I am in a taxi on the island of Zakynthos, on the way to the rental car dealer. It’s the usual 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s barely 11 in the morning. Luckily, this driver is not at all persuaded by the climate alarmists. He has his air conditioning on.
Read more The Collective Is the Enemy of Community
“It’s always been hot in the summer here,” he says. “I grew up here. Always the same.”
I tell him, in the best Greek I can muster, that at my home in California it gets very hot in the summer months but cools substantially at night. “It looks a lot like here,” I say, pursuing the conversation because he’s a young guy who seems genuinely interested. “But it cools down at night because it’s a desert. So it’s better.” I tell him that my family is from Naxos on my mother’s side and a small village in the Peloponnese on my father’s side. He asks when they came to America, and I tell him that my grandparents came separately and met in Chicago.
“Many Greeks in Chicago,” he says. “Fourth largest—first Athens, then Melbourne, then Salonica, then Chicago.” I’m not sure about the order, but I’m not going to quibble. Chicago may have lost its place because Greek immigration, even at its height, was never allowed to reach anywhere near the level of Hispanic or Islamic immigration we have in America today.
“I think about coming, but then I realize everyone I would leave behind.”
Indeed. Leaving now would be a change for him, but nowhere near what it meant for the millions of immigrants who formed the backbone of our industrial age. They came with nothing, leaving everyone and everything behind, confident they would never see their families again. For some, that was a blessing. But for my young grandparents, it was devastating. However, they soon became proud Americans who, like millions of other immigrants, sent money back to their villages for everything from houses and medical bills to the building of churches. From 1950 to 1970, Greek emigrants were sending home $450 million annually, which amounts to roughly $3.4 billion in today’s dollars—a staggering sum. The remittances alone amounted to about 4 percent of Greece’s GDP in 1970, when its economy was growing at 8 percent annually. In Greek real estate alone, the figure was around $100 million in 1970. Looking at all remittances sent from America annually, by the 1970s the total represented about $12–14 billion a year in today’s dollars.
Newly arrived immigrants sent billions to their relatives and friends all over the world. The money went to Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Britain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, China, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Syria, and other parts of Asia. This was, of course, in addition to the billions in aid provided by the American government to these nations. The money paid for medical care, dowries and weddings, the repair and construction of homes, the purchase of farm equipment, the establishment of businesses, and even passage to America.
So the United States aided Europe through millions of private decisions made at kitchen tables in Chicago, New York, Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco from the late 19th century onward. American immigrants were not rich. They sent what they could from their jobs in factories, restaurants, mines, and construction work. Each decision was a Marshall Plan in miniature, repeated millions of times by millions of new immigrants.
I found this out when a village elder, Stella, took me around my grandfather’s village for the first time some 30 years ago. In the tiny mountain village of Damalas, she showed me a number of houses on a pretty street and then took me by the hand to the church they were so proud of. To my astonishment, she said to me, “Do you know why these houses and church are here, Spiro?” I shook my head. “They are here because your grandfather and other relatives sent money back to build them.”
This is all long forgotten, most obviously. I get comments all the time from leftist students in Europe and America about what a horrible country we are, including one today stating that the idea that he has anything to be grateful for from America is “preposterous.” It’s an especially stupid remark—not only as a matter of historical fact, but also as a way of looking at life. But it’s not uncommon. This person could have been from anywhere, and I admit that I didn’t pursue any more details about where he or she was from. But it doesn’t matter whether it is New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Tuscany, Rome, Berlin, Madrid, or London. The mantra is the same.
Not everyone feels this way. My friend Valerio back in Lucca loves America and Americans, and this young taxi driver tells me that Americans are always very nice and the most generous. We exchange emails, and I tell him that I will call him the next time I need a ride.
As I weave my way back to the hotel, I think about two things. First, how similar this island looks to California. Then something far more serious: what life must have been like for the people of Greece and Europe at the end of the Second World War. The end of the war was a time of great prosperity for the United States, which had lived through the Depression and now replaced Great Britain as the preeminent world power—something the Brits are still seething about. When they had their empire, it was glorious, of course. But now that we have ours—tame by comparison—they have all turned socialist and anti-imperialist.
By contrast, the empires of France and the United Kingdom were brutal, and there were few countries they didn’t piss off, despite the way they now pretend none of it ever happened. The British are not liked in Africa or India for a reason, and the French—whom we will get to soon enough in the coming weeks—did things so scandalous in Africa that the Islamic push into France still does not equal what they deserve. Moreover, during their empires, it can hardly be said that there was anything resembling a lasting peace on the European continent. Far from it. It was more of a forever war, interrupted only by very short periods of peace.
And so today’s objective is to contrast the period after the Great War with the Pax Americana that has been in place since 1945. When the fighting ended in 1945, Europe was not a collection of picturesque cities with slightly damaged buildings. It was an utter catastrophe. Railways and bridges had been destroyed, cities reduced to rubble, and food and fuel were desperately scarce. Governments had collapsed or were discredited, borders were being redrawn, and millions of people were being uprooted.
After Germany surrendered, roughly 11 million people remained displaced. Allied armies and relief organizations worked to return millions to their countries, but millions of others had no countries or homes to which they could safely return. For years, camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy housed people suspended between countries and regimes, people who had lost their identities.
Read more Morning Greatness: DOJ Moves to Strip Citizenship From 40 People
Who were these people? They were Jewish survivors of concentration camps whom no one wanted and whose families had been murdered, homes occupied, communities destroyed, and identities erased. There were displaced Poles, Ukrainians, Frenchmen, Dutch, Italians, and others whom the Nazis had transported into Germany as slave laborers during the war. Then there were ethnic Germans evacuated westward from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and territories transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union. The roads were crammed with royalists and communists alike—Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bosnians—all escaping a country that had endured foreign occupation, ethnic massacre, and civil war at once. Russians could not return home because Stalin did not trust any former Soviet citizen who had spent time in the West.
And there was far more than a displacement problem. Neighbors had collaborated against neighbors, partisans had killed collaborators, and occupying armies now faced the prospect of retribution. To think peace treaties settled every dispute is a fantasy that lives inside universities. People were ready to take matters into their own hands and settle scores over neighbors, friends, and family members who had been murdered or mistreated. Economic depression, starvation, and the lack of food, water, and basic necessities made conditions absolutely ripe for another global conflict right then and there.
And now we come to the role of the United States and the Pax Americana. Allied soldiers, in the absence of any real civil order, imposed physical order in the western occupation zones. They disarmed German forces, administered territory, guarded supply routes, distributed food, and supervised displaced-person camps and transportation networks. They filled the vacuum left by the Nazi state and ensured that people did not fall into the hands of private armies, revolutionary movements, renewed national rivalries, or Mad Max-type chaos.
In addition to the relief that came from millions of American kitchens, the Marshall Plan supplied food, fuel, machinery, raw materials, credit, and industrial assistance. The United States opened its consumer market to countries that desperately needed to export their goods to stay alive.
And the old rivalries were ready to reignite at any moment. France’s rivalry with Germany was raw, Italy needed to rebuild, and Britain could no longer sustain its empire. The United States filled the vacuum, allowing Italy, France, and the United Kingdom to redevelop while providing much-needed cash, supplies, and basic necessities.
At the same time, Western Europe was dealing with the menace of the Soviet Union. Unlike what your favorite bearded twit of a professor at Sapienza in Rome, Oxford, or the Sorbonne thinks these days, no one wanted to be governed by the Soviet Union. The United States stepped up to defend NATO. It permanently stationed tens of thousands of troops, aircraft, and nuclear weapons in Europe. NATO was a tripwire, a fail-safe. It meant that Moscow could not gamble on conquering one isolated country, because it had to assume that the United States would step up to protect Europe. The American presence served two purposes at once: it prevented the remaining European countries from going to war with one another, and it prevented Moscow from launching a full-scale invasion of Western Europe.
Even Russia and the communist countries of Eastern Europe benefited from the American presence. It deterred the Soviets from launching a war that would have devastated Europe once again and likely killed millions more Eastern Europeans and Russians.
Yes, China benefited from the American effort in the Second World War, and not indirectly. The United States resisted and defeated China’s greatest enemy, Japan, which had done unspeakable things in Manchuria. Beijing also benefited from the sea lanes secured by the United States and from access to the American consumer market through which China built its export economy.
There’s even more. American universities educated generations of foreign scientists, doctors, engineers, and even political leaders—such as the insufferable Andreas Papandreou, who studied at Harvard, taught at Harvard and Berkeley, and spent time as a political refugee in my old hometown of Elmhurst, Illinois—who then went home to make careers denouncing the United States and cozying up to the commies. What a dick he was.
So, to use Thomas Sowell’s dictum, “Compared to what?” what kind of world order would Europeans prefer to the Pax Americana? Would they have preferred continued chaos and likely two or three more major wars, coupled with a plethora of civil wars and revolutions? Would mass starvation and global depression be of greater appeal? The true historical comparison is not between the United States and heavenly perfection. It is between the American-led system and the systems that preceded it or would have replaced it: European imperial rivalry, Nazi domination, Soviet expansion, closed trading blocs, revolutionary violence and repeated wars among heavily armed states with nuclear weapons. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
So what does the world owe the Pax Americana? Only everything, that’s all. Saying that the world owes nothing to the Pax Americana is only slightly dumber than saying that Western civilization owes nothing to Greece and Rome. It is a statement so incredibly stupid that it could only have been uttered by a university student—or, even worse, a professor at a Western university.
Europe owes it the strategic and political space in which France and Germany could become partners—something once unthinkable—rather than preparing for the next war. The former Axis powers owe it the chance to return to the family of nations. The small democracies of Europe owe the United States the deterrence that prevented Soviet domination and ultimately helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia owes America for its indispensable aid during the Second World War and for the deterrence that prevented another one. China owes its commercial rise to the American-led system. Much of the developing world owes it access to markets, medicine, and technology, and a global system far, far, far less hostile and predatory than what would otherwise have been in its place.
Perhaps I am being too harsh when I deride European and American students and universities, but only slightly. The deepest achievement of the Pax Americana is almost invisible. Several generations of Europeans have now grown up believing that continental peace is normal and that American soldiers will be there over the horizon if things turn ugly. History suggests that absolutely none of this is normal or should be expected. It was constructed and paid for with money and blood. America may not have created utopia, but don’t look for that. It created a world in which imperfect borders could endure without constant war, old enemies could grow rich together, German tourists could sit beside Greek, Italian, French, and American tourists poolside on the Greek islands or in pubs in Portugal, and Europeans who were once bitter blood enemies could try to grow rich and successful together.
The world owes America more than endless repetition of the same old lies. It owes America a fair accounting—a measure of gratitude before the peace the Pax Americana has sustained is allowed to disappear in a sea of ingratitude.
Read more Fixing Failing U.S. Schools
* * *
This content originally appeared on AbstractTruth Substack.
