I am thumbing my nose at al Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula today, and defying their plans to interrupt my plans.

Accordingly trusting my posterior to the tender ministrations of the TSA and a United Airlines regional subcontractor. I am confident in the multi-layered security at Dulles will preclude any interference with my travel plans. All I have to do is get there, and I think I may just drive myself.

I had planned on driving the whole way, but Jiggs walked into my new poolside unit, demanding fresh-brewed Dazbog Coffee, and told me candidly I was insane. I had to agree with him, since the Verizon FiOS installer was perched on my footstool routing fiber-optic cable across the ceiling.

I got through the chaos without major travail, though Jiggs was highly critical of the Pond Hill Farms single clover honey sweetner in my Dazbog.

“I thought you were in the friggin’ Navy,” he growled. He is an Academy grad, you know, and we enjoy the service banter.

By the time I confirmed that the internet actually worked in the new unit, it was time to get in the pool and then get on down the road to the farm to leave a key for Don-the-Builder, check the Mouse Occupy Movement in the mailbox, and download the Panzer of the last of the crap.

On the way, I found something else that provided me a unifying field theory to recent history. No surprises, just a neat way that the slowly revealed history of the Soviet penetration of FDR’s New Deal is laid out in a remarkable new way.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/08/03/Breaking-History-Part-1

The link above is to something that I had been thinking for several years in a more inchoate manner. I was off on a tear awhile back about the topic of Soviet penetration of the United States Government in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, which was a cause celeb amongst our Progressive brethren during the decades of contempt for the Red Scare, Tail Gunner Joe and the pathetic defense of traitor Alger Hiss and his ilk.

(Noted fellow traveler, senior government official and Soviet Agent, Mr. Alger Hiss. Shifty eyes, don’t you think?)

I recommend the marvelous memoir of Whittaker Chambers: “Witness” as a relevant document of the period. He was a committed Commie for the first part of his life, and his revelations were so extraordinary that right-thinking people spent the rest of their lives trying to bury the evidence of treason at the highest levels of the American Republic.

Alger Hiss was not alone. Harry Hopkins in the White House and Harry Dexter White at Treasury were equally committed agents of the Soviet Union, though I am sure they would have sniffed primly and explained they were just bringing about the necessary reforms and the fact that they happened to agree with Uncle Joe Stalin was just coincidence.

This new appreciation of history brings things into a focus that I had not considered. The debacle at Pearl is part and parcel of a Soviet influence operations campaign to apportion American war aid to the red Army, and to permit MacArthur and his 151,000 troops to be starved into submission at the hands of the Japanese.

That FDR’s closest advisor on foreign policy was a committed Red is no surprise. I just had not thought it all the way through. I have an associate who is researching the nature of clear and unambiguous warning provided by the Brits and Dutch on Japanese intentions to attack Pearl.

It was Alger Hiss at State who ran Far East policy in the years of worsening relations, remember, and Harry Hopkins at FDR’s elbow for the end-game of peace in the Pacific. Despite the marvelous work in breaking the Japanese naval codes at Station HYPO in Pearl Harbor, both our allies were ahead of us in terms of exploitation.

Imagine my pal’s astonishment that the de-classified records of the British Empire Desk from the Office of Naval Intelligence from the 1930s and 40s are missing from the National Archives in their entirety.

I was not surprised. Of course the records are missing. The people whose reputations needed to be saved were in a direct position to do whatever they wanted to the historical record. One of them was the notorious and hard-headed Admiral Richmond Kelly Freaking Turner, whose erroneous world view contributed to the failure to prepare properly for the Japanese surprise attack, which should not have been.

The others were the ones working actively for Uncle Joe Stalin. I understand True Believers and Fellow Travelers- there is a lot of that going around these days, but Admiral Kimmel and General Short really were small fries in the game to pin the disaster on anyone except those actually responsible.

The cover up is that the USG writ large was an active dupe of Stalin, and we sacrificed tens of thousands of American and Filippino troops on the alter of the Red Army.

No reference to the present, after all, with the failure of the Administration to grasp the nature of our opponents in militant Islam. They can’t even begin to say the term. Hence, I can understand the over-reaction on the part of new National Security Advisor Susan Rice in shutting down 21 embassies and consulates across the Middle East.

This is her first real crisis in the new job, and having been burned so badly over Benghazi, I certainly understand her panic in dealing with things she only vaguely understands. Pesky enemies are just not cooperating with the agreed narrative that they are in retreat and disarray.

Instead, the Taliban is resurgent in a war we are walking away from, hundreds of detained Jihadis are being jail-broken out of prison in Iraq and across the lands of conflict, and things appear to be deteriorating throughout the entire region of the Arab Spring. If there was a more inept crew handling foreign policy…well, whatever. I am sure they know best.

That put me on a tear this morning, since I consider the influence of the Soviets in the USG during FDR’s long reign to be one of the great unsolved- or at least unexploited- aspects of the history of the war.

Before I got too far down that road, a thoughtful pal wrote back to remind me of inconvenient facts and the tyranny of distance:

“Soviet agents or no Soviet agents, Lend-Lease or no Lend-Lease, there was simply no way to get supplies or reinforcements to MacArthur in the Philippines. The Japanese controlled the sea and the air. And even if we could have gotten aid to him, chances are they just would have inflated the number captured in the end. The British were able to send reinforcements to Singapore via the Indian Ocean. They arrived just in time for the big surrender.”

Which is all true, of course, and the commitment to Russia First actually has a certain sense to it- with the Soviets out of the war, we would have faced the brunt of the German hoards only in the west, and that may have been as catastrophic as the War to End Wars.

So, I take the point. But narrow self-interest would have argued for a direct response to the Japanese. That it did not is interesting, and coincidently, our relations with the Empire of the Sun were managed by known Soviet agents.

How would history have been different if the traitors had been unmasked decades earlier?

I wish my old pal Mac Showers was around to ask. Something to think about in seat 3D on the airplane this morning. Two hours and five minutes airborne, they say. We will see how that goes.

More from the Gateway Arch, the largest single croquette wicket ever constructed.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter @jayare303