The Four Freedoms.
Geeze! It was all laid out when I was a wee baby. That was a damned long time ago.
Since then, despite the present players in this drama, it's been an ongoing war surreptitious between:
Good and Evil.
I am serious.
On January 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a speech to the United States Congress and delineated the Four Freedoms:
The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the world.
Please note Roosevelt's repetitive refrain:
everywhere and anywhere in the world
Roosevelt warns:
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
Counter to that there appeared on February 17 in the same year an article called "
The American Century" penned by Henry R. Luce (and, believe me, the R does not stand for Roosevelt) in Life Magazine dictating that We Americans "
accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
That would be "for America alone to determine whether a system of free economic enterprise - an economic order compatible with freedom and progress - shall or shall not prevail in this century."
Then, "America as the principal guarantor of the freedom of the seas, the vision of Americas [sic] as the dynamic leader of world trade..."
But, we would graciously bestow largesse: "We must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world.... For every dollar we spend on armaments, we should spend at least a dime in a gigantic effort to feed the world - and all the world should know that we have dedicated ourselves to this task."
Lastly, America is "the sanctuary of the ideals of civilization." We are, after all, "the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization - above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity."
This Divine Credo declared by its high priest Henry Robinson Luce became Project for the New American century and its attendant ills, signed by Dick Cheney and that bunch. And wasn't it magnanimous of Mr. Luce to tithe a dime for feeding the hungry out of every buck spent for warfare?
Credits to Andrew Bacevich and his book, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War.