Vets and Refugees - Part 2

Refugees

UN: By the end of 2021, 89.3 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence or human rights violations. This includes:?27.1 million?refugees and 53.2 million internally displaced people.

Housing, feeding and finding employment for the refugee and the displaced will not only challenge economies, but will ultimately invigorate them. America is proof of this.?

Financing Mercy: The Challenge?

When millions of troops returned home from WWI, the financial and charitable resources of America were marshalled into providing food, shelter, clothing, jobs, medical and mental care for them. This capacity of America to both engage in war and care for those whose lives were unalterably changed by war, became the envy of the world. No other country had the material, productive and moral resources to achieve what American Democracy had.?

A Little History

According to Robert Kagan, in his book?The Ghost at the Feast, "for all their professed desire to remain aloof from the world, Americans had never been good at minding their own business. They may have wanted to be left alone but they had never left anyone in their vicinity alone. They had expanded territorially, and ideologically almost continually since before the nation was even founded. Although the United States did not need foreign trade to flourish, Americans regarded trade as both normal and desirable, and as a critical right of sovereignty. As John Adams once observed, their 'love of commerce, with its conveniences and pleasures' was as 'unalterable as their natures.' Americans had fought a war against the world’s strongest empire in 1812 largely over their neutral rights to trade, refusing to cooperate with British embargo against Napoleon’s France.17 Even in their state of "isolation" in the nineteenth century, Americans were quick to express their opinions about the behavior of other states, cheering for liberal revolutions in Spain, Greece, Italy and Hungary and, of course, in the Western Hemisphere, condemning tsarist persecution of Jews, British persecution of the Irish, standing up, rhetorically, for the rights of the Chinese against their imperial oppressors, Americans had never been shy about judging others against their own standards.?

Nor had Americans ever been shy about their ambitions. Even as a weak, vulnerable, and barely unified string of states along the Atlantic Seaboard, the founding generation’s leaders had spoken of their new republic as "Hercules in a cradle," the "embryo of a great empire." Washington himself had foreseen the day when, 'thanks to the increase in population and resources' the United States would be able to 'bid defiance to any nation on earth.'?

Update

During 1941-1945, American weapons production eclipsed all previous efforts. Shipyards produced almost 9,000 “major naval vessels” between 1941 and 1945, nearly 10 times the number produced by Britain in the same period and 16 times the number produced by Japan. In 1943 alone, the United States built 16 aircraft carriers, which more than replaced their early losses. The Japanese, who lost just as many in the early fighting, built none. American industry produced over 300,000 military aircraft during the war, more than Britain, Germany, and Japan combined. The United States also produced 90 percent of the Allies’ aviation fuel and, through Lend-Lease, supplied a quarter of all British munitions and over half of all military vehicles used by the Red Army. The Soviets acknowledged then and later that they never could have held out against the German onslaught without American financial and material assistance. “I drink to the American auto industry and the American oil industry,” Stalin remarked with conscious irony in 1943.

Meanwhile, the American economy soared. While every other great power’s economy?collapsed under the strain of total war, U.S. GNP more than doubled. Eleven million Americans joined the armed forces, but 6 million more joined the ranks of the civilian workforce. This expansion allowed the American economy to increase military production without greatly limiting production of many non-war-related goods.

The phenomenon of a single power fighting two full-scale wars on land and sea, financing and producing enough military equipment for itself and its allies, while at the same time also raising its people’s standard of living, was so unprecedented that Hitler could be forgiven for not having anticipated it. He admitted to the Japanese ambassador, soon after declaring war, that he did “not know yet” how “one defeats the USA.” He soon came to regard the war with America as “a tragedy, illogical, devoid of fundamental reality.”

Continued