This is a talk on national security;
because the nub of the whole purpose of your President is to keep you now, and your children later,
and your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence,
and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours.
Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.
The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country,
but also to enslave the whole of Europe,
and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.
In view of the nature of this undeniable threat, it can be asserted, properly and categorically,
that the United States has no right or reason to encourage talk of peace
until the day shall come when there is a clear intention on the part of the aggressor nations to abandon all thought of dominating or conquering the world.
The forces of the States that are leagued against all peoples who live in freedom are being held away from our shores.
The Germans and Italians are being blocked on the other side of the Atlantic by the British
and by the Greeks,
and by thousands of soldiers and sailors who were able to escape from subjugated countries.
The Japanese are being engaged in China, in Asia
by the Chinese nation in another great defense.
In the Pacific Ocean is our fleet.
a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military.
Frankly and definitely there is danger ahead
danger against which we must prepare.
But we well know that we cannot escape danger, or the fear of it,
by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.
Germany has said that she was occupying Belgium to save the Belgians from the British.
Would she then hesitate to say to any South American country:
"We are occupying you to protect you from aggression by the United States"?
Belgium is being used as an invasion base against Britain, now fighting for its life.
And any South American country, in Nazi hands,
would always constitute a jumping off place for German attack on any one of the other republics of this hemisphere.
We think of Hawaii as an outpost of defense in the Pacific.
Yet the Azores are closer to our shores in the Atlantic than Hawaii is on the other side.
There are those who say that the Axis powers would never have any desire to attack the Western Hemisphere.
This is the same dangerous form of wishful thinking which has destroyed the powers of resistance of so many conquered peoples.
Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our own gates.
Your government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out.
Their secret emissaries are active in our own and in neighboring countries.
They seek to stir up suspicion and dissension, to cause internal strife.
They try to turn capital against labor, and vice versa.
They try to reawaken long slumbering racial and religious enmities which should have no place in this country.
And there are also American citizens, many of them in high places,
who, unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents.
I do not charge these American citizens with being foreign agents.
But I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States.
The experience of the past two years has proven beyond doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis.
No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.
There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.
There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.
