Lindbergh: visionary or ideologue?

During the time I was not blogging, I spent many hours going through old printed material on Archive.org. I came across this transcript in an old radio magazine, Radio Digest, from the year 1930, titled Lindbergh’s Message. It appears that Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator (and ‘America First’ proponent) delivered this address somewhere, or was it written for the magazine in which it appeared? In any case, I found this piece very pertinent to our present-day crisis, in which the West is inundated with immigrants and ‘refugees’, mostly thanks to cheap, easy air travel. Lindbergh foresees this in 1930, and yet seems very sanguine about the consequences. From the piece:

“As methods of transportation improved, it was found impossible for the individual or the community to remain completely independent of other individuals and communities. Contact with foreign countries brought about an intellectual development together with the commercial. Men became no longer content with the bare necessities of existence of a more modern world. The intercourse which sprang up as a result was responsible for the banding together of larger and larger communities under one central government and eventually brought about the comparatively high standard of living.

Every great advance in transportation has forecast a greater unity in world government. Directly or indirectly, whether by peaceful negotiation of by warfare, the demands of commerce have made it both impossible and undesirable for an entirely independent community to exist permanently.
[…]Transoceanic traffic with its worldwide commerce brought about the necessity of international regulation and agreement. In every instance the advantages of cooperation and exchange broke down the barriers of sectionalism.”

Lindbergh seemed to see this as an unqualified good, this breaking down of barriers and the erasure of distances.

“When measured in hours of flying time the great distances of the old world no longer exist. Nations and races are not separated by the traditional obstacles of earthbound travel.”

I’m by no means the only one to note that our present situation, facing an ongoing invasion from the Third World, would not be happening had it not been for the advent of cheap and easy air travel — along with the ‘advertising’ by the global media of the material attractions of the West, luring the ‘have-nots’ plus the ‘have-somes-who-want-more’ to enter our countries bent on conquest, slow or otherwise.

The quoted message from Lindbergh is causing me to re-assess what I thought of his aviation pioneering; I was brought up to see ‘Lucky Lindy’ as simply a rugged individualist, the ‘Lone Eagle’, as he was called, the adventuring spirit in the tradition of our Western European ancestors, driven only by the desire to explore and surmount barriers. Yet in this piece he sounds just like so many of the peace-at-all-costs globalists who were especially vocal in the years between the two world wars. The world was understandably sickened by the ugliness and the destruction of World War I, so that they were determined that the world must be unified, and that an official universal brotherhood of man, institutionalized in something like a League of Nations must be put in place to prevent another war, in fact, to make all future war impossible. So they naively thought.

Was Lindy just another globalist utopian ideologue, and was he conscious that when he made his transatlantic solo flight that he was taking a big step towards unifying the world, and breaking down the barriers, the ‘bounds of nations’ as instituted by God?

I wonder. Nevertheless he did seem to foresee what would happen once worldwide air travel was a reality. Maybe he thought it would be worth it, regardless. Too bad he could not seem to foresee the dire downside to it all.

[To see an enlarged image of the complete text, click on the image below.]