It seems so strange to realise that Dwight Eisenhower, a 5-star General and highly-respected Republican President in his day, would nowadays be regarded by most ordinary Republicans as a pussy, a commie and a traitor to “traditional” American values.

Values Australia has been saying for years that the American right is crazy mad. Now here is statistical proof:

Seems pretty precisely to map the Republican vs Democratic states.

But Eisenhower’s understanding of America’s role in the world is as relevant today as it was when he was President and the Republicans could do worse than to take another look:

“  The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs.

 

First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

 

Second: No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.

 

Third: Any nation’s right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.

 

Fourth: Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

 

And fifth: A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.

He also said in his “Cross of Iron” speech:

“ Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

 

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

 

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . .

 

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

~  April 16, 1953