http://www.reformer.com/editorials/ci_4271320 Rather a good editorial, I thought. Made some good points about who it actually was who was ignoring fascism and calling for appeasement.
Dumb and Rumsfeld
It's not unusual for bizarre ideas to exit the mouth of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which is why few paid much attention to the speech he gave Tuesday before the 88th annual American Legion National Convention in Salt Lake City.
But we wish to take note of it here, because of a dangerous idea. In Tuesday's speech, Rumsfeld compared those who oppose this nation's ongoing debacle in Iraq to those who did not take Adolf Hitler seriously in the 1930s.
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In the 1930s, when Hitler and Benito Mussolini rose to power, it was the Republican Party that pushed for appeasement. While Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow internationalists in the Democratic Party sounded the first alarms about fascism, conservative Republican leaders like Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenburg maintained their isolationism right up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
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Henry Ford supported Hitler and lent the Nazis money from the early 1920s until the start of the war. The House of Morgan fronted Mussolini $100 million to keep his government from going bankrupt. Many other American bankers -- including Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush -- lent money to Nazis. The Hearst newspapers published columns by Josef Goebbels and other Nazi luminaries and many major newspapers and magazines lauded Hitler and Mussolini right up to Pearl Harbor.