The Sword versus the Shield

This is a discussion of Bad America versus Good America. The Sword is the current bad destructive support for dictators and torture, and the readiness for War. But most of the world wants to remember us as the Shield. The Shield is a beacon of hope, freedom, and liberty of our ideals. This would be an America as under decent and forward looking American Presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Franklin D Roosevelt.

I think we swallowed the Red Scare of McCarthyism after WWII and this was deliberate. Look at the movies of the late forties and you see an idealism not seen since in American films. We chose this path (The Sword) in Vietnam. I think Lyndon Johnson thought he was doing the right thing there, but he was wrong. From the point when we stopped the national election that was scheduled for 1956 in Vietnam, we were on the wrong side to the world there. Ho Chi Minh wrote the Declaration of Independence for Vietnam and the only changes were substitutions in country names (The Shield). We backed up the French there in trying to get back their vestige of colonialism and justified it as battles against communism (The Sword).

Conveniently these menaces to America always involve using the Military-Industrial Complex (The Sword) to combat the enemy and every single time we empower Fascism to new heights. Even George Washington (THE SHIELD) warned us about this dangerous problem, but Americans always have to learn the lesson the hard way in proceeding generations.

Once we condemned War as an instrument of national policy, The Kellogg Briand Pact after WWI. This was a mistake that the Military-Industrial Complex always likes to point out. America retreated from The League of Nations and was not prepared for WWII. We endured a Great Depression and all sorts of ills but this was of Republican making. It was Republicans that established a policy of liaise faire and could not slow or stop the Great Depression. It was a Democratic President, Franklin D Roosevelt that reconstructed America and prepared America to take on the challenges of Fascism and win a world war that saved the world from slavery and certain oppression.

Unfortunately we also empowered the Military-Industrial Complex in the process and now, with peace at hand, the idealism of America was returning. America was getting ready to turn weapons into instruments of peace (The Shield) and The Sword had to prevent that. America created a quasi Sword and Shield in the policy of containment against communism with the concept of using The Sword when necessary, but using The Shield to rebuild Italy, Germany, and Japan.

Indeed Lyndon Johnson envisioned a Marshal Plan for Vietnam after America won the war against communism there. America, as the world's only superpower, has terrific responsibilities to the world and its citizens. We must never betray our founding principles (The Shield) and allow War (The Sword) to pollute us. All great nations eventually fall in the greater scheme of history and we will not be an exception to this rule. How would Americans rather our country be remembered as The Sword or The Shield?

Thomas P Love