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                 The Reactionary Utopian
                    December 18, 2007


HONORING EVIL
by Joe Sobran

     The enormous monument to Franklin Roosevelt will be 
dedicated on May 2, [1997,] and it's probably too late to 
do anything about it now except to hang our heads in 
shame.

     The monument is enormous in two senses. For one 
thing, it's big: It consumes 7.5 acres of Washington's 
choicest real estate, along the Tidal Basin. It cost 
$48 million to build. But it's also enormous in the old 
sense of being aberrational.

     So far, the only debate about the monument has been 
whether it should depict Roosevelt in his wheelchair, in 
accordance with the latest victimhood guidelines. 
Roosevelt's liberalism hadn't gotten to that phase yet; 
exquisite sensitivity to human suffering (mandating ever 
greater concentrations of power to relieve it) was still 
in its early stages as a political posture.

     Roosevelt, as they say, "led us through Depression 
and war." He used the Depression to claim for the federal 
government powers it had never had -- powers that were 
nowhere suggested, let alone mentioned, in the 
Constitution. Roosevelt blithely observed that the 
Constitution had been written for "horse-and-buggy days" 
and decided the solution was to dilute the obstinate 
Supreme Court with more pliant personnel. His 
Court-packing plan shocked even his allies, but it did 
send the message, and the Court quickly learned to see 
things his way.

     Roosevelt didn't end the Depression, but he did 
pretty much abolish constitutional government. Before his 
presidency the federal government bore a heavy burden of 
proving its claim to novel or ambiguous powers. Today it 
takes what it wants. The clearest proof that the original 
system is gone is that today's congressmen, when 
contemplating a proposal as vast as national health care, 
don't even worry about whether they are exceeding their 
delegated powers. The basic practical question of limited 
government -- whether power is being usurped -- is simply 
never asked.

     Roosevelt used his power, including the IRS and FBI, 
to silence his critics. The biographer Ted Morgan 
describes how his machinations damaged the career of John 
Flynn, a brave and honorable journalist. This was only a 
symptom of Roosevelt's contempt for personal liberty, 
which became more evident when he put thousands of 
innocent people into concentration camps. (He called them 
"Japs.")

     Since nobody can plausibly call Roosevelt honest, 
his admirers take the aggressive tack of praising him for 
lying his way into World War II. In 1940 he assured the 
nation that its sons would not be sent to fight in 
"foreign wars" when he had every intention that they 
should. It was a cold-blooded lie.

     During the war Roosevelt formed an alliance with a 
worse tyrant than Hitler, Mussolini, or Hirohito: the 
incomparable Joseph Stalin. The excuse his admirers make 
is that in war he had no alternative. But Roosevelt's 
benefactions to the Soviet Union began long before the 
war. Ignoring the evidence of a huge, forced famine in 
Ukraine, he had given the USSR diplomatic recognition and 
international respectability in 1933.

     Later, when war came, Roosevelt didn't just 
compromise with Stalin; he glorified him as a partner in 
the quest for a better, more democratic world. 
Roosevelt's admirers have been far more understanding 
about this than they would have been about similar 
treatment of Hitler. In fact, in virtually ceding Poland 
to Stalin at the end of the war, he somehow forgot that 
the war had begun with a joint German-Soviet rape of 
Poland.

     Roosevelt's other great legacy was the atomic bomb, 
whose creation he secretly presided over. His excusers 
say he had to get it before Hitler did, then that its use 
against Japan (when Hitler and Roosevelt were both dead) 
"shortened the war." But he had conducted a war against 
civilians even without the atomic bomb, ordering the 
massive bombing of great cities, and he was willing to 
lengthen the war by insisting on unconditional surrender. 
There is no evidence that the suffering his policies 
entailed disturbed his conscience in the slightest.

     The exercise of excusing and even celebrating 
Roosevelt is deleterious to the moral sense. He was not 
only callous in himself, but the cause of callousness in 
other men. As we erect a monument to him, we should no 
longer marvel that many Russians yearn for the good old 
days of Stalin.

[This column was originally published by Universal Press 
Syndicate April 23, 1997.] 

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