D-Day: American Troops Invade Normandy

Kevin Alfred Strom and Mark Weber discuss D-Day:

David Weber: D-Day, of course, was the American-British landing in Normandy, France, on June 6th, 1944. As a purely historical event it was important because it was the largest naval operation in history. But it’s presented in our media as a kind of central turning point of World War II. There’s a natural tendency among everyone and every society to project the present back onto the past, and that’s nowhere more evident than in how we look at D-Day, because it was the very important great military operation by the United States in the Second World War in Europe. But the way that landing is presented is very misleading.

For one thing, the D-Day invasion did not decisively change the outcome of the Second World War. Now I know that sounds incredible, given all that we’ve heard about that, but the D-Day landing took place less than a year before the end of the war in Europe. The war ended in Europe in May, 1945; the D-Day landing was in June, 1944. The decisive battles of the Second World War had already been fought, on the Eastern Front. And in the emphasis on D-Day is a kind of playing down of the much more important military role that the Soviet forces played in World War II. Very few people realize that 80% — four fifths — of the German forces in World War II were defeated not on the Western Front, but on the Eastern Front by the Soviet forces. Germany’s decisive battles had already been fought — and lost — on the Eastern Front, such as in Stalingrad, which ended in early 1943. And then the final major German offensive of the Second World War was the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, about which we hear very little in America; and that was in the summer of 1943. So when the American, British, and Canadian forces landed on Normandy in June 1944, German forces were already largely destroyed. And Germany was fighting a very, very desperate defensive war. That’s why, when the American forces landed on D-Day, I think there were only two German airplanes that could take to the air to fight off the landing armada. The German Air Force was very, very hard-pressed, what was left of it, to even defend the German homeland, which was under intense Allied bombardment from the air at that time, and of course on the Eastern Front.

So the battle of D-Day is important in our media, in large measure, because it comports with a kind of American-centric view of the Second World War. But in fact the role of the Soviet Union is one that many Americans, and especially American leaders, would like to forget.

And that brings us to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is remembered, in terms of foreign policy achievements, largely as a man who opposed Communism. But during the Second World War, the most important American ally in that conflict was in fact the Soviet Union. To put it another way, no country did more to defend the Soviet Union, to help the Soviet Union, than did the United States during World War II. And Ronald Reagan spent World War II as a propagandist for the American military. That is, in his actual deeds as a man working in Hollywood, he helped the American war effort which was at that time in alliance and concert with the Soviet Union.

But that’s forgotten a lot today because we want to uphold, and American leaders want to uphold, this kind of myth that on the one side of the Second World War were the ‘bad guys,’ the tyrants — that is, the Germans and the Japanese; and that on the other side, the Allied side, were the ‘good guys.’ But that in fact is not only simplistic, it’s just simply wrong. During the Second World War, the most tyrannical regime in the world at that time — the Soviet Union — was on the Allied side. And the most imperialistic regime in the world at that time — that is, the British Empire — was also on the Allied side in that conflict. While looking at history in simplistic terms of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ may make people feel good, and it comports with how we like to have our motion pictures end and our books and so forth, it doesn’t correspond with reality in real historical terms.

KAS: The legacy of D-Day, in broad terms, is the legacy of the Second World War. That’s how we see it from our media-saturated, from our — as you say — American-centric view. Maybe D-Day wasn’t a watershed in the conduct of the war, but that war was a watershed in diminishing traditional Americans’ power over our own country, in increasing globalism, and in increasing Jewish power. And it was a watershed in breaking down the old order in Europe, destroying not only German power, but French and British power as well. And it brought about the complete collapse of Eastern Europe, which was swallowed up by Communism for almost half a century.

MW: Right. There are several points to be made in that regard, I think. And it again, I think, relates to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is remembered as the great American conservative president. But his idea of conservatism was really just to present the best view of American history during the Second World War.

The greatest and most decisive conflict of the twentieth century was the Second World War, in which the United States fought openly for a ‘New World Order’ in which the United States and the Soviet Union, above all, would rule the entire world. When Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Teheran, Iran in 1943, and then at Yalta in 1945, the three men did what they accused the Axis leaders of wanting to do: That is, they decided the fate of the entire planet. And, in that, the United States regarded the Soviet Union as not only a worthy ally, but a trustworthy ally, an ally with which Roosevelt and the United States were willing and even eager to cooperate in ruling the entire world.

You know, the wrongness of the simplistic view of how the Second World War was fought is pointed up in the tragedy of Poland. In 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany because Germany had attacked Poland. And, supposedly, British and French concern for the sovereignty of Poland was the reason for the declarations of war against Germany. (By the way, this was a war that Germany and Hitler wanted at all costs to avoid. They didn’t want war with Britain and France.) At the end of that terrible conflict, six years later, in 1945, Poland was no more free than it was in 1939. It was swallowed up and brutally occupied by the Soviet Union. So the principles that Britain and France proclaimed when they declared war on Germany in 1939 — and which America proclaimed in fighting the Second World War — were betrayed by the Allied leaders in how they actually conducted the war. They not only permitted but they actively cooperated with the Soviet Union in expanding its tyranny over half of Europe — including Poland, which was the first victim of the Second World War.

KAS: How does Jewish power fit into all of that?

MW: Ronald Reagan, throughout his presidency, was very pro-Israel and very pro-Jewish. He’s not alone, of course. Every American president since Harry Truman has been committed to supporting the state of Israel and its policies. Now fortunately for Reagan, there was no great war in the Middle East as there was in 1967 or 1973. And, also fortunately for Reagan’s legacy, there was no conflict like the current situation in Iraq. Nevertheless, Ronald Reagan was entirely subordinate to and supportive of Israel and its policies, even though this meant supporting Israel in actions which were violations not only of the principles that we as Americans try to uphold, but even of American law.

Specifically, in 1982, when Reagan was President, Israel invaded Lebanon. It invaded Lebanon on the deceitful basis of a pretext that the Israeli ambassador in London had been shot by a member of the PLO. In fact, the person who shot the Israeli ambassador in London was not even with the PLO. But on the basis of that pretext, Israel invaded Lebanon, costing thousands of lives and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees. Enormous destruction was the result. And Ronald Reagan supported Israel in this.

One of the speakers several years ago at an IHR conference was US Congressman Pete McCloskey. And he spoke out at the time on the floor of the House about Israel’s violation even of American law in that conflict. But Ronald Reagan put America’s ‘special relationship’ with Israel above even his oath as President to uphold American law. This was pointed up in the case of that conflict, in which America helped and cooperated with Israel in this completely illegal, horrible, destructive invasion of Lebanon.

And this is a parallel with the present. In the aftermath of the Lebanese fiasco, the United States sent military troops to Lebanon. And Reagan made a big issue at the time about ‘staying the course’ and how we were ‘going to have troops there until Lebanon was a free and democratic country,’ and how this was part of a big campaign to bring ‘democracy’ and ‘stability’ to that part of the world — pre-echoes of exactly the same kind of rhetoric we’ve heard from the White House during the past year with regard to the war in Iraq.

But in 1983, when a Marine barracks was blown up, and 240 some American Marines were killed, Reagan cut his losses, abandoned all his rhetoric, and just simply pulled the American troops out. For all his rhetoric, Reagan was a very pragmatic man. He was not one to let principles stand in the way of political expediency. And he was willing to cut his losses when things went wrong or things went bad. And if he was President, and had engaged in a fiasco like the one we’re dealing with now in Iraq, he would have long ago cut his losses and pulled out, and saved face in the best possible way — whereas George W. Bush seems incapable emotionally of admitting a mistake.

To go back to the legacy of D-Day: Especially for Americans, it is simply the legacy of World War II. And it wasn’t simply a defeat for Germany in World War II; it was, in a sense, the defeat of Europe — because the great victorious powers of the Second World War were the Soviet Union and the United States, which together imposed a hegemony and occupation over Europe. And the European homeland, the European heart, ceased to have any independent political power or even cultural vitality of its own, and was subordinate to the United States in the West and the Soviet Union in the East.

Now the legacy of that whole period is receding into the past, because the Soviet Union has disappeared as a power and a force — but the cultural and intellectual legacy persists, because Europeans have been browbeaten by decades of propaganda.

The Second World War was the triumph in 1945 of the principles of egalitarianism and universalism — and those principles are fundamentally at odds with any kind of patriotic or conservative principles.

And that’s part of the paradox or contradiction of the Reagan legacy. He’s remembered as a conservative — but what did he actually conserve?

KAS: Good question.

MW: What did he actually conserve? This morning on the radio, in a tribute to Ronald Reagan, one commentator said “He was a president who made us feel good about ourselves.” Well, that’s true. But that’s about all he did. He made us feel good.

But in terms of conserving or preserving anything of real substance, Ronald Reagan presided over America’s forward advance — or, should I say, backward advance — in the same direction she had been going since the 1940s and has been going ever since. When Ronald Reagan was elected, many conservatives thought that Reagan was going to make good on his rhetoric and dismantle, for example, the unconstitutional portions of the federal government such as the Department of Education, which had no constitutional validity. There’s nothing in the Constitution to permit the federal government to be involved in education.

KAS: Yes, I can remember all of that. In 1980, Mark, it was almost a sense of euphoria — he was going to reclaim America, he was going to remake America back into the Old America that people felt had been betrayed and abandoned.

MW: Exactly. But, to the amazement of many of his conservative followers, he did none of that. He didn’t dismantle the federal government; he expanded it. The irony is that his actual policies were in contradiction to his supposed principles as a conservative and to his rhetoric. But most Americans didn’t really care. The hard core of his supporters, those patriotic Americans, were satisfied with the mere trappings and symbols and mythology of America rather than the reality.

KAS: We’ve seen that in the celebrations of his life that we’ve witnessed since he died. For many people, I think he still embodies the Old America — the America he helped destroy while he was paying lip service to it. Do you think that, now that he’s gone, Americans are going to wake up from their illusion that we’ve really had a continuity of government?

MW: Whatever the harmful effects of his policies, it’s hard to dislike Reagan, because he was such an affable guy. Apparently, in his private life, he was kind, courteous to people, and wasn’t deceitful; that is, really, he believed the things that he said.

What Americans are mourning, I think, this week with the death of Ronald Reagan is not merely a man, but an America that’s past and which he personified. The America that Ronald Reagan believed in, that he came out of, is an America that’s gone. It’s an America of Norman Rockwell paintings. It’s an America of Leave it to Beaver television. It’s an America of It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s an America that really existed to some degree before the Second World War, up until the 1940s or 50s. But it’s an America that just doesn’t exist any more. The Los Angeles that Ronald Reagan lived in in the 1940s or 50s — that Los Angeles is gone forever. California itself is changing dramatically. And what many Americans are mourning with his passing, I think, is that America that’s gone.

Now will Americans wake up? I think a number of commentators have made this point: the President that we now have, who also calls himself a conservative, isn’t able to pull it off the way that Ronald Reagan could, not merely because he’s not as smooth as Ronald Reagan, but because the reality is now harder and harder to avoid — the reality that the America that so many Americans nostalgically look back upon is really gone.

Having said that, though, I think that the majority of George Bush’s hardcore supporters are still impressed by — and loyal to — the mythology or the trappings of America, which are very different from the reality.

KAS: I remember Ronald Reagan signing the ‘Martin Luther King’ holiday bill. I remember his unkept promises to roll back the intrusive judicial and other federal power over us. I remember his giving an award to Elie Wiesel; his continuation — and expansion — of the anti-European-American policies of all the previous administrations going back to the Roosevelt administration. It’s hard not to see Reagan, from my point of view, as man who — perhaps — did believe in the Old America, but who just wasn’t quite bright enough to understand that his employers, those who ‘handled’ him, who organized his campaigns, who were behind him all the time, were destroying that Old America.

MW: Ronald Reagan personifies that contradiction, that paradox — the belief that, somehow, the Old America that he believed in and was part of could be kept in place and preserved while at the same time supporting and promoting policies that inevitably must destroy that very America. That’s the tragedy of it all –presuming he was sincere.

I saw Ronald Reagan speak in person only once, and that was at a large gathering of ‘Holocaust survivors,’ of all places, in Washington, DC. And, as he usually was, he was very eloquent on that occasion. But what he did was give a tremendous boost during his administration to Jewish power, a power that was working and has been working feverishly to tear down and corrode the very America that Ronald Reagan loved and represented. As you say: Was he stupid? — or just ignorant, or whatever?

I think it’s part of the mythology of America that people of whatever background can come to this country and through some kind of magic can be made into part of the America of motion pictures and Norman Rockwell paintings.

KAS: Well, some ethnicities melt better than others…

MW: Well, of course (laughter). No group — no ethnic group, no religious group — in America is so determined to preserve and hold onto its identity and further the interests of its own group as are Jews. No group is as self-aware, as focused, as determined as are Jews in America. And that’s not surprising, because Jews have been focused, determined, and have had a very high sense of purpose and identity for centuries. In fact, if Jews didn’t have such a very very strong sense of self — of peoplehood — they would have long ago disappeared as a people, under the pressures of assimilation and so forth. In America, as in every other country where Jews have settled in large numbers, they persist in — and insist on — furthering their own interests, even as those interests clash and compete with the interests of the people among whom they live, here in this country and elsewhere.

KAS: Well, if Ronald Reagan understood that about his employers, then he was a much more subtle person than I took him to be. I tend to think that he was a man with a magnetic personality but a nearly empty mind. That made him a perfect ‘leader’-type for those who surrounded him. After all, did he not take Jewish direction in Hollywood, and in his radio network jobs; and all through his career as a politician, was he not surrounded by powerful Jews?

MW: Margaret Thatcher, who of course is going to be here in the United States for the Reagan funeral, and who was an ally of Ronald Reagan when she was Prime Minister of Britain, said privately on one occasion that he was a great guy, but there was very little between his ears. I don’t think Reagan did understand these larger things. But what drove him, what kept him going, was a kind of mythology about America. And it’s a kind of attractive mythology. In life, I think that most people — certainly most people in any kind of electorate or collective — prefer a pleasant lie to an unpleasant truth. And Ronald Reagan was a master at telling people the pleasant untruth that they wanted to hear.

KAS: You at the Institute are trying in some sense to give people enough perspective to see some of those dangers ahead. Can you tell us what lesson you’d like to leave my listeners with on these subjects?

MW: The best guide to the future is an understanding of the past. And that means not just American history, but world history. This is very difficult here in the United States, in many ways, because this is a country in which there’s a kind of national mythology that America is an exception from history. The idea that we can be an exception from history is childish. And it’s only through an understanding of history, of the past, that we can have a real understanding of our present plight and think wisely and intelligently about the future.

The power of historical consciousness is an immensely important one. It’s one of the reasons Jews are as successful as they are. In fact, their entire religion underscores and emphasizes their sense of history — of Jewish peoplehood. It’s a distorted, kind of mythologized history — but nonetheless, it’s a sense of history.

Americans, as a people, have a great deal of difficulty with that, because we are encouraged in this country to think of ourselves as individuals. And people who think of themselves as individuals are not going to think much about history, because as individuals, we simply die. A historical consciousness also carries with it an awareness of the continuity of history — that we are part of something larger than ourselves. That’s one of the reasons history is so important, and why the work of the IHR [http://www.ihr.org ] is so important. Fostering historical awareness and historical consciousness is a task of very very high importance.

KAS: Mark, I want to thank you for the work you’re doing for Ernst Zündel [ http://www.zundelsite.org ], of course; I also want to thank you for what is always a bracing intellectual adventure being on the show and talking with me; and I want to thank you for the work you’re doing to bring the truth to light through the Institute for Historical Review.

MW: Thank you very much, Kevin, and it’s always a pleasure to be on your show and I admire your work as well.

KAS: Thank you.

Based on the American Dissident Voices broadcast of June 12th, 2004

The “Good War” Myth of World War 2
by Mark Weber

WORLD WAR II was not only the greatest military conflict in history, it was also America’s most important twentieth-century war. It brought profound and permanent social, governmental and cultural changes in the United States, and has had a great impact on how Americans regard themselves and their country’s place in the world.

This global clash — with the United States and the other “Allies” on one side, and Nazi Germany, imperial Japan and the other “Axis” countries on the other — is routinely portrayed in the US as the “good war,” a morally clear-cut conflict between Good and Evil. / 1

In the view of British author and historian Paul Addison, “the war served a generation of Britons and Americans as a myth which enshrined their essential purity, a parable of good and evil.” / 2 Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme wartime Commander of American forces in Europe, and later US president for eight years, called the fight against Nazi Germany “the Great Crusade.” / 3 And President Bill Clinton said that in World War II the United States “saved the world from tyranny.” / 4 Americans are also told that this was an unavoidable and necessary war, one that the US had to wage to keep from being enslaved by cruel and ruthless dictators.

Whatever doubts or misgivings Americans may have had about their country’s role in Iraq, Vietnam, or other overseas conflicts, most accept that the sacrifices made by the US in World War II, especially in defeating Hitler’s Germany, were entirely justified and worthwhile.

For more than 60 years, this view has been reinforced in countless motion pictures, on television, by teachers, in textbooks, and by political leaders. The reverential way that the US role in the war has been portrayed moved Bruce Russett, professor of political science at Yale University, to write: / 5

“Participation in the war against Hitler remains almost wholly sacrosanct, nearly in the realm of theology … Whatever criticisms of twentieth-century American policy are put forth, United States participation in World War II remains almost entirely immune. According to our national mythology, that was a ‘good war,’ one of the few for which the benefits clearly outweighed the costs. Except for a few books published shortly after the war and quickly forgotten, this orthodoxy has been essentially unchallenged.”

How accurate is this hallowed portrayal of America’s role in World War II? As we shall see, it does not hold up under close examination.

First, a look at the outbreak of war in Europe.

When the leaders of Britain and France declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939, they announced that they were doing so because German military forces had attacked Poland, thereby threatening Polish independence. In going to war against Germany, the British and French leaders transformed what was then a geographically limited, two-day-old clash between Germany and Poland into a continental, European-wide conflict.

It soon became obvious that the British-French justification for going to war was not sincere. When Soviet Russian forces attacked Poland from the East two weeks later, ultimately taking even more Polish territory than did Germany, the leaders of Britain and France did not declare war against the Soviet Union. And although Britain and France went to war supposedly to protect Polish independence, at the end of the fighting in 1945 — after five and a half years of horrific struggle, death and suffering — Poland was still not free, but instead was entirely under the brutal rule of Soviet Russia.

Sir Basil Liddell Hart, an outstanding twentieth-century British military historian, put it this way: / 6

“The Western Allies entered the war with a two-fold object. The immediate purpose was to fulfill their promise to preserve the independence of Poland. The ultimate purpose was to remove a potential menace to themselves, and thus ensure their own security. In the outcome, they failed in both purposes. Not only did they fail to prevent Poland from being overcome in the first place, and partitioned between Germany and Russia, but after six years of war which ended in apparent victory they were forced to acquiesce in Russia’s domination of Poland — abandoning their pledges to the Poles who had fought on their side.”

In 1940, shortly after he was named prime minister, Winston Churchill spelled out, in two often quoted speeches, his reasons for continuing Britain’s war against Germany. In his famous “Blood, Sweat and Tears” speech, the great British wartime leader said that unless Germany was defeated, there would be “no survival for the British empire, no survival for all that the British empire has stood for…” A few weeks later, in his “Finest Hour” address, Churchill said: “Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire.” / 7

How strange those words sound today. Even though Britain supposedly “won,” or at least was on the winning side in the war, the once-mighty British empire has vanished into history. No British leader today would dare defend the often brutal record of British imperialism, including killing and bombing in order to maintain exploitative colonial rule over millions in Asia and Africa. Nor would any British leader today dare to justify killing people in order to uphold “Christian civilization,” not least for fear of offending Britain’s large and rapidly growing non-Christian population.

Americans like to believe that “good guys” win, and “bad guys” lose, and, in international affairs, that “good” countries win wars, and “bad” countries lose them. In keeping with this view, Americans are encouraged to believe that the US role in defeating Germany and Japan demonstrated the righteousness of the “American Way,” and the superiority of our country’s form of government and society.

But if there is any validity to this view, it would be more accurate to say that the war’s outcome showed the righteousness of the “Soviet Way,” and the superiority of the Soviet Communist form of society and government. Indeed, for decades that was a proud claim of Moscow’s leaders. As one official Soviet history book, published in the 1970s, put it:

“The war demonstrated the superiority of the Soviet socialist social and state system … The war further demonstrated the social and political unity of the Soviet people … Once again it underscored the significance of the guiding and organizing role of the Communist Party in socialist society. The Communist Party consolidated millions of people in their fight against the fascist aggressors … The selfless dedication demonstrated by the Communist Party during the war years further solidified the trust, respect and love it enjoys among the Soviet people.” / 8

In fact, Hitler’s Germany was defeated, first and foremost, by the Soviet Union. Some 70-80 percent of German combat forces were destroyed by the Soviet military on the Eastern front. The D-Day landing in France by American and British forces, which is often portrayed in the United States as a critically important military blow against Nazi Germany, was launched in June 1944 — that is, less than a year before the end of the war in Europe, and months after the great Soviet military victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, which were decisive in Germany’s defeat. / 9

What were the American goals in World War II, and how successful was the US in achieving them?

In 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt, together with British prime minister Winston Churchill, issued a formal declaration of Allied war aims, the much-publicized “Atlantic Charter.” In it, the United States and Britain declared that they sought “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned,” that they would “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of governments under which they will live,” and that they would strive “to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”

It soon became apparent, though, that this solemn pledge of freedom and self-government for “all peoples” was little more than empty propaganda. / 10 This is hardly surprising, given that America’s two most important military allies in the war were Great Britain and the Soviet Union — that is, the world’s foremost imperialist power, and the world’s cruelest tyranny.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Britain ruled over the largest colonial empire in history, holding more millions of people against their will than any regime before or since. This vast empire included what is now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa.

America’s other great wartime ally, the Soviet Union, was, by any objective measure, the most tyrannical or oppressive regime of its time, and a vastly more cruel despotism than Hitler’s Germany. As historians acknowledge, the victims of Soviet dictator Stalin greatly outnumber those who perished as a result of Hitler’s policies. Robert Conquest, a prominent scholar of twentieth century Russian history, estimates the number of those who lost their lives as a consequence of Stalin’s policies as “no fewer than 20 million.” / 11

During the war the United States helped substantially to maintain Stalin’s tyranny, and to aid the Soviet Union in oppressing additional millions of Europeans, while also helping Britain to maintain or re-establish its imperial rule over many millions in Asia and Africa. / 12

Paul Fussell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who served in World War II as a US Army lieutenant, wrote in his acclaimed book Wartime that “the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant and the bloodthirsty.” / 13

An important feature of this “sanitized” view is the belief that whereas the Nazi German regime was responsible for many terrible war crimes and atrocities, the Allies, and especially the United States, waged war humanely. In fact, the record of Allied misdeeds is a long one, and includes the British-American bombing of German cities, a terroristic campaign that took the lives of more than half a million civilians, the genocidal “ethnic cleansing” of millions of civilians in eastern and central Europe, and the large-scale postwar mistreatment of German prisoners. / 14

After “forty months of war duty and five major battles” in which Edgar L. Jones served as “an ambulance driver, a merchant seaman, an Army historian, and a war correspondent,” he wrote an article dispelling some myths about the Americans’ role in the war. “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway?,” he told readers of The Atlantic monthly. “We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter-openers.” / 15

Shortly after the end of the war, the victorious powers put Germany’s wartime leaders on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In doing so, the US and its allies held German leaders to a standard that they did not respect themselves.

US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was not the only high-ranking American official to acknowledge, at least in private, that the claim of unique Allied righteousness was mere pretense. In a letter to the President, written while he was serving as the chief US prosecutor at the great Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, Jackson acknowledged that the Allies “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of [German] prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them [for forced labor in France]. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.” / 16

At the conclusion of the Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, the respected British weekly The Economist cited Soviet crimes, and then added, “Nor should the Western world console itself that the Russians alone stand condemned at the bar of the Allies’ own justice.” The Economist editorial went on:

“… Among crimes against humanity stands the offence of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations. Can the Americans who dropped the atom bomb and the British who destroyed the cities of western Germany plead ‘not guilty’ on this count? Crimes against humanity also include the mass expulsion of populations. Can the Anglo-Saxon leaders who at Potsdam condoned the expulsion of millions of Germans from their homes hold themselves completely innocent?… The nations sitting in judgment [at Nuremberg] have so clearly proclaimed themselves exempt from the law which they have administered.” / 17

Another popular American assumption is that this country’s enemies in World War II were all non-democratic dictatorships. In fact, on each side there were regimes that were repressive or dictatorial, as well as governments that had broad public support. Many of the countries allied with the US were headed by governments that were oppressive, dictatorial, or otherwise non-democratic. / 18 Finland, a democratic republic, was an important wartime partner of Hitler’s Germany.

In crass violation of their own solemnly proclaimed principles, the US, British and Soviet statesmen disposed of tens of millions of people with no regard for their wishes. The deceit and cynicism of the Allied leaders was perhaps most blatant in the infamous British-Soviet “percentages agreement” to divide up South Eastern Europe. At a meeting with Stalin in 1944, Churchill proposed that in Romania the Soviets should have 90 percent influence or authority, and 75 percent in Bulgaria, and that Britain should have 90 percent influence or control in Greece. In Hungary and Yugoslavia, the British leader suggested, each should have 50 percent. Churchill wrote all this out on a piece of paper, which he pushed across to Stalin, who made a check mark on it and passed it back. Churchill then said, “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an off-hand manner? Let us burn the paper.” “No, you keep it,” replied Stalin. / 19

To solidify the Allied wartime coalition — which was formally known as the “United Nations” — President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill, and Soviet premier Stalin met together on two occasions: in November 1943 at Tehran, in occupied Iran, and in February 1945 in Yalta, in Soviet Crimea. The three Allied leaders accomplished what they accused the Axis leaders of Germany, Italy and Japan of conspiring to achieve: world domination.

During a 1942 meeting in Washington, President Roosevelt candidly told the Soviet foreign minister that “the United States, England and Russia, and perhaps China, should police the world and enforce disarmament [of all others] by inspection.” / 20

To secure the global rule of the victorious powers after the war, the “Big Three” Allied leaders established the United Nations organization to serve as a permanent world police force. Once Germany and Japan were defeated, though, the US and the Soviet Union squared off against each other, which made it impossible for the UN to function as President Roosevelt had intended. While the US and Soviet Union each sought for decades to secure hegemony in its own sphere of influence, the two “super powers” were also rivals in a decades-long struggle for global supremacy.

In his book, A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn wrote: / 21

“The victors were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work — without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but under the cover of ‘socialism’ on the one side, and ‘democracy’ on the other, to carve out their own empires of influence. They proceeded to share and contest with one another the domination of the world, to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to. They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques — crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States — to make their rule secure.”

The United States officially entered World War II after the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. Until then, the US was officially a neutral country, and most Americans wanted to keep out of the war that was then raging in Europe and Asia. In spite of the country’s neutral status, President Roosevelt and his administration, together with much of the US media, prodded the American people into supporting war against Germany. A large-scale propaganda campaign was mounted to persuade Americans that Hitler and his Nazi “henchmen” or “hordes” were doing everything in their power to take over and “enslave” the entire world, and that war with Hitler’s Germany was inevitable.

As part of this effort, the President and other high-ranking American officials broadcast fantastic lies about supposed plans by Hitler and his government to attack the United States and impose a global dictatorship. / 22

President Roosevelt’s record of lies is acknowledged even by his admirers. Among those who have sought to justify his policy is the eminent American historian Thomas A. Bailey, who wrote: / 23

“Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor … He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good … The country was overwhelmingly noninterventionist to the very day of Pearl Harbor, and an overt attempt to lead the people into war would have resulted in certain failure and an almost certain ousting of Roosevelt in 1940, with a complete defeat of his ultimate aims.”

Professor Bailey went on to offer a cynical view of American democracy:

“A president who cannot entrust the people with the truth betrays a certain lack of faith in the basic tenets of democracy. But because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. This is clearly what Roosevelt had to do, and who shall say that posterity will not thank him for it?”

As part of the US government’s campaign to incite war, President Roosevelt in 1941 ordered the US Navy to help British forces in attacking German vessels in the Atlantic. This was reinforced by a presidential “shoot on sight” order to the US Navy against German and Italian ships. Roosevelt’s goal was to provoke an “incident” that would provide a pretext for open war. Hitler, for his part, was anxious to avoid conflict with the United States. The German leader responded to the US government’s blatantly illegal provocations by ordering his navy commanders to avoid clashes with US ships. / 24

Also in crass violation of international law, the officially neutral US government provided massive “Lend Lease” aid to Germany’s enemies, especially Britain and its empire, as well as to Soviet Russia.

Two prominent American historians, Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, noted that:

“This [1941 “Lend Lease”] measure was clearly unneutral, but the United States, committed now to the defeat of Germany, was not to be stayed by the niceties of international law. Other equally unneutral acts followed — the seizure of Axis shipping, the freezing of Axis funds, the transfer of tankers to Britain, the occupation of Greenland and, later, of Iceland, the extension of lend-lease to the new ally, Russia, and … the presidential order to ‘shoot on sight’ any enemy submarines.” / 25

In the view of British historian J.F.C. Fuller, President Roosevelt “left no stone unturned to provoke Hitler to declare war on the very people to whom he so ardently promised peace. He provided Great Britain with American destroyers, he landed American troops in Iceland, and he set out to patrol the Atlantic seaways in order to safeguard British convoys; all of which were acts of war … In spite of his manifold enunciations to keep the United States out of the war, he was bent on provoking some incident which would bring them into it.” / 26

So belligerent and unlawful were the Roosevelt administration’s policies that Admiral Harold R. Stark, chief of US naval operations, acknowledged in a confidential September 1941 memorandum for the President: “He [Hitler] has every excuse in the world to declare war on us now, if he were of a mind to.” / 27

Across Europe and Asia, the Second World War brought mass destruction, death to tens of millions of men, women and children, and great suffering to many more. Americans, though, were spared the horrors of large-scale bombing, combat fighting on their home soil, or occupation by foreign armies.

At the end of the war the United States was the only major nation not shattered in the global conflict. It emerged as the world’s preeminent economic, military, and financial power. For the US, the half-century from 1945 to the mid-1990s was an era of spectacular economic growth and unmatched global stature.

Lewis H. Lapham, author and for years editor of Harper’s magazine, put it this way:

“In 1945, the United States inherited the earth … At the end of World War II, what was left of Western civilization passed into the American account. The war had also prompted the country to invent a miraculous economic machine that seemed to grant as many wishes as were asked of it. The continental United States had escaped the plague of war, and so it was easy enough for the heirs to believe that they had been anointed by God.” / 28

But were Americans really better off than if they had stayed out of World War II? Among those who has not thought so is Prof. Bruce Russett, who wrote: / 29

“American participation in World War II had very little effect on the essential structure of international politics thereafter, and probably did little either to advance the material welfare of most Americans or to make the nation secure from foreign military threats … In fact, most Americans probably would have been no worse off, and possibly a little better, if the United States had never become a belligerent…

“I personally find it hard to develop a very emphatic preference for Stalinist Russia over Hitlerite Germany … In cold-blooded realist terms, Nazism as an ideology was almost certainly less dangerous to the United States than is Communism.”

Although Third Reich Germany and imperial Japan were destroyed, the United States and Britain failed to achieve the political goals proclaimed by their leaders. In August 1945, the prestigious British weekly, The Economist, noted: “At the end of a mighty war fought to defeat Hitlerism, the Allies are making a Hitlerian peace. This is the real measure of their failure.” / 30

Among those who were not happy about the war’s outcome was British historian Basil Liddell Hart, who wrote:

“… All the effort that was put into the destruction of Hitlerite Germany resulted in a Europe so devastated and weakened in the process that its power of resistance was much reduced in the face of a fresh and greater menace — and Britain, in common with her European neighbours, had become a poor dependent of the United States. These are the hard facts underlying the victory that was so hopefully pursued and so painfully achieved — after the colossal weight of both Russia and America had been drawn into the scales against Germany. The outcome dispelled the persistent popular illusion that ‘victory’ spelt peace. It confirmed the warning of past experience that victory is a ‘mirage in the desert’ — the desert that a long war creates, when waged with modern weapons and unlimited methods.” / 31

Even Winston Churchill had misgivings about the war’s outcome. Three years after the end of the fighting, he wrote:

“The human tragedy [of the war] reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace or Security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.” / 32

At the end of the war, Europe for the first time in its history was no longer master of its own destiny, but was instead under the domination of two great outer European powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, which for political and ideological reasons had no special interest in, or concern for, European culture or Western civilization. / 33

In the view of Charles A. Lindbergh, the world-famous author and aviator, the war was a great setback for the West. Twenty-five years after the end of the conflict, he wrote: / 34

“We won the war in a military sense; but in a broader sense it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before. In order to defeat Germany and Japan we supported the still greater menaces of Russia and China — which now confront us in a nuclear-weapon era. Poland was not saved … Much of our Western culture was destroyed. We lost the genetic heredity formed through aeons in many million lives … It is alarmingly possible that World War II marks the beginning of our Western civilization’s breakdown, as it already marks the breakdown of the greatest empire ever built by man.”

The outcome of the US and British role in the war moved British historian J.F.C. Fuller to write: / 35

“What persuaded them [Roosevelt and Churchill] to adopt so fatal a policy? We hazard to reply — blind hatred! Their hearts ran away with their heads and their emotions befogged their reason. For them the war was not a political conflict in the normal meaning of the words, it was a Manichean contest between Good and Evil, and to carry their people along with them they unleashed a vitriolic propaganda against the devil they had invoked.”

Even after the passage of so many years, this hatred has endured. American schools, the US mass media, government agencies and political leaders have for decades carried on a campaign of emotion-laden, one-sided propaganda to uphold the national mythology of World War II.

How a nation views the past is not a trivial or merely academic exercise. Our perspective on history profoundly shapes our actions in the present, often with grave consequences for the future. Drawing conclusions from our understanding of the past, we make or support policies that greatly impact many lives.

The familiar American portrayal of World War II, and the “good war” mythology of the US role in it, is not merely bad history. It has helped greatly to support and justify a series of arrogant US foreign policy adventures, with harmful consequences for both America and the world.

“World War II has warped our view of how we look at things today,” said US Navy rear admiral Gene R. LaRoque, who served in 13 major battles during the war. “We see things in terms of that war, which in a sense was a good war. But the twisted memory of it encourages the men of my generation to be willing, almost eager, to use military force anywhere in the world.” / 36

Since 1945, American presidents have repeatedly sought to justify US military actions in foreign countries by recalling the “good war” and, in particular, the US role in defeating Germany. During the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson sought to win support for his Vietnam war policy with historically false portrayals of World War II and Hitler’s Germany. / 37

This moved historian Murray Rothbard to write in 1968: / 38

” …World War II is the last war myth left, the myth that the Old Left clings to in pure desperation: the myth that here, at least, was a good war, here was a war in which America was in the right. World War II is the war thrown into our faces by the war-making establishment, as it tries, in each war that we face, to wrap itself in the mantle of good and righteous World War II.”

In recent years, American political leaders have tried to gain support for war against Iraq and Iran by drawing historical parallels between Hitler and the leaders of those two Middle East countries.

Many Americans are understandably outraged by the deceit and falsehoods of President George W. Bush and his administration in seeking public support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. But as we have seen, presidential deception to justify war did not start with him. Americans who express admiration for the US role in World War II, and for Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential leadership, have little moral right to complain when presidents follow his example and lead the country into war by breaking the law, subverting the Constitution, and lying to the people.

If the history of war and conflict teaches us anything, it is the danger of arrogance and hubris — that is, the danger of going to war because a nation’s leaders are convinced of their own righteousness, or have persuaded themselves and the public that a foreign country should be attacked because its government or society is not merely alien, hostile or threatening, but “evil.”

This is perhaps the most harmful legacy of America ‘s national mythology about World War II — the notion that worthwhile or justifiable wars are fought against countries headed by supposedly “evil” regimes. And it is this very outlook that moved President George W. Bush to refer to his “war on terrorism” as a “crusade,” and, in a major speech, to proclaim a US foreign policy dedicated to “ending tyranny in the world.” / 39

A nation should go to war only after prudent consideration, after carefully weighing the possible consequences, and only for the most compelling of reasons, after all other alternatives have been exhausted, and as a last resort. This is especially true given the awesome destructive power of modern weaponry, and because — as World War II , the “Good War,” so tragically attests — wars rarely turn out the way anyone expects.

End Notes

1. Studs Terkel, “The Good War” (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. vi.
2. P. Fussell, Wartime (1989), pp. 164-165.Also quoted there by Fussell is Eric Severeid, an influential American journalist and commentator, who wrote that the war “absolutely” was a “contest between good and evil.”
3. Eisenhower declaration of June 6, 1944, issued in connection with the D-Day invasion.
4. Clinton’s second inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1997. See: M. Weber, “The Danger of Historical Lies: President Clinton’s Distortion of History,” The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1997.http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-2_Weber.html )
5. B. M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger (1972), pp. 12, 17.
6. Basil H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), p. 3.
7. Churchill speeches of May 13, 1940, and June 18, 1940.
8. K. Gusev, V. Naumov, The USSR: A Short History (Moscow: Progress, 1976), p. 239.
9. N. Davies, No Simple Victory (2007), pp. 24, 25, 276, 484-485; John Erickson, The Road to Berlin (Yale Univ. Press, 1999), p. ix (preface); Soviet losses in the three-week Berlin offensive of April 16 to May 8, 1945, it’s been estimated, were greater than the total of American dead in the Second World War, and greater than the losses of the Western allies in the whole of 1945. H. P. Willmott, The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War (New York: 1990), p. 452; In the view of historian John Lukacs: “Their [the Soviet Russians’] resistance and victory over the Germans was their greatest – no, their only great – achievement during the seventy-four years of Soviet Communism.” J. Lukacs, The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (New York: 1993), p. 55.
10. British historian J. F. C. Fuller called the Atlantic Charter “first class propaganda, and probably the biggest hoax in history.” J. F. C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World , Vol. 3 (New York: DaCapo, 1987), p. 453.
11. R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), p. 48. See also: N. Davies,No Simple Victory (2007), pp. 64-67
12. A few years after the end of the war, former US President Herbert Hoover recalled his critical view of Roosevelt’s policy of aiding the Soviet Union: “In June 1941, when Britain was safe from German invasion due to Hitler’s diversion to attack Stalin, I urged that the gargantuan jest of all history would be our giving aid to the Soviet government. I urged that we should allow those two dictators to exhaust each other. I stated that the result of our assistance would be to spread Communism over the whole world. … The consequences have proved that I was right.” Cited by: Scott Horton, “Saving England Wasn’t Worth It,” June 2007. (http://www.antiwar.com/horton/?articleid=11213 )
13. P. Fussell, Wartime (New York: 1989), p. ix (preface)
14. See, for example: Max Hastings, Bomber Command (New York: 1979); Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich(2007); N. Davies, No Simple Victory (2007), pp. 67-72; Alfred M. de Zayas, The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (New York: 1993); Frederick J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (IHR, 1993); Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (Columbia University Press, 2006); Ralph F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (Chicago: 1947)
15. Edgar L. Jones, “One War is Enough,” The Atlantic, Feb. 1946. (http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/nonatlserv.shtml ). Also quoted in P. Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: 1988), pp. 50-51.
16. Jackson letter to Truman, Oct. 12, 1945. Quoted in: Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York: 1983), p. 68. See also: James McMillan, Five Men at Nuremberg (London: 1985), pp. 67, 173-174, 244-245, 380, 414-415.
17. “The Nuremberg Judgment,” editorial, The Economist (London), Oct. 5, 1946. Quoted in: M. Weber, “The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust,” The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1992, p. 176. (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_Webera.html)
18. In addition to the Soviet Union and the puppet states under British colonial rule, those countries included China, Brazil, Cuba, and Egypt.
19. Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory, Winston Churchill 1941-45, Vol. VII (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), pp. 992-994. Source cited: W. Churchill, The Second World War. Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (London, 1954), p. 198.
20. Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), p. 85 and p. 235 (n. 6). Source cited: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1942, vol. III, pp. 573 f.
21. H. Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins/ Perennial, 2001), pp. 424-425.
22. In his nationally broadcast address of Dec. 29, 1940, President Roosevelt told Americans that “the Nazi masters of Germany” were seeking “to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.” In his address of May 27, 1941, Roosevelt said that “the Nazis” sought “world domination.” On Oct. 25, 1941, US Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle told Americans that Hitler and the Nazis “planned to conquer the entire world.” Two days later, the President issued perhaps his most extravagant claim of supposed Nazi plans to take over the world. See: M. Weber, “Roosevelt’s ‘Secret Map’ Speech,” The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1985. See also: Thomas A. Bailey and P. Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt (1979), esp. pp. 199-203; Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography (New York: 1985), pp. 602-603; “From the captured German archives, there is no evidence to support the President’s claims that Hitler contemplated any offensive against the western hemisphere, and until America entered the war there is abundant evidence that this was the one thing he wished to avert.” J. F. C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World, Vol. 3 (New York: DaCapo, 1987), p. 629.
23. T. A. Bailey, The Man in the Street (1948), pp. 11-13. Quoted in: W. H. Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade, p. 123. See also: Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939-1941 (New York: 1976), pp. 9, 10, 420, 421.
24. C. Tansill, Back Door to War (1952), pp. 606-615; Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939-1941(New York: 1976), pp. 298, 323, 340, 344, 392, 418, 419, 421; T. A. Bailey and P. B. Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt (1979), pp. 166, 265, 268; Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography (1985), pp. 589, 601; Frederic R. Sanborn, “Roosevelt is Frustrated in Europe,” in H. E. Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace(1993), pp. 219-221; James McMillan, Five Men at Nuremberg (London: 1985), pp. 173-174; W. H. Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade (1950), pp. 124-147.
25. Allan Nevins, Henry Steele Commager, A Pocket History of the United States (New York: Washington Square Press, 1986), p. 433.
26. J. F. C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World , Vol. 3 (New York: DaCapo, 1987), p. 416
27. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), p. 380.
28. Lewis H. Lapham, “America’s Foreign Policy: A Rake’s Progress,” Harper’s, March 1979. Quoted in: Studs Terkel, “The Good War” (New York: 1984), p. 8.
29. B. M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger (1972), pp. 19, 20, 42.
30. The Economist (London), August 11, 1945. Quoted in: J.F.C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World , Vol. 3 (New York: DaCapo, 1987), p. 631.
31. Basil H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), p. 3.
32. W. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: 1948), pp. iv-v (preface).
33. H. P. Willmott, The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War (New York: The Free Press, 1990), pp. 102-103, 474 , 476; See also: F. P. Yockey, Imperium (Noontide Press, 2000).
34. Charles A. Lindbergh, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: 1970), pp. xiv-xv; Donald Day, for years a correspondent in central Europe for the Chicago Tribune, was even more emphatic in viewing an Allied victory as catastrophic for Europe and the West. “Speaking as an American and as a newspaperman of 15 years experience who knows something about both the United States and Europe,” he wrote in early 1943, “I think an American control and administration of Europe would be just as destructive and ruinous as Soviet control. Both would be really Jewish control.” Donald Day, Onward Christian Soldiers(Noontide Press, 2002), p. 168.
35. J. F. C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World, Vol. 3 (New York: DaCapo, 1987), p. 631.
36. Studs Terkel, “The Good War” (1984), p. 193.
37. President Johnson repeatedly compared the North Vietnamese leadership to Hitler to justify the use of American military power in Southeast Asia. At a news conference on July 28, 1965, for example, he said that “the lessons of history” showed that “surrender” in Vietnam would not bring peace. “We learned from Hitler at Munich,” he said, “that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The battle will be renewed in one country and then another country…”
38. Murray N. Rothbard, “Harry Elmer Barnes, RIP,” Left and Right, 1968. (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard165.html )
39. George W. Bush, Inaugural address, Jan. 20, 2005. “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world.”

For Further Reading

• Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994).
• Thomas A. Bailey, Paul B. Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt: The Undeclared Naval War (New York: The Free Press, 1979).
• Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008)
• Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Institute for Historical Review, 1993)
• Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (New York: Crown, 2008).
• William H. Chamberlain, America’s Second Crusade (Chicago: 1950)
• Benjamin Colby, ‘Twas a Famous Victory (Arlington House, 1975)
• George N. Crocker, Roosevelt’s Road to Russia (Regnery, 1961)
• Norman Davies, No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945 (New York: Viking, 2007)
• Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: 1989).
• Adolf Hitler. Reichstag speech of Dec. 11, 1941. (Declaration of war against the USA.)
  ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v08/v08p389_Hitler.html )
• Max Hastings, Bomber Command (New York: 1979)
• Robert Higgs, “Truncating the Antecedents: How Americans Have Been Misled about World War II.” March 18, 2008 ( http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs77.html )
• David L. Hoggan. The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed. IHR, 1989.
• David Irving, Hitler’s War. Focal Point, 2002.
• Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation (Basic Books, 2007)
• Robert Nisbet, Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship (London: 1989)
• Amos Perlmutter, FDR & Stalin: A Not So Grand Alliance, 1943-1945 (University of Missouri Press, 1993)
• Bruce M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into World War II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972)
• Friedrich Stieve. What the World Rejected: Hitler’s Peace Offers, 1933- 1939.
  ( http://ihr.org/other/what-the-world-rejected.html )
• R. H. S. Stolfi, Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny. Prometheus Books, 2011.
• Michel Sturdza, The Suicide of Europe (Boston: 1968)
• Viktor Suvorov (pseud.), The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008
• Charles C. Tansill, Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933-1941 (Chicago: 1952)
• A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War. New York: 1983.
• Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two (New York: Pantheon, 1984)
• John Toland, Adolf Hitler. Doubleday & Co., 1976.
• Nikolai Tolstoy, Stalin’s Secret War (New York: 1981)
• F. J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Institute for Historical Review, 1993)
• Mark Weber, “President Roosevelt’s Campaign to Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents,” The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983 (Vol. 4, No. 2), pp. 135-172.
  (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v04/v04p135_Weber.html)
• Mark Weber, “Roosevelt’s ‘Secret Map’ Speech,” The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1985.
  ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v06/v06p125_Weber.html )
• Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans from the East (University of Nebraska, 1989)
• from the Institute for Historical Review

1944: US Normandy Invasion was “Tsunami of Lust”

by Mathieu von Rohr

Upon the occupation of France by American soldiers, French women had much to fear as large numbers of rapes and other terrible crimes were committed across the country.

AN IMPORTANT BOOK shows us that the “liberators” made a lot of noise and drank too much. They raced around in their jeeps, fought in the streets, and stole. But the worst thing was their obsession with French women. They wanted sex — some for free, some for money and some by force…. (ILLUSTRATION: American soldiers marching in Paris with the Arc de Triomphe in the background)

By the late summer of 1944, large numbers of women in Normandy were complaining about rapes by US soldiers. Fear spread among the population, as did a bitter joke: “Our men had to disguise themselves under the Germans. But when the Americans came, we had to hide the women.”

With the landing on Omaha Beach, “a veritable tsunami of male lust” washed over France, writes Mary Louise Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in her book What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. In it, Roberts scrapes away at the idealized picture of war heroes. Although soldiers have had a reputation for committing rape in many wars, American GIs have been largely excluded from this stereotype. Historical research has paid very little attention to this dark side of the liberation of Europe, which was long treated as a taboo subject in both the United States and France.

American propaganda did not sell the war to soldiers as a struggle for freedom, writes Roberts, but as a “sexual adventure.” France was “a tremendous brothel,” the magazine Life fantasized at the time, “inhabited by 40,000,000 hedonists who spend all their time eating, drinking (and) making love.” The Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the US armed forces, taught soldiers German phrases like: “Waffen niederlegen!” (“Throw down your arms!”). But the French phrases it recommended to soldiers were different: “You have charming eyes,” “I am not married” and “Are your parents at home?”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This crude vision of French womanhood and the sexual rewards “due” to conquering Americans, Black and White, is not dead even today. Writing in the Daily Mail (link http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2726185/50-years-ago-Paris-finally-overthrew-Nazis.html ), Antony Beevor says as much no fewer than three times in one short article: “Paris celebrated with open arms, open beds and plenty of cognac”; “Paris welcomed officers with open arms and open beds after their triumph”; and “Paris celebrated with open arms and open beds.”]

After their victory, the soldiers felt it was time for a reward. And when they enjoyed themselves with French women, they were not only validating their own masculinity, but also, in a metaphorical sense, the new status of the United States as a superpower, writes Roberts. The liberation of France was sold to the American public as a love affair between US soldiers and grateful French women.

On the other hand, following their defeat by the Germans, many French perceived the Americans’ uninhibited activities in their own country as yet another humiliation. Although the French were officially among the victorious powers, the Americans were now in charge.

‘Scenes Contrary to Decency’

The subject of sex played a central role in the relationship between the French and their liberators. Prostitution was the source of constant strife between US military officials and local authorities.

Some of the most dramatic reports came from the port city of Le Havre, which was overrun by soldiers headed home in the summer of 1945. In a letter to a Colonel Weed, the US regional commander, then Mayor Pierre Voisin complained that his citizens couldn’t even go for a walk in the park or visit the cemetery without encountering GIs having sex in public with prostitutes.

“Scenes contrary to decency” were unfolding in his city day and night, Voisin wrote. It was “not only scandalous but intolerable” that “youthful eyes are exposed to such public spectacles.” The mayor suggested that the Americans set up a brothel outside the city so that the sexual activity would be discreet and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases could be combated by medical personnel.

But the Americans could not operate brothels because they feared that stories about the soldiers’ promiscuity would then make their way back to their wives at home. Besides, writes Roberts, many American military officials did not take the complaints seriously owing to their belief that it was normal for the French to have sex in public.

But the citizens of Le Havre wrote letters of protest to their mayor, and not just regarding prostitution. We are “attacked, robbed, run over both on the street and in our houses,” wrote one citizen in October 1945. “This is a regime of terror, imposed by bandits in uniform.”

‘The Swagger of Conquerors’

There were similar accounts from all over the country, with police reports listing holdups, theft and rapes. In Brittany, drunk soldiers destroyed bars when they ran out of cognac. Sexual assaults were commonplace in Marseilles. In Rouen, a soldier forced his way into a house, held up his weapon and demanded sex.

The military authorities generally took the complaints about rape seriously. However, the soldiers who were convicted were almost exclusively African-American, some of them apparently on the basis of false accusations, because racism was also deeply entrenched in French society.

[The Speigel author is somewhat disingenuous here. It is well-known that Black American soldiers were brought in to both France and Italy as part of the “conquering Army” and their rapes of White women in both countries were a source of outrage and complaints. Even today, Blacks commit interracial rape at thousands of times the White rate. In US-occupied France, out of what must have been a huge number of rapes, only 29 were punished — and 25 of these were committed by Blacks. There is some small satisfaction in knowing that they were punished by hanging. — Ed.]

A café owner from Le Havre expressed the deep French disillusionment over the Americans’ behavior when he said: “We expected friends who would not make us ashamed of our defeat. Instead, there came incomprehension, arrogance, incredibly bad manners and the swagger of conquerors.”

* * *

APPENDIX: Roosevelt’s Normandy “Prayer”

On the eve of the Normandy invasion, the American President addressed the nation with a prayer. It is ironic that this prayer states his men are not fighting for conquest but for “tolerance and good will”, whereas the later actions of his soldiers speak otherwise.

“My fellow Americans: Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

“And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

“For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people….

“With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

“Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, June 6th 1944

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan and edited by Chris Rossetti and Vanessa Neubauer

Read the full article: Der Spiegel

World War 2: Battling the People of the Lie, part 1

American Dissident Voices broadcast of March 25, 2017

by Kevin Alfred Strom

NOT EVERY World War 2 veteran is still around to tell us how he feels about the world his sacrifices brought into being. But there are a few veterans, and sons and daughters of veterans, who are no longer keeping their heads down and pretending that everything is just fine. Some of them are angry — very angry — at what has been done to their world — the world they thought they were fighting to preserve. Listen to this:

I stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day so my kids could be manipulated by media Jews to hate me — and to hate themselves.

I stormed Omaha Beach so my kids could be the sex playthings of any invader or racial alien who took a fancy to them — and so my kids could be taught to like it.

I stormed Omaha Beach so my kids could could say “F America” and scream that Black gangbangers and Mexican cartel gangs are equal to us –and hate me if I think otherwise.

I stormed Omaha Beach so when my kids had kids, one of my grandsons could put other men’s genitals in his mouth and have other “men” put their forearms in his rectum and call it “diversity” and “love.”

I stormed Omaha Beach so that my other grandson could castrate himself and take hormones to grow female breasts.

I stormed Omaha Beach — and saw my buddies die — so that my granddaughter could cover herself with gang sign tattoos and give herself to Black gangbangers in a crack house. I stormed Omaha Beach so that she could become a junkie and then get a “job” doing sex movies for a Jewish porn studio which requires that she have group sex with Blacks in gang rape movies.

I stormed Omaha Beach — and saw my buddies die — and killed members of my own race who had never harmed me or my country — so that my other granddaughter could be beat bloody and abandoned by her Mexican invader “boyfriend” and bear his mixed-race offspring.

That is what I fought for when I fought in World War 2. God Bless America and please protect the poor, persecuted Jews who brought us all this freedom!

That’s what one man had to say recently after viewing the Murdoch Murdoch video we showcased here last week called “The Greatest Generation.” Actually, I had to clean up some of the very raw language he used before I could make it a part of this family-friendly radio show. He’s that angry. And well he should be. He has been — we all have been — betrayed and stabbed in the back.

World War 2 and National Socialist Germany are among the biggest taboos set up by our enemies to keep us intimidated, silent, and confused. Even as populism and nationalism rise, anti-invasion activists and populists and weak-kneed nationalists still try to “fit in” with those taboos and avoid being attacked by the enemy’s media outlets by continuing to use the Germans of the World War 2 period — the “Nazis” — as a metaphor for tyranny and evil. They pay obeisance to the myth of the “Good War” and the “greatest tragedy in human history,” the alleged “Holocaust.” But you can’t win a war if you let your enemy define good and evil for you. You can’t win if you let your enemy decide what kind of society you’re allowed to build.

Understanding World War 2 rightly is absolutely necessary for our victory — even our survival. That is precisely why the truth about that conflict has been made into one of the greatest taboos of all time. Let’s listen to what the founder of the National Alliance, Dr. William Pierce, said in answer to the questions: Why do you keep bringing up World War 2? Don’t we already have enough problems with people calling us “Nazis”? Can’t we just avoid the subject and stick to immigration and Black crime? What the Hell does World War 2 have to do with our problems today, anyway? Listen:

The Second World War really has everything to do with it. It was, after all, an ideological war, one could almost say a religious war, a war between two fundamentally different world views. On one side were the believers in quality over quantity, the elitists, the believers that White people, Europeans, are more progressive, are better able to maintain and advance civilization, and should hold onto their position of world mastery.

On the other side were the believers in quantity over quality, the egalitarians, the believers in racial and cultural equality, the people who thought it was wicked for the United States to remain a White country, wicked for White Britain to have a world empire, wicked for White Germany to be allowed to smash communism, wicked to permit nationalism to triumph over internationalism. And the fact is that the egalitarians won the war. After the Second World War White Americans could no more justify keeping hordes of hungry, non-White immigrants out of their country than Englishmen could justify hanging onto the British Empire. They had cut the moral ground right out from under themselves.

But the point is that, the reasons given to the American people for getting into the war against Germany were all spurious. It was not a war to keep America free. Americans weren’t in the slightest danger of losing their freedom to the Germans. It was, as I said, an ideological war. It was a war about what kind of ideas would govern the world. It was a war about whether we would be proud and White and strong, or whether we would feel guilty about the fact that Mexican peons aren’t as well off as we are.

And we lost the war. That was a real turning point in the fortunes of our race and our nation. The loss of the Second World War is the real reason for the decline of the U.S. economy–and of our social life, our cultural life, and our spiritual life. Before the war we had a White country, a country determined to stay White. After the war we no longer had that determination. Instead we had the vague feeling that it was wrong of us to want to stay White.

After the war when the controlled media began pushing for so-called “civil rights” laws and for opening our borders to the Third World, it was just a continuation of their push to get us into the war on the side of the people who had made Poland a more “equal” country by slaughtering her leaders at the killing pits in the Katyn woods. We don’t really have time today to trace the whole process of the breakdown of America after the war, but we can look at a few examples which more or less tell the story.

We’ve been talking about the economy, but it’s really our whole society which has been corrupted by the war, by the ideology for which the war was fought. Think, for example, about what life is becoming for the millions of White Americans who still live in our cities, especially those cities with a large minority contingent. We are no longer the masters in our own land, and we are paying the price for that decline in status. Crime has soared enormously in our cities and made life a daily nightmare for millions who cannot move away. Even for those who live in the suburbs and only must work in the cities during the day, crime has become an ever-present constraint, a burden, a limit to their lives.

City streets which once were safe for White women and men, by night as well as by day, are now like minefields where we must proceed with caution and be always on guard. We know who makes our streets unsafe. We know against whom we are obliged to bar our windows. We know whom we must fear if our cars run out of gas or break down at night. And these are the same people whose welfare support imposes such an intolerable burden on our strained economy. And it is interesting that the government cannot solve our crime problem for exactly the same reason that it cannot solve our economic problem: it cannot address the causes; it cannot even admit the existence of the causes, because those causes are Politically Incorrect.

Just as the government economists talk about interest rates and budget adjustments but dare not speak of the effects of globalism on our economy, the sociologists talk about “poverty” as the cause of urban crime, but dare not mention that crime in America today is above all else a racial problem. Or look at what our schools have become, or look at popular entertainment. You know what the purpose of a school should be? It should be not just to pound facts into the heads of children so they can earn a living; it should be to mold them into good citizens. It should be to teach them about their roots, about their ancestors, about their race. It should be to give them a sense of identity, a feeling of solidarity with their people, a feeling of appreciation for the civilization which their people created. It should be to teach them the values and customs which are peculiar to their people.

But most of the schools in America’s cities cannot do these things. They are not even permitted to try to do these things, because these things are all profoundly “racist,” the controlled media tell us. The only kind of school which can teach meaningfully about roots and identity is a school which is racially homogeneous, but such schools were outlawed by our government after the Second World War, because they are contrary to the principles for which that war was fought.

When our kids turn to drugs today, when they learn anti-White rap lyrics from the television, when they think Magic Johnson is a hero and say upon meeting a friend, “hey, man! gimme five,” we’re paying the price of the war. I said a few minutes ago that the worst aspect of the breakdown of America was not what’s happened to our economy, but what’s happened to our spiritual life, to our morale, to our idealism, to our character. White Americans haven’t become more stupid in the last 50 years. Most of the people listening to this program understand exactly what I’m saying. They didn’t really need me to point it out to them. They can see it for themselves. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why our schools aren’t working or why the New World Order will hurt Americans at the price of making Mexicans and Chinese more prosperous. But it does take just a tiny bit of courage to stand up and say these things when we’ve had it drummed into our heads that we always must be Politically Correct.

The people listening to this program have for years been watching America being torn down. They have seen the effects of egalitarianism, of liberalism on our society. They have seen one liberal program after another make things worse and worse, and they have listened to the controlled media and the controlled politicians tell them that what’s needed to fix things is more of the same. And they’ve thought to themselves, this is crazy. But they’ve been afraid to say that out loud. They’ve been afraid to say, “Hey, look, Joe, the emperor doesn’t have any clothes on.” And it’s my considered opinion that this timidity, this willingness to go along with every new insanity imposed on us by the media and the politicians, even when we know it’s unnatural and immoral and destructive of everything worthwhile–this is a spiritual failure. This spiritual failure, this willingness to tolerate evil, is a more serious matter, in my eyes, than our economic decline. When we are able to heal ourselves spiritually, we’ll be able to heal ourselves economically and socially, but not before.

I think we all know who wields more control over the news and entertainment media than any other group. It’s the Jews. And, yes, they deserve a great deal of blame. But not all the blame. Perhaps not even most of it. After all, they’re only acting in accord with their nature. They’re doing what they always do when they come into a country. We shouldn’t have let them do it. We should have stopped them when they were taking over Hollywood 75 years ago. We should have stopped them when they began buying up newspapers back before the Second World War. After the war we shouldn’t have let them get anywhere near a television studio. But we didn’t stop them, and the blame for that really lies with those who have set themselves up as our political leaders. They sold us out. They sold out America. They sold out their race. When our kids are exposed to the god-awful, anti-White rap musicals from MTV, should we blame the Jewish owner of MTV, Mr Redstone, or should we blame the politicians in Washington who let him get away with it? Personally, I’d go after the politicians first.

More people are angry today about what their government is doing to America than at any time since the Second World War. As time passes their numbers and their anger will grow. That is inevitable, because the policies of the controlled media and the government are making America an unlivable place. The condition of the economy helps too. I would really be worried if I thought that the politicians could patch up the economy enough to lull people back to sleep. But I know that they can’t. I know that conditions can only become worse and worse under the policies which come from Washington, regardless of who’s in the White House. And this is what gives me hope for the future. When the pain becomes great enough, anger and frustration will overcome the fear of being Politically Incorrect, even for the most timid White American.

You’ve been listening to William Pierce speaking on the necessity of understanding the real nature of World War 2 in order to effectively lead our people to security and freedom. Since he spoke those words in 1992, we’ve made progress. The largely fictional Jewish “Holocaust” is a tottering house of cards in the minds of millions and the wisdom of fighting on the Jewish and Communist side in World War 2 is more and more openly questioned. This has made the Jewish power structure become ever more censorious, ever more suppressive, ever more likely to demand the heads of anyone who strays from their increasingly strident party line. They’ve just forced YouTube to de-monetize and isolate Politically Incorrect videos, many of which question the Kosher version of World War 2 history. They’ve pressured Amazon.com to outright ban books that cast doubt on Jewish persecution stories. Within the halls of power, our enemies still have great sway. But in the hearts and minds of our people, especially our young people, these taboos and totems have less and less effect every day.

Be with us next week as we continue to expand your mind and explore the real nature of World War 2 in “Battling the People of the Lie, part 2,” right here on American Dissident Voices.

 

Here is the complete series on World War 2, “Battling the People of the Lie.”

Source: National Alliance

“Fading Illusions” by Mark Weber and Kevin Strom; “The ‘Good War’ Myth of World War 2” by Mark Weber (with an extensive bibliography); the exposé “US Normandy Invasion was Tsunami of Lust” by Mathieu von Rohr; and “Battling the People of the Lie” (part one, with a link to the full series) by Kevin Strom. Please share them with your friends and family members and deprogram, deprogram, deprogram!
Source: https://nationalvanguard.org/2019/06/debunking-d-day-myths-an-omnibus/

Sven Longshanks and Dennis Wise discuss the 75th anniversary of the invasion of France & the ill-fated dress rehearsal that saw hundreds of American troops killed by friendly fire.

Vichy France was under an armistice with Germany, the same as Northern Ireland is under an armistice today with Southern Ireland. To break that armistice is an act of terrorism, yet that is exactly what the Allies did when they invaded France. This was not a liberation, this was an invasion and the legitimate government were toppled and an unelected occupying government were put in place the same as happened in Germany.

One month before that happened, there was a dress rehearsal for the invasion of Normandy that took place on the sea off Dorset that ended in a complete fiasco. First, the flotilla was torpedoed by Germans but instead of instructing the boats to pick up the wounded in the sea, they were told to leave them.

Hundreds of sailors drowned due to this betrayal, but worse was yet to come. When the boats got to the beach, Eisenhower had instructed the British to use live ammunition and due to a mistake in timing, almost a thousand American troops were killed due to friendly fire.

There were more dead from the practice run than actually died on the beach at Utah.

Today’s media likes to mock Hitler, but what about the actions of Eisenhower, that led to all those completely needless deaths?

Presented by Sven Longshanks

Truth Will Out Radio: The D-Day Invasion – TWOR 060719