You’ll have to get Tom Woods and / or Don Beito back on to talk about W.W.2.

“The Good War” is the shared “creation myth” of both the neocons and the liberal internationalists. In all probability the current neocon priesthood will be duly kicked out thanks to their failed crusade in the Middle East. But the casting out of wicked priests is not the overthrow of a mythology. Without broader revisionist lessons being learned the whole misadventure risks being resumed under new management.

The popular belief in “The Good War” is very deep and broad. We need to chip away at it from a number of fronts. One home grown idea I like to kick around is the counter-intuitive notion that America would not have won WW2, or at least not won it as comparatively easily as it did, had it not been for the strength of the isolationist movement.

Huh?

Well Pearl Harbor was only about 6 months after Hitler’s attack against Stalin. Had FDR “had his way” and had the US entered the war against Germany say a year earlier, Hitler may have decided to put Operation Barbarossa on hold, say for a year or even two, and concentrate on the Anglo-Americans. Thus instead of the US being the “Johnny Come Lately (again)” who thus managed to win the best deal from the war, we could be calling Joe Stalin, “Joey Come Lately”. Even if we rule out the possibility of him entering on Hitler’s side as he did in Poland.

There is some evidence that Stalin, who generally pursued a much more aggressive foreign policy than most historians will have you believe, did not agree to the Hitler-Stalin Pact out of sheer defensiveness. The myth that prevailed for decades. East European archival researchers have been burying that idea even if western history books are yet to reflect it. Stalin may even have been planning to double-cross Hitler and invade Greater Germany sometime in 1941-42, although the alleged D-Day is a matter of speculation.

What we do know for sure is that in the war as it actually panned out, the USSR suffered about 10,000,000 military personnel killed, compared to the USA’s 400,000. Had America entered WW2 in 1939 or early 1940, “the Johnny Come Early” scenario, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that US casualties could easily have topped a million and the economic cost could have been two (maybe three) times the cost of the “Johnny Come Lately” alternative.

There is a strange double standard applied by “Good War” boosters. If dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima was ‘justified’ because it saved “a million allied soldiers’ lives”, presumably delaying entry into war to save a half million makes sense too. So why don’t they praise the isolationists, at least, for that?

Even had a “Johnny-come-Early” America ultimately triumphed the post-war world would have been even gloomier than it was. The Soviets would have been stronger. A J.C.E-America’s higher debt situation probably would have ruled out the Marshall Plan, the aid program that it’s boosters tell us was critical for the emergence of a free and prosperous West Europe. And the higher death toll would have made a credible American non-nuclear deterrent in Western Europe much less likely.

All I am doing with this alternate history scenario is applying the assumptions of the “Good War” crowd consistently.

Most pro-war historians and commentators argue that the isolationists were “successful” in delaying and hamstringing FDR’s war plans until Pearl Harbor. Maybe so, maybe not. But if this is so, and it wasn’t just FDR picking his own start date, then …even if the isolationists were, as is often claimed, on “the wrong side of history”, …they surely deserve a significant slice of the victory pie. The interventionists can’t hog the whole lot!

Roderick Long (see here) says a Ron Paul clip will appear on The Daily Show, but it will be a negative clip and TDS will thus have an opportunity to blow rhubbarbs. These guys just do not want to anti-war conservatives. They and the neocons are as one on this.

Is it just intellectual cognitive dissonance? Or do they fear the paleos will steal their wind?