Four Freedoms Speech: Favorite Let-Downs in Recent Memory (Sentences 19-22) Summary

Speaking of World War I

  • FDR encourages his audience not to get caught up in the failures of the Treaty of Versailles and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919—all those plans that were meant to put Europe back together and punish Germany after World War I.
  • He makes an awkward comparison between the severity of these treaties to the "pacification," i.e. fascism, that's blanketing the world.
  • He makes a clear distinction that the former is international law (war crimes, anyone?), and the latter is tyranny.
  • And America hates tyranny.