Robert Welch was fond of a quotation from Herbert Spencer, and repeated it often: “The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.” That government seemed intent on transforming the entire citizenry into whining fools, or into children to be cared for and controlled, was in Mr. Welch’s opinion the “greatest tragedy of the twentieth century.” Not content with corrupting the American people and duping them into surrendering their precious freedom, those same forces were crushing the freedom of other peoples and using American money and might to deliver whole nations into the hands of the most evil and rapacious tyranny in history.
The struggle against the forces of the collectivist conspiracy is the fiercest in which the American Republic has ever engaged. Too few people today, however, grasp the fact that many Americans did not immediately fathom the seriousness of this fight. In the Roosevelt and Truman years, Americans were told that Joseph Stalin was our friend and ally, that he was a good “democrat,” and that he was in no way different from us in wanting a just and peaceful world. Exhausted by the tremendous exertion of the war, Americans were slow at first to come to grips with the communist menace.
To make matters worse, Roosevelt and Truman refused themselves to come to grips with communist subversives in the U.S. government. “Some of my best friends are communists,” Roosevelt once declared (no doubt accurately!) with a chuckle. With so blasé an attitude on the part of the President of the United States, it is no surprise that hordes of communists infiltrated critical agencies of the federal government and, once ensconced in influential positions, used their newly acquired power to advance the aims of their superiors abroad. Robert Welch was among the first to expose the scandal of the use of the country‘s power, prestige, and money in furthering communist objectives, and he did this by writing his first major political work, May God Forgive Us.
May God Forgive Us, like The Politician, began as a lengthy letter to an acquaintance, and was written during July and August 1951. Shortly after completing it, Mr. Welch sent copies to three other friends and within a short span of time requests for additional copies poured in. This led him to make several hundred duplicates, but the more he produced the greater was the demand. Americans, it seemed, sensed the truth when they read it. Roughly 30 thousand mimeograph copies were distributed during those months after the letter first appeared. Henry Regnery, the well-known publisher, read one of these copies and then asked Mr. Welch if he could publish it. Mr. Welch added another ten thousand words to the work and thereupon Regnery began the publication of tens of thousands of copies. In the eight months between March 1952 and the end of that year, 194,000 copies of May God Forgive Us were published and distributed.
In May God Forgive Us, Mr. Welch begins with an analysis of the tremendous disasters that followed in the wake of our World War II victory and that threatened to overwhelm free nations around the world. These included, most particularly, the loss of Eastern Europe and of China to the Communist Bloc. Welch considered carefully the widespread influence of various leftist organizations in accomplishing these victories for communism. He also turned the spotlight on government agencies that had been subverted by communist agents and on individuals who used their positions of power and prestige to change the direction of American policy, to allay the rising suspicions of the American people about communism, and to spread various forms of disinformation to cause confusion and misunderstanding. The brunt of Mr. Welch’s criticism was aimed at Truman‘s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, who played an extremely unsavory role in these debacles.
Mr. Welch desired neither fame nor fortune from this endeavor. Such proceeds as he received from the huge sales of his book were immediately dedicated to the free distribution of 40,000 copies to community leaders and various influential citizens throughout America.
Robert Welch speaks truly from the heart in May God Forgive Us. Intensely ashamed for his country and deeply distressed that “the land of the free and the home of the brave” was being used by vicious traitors to betray innocent men, women, and children to Bolshevik beasts and to undermine the very foundation of our Western culture, Mr. Welch’s mode of expression is poignant and eloquent:
[T]he real trouble is a callousness throughout the whole mood and the collective conscience of the American people. How can we expect either a Roosevelt or Truman to have been disturbed by the barbarous Katyn Massacre, or to have reduced for that reason their pampering appeasement and generosity to its perpetrators? The news of a similar mass murder, of eight thousand of our own sons and brothers, as prisoners of war behind the Korean lines, caused only a temporary ripple of indignation across the national consciousness; and we go serenely on negotiating with, and making new concessions to, the cold-blooded murderers.
What is the matter with us, anyway? Neither facts nor pictures seem to sink into our centers of feeling any more .... The physical suffering, the mental anguish, the never-ceasing terror of our fellow human beings, represented by these words and pictures, no longer reach through the glaze to activate our imaginations or to excite our sympathies ....
As we sit in our warm homes, after a happy meal with our families, and turn on our television sets or radios, it is hard for us to think of a man just like ourselves always half-starved, always half-frozen, haggard and hopeless, remembering the days when he too was free, as he is brutally driven to finish up the literal exhaustion of his body in labor for the benefit of the very tyrant who has enslaved him. It is harder still to remember that there are millions of such men; or that in the past six years six hundred millions of our fellow human beings have been placed under the merciless heel of this monster and the bestial control of his henchmen and police.
For the pusillanimous part that we played in all this spreading horror; for our indifference to the grief of others; for our apathy to the crimes we saw and our blindness to those we should have seen; for our gullibility in the acceptance of veneered treason and our easy forgetfulness even when the veneer rubbed off; for all our witting and unwitting help to the vicious savages of the Kremlin and to their fellow ordinate savages everywhere, may God -- and our fellow men -some day forgive us!
There can be no doubt whatever that in this small volume a genuine patriot of the old school stares straight into the hideous countenance of treachery and cries out for the tocsin to be sounded in defense of our national honor and of freedom everywhere.