyes to the horizons of business’, he told American salesmen, 
‘and with the inspiration of the thought that you are Americans and are 
meant to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever 
you go, go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and 
more happy, and convert them to the principles of America.’ [10] In a 
campaign address of 1912, he declared: ‘If I did not believe in Providence I 
would feel like a man going blindfolded through a haphazard world. I do 
believe in Providence. I believe that God presided over the inception of 
this nation. I believe he planted in us the visions of liberty.’ A ‘divine 
destiny’ was furthermore in store for America: ‘We are chosen and 
prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they 
shall walk in the paths of liberty’. [11] The route might be arduous, but 
the bourne was clear. ‘Slowly ascending the tedious climb that leads to the 
final uplands, we shall get our ultimate view of the duties of mankind. We 
have breasted a considerable part of that climb and shall presently, it may 
be in a generation or two, come out upon those great heights where there 
shines unobstructed the light of the justice of God’. [12] After sending US 
troops into more Caribbean and Central American states than any of his 
predecessors—Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua—in 1917 
Wilson plunged the country into the First World War, a conflict in which 
America had ‘the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the 
world’. [13]

If US entry into the war made victory for the Entente a foregone conclusion, 
imposing an American peace proved more difficult. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, 
a hurried attempt to counter Lenin’s denunciation of secret treaties and 
imperialist rule, were distinguished mainly by their call for a global Open 
Door—‘the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers’—and 
‘impartial adjustment’, not abolition, of ‘all colonial claims’. Contrary to 
legend, self-determination appears nowhere in the enumeration. Wilson’s 
bulletins of democratic deliverance were treated with disdain by his 
partners at Versailles. At home, the League he proposed to avert future 
conflicts fared no better. ‘The stage is set, the destiny disclosed’, he 
announced, presenting his arrangements for perpetual peace in 1919, ‘the 
hand of God has led us into this way’. [14] The Senate was unmoved. America 
could dispense with Wilson’s ambitions. The country was not ready for an 
indefinite extension of regenerative intervention into the affairs of the 
world at large. Under the next three presidents, the United States 
concentrated on recovering its loans to Europe, otherwise limiting its 
operations outside the hemisphere to ineffectual attempts to get Germany 
back onto its feet and restrain Japan from overdoing expansion into China. 
To many, capsizal to the pole of separation—in the vocabulary of its 
opponents, ‘isolationism’—seemed all but complete.

The reality was that American entry into the First World War had answered to 
no determinable national interest. A gratuitous decision by its president, 
enforced with sweeping ethnic persecution and political repression at home, 
it was the product of a massive excess of US power over any material goals 
procurable by it. The rhetoric of American expansionism had typically 
projected markets overseas as if they were an external frontier, with the 
claim that US goods and investments now required outlets abroad that only an 
Open Door could assure. Yet the American economy, with its abundant natural 
resources and vast internal market, continued to be largely autarkic. 
Foreign trade accounted for no more than 10 per cent of GNP down to the 
First World War, when most American exports still consisted of raw materials 
and processed foodstuffs. Nor, of course, was there any Open Door to the US 
market itself, traditionally protected by high tariffs with scant regard for 
the principles of free trade. Still less was there the remotest threat of 
attack or invasion from Europe. It was this disjuncture between ideology and 
reality that brought Wilson’s millenarian globalism to an abrupt end. The 
United States could afford to dictate the military outcome of war in Europe. 
But if the cost of its intervention was small, the gain was nil. Neither at 
popular nor at elite level was any pressing need felt for institutional 
follow-through. America could look after itself, without worrying unduly 
about Europe. Under the banner of a return to normalcy, in 1920 Harding 
buried his Democratic opponent in the largest electoral landslide of modern 
times...

--PERRY ANDERSON, "IMPERIUM"
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