[ARCHIVED] Shit Liberals Say

This is a classic example of what some logicians like to call the Texas sharpshooter fallacy: by relying on a small pool of data, you can ‘prove’ just about anything. While it was natural that Washington would enact some anti‐Axis measures when it officially entered the war in 1941, these are probably best summarized as ‘too little, too late’.

>Concession Blacklist and Tarrifs [sic] against Germany - 1935

This is very misleading, and I wasted a couple dozen minutes of my time trying to research it. This doesn’t refer to a unique law designed to limit trade with the Third Reich specifically, but rather with all of the belligerent powers in Europe, including (until 1939) Britain and France. They didn’t enact this on grounds of antifascism either, but to avoid involvement in another major war.

The Neutrality Act was basically a failure. Not only did corporations like Chase and Ford repeatedly bypass it with great success, but, as Gaetano Salvemini noted:

>As if Mussolini's mill needed more water to work it, the isolationist Congress of the United States passed a “Neutrality Act” (August 23-24) which made it mandatory for the President until February 29, 1936, in case of war between foreign countries, to place an embargo on the export of arms and munitions to all belligerents without discrimination. It was obvious that the Act could not affect Italy, which manufactured guns and shells but had to import cotton for explosives, steel, and copper for military equipment, coal and oil for her navy. Putting an embargo on arms alone meant leaving Italy undisturbed.

While this passage is referring to Fascist Italy, it applies to the Third Reich as well. Now, it may be true that American–German trade (or at least the legal kind) fell by 50% from 1929 to 1939, but that had more to do with the Great Depression than moral objections (which few U.S. businesses had) to the German Reich; an overall decrease in trade was already probable, with some important exceptions:

>And it is important to consider the size of [Yankee] investments in [Fascist] Germany at the time of Pearl Harbor. These amounted to an estimated total of $475 million. Standard Oil of New Jersey had $120 million invested there; General Motors had $35 million; ITT had $30 million; and Ford had $17.5 million. > >[…] > >Why did even the loyal figures of the [Yankee] government allow these transactions to continue after Pearl Harbor? A logical deduction would be that not to have done so would have involved public disclosure: the procedure of legally disconnecting these alliances under the antitrust laws would have resulted in a public scandal that would have drastically affected public morale, caused widespread strikes, and perhaps provoked mutinies in the armed services. Moreover, as some corporate executives were never tired of reminding the government, their trial and imprisonment would have made it impossible for the corporate boards to help the [Yankee] war effort. Therefore, the government was powerless to intervene.

(Emphasis added.)

Thus the Neutrality Act’s effects must have been marginal at best.

>Cash and Carry - 1939

Yes, the White House created a loophole in its Neutrality Act in order to provide France and the United Kingdom with some (sorely needed) rearmament. That is true. The complete loss of France and the United Kingdom, however, would have placed them under unstable régimes under attack from partisans, at serious risk for eventual liberation by the U.S.S.R., and finally transformed from anticommunist régimes into people’s republics, as the pattern became in most of Eastern Europe:

> Britain and France did not appease Germany because they expected to be defeated by the Wehrmacht, but because, in the words of France’s right-wing Prime Minister Daladier, another European war would mean the ‘utter destruction of European civilization’, creating a vacuum that could only be filled by ‘Cossack and Mongol hordes’ and their ‘culture’ of Soviet Communism.

So the suddenly increased trading with France and the U.K. had more to do with reinforcing Western capital and less to do with antifascism. Nothing surprising here.

> Lend Least Act - 1941

See here.

>German Soviet Credit Agreement - 1939 >Ribbenntrop [sic] Pact - 1939 >German Soviet Commercial Agreement - 1940

I have already replied to all of these here.

What I find most frustrating about this meme, though, is that it leaves a lot unsaid. The U.S. press’s reactions in 1933, the tolerance for the Fascists at Madison Square, the tolerance for them in Hollywood, the benevolent treatment of Fascist POWs, the CIA’s recruitment of Axis personnel and their collaborators? All omitted. Most obviously, the massive anticommunist invasion of the U.S.S.R. is omitted, as if it were unimportant.

While it would be an exaggeration to say that Imperial America and the Third Reich were ever ‘best buds’, they were not natural born enemies either, which is why Western forces invaded the R.S.F.S.R. almost immediately but left both Fascist Italy and the Third Reich in peace as they safely accumulated power in the 1930s—in many cases with the help of U.S. capitalists.