Samizdata used to be closely associated with the Libertarian Alliance, and over time became the dumping ground for Dehavilland and associated LA members who were neolibertarian hawks. Since Sean Gabb took over, most of these people seem to have vanished from the LA’s discussion list. No great loss.

I was especially amused by one commenter’s suggestion that FDR had no choice in the war with Japan because of Peal Harbor. Well, sure, aside from the fact that he’d been engaged in a dick-waving contest with the Japanese over the markets and resources of the Western Pacific since the late ’30s. The former colonial territories of England, France, and the Netherlands which Japan was absorbing into the Co-Prosperity Sphere were seen by the Roosevelt administration as an integral part of the “Grand Area” without which the American corporate economy couldn’t survive. FDR had been trying to goad Japan into war for the previous couple of years, what with the oil embargo, popup cruises in Japanese imperial waters, and the like. FDR was actually planning to initiate war with Japan, by whatever means he could finagle, if they attacked the Dutch East Indies.

One of the funniest things I ever saw was a skit on SNL, G. Gordon Liddy’s version of history. Churchill and Stalin stormed into the Oval Office and accosted FDR: “You said you’d get Japan to attack so you could trick the American people into war, and then we could all divide up Europe between ourselves. What’s the holdup?”

Looking over your back-n-forth at Samizdata (wow, to think I used to be like THEM), you could add to the discussion on Iran the fact that Ahmedinijad never actually said he wanted to destroy Israel (”wipe it off the map”), but rather wanted to remove the Israeli regime from the “pages of time”. Those who actually understand Farsi know this, and I believe Juan Cole pointed this out.

I can dig up a reference if anyone wants it.

I think it is fair to say many were complicit. Emma Goldman told them during Lenin’s reign that this was a police state, and they pushed her reports aside. The “show trials” were defended,” even in outlets like The New Republic. They just did not want to know.

A question for Mona: is there an equivalent right-wing organization of that era or other that it would be considered unacceptable to remain a member of but okay to work with for some shared goals?

Yes. I think Charles Lindbergh was unfairly tainted with anti-Semitic views due to his opposition to WWII until Pearl Harbor — then he flew some 50 dangerous missions as a a civilian in the South Pacific. (FDR was so pissed about Lindbergh’s prior opposition to war, he would not reinstate Lindberghs’s military commission, so the nascent Air Force worked around that and used Lindbergh as a civilian, doctoring the paperwork.)

But, there were many, many left-wing alternatives to the CPUSA. The problem is the government and anti-Communist hysterics stoked a conflation of all of these groups.

But that “connection” is why Hillary has been so frantic about keeping her Alinsky “senior thesis” under wraps. She figures some will scream “Commie!” (which the odious Bill O’Reilly did a few years ago when doing an entire segment on her paper).

I can be very hard on unrepentant Stalinists and their fellow-travelers. But the fact is, the CPUSA for all of its many, many sins, got some things right. Like ending Jim Crow, well before that was a fashionable position.

Hillary should engage in a defense of where Alinsky was right, not run from her paper.