What position would today's Republicans take in WWII

Would they be doing the whole "dissent is treason" thing, even with a Dem in office? Or would they have supported the Axis powers, like I imagine they would have?

Because Hitler was "tough on communism".

Prescott Bush-George's grandfather actually supported the Nazis-trading with the enemies act

What on earth is the point of this entire post?

Republicans came very close to a coup against Roosevelt until General Smedley Butler put an end to it. Even the good conservative Democrat Joe Kennedy was friendly to Nazi Germany. Of course Pearl Harbor changed everything.

The repukes were the isolationists who didn't want us entering the war--only after Pearl Harbor did their voices become muted.

He was a key in the financing the Nazi's via Harriman Bank and was prosecuted by FDR under the "Trading With the Enemy Act" where much of his financial empire was seized by the federal government. Incidentally, many of the people he was involved with also had planned a coup against FDR for the expressed reason of establishing a fascist government in the United State. Look it up.


From a letter, dated 1936, from William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, to President Roosevelt


More about the coup:
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/53-index.html

This is why people need to learn more about history.

On edit: Knowing all we do about the Bush family, why would this seem so shocking to you? Seems pretty much par for the course to me. Half the reason they get away with what they do is people unbelievably giving them the benefit of the doubt despite all their actions and a very long history to the contrary. They have shown again and again they simply cannot be trusted with power or wealth of any kind.

lover, was an ass.

There were Nazi supporters everywhere and they were mostly the wealthy.

thought that Hitler was a great, visionary man. He was turning Germany around.

...with glowing, pro-Nazi titles, like 'Hitler's German Miracle', etc...

That changed after Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on us, but before the Japanese attack, the opinion of the moneyed classes was that the US should either stay out of the war or help Hitler fight the Soviet Union.

Here's a link to the first two chapters of an EXCELLENT book about this period, "Facts and Fascism" (1943) by George Seldes:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/George_Seldes/Facts_and_Fascism.html

THE TIME will come when people will not believe it was possible to mobilize 10,800,000 Americans to fight Fascism and not tell them the truth about the enemy. And yet, this is exactly what happened in our country in the Global War.

The Office of War Information published millions of words, thousands of pamphlets, posters and other material, most of it very valuable and all of it intended to inspire the people and raise the morale of the soldiers of production and the soldiers of the field; but it is also a fact that to the date of this writing the OWI did not publish a single pamphlet, poster, broadside or paper telling either the civilian population or the men and women in uniform what Fascism really is, what the forces are behind the political and military movements generally known as Fascism, who puts up the money, who make the tremendous profits which Fascism has paid its backers in Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and other nations. Certainly when it comes to relating foreign Fascism with native American Fascism there is a conspiracy of silence in which the OWI, the American press, and all the forces of reaction in America are united. Outside of a few books, a few pamphlets, and a few articles in the very small independent weekly press which reaches only a few thousand readers, not one word on this subject has been printed, and not one word has been heard over any of the big commercial radio stations.

Faraway Fascism has been attacked, exposed, and denounced by the same publications (the Saturday Evening Post for example) which for years ran articles lauding Mussolini and his notable backers in all lands; and the Hearst newspapers, which published from 1934 to Pearl Harbor dozens of signed propaganda articles by Dr. Goebbels, Goering and other Nazis, now call them names, but no publication which takes money from certain Big Business elements (all of which will be named here) will dare name the native or nearby Fascists. In many instances the publications themselves are part of our own Fascism.
But we must not be fooled into believing that American Fascism consists of a few persons, some crackpots, some mentally perverted, a few criminals such as George W. Christians and Pelley, who are in jail at present, or the 33 indicted for sedition. These are the lunatic fringes of Fascism, they are also the small fry, the unimportant figureheads, just as Hitler was before the Big Money in Germany decided to set him up in business.

(much, much more at link)

Keeping in mind that this book was written in 1943, you get the most incredible sense of deja vu while reading it nowdays...

Do some reading on Prescott Bush and Union Banking Corporation.

He was approached by some of the richest people in the country to overthrow FDR and set up a junta because of the New Deal.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/McCormack-Dickstein_Committee

Fortunately, Butler was a true patriot and reported it to Congress. As far as I know, no one was punished.

Were English lords and landed gentry and Wall Street businessmen and industrialists.

They would stay home, content that "I am helping by supporting the war here at home".

The lousy cowards.

opposed the war . . . made a big speech in January 1941 opposing the idea of helping Europe . . .

... and one of him socializing at a Nazi party in Berlin in 1935.

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/0609607995.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0609808990/qid=1134502615/sr=8-7/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/104-5836122-5917503?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

The crucial technology was a precursor to the computer, the IBM Hollerith punch card machine, which Black glimpsed on exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, inspiring his five-year, top-secret book project. The Hollerith was used to tabulate and alphabetize census data. Black says the Hollerith and its punch card data ("hole 3 signified homosexual ... hole 8 designated a Jew") was indispensable in rounding up prisoners, keeping the trains fully packed and on time, tallying the deaths, and organizing the entire war effort. Hitler's regime was fantastically, suicidally chaotic; could IBM have been the cause of its sole competence: mass-murdering civilians? Better scholars than I must sift through and appraise Black's mountainous evidence, but clearly the assessment is overdue.

Many of you are still under the mistaken belief that Republicans believe in anything except what they want right now. They don't.

Perhaps you'll remember how adamantly, how vociferously, how deeply-felt was their conviction that we have absolutely no business in 'nation-building'. You haven't heard that slur in a while. It was none of our goddamn business what those other people are fighting about. We should be concerned with Murka. Period. 'We aren't the world's policeman.'

What that means, just like what their heartfelt charge now to 'spread democracy' means, is nothing. It's total bullshit. They didn't believe that then, and they don't believe this now. Even today, within the context of the current self-serving mindset, they have no inclination to 'spread democracy' to any of the other petty tyrants around the world. Only where 'commies' threaten their ideology by their very existence, or where oil is needed to maintain it. What they want.

What they believe is that Democrats don't have the right to spend their money. What that means in larger terms, if you want to get at the base of how they think, is that nobody else but them gets to exercise power. That means the right to institute social policy. It means the right to spend money - that's stealing from them when you do it; it's your patriotic duty when they do it. It means the right to use the military - you don't have the right to use the military even for humanitarian or peacekeeping needs, or to fight in a world war; they on the other hand have the right to start and prosecute any damn war they want. For any reason they want.

They didn't want to fight that 'European war' even while some of our ships were being attacked. The only thing that got us into World War II was Pearl Harbor being attacked because that was an undeniable act of war. Without that Roosevelt would have had less justification to fight Hitler than Bush did to attack Iraq in their mindsets. Dissent wasn't treason while American ships were being attacked attacked. Dissent is treason even though Iraq attacked nothing.

Nobody else has the right to exercise power but them, and when they want to exercise power - political, economic, blocking judges or anything else, then they'll accept any excuse, even blatant lies, as justification. They'll do a complete 180 on your exercise of power and theirs, and you don't get to question it. Their reasoning and justifications will be stunningly contradictory within themselves, and you don't get to question it. They are completely self-centered, on everything from what you get to put on TV or what you smoke, all the way through economics and up to national security.

They'll justify why you can't, and why they can, after the fact. And they'll change those justifications, or lie about those justifications, any time they want. They get to do what they want. You don't get to do what they don't want. Always and in everything they have the right to power and you don't.

For an illustration of GOP ideology, draw a straight line in between two points. The first point is a conservative, the second point is something they want. That line in between those points is what they call "policy".

in much less space.

The right wing mind doesn't 'reason' in the way we think of reason, in the same way they use the words 'theory' and 'science' for intelligent design in completely different ways than we commonly define those words. By and large, the left mind looks at the real world and tries to reason its way to deal with it, sociologically, economically, spiritually, etc. The right mind spends a nano-second determining what it wants and then expends all of its energy justifying its position. It is the exact opposite of reason. Their 'reasoning' is rationalization.

That's how we get 'science' like god makes the stars go around the earth, which is 6,000 years old, intelligent design as a 'theory' on a par with evolution theory, supply-side 'economics', justification for invading Iraq and a thousand other things.

What they want is the sole determinant of what they think. To them 'reasoning' is justifying belief. That's why you can't educate them: they aren't going from an educated perspective TO anything. They are backfilling what they believe FROM what they want and all you can change are their rationalizations, which start jumping around and eventually just turn into whatever lies they have to tell to hold their ground, backed up with resentment that their opinion isn't considered as informed as your 'elite' perspective, which is just an opinion to them.

This is why progressives - thinkers - have never and will never be able to make so much as a dent, with evidence or reason or compassion or humanism, in the mindsets or worldviews of regressives - believers. It is fundamentally, ontologically, structurally if you will, an impossibility. Beat your head against the wall in private until the blood starts coming down. That will have just as much of an impact on people whose minds work diametrically against reason as a discussion with basic truth and straight-forward logic will. None. Ever. Hundreds of years of science and post-Enlightenment progress hasn't been able to do it. Fifty-billion conversations with Republicans haven't done it.

Oh my, they'd probably be spellbound by the brutal facism. All that military might, a total police state, torture is OK, etc, it would be too much. They might even enlist to go crush some commies.

Oh wait, they ARE collaborating.

"How much money & power can Republicans get for this, and how much money & power can our corporate donors get for this? Also, can we get an agreement that the Democrats will remove the New Deal and cut all taxes for the wealthiest 2%?"

and lost the war