The Rockefeller Foundation and Council on Foreign Relations . . . intend to prevent, if they can, a repetition of what they call “the debunking journalistic campaign following World War I.” Translated into precise English, this means that the Foundation and the Council do not want journalists or any other persons to examine too closely and criticize too freely the official propaganda and statements relative to “our basic aims and activities” during World War II. In short, they hope that the policies and measures of Franklin D. Roosevelt will escape in coming years the critical analysis, evaluation and exposition that befell the policies and measures of President Woodrow Wilson and the Entente Allies after World War I.1
Postwar, World War I was thoroughly debunked: the truth about the Lusitania had been publicly known since Senator Robert La Follette’s 1917 speech; atrocity stories about German soldiers cutting the hands off of Belgian children had turned out to be fabrications; noble speeches about “national self-determination” went up in smoke as Britain seized nearly a million square miles of new territory; in a 21-volume report, the Graham Committee of Congress demonstrated that, while soldiers risked their lives for 30 dollars a month, some $6 billion was looted from American taxpayers by industrialists who never honored their contracts to deliver arms and supplies to the front.2 And all the talk about “the war to end wars” and “making the world safe for democracy” collapsed as wars continued unabated, and the Bolsheviks murdered millions.
The Rockefeller Foundation and Council on Foreign Relations—which, in 1947, represented the highest echelons of oligarchical policy-making—wanted to ensure that World War II was not similarly debunked. This meant that all criticism of the war was to be ruthlessly suppressed; the scene from The Best Years of Our Lives was an early manifestation of that campaign.
The war critic at the drugstore is depicted in the vilest terms: to maximize his nastiness, he gets into a fight with a highly disabled veteran; to portray him as an elitist, he remarks, “Every soda jerk in this country’s got an idea he’s somebody”; he is also physically unattractive.
His explanation of his position is a comic-book version of actual revisionism. Here is what was already known by 1947:
- That Roosevelt and his inner circle had full foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, a fact that had been documented by the Army Pearl Harbor Board and Naval Court of Inquiry in 1944; in testimony before Congress’s Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (1945-46); and thoroughly vetted in the book Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (1947) by George Morgenstern of the Chicago Tribune. (This establishes who really thought hundreds of men going down in ships were “suckers.”)
- That Roosevelt had moved the Pacific Fleet from its normal safe berthing on the West coast to vulnerable Pearl Harbor against the strident protests of the Navy; a maneuver for which the President had never been held accountable.
- That the attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked after the Roosevelt administration enforced a relentless trade embargo against Japan, and that the specific trigger was an ultimatum to Japan secretly authored by Soviet mole Harry Dexter White, a fact that even mainstream media acknowledges.
- That there was (and is to this day) zero evidence that Germany ever had a plan to conquer the world; that it never would have fought France nor England had not the latter two declared war; that its strike on the Soviet Union was not a manifestation of “world conquest,” but was intended to eradicate communism, a fact verified by its being joined in that effort by the armies of Finland, Hungary, Romania, Croatia and Italy, along with 47,000 volunteers from neutral Spain, as well as thousands of volunteers from Belgium.
(I have discussed these details at great length in an interview with Tim Kelly on Our Interesting Times.)
Read more here…
NOTES
1. Charles Beard, “Who’s to Write the History of the War?” Saturday Evening Post (October 4, 1947), 172.
2. Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s Sixty Families (New York: Citadel Press, 1937), 189-201.
Source: James Perloff
