During his Sunday opening monologue, Fox News Channel “Life, Liberty & Levin” host Mark Levin argued that President Donald Trump’s actions against Iran were in line with those of some of his predecessors, including Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
According to Levin, citing Madison in part, peace was better than war. However, he said war is better than nuclear annihilation.
[P]eace is better than war, but war is better than nuclear annihilation.
It’s sort of a takeoff on something that James Madison said during the second Barbary Wars.
You know, one of the things I love about doing this show is, number one, the freedom I have to do it. Number two, you and the audience; but number three, the long form interviews and the opportunity to have an opening statement where I try to use history and philosophy and logic and the Constitution, because I think context, knowledge and experience are important things when we talk about modern events, like a war with Iran.
And I thought to myself, let me go back and look at some of the great statements that have been made by some great wartime presidents and how can I try and get through to the Democratic Party, to the isolationists and so forth, to the media, and I’m not sure I can, but let’s give it a try.
In a Fireside chat, December 29, 1940, Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the American people. I’m not going to read everything he said, but I’m going to read some of the important parts he said, because they’re incredibly relevant, and this is when Hitler and the Axis Powers were at war with most of Europe.
Roosevelt desperately felt we needed to get in before they attack us, but he couldn’t convince the isolationists, members of Congress, and so he gave this all important speech for the Lend Lease Program that we were going to provide support to the British, but not actually get involved in the war.
He said: This is not a fireside chat on war, it’s a talk on national security, because the nub of the whole purpose of your president is to keep you now and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours.”
He said later, “The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.”
Sound familiar?
“It was only three weeks ago,” he said “That their leader stated, there are two worlds that stand opposed to each other. And then, in defiant reply to his opponents, he said, ‘Others are correct when they say, with this world, we cannot ever reconcile ourselves. I can beat any other power in the world,’ so said the leader of the Nazis.”
Again, sound familiar?
Roosevelt said, “In other words, the axis not merely admits, but the axis proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy, their philosophy of government, and our philosophy of government.”
Roosevelt said, “In view of the nature of this undeniable threat, it can be asserted properly and categorically that the United States has no right or reason to encourage talk of peace until the day shall come when there is a clear intention on the part of the aggressor nations to abandon all thought of dominating or conquering the world.”
I remind the Democrats, this is your hero, Franklin Roosevelt. He said later, “If Great Britain goes down, the axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Asia and the high seas, and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.” Think about nuclear weapons.
“It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas would be living at the point of a gun or a point of a nuclear weapon, a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic, as well as military.”
He went on to say, “Frankly and definitely, there is a danger ahead, danger against which we must prepare, but we well know that we cannot escape danger or the fear of danger by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.”
He was talking to the isolationists, which were very prominent then, as they are today. He said later, “Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our gates. Your government knows much about them, and every day is ferreting them out” — like our enemy within — “… their secret emissaries are active in our own and in neighboring countries. They seek to stir up suspicion and dissension, to cause internal strife. They try to turn capital against labor and vice versa. They try to reawaken a long slumbering racial and religious enmities which should have no place in this country.”
Again, sound familiar?
“They are active in every group that promotes intolerance. They exploit for their own ends, our own natural abhorrence of war. These troubled breeders,” he said, “… have but one purpose. It is to divide our people, to divide them into hostile groups and to destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves.”
“Roosevelt said, there are also American citizens, many of them in high places, who, unwittingly, in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents.”
Slightly different today, they are intentionally aiding and abetting the agents that we’re dealing with in our country.
“I do not charge these American citizens with being foreign agents, but I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States,” and this includes the Islamist leaders in Iran and elsewhere. This includes Russia and Putin and Communist China.
He said, “These people not only believe that we can save our own skins by shutting our eyes to the fate of other nations, some of them go much further than that. They say that we can and it should become the friends and even the partners of axis powers.”
You hear this from the woke right; you hear this from the Marxists and the Islamist left.
“Some of them even suggest that we should imitate the methods of the dictatorships.” We hear that, too, “… but Americans never, never can and never will do that.” Never can and never will, … since they tell you that all of this bloodshed in the world could be saved, that the United States might just as well throw its influence into the scale of a dictated peace and get the best out of it that we can.” Roosevelt would have nothing to do with that.
He says, “The proposed new order is the very opposite of a United States of Europe or United States of Asia. It’s not a government based upon the consent of the governed. It’s not a union of ordinary, self-respecting men and women to protect themselves and their freedom and their dignity from oppression. It is an unholy alliance of power and pelt to dominate and enslave the human race.”
He says later, “If we are to be completely honest with ourselves, we must admit that there is risk in any course we may take. But I deeply believe that the great majority of our people agree that the course that I advocate involves the least risk now and the greatest hope for world peace in the future.”
Roosevelt said, “We have no excuse for defeatism. We have every good reason for hope, hope for peace, yes, and hope for the defense of our civilization, for the building of a better civilization in the future.”
And of course, not long after that, we were attacked. Donald Trump is operating in the tradition of our greatest peacetime/wartime presidents despite the outrageous media coverage in this country, despite the constant efforts under Operation Sabotage by a Democratic Party that is hell bent on losing this war, that is hell bent on undermining the Commander-in-Chief, that is hell bent on undermining our Armed Forces, and yes, is giving aid and comfort, propaganda to the enemy, as are individuals who I call the woke right neofascists, who are stirring the antisemitism pot, who are stirring the trash Christian pot.
They are no different than the same voices we heard in the 1930s and just as disgusting, evil and reprehensible.
Let’s take a further step back in American history. I’ve talked about this briefly, but not in the context I want to discuss it right now.
The first war the United States in a war was the first Barbary Pirate War. The late great Christopher Hitchens, almost 20 years ago, he wrote a piece in “The City Journal”: Thomas Jefferson versus the Muslim Pirates.
And again, I can’t read the whole thing, but let me give you a little flavor for this, because he was right on: “How many know that perhaps 1.5 million Europeans and Americans were enslaved in Islamic Northern Africa between 1530 and 1780?”
I didn’t know that. Did you know that? Well now, we all know it together.
“One of the immediate effects of the American Revolution,” he says, “… was to strengthen the hand of the very same North African potentates, roughly speaking, the Maghrebian provinces of the Ottoman Empire that conform to today’s Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Deprived of Royal Navy protection, American shipping became even more subject than before to the depredations of those who controlled the Strait of Gibraltar.”
All the shipping that was going through the Strait, just like the shipping — the auto shipping that’s going through a strait right now.
“But the infant United States had therefore to decide not just upon a question of national honor, but upon whether it would stand or fall by free navigation of the seas. One cannot get around what Jefferson heard when he went with John Adams to wait upon Tripoli’s Ambassador to London in March 1785, when they inquired ‘By what right the Barbary states …” — these are Muslim states “… preyed upon American shipping, enslaving both crews and passengers, America’s two foremost envoys were informed that ‘It was written in the Quran that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners.’”
This is a quote “… that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mosul man (Muslim) who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.”
Well, it seems that Jefferson decided from that moment on that he, if and when he became President, would make war upon the Barbary kingdoms as soon as he commanded American forces. His two least favorite institutions, enthroned monarchy and state sponsored religion were embodied in one target.
“However, it is certain that the Barbary question had considerable influence on the debate that ratified our Constitution in the succeeding years. Many a delegate urging his home state to endorse the new document (and these are in the Federalist Papers) argue that only a strong federal union could repel the Algerian threat.”
“Federalist number 24, Alexander Hamilton argued that without a federal navy of respectable weight, the genius of American merchants and navigators would be stifled and lost,”
“In Federalist 41, James Madison insisted that only Union could guard America’s maritime capacity from the rapacious demands of pirates and barbarians. John Jay who also wrote in the Federalist Papers, in his letters, he took a bring it on approach. He believed that the Algerian Corsairs (their ships) and the Pirates of Tunis and Tripoli would compel the feeble American states to unite, since the more we are ill-treated abroad, the more we shall unite and consolidate at home.”
I guess, he didn’t meet the American media of today and the American Democratic Party of today, did he?
“The questions of nation building, of regime change, of mission creep, of congressional versus presidential authority to make war, negotiation versus confrontation of entangling alliances and of the clash of civilizations all arose in the first overseas war that the United States ever fought.”
“The nation building that occurred, however, took place not overseas, but in the 13 colonies, welded by warfare into something more like a Republic.”
Unite or die.
There were many Americans, John Adams among them, who made the case it was better policy to pay the tribute and when he was president, our second president, that’s exactly what he did.
“It was cheaper than the loss of trade. For one thing embattled against the pirates would be, he said, ‘Too rugged for our people to bear.’ Putting the matter starkly, Adam said, ‘We ought not to fight them at all, unless we determine to fight them forever.’” He was worried about the Forever Wars.
Well, there was a second Barbary battle. The first battle resulted in an unconditional surrender. But the unconditional surrender didn’t last, because after the War of 1812, the Barbary Pirates of the Muslim coast there went right back at it. This time, James Madison was President.
This time, the second Barbary War ended this way, in 1815, President Madison sent a massive squadron, armada, of ships, all but destroyed the entire navy, if you want to call it that, the pirate ships of these Muslim coastal regimes, and forced another unconditional surrender.
Now, let’s tie all this to modern times.
All this talk about this war wasn’t imminent. Why did we decide now? All this talk about what is the mission? All of this is used to try and obstruct, undermine, dispirit and divide this nation, at a time when Donald Trump is doing what great presidents do. And the battle against Iran, maybe we should call it for now, the Battle of Iran. I call it a peace mission, because that’s the objective peace, peace through strength, taking on a government, an illegitimate terrorist regime whose roots are in the seventh century of barbarism, just like our Founding Fathers had to take on barbarism, just like Franklin Roosevelt needed to lead the nation against a barbaric Third Reich.
You see many similarities here in our own country, you see individuals who are spreading antisemitism, pushing it as hard as they can, people who have come into this country, newly from parts of this world, who are undermining our country, who are committing acts of terrorism on a heightened level against Jews, in particular, but not exclusively, against Americans of all faiths.
You see this enemy within, as Roosevelt saw the enemy within, stirring the pot, undermining our war effort, or our pre-war effort back then. Same thing. You see him say, we can’t make peace with an enemy that doesn’t want peace, and we will not do that.
In fact, one line that caught my attention in his speech, “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with incendiary bombs.” There can be no reasoning with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Shame on you, Democrats for what you are doing to this country. You will be remembered forever. You will remember as the isolationists of the 1930s, shame on you woke right neofascists. You will be remembered as the unpatriotic, anti-American Jew haters that you are, and Donald Trump will be remembered as a Jefferson, as an FDR in wartime, as a great, great leader, and the war that we are conducting, this peace mission to take out this enemy that slaughtered 50,000 of its own people in two days and is still slaughtering them, this enemy that is now firing ballistic missiles at all of its neighbors, this enemy that was hell bent on killing as many Americans as possible and killed more Americans than any other regime since recent major wars, this enemy that seeks to destroy the home, the heritage of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land.
One man out of seven presidents decided to take them on. One man, our commander-in-chief, Donald Trump, who is facing the same kind of ugly internal forces as Roosevelt did, who is facing the same kind of enemy that Jefferson did and Madison did.
Just remember this, this is a righteous war that seeks peace. Peace, again, changing slightly the quote from Madison in 1815, “Peace is better than war,” he said, but war is better than nuclear annihilation. He said, war is better than enslavement. War is better than nuclear annihilation.
I ask you, I ask you, what do you think Jefferson and Madison would do in these circumstances today? What do you think Franklin Roosevelt would do in these circumstances today, or Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, or even Ronald Reagan when they didn’t have nuclear weapons in Iran?
What do you think they would do? They would take action.
