The Russian leader has accused Western powers of trying to build a system of “robbery, violence and suppression”
“It seems that they have forgotten what the insane ambitions of the Nazis led to. They have forgotten who defeated this monstrous, total evil,” he stressed.
Western elites have forgotten the consequences of the Nazis’ “insane ambitions,” Russian President Vladimir Putin has said during his Victory Day Parade speech on Red Square in Moscow.
Russia believes that “any ideology of superiority is by its nature disgusting, criminal and deadly,” the president pointed out.
“The globalist elites keep insisting on their exceptionalism; they pit people against each other, split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia and aggressive nationalism, destroy traditional family values that make human a human,” Putin said.
According to the Russian leader, all this is being done by the US and allies in order to “further dictate their will, their rights and their rules” and implement what is basically “a system of robbery, violence and suppression” on the international stage.
“It seems that they have forgotten what the insane ambitions of the Nazis led to. They have forgotten who defeated this monstrous, total evil,” he stressed.
Referring to the conflict in Ukraine, Putin said that “a real war has been unleashed against out Motherland. But we resisted international terrorism. We’ll also defend the residents of Donbass and assure our security.”
The aim of the West is “to achieve the disintegration and destruction of our country, nullify the results of World War II, completely break down the system of global security and international law, and strangle any sovereign centers of development,” he insisted.
The US and its allies are to blame for the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, the head of state said.
“Overwhelming ambitions, arrogance and permissiveness inevitably lead to tragedies. This is the reason for the catastrophe that the Ukrainian people are now experiencing,” he pointed out.
The Ukrainians became “hostages” of the coup that took place in the country in 2014 and were turned into “a bargaining chip” by the West, which uses the country to implement its “cruel selfish plans.”
In his speech on Red Square, Putin denounced the “disgusting, criminal and deadly” ideology of Western supremacy and the globalists who “pit people against each other, split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia and aggressive nationalism, destroy traditional family values that make human a human.”“It seems that they have forgotten what the insane ambitions of the Nazis led to. They have forgotten who defeated this monstrous, total evil,” the Russian president pointed out.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday attempted to describe Russia as analogous to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Her remarks followed a claim to reporters that the “US and allied forces” had secured victory in the Second World War.
“This week marks, as you all know, the anniversary of the end of WWII in Europe and the victory of the United States and allied forces over fascism and aggression on the continent,” President Joe Biden’s press secretary told reporters at the daily briefing.
“The European continent now faces new aggression,” Jean-Pierre added. “The US has rallied the world in response, and we will continue to support the people of Ukraine as they defend their independence and their democracy.”
After announcing a $1.2 billion package of ammunition and other supplies for Kiev’s military, Jean-Pierre offered more thoughts about the meaning of WWII and the speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the triumphant parade in Moscow.
“Victory Day is supposed to be about peace and unity in Europe. It’s supposed to be about the end of war and bloodshed and suffering. Instead, Mr. Putin promised only more violence and spewed only more lies about the war he falsely claims has been unleashed against Russia,” she said.
In his speech on Red Square, Putin denounced the “disgusting, criminal and deadly” ideology of Western supremacy and the globalists who “pit people against each other, split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia and aggressive nationalism, destroy traditional family values that make human a human.”
“It seems that they have forgotten what the insane ambitions of the Nazis led to. They have forgotten who defeated this monstrous, total evil,” the Russian president pointed out.
The Soviet Union did the lion’s share of the fighting in Europe, at the cost of 8.7 million soldiers and up to 20 million civilian lives. May 9 is the date on which the remnants of the Nazi regime signed their surrender to the Red Army, a week after the banner of the 150th Rifle Division was planted atop the Reichstag in Berlin.
A lifelong Democrat political operative, Jean-Pierre worked for Biden when he was Barack Obama’s vice-president, then moved to the cable channel MSNBC as a political commentator. She returned to the White House in 2021, and replaced Jen Psaki in May 2022, as the “historic first” openly lesbian black woman to ever hold the post of press secretary.
Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
– Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials after WWII
PUTIN (2022): "This historical period of boundless Western domination in world affairs is coming to an end. The unipolar world is being relegated into the past… We're in for probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and most important decade since the end of World War II." pic.twitter.com/NyNL5QCIxg
This is a little-known and never-discussed part of US history, but yet one of the major factors that propelled the US to its overwhelming manufacturing and economic supremacy after the Second World War. It involves the final destruction of the British Empire, for which no thinking person would have regrets, and also the conditions obtaining after the end of World War II. The First World War caused Britain to lose about 40% of its former Empire and wealth, and the Second World War completed this task, but not without the little-known predatory intercession of America.
During the Second War, Britain needed huge volumes of supplies of food, raw materials, manufactured goods, armaments and military hardware. But Britain’s factories were being destroyed by the war, and in any case lacked sufficient productive capacity. Britain also increasingly lacked money to pay for those goods, its solution being to purchase on credit from its colonies. Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and many other nations supplied England with necessary goods and war materials, on promise of future payment. The plan was that after the War ended, Britain would repay these debts with manufactured goods which a rebuilt Britain would be able to supply. These debts were recorded in the then British currency of Pounds Sterling, and maintained on ledgers in the Bank of England, commonly referred to as “The Sterling Balances”.
After the Second War ended, the US was the world’s only major economy that had not been bombed to rubble, a nation with all its factories intact, and able to operate at full capacity producing almost everything the world needed. The US had enormous capacity to supply, but the many countries of the British Empire, whose economies were in sound condition and had money to pay, were refusing to buy from the US since they were waiting for the UK to rebuild and repay the outstanding debts with manufactured goods. The US government and corporations realised that this enormous market consisting of so many of the world’s nations, would remain closed to it for perhaps decades, that it would have little or no commercial success in any part of the former British Empire so long as those Sterling Balances remained on the ledgers in the Bank of England. And this is one place where the true nature of America comes into sharp focus, an incident which serves better than many to illustrate the story of American “fair play” and of the US creating “a level playing field”.
At the end of the war, Britain, physically devastated and financially bankrupt, lacked factories to produce goods for rebuilding, the materials to rebuild the factories or purchase the machines to fill them, or with the money to pay for any of it. Britain’s situation was so dire, the government sent the economist John Maynard Keynes with a delegation to the US to beg for financial assistance, claiming that Britain was facing a “financial Dunkirk”. The Americans were willing to do so, on one condition: They would supply Britain with the financing, goods and materials to rebuild itself, but dictated that Britain must first eliminate those Sterling Balances by repudiating all its debts to its colonies. The alternative was to receive neither assistance nor credit from the US. Britain, impoverished and in debt, with no natural resources and no credit or ability to pay, had little choice but to capitulate. And of course with all receivables cancelled and since the US could produce today, those colonial nations had no further reason for refusing manufactured goods from the US. The strategy was successful. By the time Britain rebuilt itself, the US had more or less captured all of Britain’s former colonial markets, and for some time after the war’s end the US was manufacturing more than 50% of everything produced in the world. And that was the end of the British Empire, and the beginning of the last stage of America’s rise.
Americans have been propagandised into believing that their country selflessly supported the European war effort, and generously planned and financed the entire rebuilding of all of war-ravaged Europe. Their heads are full of ‘lend-lease’, the “Marshall Plan” and much more. But here we have three silent truths: One is that the US assisted Europe and the UK primarily because it needed markets for its goods. US corporations found little purchasing power in the European nations that were now largely destroyed and bankrupt, and without these markets the US economy would also have crashed. It was commercial self-interest rather than compassion or charity that prompted the US financial assistance to the UK and Europe. All the US did was provide large-scale consumer financing for the products of its own corporations, with most of the ‘financing’ never leaving the US. The Marshall Plan was mostly a welfare program for American multinationals. The second truth is that Europe and England paid heavily for this financial assistance. It was only in 2006 that Britain finally paid the last installment on the loans made to it by the US in 1945. The third is that the post-war financing of Europe was not primarily for reconstruction but as the foundation for an overwhelming political control that has largely persisted to this day. Funds from the American’s vaunted Marshall Plan were spent more to finance Operation Gladio than European reconstruction.
As William Blum so well noted in one of his articles, the US was far more interested in sabotaging the political left in Europe than in reconstruction, and Marshall Plan funds were siphoned off to finance political victories for the far right, as well for the violent terrorist program known as Operation Gladio. He also correctly mentioned that the CIA skimmed off substantial amounts to fund covert journalism and propaganda, one of the conduits being the Ford Foundation. As well, the US exercised enormous economic and political restrictions on recipient countries as conditions for the receipt of funds, most being used to help re-entrench the European bankers and elites in their positions of economic and political power (after a war that they themselves instigated) rather than to assist in reconstruction. In the end, the Europeans could have done as well without this so-called ‘assistance’ from the US, and Europe would have been far better and more independent today had they refused the offer. The conviction of most Americans that their nation ‘rebuilt’ Europe is pure historical mythology created by propaganda and supported by ignorance.
“Essentially, capitalism is a plunder mechanism that generates short-run profits by externalizing long-run costs.It exhausts natural resources, including air, land, and water, for temporary profits while imposing most of its costs, such as pollution, on the environment. “
Capitalists have claimed responsibility for America’s past economic success.Let’s begin by setting the record straight. American success had little to do with capitalism. This is not to say that the US would have had more success with something like Soviet central planning.
Prior to 1900 when the frontier was closed, America’s success was a multi-century long success based on the plunder of a pristine environment and abundant natural resources. Individuals and companies were capitalized simply by occupying the land and using the resources present.
As the population grew and resources were depleted, the per capita resource endowment declined.
America got a second wind from World War I, which devastated European powers and permitted the emergence of the US as a budding world power.World War II finished off Europe and put economic and financial supremacy in Washington’s hands.The US dollar seized the world reserve currency role from the British pound, enabling the US to pay its bills by printing money.The world currency role of the dollar, more than nuclear weapons, has been the source of American power. Russia has equal or greater nuclear weapons power, but it is the dollar not the ruble that is the currency in which international payments are settled.
The world currency role made the US the financial hegemon.This power together with the IMF andWorld Bank enabled the US to plunder foreign resources the way vanishing American resources had been plundered.
We can conclude that plunder of natural resources and the ability to externalize much of the cost have been major contributors right through the present day to the success of American capitalism.Michael Hudson has described the plunder process in his many books and articles (for example, http://www.unz.com/mhudson/u-s-economic-warfare-and-likely-foreign-defenses/ ), as has John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
Essentially, capitalism is a plunder mechanism that generates short-run profits by externalizing long-run costs.It exhausts natural resources, including air, land, and water, for temporary profits while imposing most of its costs, such as pollution, on the environment.An example is the destruction of the Amazon rain forest by loggers.The world loses a massive carbon sink that stabilizes the global climate, and loggers gain short-run profits that are a tiny percentage of the long-run costs.
This destructive process is amplified by the inherently short-run time perspective of capitalist activity which seldom extends beyond the next quarter.
US economic success was also a result of a strong consumer demand fed by rising real wages as technological advances in manufacturing raised the productivity of labor and consumer purchasing power. The middle class became dominant. When I was an economics student, Paul Samuelson taught us that American prosperity was based entirely on the large American consumer market and had nothing to do with foreign trade.Indeed, foreign trade was a minor factor in American GDP.America had such a large domestic consumer market that the US did not need foreign trade to enjoy economics of scale.
All of this changed with the rise of free-market ideology and the collapse of the Soviet Union. When I was a student we were taught that boards of directors and corporate executives had responsibilities to their employees, their customers, their communities, and to their shareholders.These responsibilities were all equally valid and needed to be kept in balance.
In response to liberals, who tried to impose more and more “social responsibilities” on corporations, free-market economists responded with the argument that, in fact, corporations only have responsibilities to their owners. Rightly or wrongly, this reactive argument is blamed on Milton Friedman.Conservative foundations set about teaching jurists and legislators that companies were only responsible to owners.
Judges were taught that ownership is specific and cannot be abridged by government imposing obligations on the investments of owners for responsibilities that do not benefit the owners. This argument was used to terminate all responsibilities except to shareholders and left profit maximization as the corporate goal.
Thus, when the Soviet Union collapsed and China and India opened their economies to foreign capital, US corporations were free to desert their work forces and home towns and use cheaper labor abroad to produce the goods and services sold to Americans. This increased their profits and, thereby, executive bonuses and shareholder capital gains at the expense of the livelihoods of their former domestic work force and tax base of their local communities and states.The external costs of the larger profits were born by their former employees and the impaired financial condition of states and localities. These costs greatly exceed the higher profits.
Generally speaking, economists assume away external costs.Their mantra is that progress fixes everything.But their measures of progress are deceptive.Ecological economists, such as Herman Daly, have raised the issue whether, considering the neglect of external costs and the inaccurate way in which GDP is measured, announced increases in GDP exceed in value the cost of producing them.It is entirely possible that GDP growth is simply an artifact of not counting all of the costs of production.
As we approach the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the long history of American capitalism fed by plunder seems to be coming to an end simultaneously with the ability of the US central bank to protect existing financial wealth by creating ever more money with which to support stock, bond, and real estate prices.The US has a long history of overthrowing reformist governments in Latin America that threatened American control over their resources.Washington’s coups against democracy and self-determination succeeded until Venezuela.Washington’s coup against Chavez was overturned by the Venezuelan people and military, and so far Washington’s attempt to overthrow Chavez’s successor, Maduro, has failed.
Washington’s attempt to overthrow the Syrian government was prevented by Russia, and most likely Russia and China will prevent Washington from overthrowing the government of Iran.In Africa, the Chinese are proving to be better business partners than the exploitative American corporations.To continue feeding the empire with its heavy costs is becoming more difficult.
Washington’s policy of sanctions is making it even more difficult. To avoid the arbitrary and illegal sanctions, other countries are starting to abandon the US dollar as the currency of international transactions and arranging to settle their international accounts in their domestic currencies. China’s Silk Road encompasses Russia with much of Asia in a trade bloc independent of the Western financial system.Other countries hoping to escape US control are turning to Russia and China to achieve sovereignty from Washington.These developments will reduce the demand for dollars and impair US financial hegemony.Alternatives to the World Bank will remove areas of the world from the reach of US plunder.
As plunderable resources diminish, American capitalism, which is heavily dependent on plunder, will have one foundation of its success removed.As aggregate consumer demand collapses from the absence of growth in real income, absence of middle-class jobs, and the extreme polarization of income and wealth in the US, another pillar of American capitalism disintegrates.As business investment has also collapsed, as indicated by the use of corporate profits and borrowing to repurchase the corporations’ equity, thus decapitalizing the companies, total aggregate demand itself collapses.
The absence of growth in aggregate demand will make the gap between high stock prices and dismal prospects for corporate profits too great to be bridged by the Federal Reserve flooding money into financial assets.Without the ability to prop up financial asset prices with money creation, flight from dollar-denominated assets could bring down the US dollar.
“Time and again, Washington has abused its privileged position of printing or withholding dollars in order to further its own agenda of dominating other nations. That abuse has to stop, and it will stop as Russia and China pave the way to a new, fairer mechanism of international finance and trade.”
President of China Xi Jinping awarded the Order of Friendship of the People’s Republic of China to Vladimir Putin. The President of Russia is the first foreign leader to be awarded this high national order of China.
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed China’s Xi Jinping to Moscow this week for a three-day state visit. It wasn’t just the personal warmth between the two leaders that was on display. They have met on nearly 30 occasions over the past six years. President Xi referred to Putin as his closest international ally and friend.
More importantly, the two nations are solidifying a strategic alliance that could define the shape of geopolitics for the 21stCentury.
Putin and Xi, who also attended the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum this week, signed a raft of bilateral commercial agreements which will propel Eurasian development and indeed global development.
Of particular significance is the continued drive by Moscow and Beijing to conduct international trade in national currencies, obviating the US dollar as a payment means. This is a crucial step in countering the desired “hegemonic control” of the global financial system by Washington. Time and again, Washington has abused its privileged position of printing or withholding dollars in order to further its own agenda of dominating other nations. That abuse has to stop, and it will stop as Russia and China pave the way to a new, fairer mechanism of international finance and trade.
The vision of cooperation and partnership outlined by Putin and Xi is one based on mutual respect and peaceful prosperity. Not just for those two nations but for all others who participate in the multilateral vision that they promulgate. In that way, the alliance being consolidated by Russia and China is one that offers renewed hope in a progressive and peaceful future for the planet.
This positive vision is especially welcome at a time when the US under President Donald Trump is unleashing a barrage of tensions and potential conflicts from its bid to assert global dominance. The US is wielding sanctions and threats at numerous nations, including Russia and China, as well as even towards its own supposed allies in Europe, all in a desperate attempt to assert a hegemonic unipolar ambition.
Such a scheme is a negation of the vision of solidarity and partnership outlined by the Russian and Chinese leadership. The “American way” is not only futile. Ultimately, it is a zero-sum mentality that leads to destruction and war. A path to where, ultimately, nobody wins.
It is not as if history has not shown us that already. Two horrendous world wars were fought in the 20th century – with a total death toll of as many as 100 million people – largely because of selfish imperialist rivalry and zero-sum mentality.
Russia and China were two nations that suffered the most in those conflagrations. They both know the horrific cost of conflict, but also the preciousness of peace. That’s why it is heartening to see those two countries forging a new paradigm of international cooperation based on mutualism and a commitment to development for the common good of all people.
The much-vaunted multilateralism during the so-called Pax Americana decades following the Second World War was always over-rated. It was always a cover for Washington’s presumed global hegemony. The present unwinding of the US-led Western order is really just the ugly face of American power coming to the surface.
While Putin and Xi were embodying a vision for the future this week, it seemed ironically appropriate that the US and some other Western leaders were indulging in a backward look at history. The faux camaraderie of Western leaders was also apparent, belied by ongoing seething squabbles and rivalries between the US, France, Britain, and Germany.
President Trump and others were marking the 75thanniversary of the D-Day Normandy Landings in June 1944. That event heralded the opening of the Western Front against Nazi-occupied Europe and contributed to the final defeat of the Third Reich in May 1945. Lamentably, however, Western leaders persist in a conceited and false notion that D-Day was the key turning point in the definitive victory of the Second World War.
It is frankly incontestable that it was the Soviet Red Army and the colossal sacrifices of Soviet citizens that were the pivotal force in defeating Nazi Germany and yielding the liberation of Europe from fascism. The momentous Battle of Stalingrad which smashed the Nazi war machine was over by February 1943, some 16 months before the Western allies launched their long overdue D-Day.
Western leaders can indulge in self-serving vanities about presumed past glories all they want. It doesn’t change the historical record or objective truth. And besides, those who don’t learn from history are bound to be trapped by repeating its errors and dead-ends. They are quite literally yesterday people.
Fittingly, Putin and Xi were not at the D-Day nostalgia event and its escapism to delusional glory of the 20th Century. They were busy forging an alliance fit for the 21st Century.
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.
Thank you Russia from saving us from the barbaric Nazis.
“The truth is Victory in Europe was predominantly a victory by the Russian and Soviet nations. After all, several of the European countries are guilty from their ruling establishments collaborating with Nazi Germany, as in France, Norway, Poland, and others.”
“Some 90 per cent of all Nazi army casualties during World War II were inflicted in the East fighting against the Soviet nations. That tells you how and where the Nazi war machine was terminated.”
As the world again marked the annual Victory Day against Nazi Germany this week, one thing seems more evident with each passing year – Russia holds the highest honour for celebrating this event.
The commemorations in Russia in terms of people numbers and ceremonial splendor far excel similar public events held across Europe and North America. Even though, in theory, those latter countries were allies which defeated Nazi Germany in May 1945.
Why have Victory Day celebrations seem to have become more subdued in Europe and North America with each passing year, while in Russia, 74 years on, the “Great Patriotic War” is remembered and revered with undiminished passion?
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin delivered a rousing speech dedicated to the sacrifices of the war dead in front of multitudes attending Moscow’s Red Square. There was also an impressive military parade honoring the fallen heroes, followed by a breathtaking fireworks display, and marches held across all Russia in towns and villages for the “Immortal Regiments”.
Meanwhile, tellingly, an article posted on the BBC website was headlined: “What is VE [Victory in Europe] Day?”
One reason for the difference is because Russia and other Soviet nations paid a far greater human price of suffering in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The memory of the horror is seared into Russian families. And, likewise, so too is the memory of resistance and ultimately the glory of defeating a monstrous enemy – at times against all the odds of victory.Take the Nazi siege of Leningrad (St Petersburg). For over two years the people of that city endured starvation and cruelties that hardly anyone in Western Europe or North America could imagine. Yet the Nazi barbarity was finally overcome, the city was liberated by the Red Army, and Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich who was trapped in the besieged city wrote an internationally renowned symphony heralding the vanquishing of that trauma.
The later final defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945 was indeed a liberation for all of Europe. But that victory was indisputably due to the resilience and fortitude of Russian and other Soviet citizens. All told, the Soviet people lost about 27 million from Nazi war depredations, including from extermination operations and atrocities inflicted on whole villages. That number is incomparably greater to what other European countries incurred. Yet, in spite of the massive onslaught, it was the Soviet people who rose to the occasion to push back the Nazi invaders all the way to Berlin where the Third Reich was eventually buried in its war bunkers.
Just one more figure is enough to tell the story. Some 90 per cent of all Nazi army casualties during World War II were inflicted in the East fighting against the Soviet nations. That tells you how and where the Nazi war machine was terminated.
There are several current consequences from that horrific war that are still felt today.
One is that Russia will never allow itself to be invaded and threatened as it was by Nazi Germany in June 1941. Russia’s defense forces and weapons are perhaps the best in the world. No wonder Russia is vehemently opposed to NATO expansionism. How would Americans or British feel if the shoe was on the other foot?
Secondly, in a paradoxical way, because Russia suffered such infernal hardships from war, it is perhaps the most peace-loving of all modern nations. In President Putin’s speech this year, he once again extended a hand of friendship and cooperation to others to strengthen global security. That is in spite of the fact that the US and its NATO allies have continually insulted and provoked Russia with slanderous claims, military saber-rattling and economic sanctions. A third consequence is that Western nations who claim to have defeated Nazi Germany – thereby trying to undermine Russia’s honorable place in that event – have at the same time an evident historical amnesia. This is not to belittle the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of ordinary soldiers from the US and Britain who did gave their lives in the fight against Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, the boastful claims of Western leaders and media is belied by the diminishing memorials to the Victory in Europe.
The truth is Victory in Europe was predominantly a victory by the Russian and Soviet nations. After all, several of the European countries are guilty from their ruling establishments collaborating with Nazi Germany, as in France, Norway, Poland, and others.
The concomitant of that duplicitous reality is that victory celebrations across Europe – except for Russia – tend to become somewhat hollow and muted with time.
Another reality – one that is shameful and concealed by Western establishments – is that American and British finance capital was very much instrumental in bankrolling the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. US corporations such as Ford, ITT, General Motors and Du Pont made fortunes from investing in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, making full use of slave camps for cheap labor, before the outbreak of the war.
The ambiguous relationship between Western capitalism and Nazi fascism is testified in today’s cozy alliance between Washington and the Neo-Nazi regime that seized power in Ukraine. The disgusting veneration by politicians in Kiev for Nazi collaborators and their vile blood lust against the ethnic Russian people in Eastern Ukraine are never objected to by governments in Washington or the European Union.Russia knows the evils of fascism because it stared this force in the face and defeated it 74 years ago. That world-changing event will never be forgotten nor taken for granted.
The Western countries – who by contrast did comparatively little to defeat Nazi Germany – are the same ones today who feel entitled to wage covert and overt wars for regime change around the world. One may argue, therefore, that the battle against fascism has never ended. Nazi uniforms, soldiers, guns and tanks may have been buried, but the mentality of aggression, superiority, lawlessness and impunity is very much alive. Thankfully, however, Russian vigilance and courage is also alive today.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik
“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
John Wight has written for a variety of newspapers and websites, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal.
The existence of NATO 70 years on from its creation is an insult to the millions who died so that the UN Charter could be born.
The most significant and enduring testament to those who perished in the struggle to defeat fascism in WWII remains the UN Charter, the foundational document of the United Nations upon its birth in October 1945. The Charter arose from the ashes of that epic struggle as a tangible symbol of hope. Enshrined within its articles was a solemn promise that henceforth justice, international law and tolerance would reign in place of brute power, force and intolerance.
Consider for a moment the first section of the Charter’s preamble:
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom
It is impossible to read those words and not lament the gaping disjuncture between the noble ideals they embrace and the grim reality that arrived in their wake. For rather than mankind being saved from the scourge of war, the scourge of war and conflict has grown to become a near-everyday reality across the globe.
The pressing question we are required to grapple with today is: Why? What lies at the root and what is the common denominator responsible for mankind’s abject failure to achieve the vision set out in the UN Charter?
Upon due consideration, we are left in no doubt that, fundamentally, the series of conflicts that have come to define our existence are a consequence of the drive by one ideological bloc to dominate and impose a particular political, economic and value system onto a world defined by its diversity of languages, cultures, histories and traditions.
The result is the normalization of war and the apotheosis of hard power, rather than war and hard power being regarded as grotesque perversions in a world cured of the moral sickness of might is right.
Seventy years ago, NATO, a military alliance whose entire existence and ethos is predicated on might is right, emerged from the womb of the Cold War objectives devised by a Truman administration of fanatical hawks, consumed with the goal of full-spectrum dominance at the close of WWII.
In his 1997 essay, ‘The Last Empire,’ Gore Vidal savages the official history proffered by Western ideologues when it comes to the sudden shift that took place from Moscow being viewed as an indispensable ally in the war against Nazi Germany in the eyes of the Roosevelt administration, to implacable foe when Truman entered the White House upon Roosevelt’s death in April 1945.
Gore Vidal: “The National Security State, the NATO alliance, the forty-year Cold War were all created without the consent, much less advice, of the American people… The impetus behind NATO was the United States… We were now hell bent on the permanent division of Germany between our western zone (plus the British and French zones) and the Soviet zone to the east. Serenely, we broke every agreement that we had made with our former ally, now horrendous Communist enemy.”
Moving things forward, it is by now no secret that US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in a meeting on February 9, 1990, that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” upon the reunification of Germany. According to declassified documents, Baker’s pledge was made as part of a “cascade of assurances” over Soviet security given by Western leaders at that time and on into 1991, when the Soviet Union came to an end. It is the breaking of those assurances that lies at the heart of the deterioration in relations between East and West that has taken place from then to now.
Flush with triumphalism over the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, NATO was loosed upon the world not in name of democracy but in the cause of imperialism. Neocon scribe Thomas Friedman, more than any of his ilk, has written openly of the driving ethos of Western foreign policy after the Soviet Union’sdemise: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
Friedman’s gleeful celebration of the economic opportunities lying open to the US in the post-Soviet world was shared by powerbrokers in Washington on both sides of the aisle. Intoxicated with a misplaced sense of exceptionalism and virtue, the world now lay before them like a vast banquet upon which they were invited to feast. And the first course in this feast was the former Yugoslavia with its abundant human and natural resources, not to mention strategic location in the Balkans, ripe for the taking.
Michael Parenti, in his definitive work on the destruction of Yugoslavia, ‘To Kill A Nation,’ reminds us that after the fall of communism in eastern Europe, “the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free market system. It also proudly had no interest in joining NATO.” Later, Parenti also reveals: “The ultimate goal has been the complete privatization and Third Worldization of Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe… It is to replace the social wage with a neoliberal global free market, a process that would deliver still greater wealth and power into the hands of those at the top.”
The role of NATO in achieving the West’s objectives in Yugoslavia need not detain us; they have been set out in powerfully in a series of articles commemorating the 20th anniversary of the start of the Western military alliance’s 78-day air war against FRY with them in mind. Here, specifically, I refer you to the work of RT columnist Neil Clark.
The point is that today – bearing in mind NATO’s role in destroying Yugoslavia, helping to turn Afghanistan into a failed state rather than democratic state, destroying Libya, and in threatening Russia – it is no longer feasible or possible to harbor any lingering belief that NATO is anything other than a snarling beast of US hard power, deployed not to protect and defend, but destroy and dominate.
The 70th anniversary of the birth of NATO is a cause for lamentation, not celebration. The only fitting way to mark it is with a minute’s silence in solemn remembrance of its countless victims.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Everyone knows America is bankrupt, $21 trillion in debt, adding a trillion a year to that figure under Trump’s voodoo economics. Yet, America is on not just a massive military buildup, but expanding its global military presence at levels not seen since the end of World War II.
Is America controlled by an international cabal of “loan sharks?”
Everyone knows America’s military is beaten, worn down, “in over its head” in Afghanistan, defeated time and time again every time America has entered a battlefield, every conflict since Korea and Vietnam.
Is a game “afoot” as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would say of his fictional hero, Sherlock Holmes? What is America’s game? “We shall see,” quoting Dr. Watson, Doyle’s fictional “sidekick.”
America under Trump is escalating military confrontations with Russia and China. Global arms races are ramping up as former conventions limiting weapons are tossed aside and even the militarization of outer space is “on the table.”
Why now? Who can win when war can only mean planetary destruction? Can it all simply be fake? Let’s examine these questions and more. We begin with a look at the world we were dealt with the end of the Cold War.
You see, the old paradigms of endless vigilance, endless conflict, great standing armies, economies dependent on irrational defense posturing, not only exist, they define our era.
In order to inject a tone of reality, we must reject, out of hand, the post 9/11 “global war on terror” as contrived. America’s behavior in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, the CIA’s “ham handed” puppeteering of al Qaeda and ISIS is inexcusable as even third-rate drama.
The Syrian and Russian people aided by Iran and Hezbollah put an end to that neocon farce though Washington and Tel Aviv haven’t yet gotten the message.
Now, something else is going on, a different war, certainly in some ways a world war but one where defining winning and losing isn’t going to be easy. The losers won’t be hanged after fake war crimes tribunals, there will be no occupation armies, no treaties redefining the world map under the watchful guise of Europe’s ancient banking masters as we saw twice during the 20th century.
There will be no world wars, there are no enemies like in the past, no rival royal families, no real democracies left to oppose imaginary tyranny, it’s all memory, nothing more.
Replacing it, and war continues, not just as before but as never imagined, is something very different. Analysts tell us about war as economics, about “globalism” and the new low and medium intensity conflicts that break all the old rules.
Analogous to this is the same old fake “white hat vs black hat” or “East vs West” struggle, as though a real NATO, long a shadow of its former self, and a “communist bloc” still existed. Before that, two world wars killed off generations based on similar coalitions, struggles for world resources overtly, always something darker underneath, hypocrisy, propaganda, leaving the root causes for conflicts unknowable.
There is another question that, though never asked, as we so often note, must be addressed. How can a bankrupt nation keep borrowing and yet keep falling further and further in debt? Why would America’s currency be the world’s primary vehicle of trade, America’s trade protocols the world’s standard when America herself is unable to manage affairs at home?
Were one to examine the visible currency reserves banks claim to hold, including the US Treasury certificates held by three dozen nation states to varying degrees, the wherewithal to underwrite the drowning American economy simply doesn’t exist.
The money isn’t there, no bank has it, no government could, would or should invest in America, so who is paying for America’s war on the world?
Moreover, what if, and this is where we move into more “unspoken ground” as it were, those who underwrite America’s debt, including and especially the trillion-dollar military budget, were those who rig the elections, bribe the congressmen, compromise the corrupt “perfumed princes of the Pentagon, to quote Colonel David Hackworth, what if?
There, we’ve done it, we are looking under rocks for secret cabals, treading on ground that has given way under veritable armies of academics and experts who had trod the same paths we do now.
This opens another door. If America can’t exist as it does, a “fake democracy,” without secret infusions of cash that can’t possible exist under known economic principles, where do we go from here?
One method is to watch, to observe, look for patterns and ask the age-old question, “que bono,” who benefits? Is it a cabal of oil companies and bullet makers?
Then we look at the scope of America’s military moves, pushing NATO into Georgia and Serbia, perhaps to Armenia and Afghanistan. We see new American bases in Poland and Romania, Belarus targeted, Marines in Norway.
Drone bases now dot the African Sahel. American bases dot Syria and American carrier battle groups, all funded with “impossible money” from unknow sources, prowl the seas challenging any and all and we still ask the same question, who benefits?
What resources need to be controlled? What political movements need to be stifled? What tyrannies need to be replaced with an “American branded” version?
After speculation, we must return to what we know, what we observe, what can be safely assumed. We see American confronting China and Russia. What is clear to the most casual observer is how blatantly America is pushing both nations to redirect national resources toward defense.
America generally assumes that the Soviet Union was crushed by Ronald Regan’s massive military spending spree. Reagan’s weapon systems generally never materialized. A trillion dollars was spent on “Star Wars” yielding nothing. America is still two decades behind Russia in missile interception.
The result of the financial collapse of the Soviet Union may well have been a hidden collapse of the US. It is almost as though a bill has become due, but the date of collection has been put off as long as Americans are willing to die in wars around the world on behalf of the international cabal of “loan sharks” who seem to be pulling the strings.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
It seems bitterly ironic that as world leaders gather in Paris this weekend to commemorate the centennial end of World War One, international tensions and the threat of war are once again haunting humanity.
It seems bitterly ironic that as world leaders gather in Paris this weekend to commemorate the centennial end of World War One, international tensions and the threat of war are once again haunting humanity.
Stephen Cohen, Princeton professor of history, recently warned that the risk of a nuclear war between the US and Russia is greater now than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Given Cohen’s renowned academic expertise, such a warning should be sobering, and not overlooked as mere hyperbole.
One country seems to be the common denominator in generating the danger of war — the United States. Washington is pushing aggression towards numerous nations, simultaneously, from Russia, China, Iran to Venezuela, as well as antagonizing its supposed allies in Europe over trade and other commercial interests.This weekend in Paris, US President Donald Trump will join with other world leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, in holding a commemorative event marking the 1918 armistice.
But, pointedly, Trump is reportedly “snubbing” a peace summit to be held later the same day in the French capital. Dozens of other world leaders, including Putin, Germany’s Angela Merkel and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan are due to participate in the peace conference.
Why Trump is avoiding the peace summit is not clear. His cancellation seemed to be an abrupt decision. But it could be a swipe at French President Emmanuel Macron.
Earlier this week, Macron made an extraordinary verbal attack on Trump and presumed American global leadership. Macron called for the setting up of a European army in order to protect the continent from foreign powers, including the US.
“We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” said the French president.
That’s right, you read that correctly. A purported European ally was saying that the US is a threat to Europe.
Not that European citizens should entrust their security to the likes of Macron. The so-called “president of the rich” cares little about the livelihoods and wellbeing of ordinary people. Macron, who exudes an aristocratic arrogance, is pushing through draconian laws that will seriously erode workers’ rights and public welfare. The French leader, it is clear, is not on the people’s side.
But his comments regarding the formation of a European army to counter American “bullying” are significant in that they reveal one important thing. The rivalry of nation states is reemerging sharply once again — even among those nations that are considered to be allies.
World War One, also known as the Great War, was arguably a culmination of intense nation-state rivalry, especially among the European colonial powers. It was about these powers jockeying for position to assert economic advantages over perceived contenders. The advantages pertained to ruling class interests, not the mass of ordinary workers and their families.
Up to 20 million people were killed in the four-year war from 1914 to 1918. It was the first industrial-scale international conflict. It was supposed to be the “war to end all wars”. Yet only 20 years later, the world would be plunged into an even more infernal catastrophe of World War Two for which the death toll escalated four-fold up to 80 million, with most of the victims being civilians. That war also ushered in the era of nuclear weapons, which means that any future international conflagration could spell the end of humanity and the planet as we know it.
Evidently, while world leaders gather in Paris this weekend the solemn expressions by some about war and never repeating it are rather hollow.
European leaders in particular deserve censure. They obviously know full well that their American “protector” is nothing but a selfish bully. Macron’s remarks are testament to that awareness. Germany’s Merkel also knows that Washington’s haranguing over trade disputes and the Nord Stream 2 gas project with Russia is the action not of an ally but rather of a domineering competitor that doesn’t give a fig about German interests.
We can cite many other examples of Washington treating Europeans like a doormat, such as the way Trump is dictating they have to comply with US sanctions on Iran, thereby jeopardizing investments from Paris, Berlin, Rome and others.However, if that is the case, then why are European states facilitating the US-led NATO military alliance to ratchet up deplorable and ineffably dangerous tensions with Russia? This month saw the biggest-ever NATO war drills since the Cold War being held in the Arctic region near Russia’s borders.
European leaders are caught in a curious, disgraceful double-think. They surely know that the US, especially under Trump, has no regard for their interests. He is prepared to rip up the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which could put Europe on a hair-trigger for nuclear war with Russia.
Still though, European governments meekly go along with Washington’s blatant policy of aggression towards Russia, as seen from their participation in NATO provocations and in imposing trade sanctions on Moscow over dubious propaganda claims about Russia’s interference in Ukraine, the Balkans and Baltic states.
The specter of war continues to haunt the world, even as so-called political leaders around the world don solemn faces and enunciate doleful pledges concerning World War I and II. There is no guarantee against World War III erupting.
That’s because nation-state rivalry and the pursuit of national advantages over others — imperialism — is as alive today as it was 100 years ago. History is not a dead past. It is a living continuum.
The strongest nation state, the US, is the one that is most pushing the agenda of aggression as it tries to stave off perceived competitors. It seems woefully poignant that President Trump has decided to not even show up at the peace summit in Paris this weekend.
Nonetheless, the European leaders are contemptible in that they — despite occasional bickering with their American “ally” — are equally complicit in fomenting dangerous tensions with Russia, China, Iran and others by not standing up to Washington. Their weakness indulges the American bully’s bad behavior.That’s because the Europeans are wedded to the same nation-based capitalist system as the Americans are. This nationalism is driving tensions between countries once again, as did in the run-up to World War I and II.
By not learning from history and understanding underlying causes then, as the saying goes, we are doomed to repeat history.
What is needed is an international system of global cooperation in which national interests of private profit are replaced with a new organizational basis for production, finance, trade and social wellbeing. If nations were organized on a genuinely democratic basis meeting the paramount needs of their people instead of the elite profit interest of their oligarchs, then international tensions and rivalry would be obviated.
Hopefully, ordinary citizens of the world are increasingly aware of the urgency to jettison nationalist capitalism and its relentlessly warmongering tendency. The problem is, we don’t — as yet anyway — have the political leaders who see in that way. As it is, lamentably, we are doomed to repeat history — unless the mass of people rise up and assert their democratic rights.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
American leaders, politicians, policymakers and pundits are fond of talking about the “Unipolar Moment” and “Hyper Power” position that they imagine the United States enjoys in the world.
Totally lacking from this fantasy are any inconvenient historical facts.
The US Unipolar Moment (insofar as it existed at all) lasted less than a decade from the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of December 1991 to June 15, 2001. The US “moment” barely made it into the 21st Century.
On that epochal day of June 15, 2001, two major events happened. First, US President George W. Bush gave a speech in Warsaw pledging to integrate the three tiny Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into NATO as a prime strategic goal of the United States.
That very same day, Russia and China created with four Central Asian nations the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO): The most populous and powerful international security organization in history.
This year, the SCO doubled in population by adding India and Pakistan at the same time – two major nuclear powers with a combined population of 1.5 billion people. That means the SCO now includes more than 3 billion people, around 40 percent of the human race.
From the moment the SCO was created – dedicated from its inception to preserve and protect a multipolar world from the domination of any one power, the US unipolar moment was dead and gone.
This reality was confirmed less than three months later when al-Qaeda’s terror attacks of September 11, 2001 killed almost 3,000 people. More Americans died that day than in the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
George W. Bush should have been impeached for his gross incompetence. Instead his popularity soared. Imagining the Unipolar Moment (or Era) to be still in full flood he invaded Afghanistan later that year and Iraq less than two years later. The United States is still endlessly stuck in those unending wars.
The patterns of history – totally ignored by the US media, pundit-ocracy and political world – in fact teach this lesson consistently. Over the past half a millennium, there have been several unipolar moments for great powers seeking to reign supreme over the world and they all collapsed after only a few years.
When Habsburg Spain and its allies decisively defeated the huge fleet of the mighty Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, Spain’s imperial domination over Europe seemed assured. But in fact Spain was already embroiled in a Dutch revolt that started in 1568. Over the following decades, it became even more exhausting than the current US deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq.
King Philip II of Spain’s dream of domination was totally buried only 17 years after Lepanto with the destruction of his giant Armada fleet to conquer England in 1588.
France rose next. Its domination over Europe appeared to be sealed with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. But by the mid-1660s, glory-crazed Louis XIV, the so-called “Sun King” had already repeated the Spanish mistake and bogged his country down in half a century of endless wars in what is now Belgium, the Netherlands and southern Germany. France’s unipolar moment lasted less than 20 years.
The British came next. Even after winning the Napoleonic Wars against France, they knew they could not rule the world alone and were forced to share it with the far more conservative major monarchies of Europe – Russia, Austria-Hungary and Prussia.
Finally in 1848, the kings of France, Austria-Hungary and Prussia were all rocked or topped by liberal popular revolutions. The British thought then, as the Americans did in 1989-91, that their Unipolar Moment had finally come and would last for eternity. The whole world would look to London for guidance and wisdom.
It didn’t: By 1871, Prussia under its Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had united Germany, smashed France, by then Britain’s ally and humiliatingly swept the British out of any continental pretensions of power and influence.
When asked what he would do if the tiny British Army ever invaded North Germany, Bismarck replied that he would send the police to arrest it.
After the defeat of Imperial Germany in World War I, Britain seemed to enjoy another hyper-power moment. The isolationist United States and the Soviet Union both temporarily withdrew from the world stage.
However, that British fantasy did not even last until the rise of Hitler in 1933. Two years earlier in 1931, Imperial Japan had occupied Manchuria – a huge chunk of Northeastern China: British military leaders were forced to admit to Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald there was nothing they could do about it. Britain’s unipolar moment had lasted only 12 years – from 1919 to 1931.
Once these historical facts are understood, it is easy to see why the US Unipolar Moment only lasted even less time than Britain’s 20th century one had – less than a decade.
Since 2001, the United States has bankrupted and exhausted itself, just as Habsburg Spain, Bourbon France and post-Victorian Britain did before it in futile, doomed and ludicrous attempts to deny and roll back the inevitable tides of history.
That should come as no surprise: As Friedrich Hegel warned us, “The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
The alternative title is: Just how crazy is this self-appointed Jewish leadership?
I once said that Jewish leaders are not elected. They select themselves based upon their ability to recruit men willing to kill from their Banking Day Jobs which would include laundering illegal weapons and drugs money (a trillion dollars a year) and political bribes (500 billion dollars a year.)
Jewish leadership rose from corruption and requires the same as cover.
The Talmud told Jewish people that it is legal to rob the Gentiles as soon as we get control of their government.
Proof that the Jews own the American government abounds. On 9-10-2001 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told CBS News that he could not account for $2.3 trillion in Department of Defense spending. Dr Mark Skidmore found that $21 trillion in undocumented adjustments had to be made to HUD (Housing and Urban Development) and DOD (Department of Defense) budgets from 1998 to 2015. $21 trillion is a lot of money to just go Missing.
But all that Missing Money does not phase our Jewish owned media. Not a word from them about robbing Gentiles by the tens of trillions. Plenty of words about the need to censor those uncouth loud mouths who say bad things about the people who think they own the government.
People who were not alive before 1963 do not know how far American society has fallen. There was a time when white children were safe from the drug culture and did not need metal detectors in the schools.
But then the Jewish leadership thought it would be a great idea to kill President Kennedy. One of the reasons America entered WW I was to make it last longer so we could bankrupt the Russian government thus allowing the Jews to take over and help kill 60 million white people. The German military tried to surrender prior to WW II. Ditto the Japanese Emperor. But the Jews ran the Soviet Union, Britain and the US so the Jewish leadership was allowed to decide for us that killing 58 million people after the other side had tried to surrender was a good thing to do.
All of America’s war were designed to benefit Jewish leaders. They killed President Kennedy which flooded American schools with drugs. The Jewish drug epidemic destroyed lives, families and communities. But the Jews made money. That is far more important than your family and the people in your neighborhood. One Jewish family is responsible for the opioid epidemic currently destroying rural America.
Details you say? I wrote “Israel Killed JFK And Has Ruled America Ever Since.” Share that.
Did you ever stop to consider what went through the minds of the Jewish leaders who did 911? Only 2 Israelis died at the Twin Towers on 911. The Hebrew language messaging service Odigo warned Israelis to stay away from the Towers on 911. Al Franken said he got a Jew Call which warned him not to go to work at his office in the Twin Towers on 911. The Dancing Israelis admitted they had been sent to document the event indicating prior knowledge.
The Jewish leadership declared war on New York City on 9-11-2001.
The Jewish leadership declared war on New York Jews on 9-11-2001. They killed 400 New York Jews that day.
The Jewish leadership declared war on America on 9-11-2001. They had waged a silent war against Americans ever since they landed on American shores. Who do you think sold liquor and guns to the Indians so they could get both whites and Indians killed?
Who do you think assassinated President Lincoln? John Wilkes Booth was of Jewish descent. President Lincoln had issued a non-interest bearing currency, the Greenback. If we had them today, we would not have a federal debt of $21 trillion and state and local debts of several trillion dollars.
Why do you think President Kennedy was assassinated on the 53rd anniversary of the first meeting to plan the Federal Reserve Bank? That law gave Jews and their allies the right to charge us interest on money they created out of thin air. That law generated hundreds of trillions in Unpayable Debts. And our Jewish Banking System with hundreds of trillions in Unpayable Debts will cause a Global Depressions that will kill billions if we do not arrest the Bankers and seize their assets to fund worldwide Debt Cancellation.
In the last Depression 3 million Gentiles died from starvation in America. The people who own our government have increased our population by 202 million people since 1929 so we can expect tens of millions to either kill themselves, die from starvation or get killed by their neighbors who came to steal their food.
Catherine Austin Fitts concluded in the 1990s that so many pensions had been looted that the leadership of this world has decided to commit genocide rather than return what they stole. Fast forward to 911. That was a declaration of war by Israel on the Muslims of the Mideast. America has been bombing and drone striking Muslims ever since Israel took down the World Trade Center Towers on 911.
The Jewish leadership intentionally created so many Muslim refugees that they could flood Europe with people willing to destroy European civilization. Some liberals actually believe that Globalism is a good thing. What could go wrong if the sovereignty of your government was taken away from you and your kind and given to Jews?
To have a One World Government, you would first have to take First World nations like America and the various states of Europe and turn them into Third World cesspools.
I can only conclude that the Jewish leadership has dedicated themselves to the destruction of the world.
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“The history of WW II is incorrect … it glorifies the victors and demonizes the vanquished … Irving’s histories are far more accurate than those written by court historians … (who) teamed up with Zionists to smear and demonize the best historian of our time.”
“Churchill’s career was funded by wealthy Jews who wanted war with Germany. Why do popular films and biographies hide this shocking fact?”
The author is an economist who served as assistant Treasury secretary in the Reagan administration, was associate editor at the Wall Street Journal, and is a former professor at Georgetown University. (Full bio).
Now retired, he is a prolific columnist for his personal site, with a very large following on the internet. He writes frequently about Russia.
Zionists destroyed David Irving’s livelihood with slander and libel, because he made public a letter from the former chancellor of Germany, Hitler’s predecessor, to Winston Churchill, a letter that Irving found in the American publisher’s file of Winston Churchill’s history of the war, and which the publisher prevented Churchill from publishing in his history.
Churchill’s career was funded by wealthy Jews who wanted war with Germany. Why do popular films and biographies hide this shocking fact?
The former chancellor of Germany, who escaped the Nazis and lived in England, wrote to Churchill that two of Hitler’s financiers were Jews who managed two of the largest banks in Germany. One was a Zionist leader. The letter exists, and there is no reason to doubt its honesty. However, for making an important historical document public, Irving was labeled by a vicious propaganda campaign an “anti-Semite” and “holocaust denier.”
Irving simply thought that he was being an historian.
Another Irving honesty, the one that destroyed him, was that after 10 years of research he could not find one document that provided evidence for the claim that Hitler personally conducted the holocaust or that he even knew about it. Irving did find and report documents that he made available in which Hitler issues orders prohibiting extermination of Jews. Being truthful does not make Irving a Hitler apologist.
Irving did not say that there was no holocaust, only that things happen in governments, just as they do in police forces https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/06/07/power-unaccountable-police-leads-criminality/ about which those in charge are not informed. I know for a fact that things happened during the Reagan administration of which the president was unaware.
The history of World War II is incorrect. It is written in a way that serves the interest of those who prevailed. It glorifies the victors and demonizes the vanquished. As the old adage goes, the victors write the history. In other words, the history is self-serving, not accurate. Irving’s histories are far more accurate than those written by court historians. Consequently, the court historians teamed up with Zionists to smear and demonize the best historian of our time.
The two Irving lectures that Ron Unz has located and included are worth your attention. Irving explains why history written by professors is essentially incorrect and why correct renditions are unacceptable to publishers and the ruling class.
Wars are great producers of lies because propaganda is necessary to motivate soldiers to fight and to ensure that populations accept the associated hardships. The use of history as propaganda prevents us from learning from history. Thus, we continue to make the same mistakes.
Germany Was Defeated on the Eastern Front, Not Normandy
On my many walking visits to the vast Normandy battlefield in France, I kept recalling the ever so wise dictum of Prussia’s great monarch, Frederick the Great: ‘he who defends everything, defends nothing.’ On this 74th anniversary of the D-Day landings, it’s well worth recalling the old warrior-king.
Adolf Hitler, a veteran of the infantry, should certainly have known better. Defending the European coast from Brittany to Norway was an impossibility given Germany’s military and economic weakness in 1944. But he did not understand this. Having so brilliantly overcome France’s Maginot Line fortifications in 1940, Hitler and his High Command repeated the same strategic and tactical errors as the French only four years later: not having enough reserves to effectively counter-attack enemy breakthrough forces.
Germany’s vaunted Atlantic Wall looked formidable on paper, but it was too long, too thin, lacked defensive depth and was lacking in adequate reserve forces. The linear Maginot Line suffered the same failings. America’s fortifications protecting Manila and Britain’s ‘impregnable’ fortifications at Singapore also proved worthless. The Japanese merely marched into their undefended rears.
In 1940, the German Wehrmacht was modern history’s supreme fighting machine. But only four years later, the Wehrmacht was broken. Most Americans, British and Canadians believe that D-Day was the decisive stroke that ended WWII in Europe. But this is not true.
Germany’s mighty Wehrmacht, which included the Luftwaffe, was destroyed by Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Red Army claims to have destroyed 507 German divisions, 48,000 German tanks, 77,000 German aircraft, and 100 divisions of Axis troops allied to Germany from Italy, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Finland.
Few Americans have ever heard of the Soviet Far East offensive of 1945, a huge operation that extended from Central Asia to Manchuria and the Pacific. At least 450,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, wounded or captured by the Red Army, 32% of Japan’s total wartime military losses. The Soviets were poised to invade Japan when the US struck it with two nuclear weapons.
Of Germany’s 10 million casualties in WWII, 75% were inflicted by the Red Army. The once mighty Luftwaffe was decimated over Russia. Almost all German military production went to supplying the 1,600 km Eastern Front where Germany’s elite forces were ground up in titanic battles like Kursk and Stalingrad that involved millions of soldiers.
Soviet forces lost upwards of 20 million men. Total US losses, including the Pacific, were one million. To Marshal Stalin, D-Day, the North African and Italian campaign were merely diversionary side-shows to tie down Axis forces while the Red Army pushed on to Berlin.
D-Day was without doubt one of the greatest logistical feats of modern military history. Think of General Motors versus the German warrior Siegfried. For every US tank the Germans destroyed, ten more arrived. Each German tank was almost irreplaceable. Transporting over one million men and their heavy equipment across the Channel was a triumph. But who remembers that Germany crossed the heavily defended Rhine River into France in 1940?
By June, 1944, German forces at Normandy and along the entire Channel coast had almost no diesel fuel or gasoline. Their tanks and trucks were immobilized. Allied air power shot up everything that moved, including a staff car carrying Marshal Erwin Rommel strafed by Canada’s own gallant future aviator general, Richard Rohmer. German units in Normandy were below 40% combat effectiveness even without their shortages in fuel.
The Germans in France were also very short of ammunition, supplies and communications. Units could only move by night, and then very slowly. Hitler was reluctant to release armored forces from his reserves. Massive Allied bombing of Normandy alone killed 15,000 to 20,000 French civilians and shattered many cities and towns.
Churchill once said, ‘you will never know war until you fight Germans.’ With no air cover or fuel and heavily outnumbered, German forces in Normandy managed to mount a stout resistance, inflicting 209,000 casualties on US, Canadian, British, Free French and allied forces. German losses were around 200,000.
The most important point of the great invasion is that without it, the Red Army would have reached Paris and the Channel Ports by the end of 1944, making Stalin the master of all Europe except Spain. Of course, the Allies could have reached a peace agreement with Germany in 1944, which Hitler was seeking and Gen. George Patton was rumored to be advocating. But the German-hating Churchill and left-leaning Roosevelt were too bloody-minded to consider a peace that would have kept Stalin out of at least some of Eastern Europe.
“We lost over 100 million people to war in the 20th century. Are we really going to let this happen again?”
The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 led to the outbreak of World War I. The Gulf of Tonkin incidents on August 2 and August 4, 1964 enabled what we call the Vietnam War
This carefully research article by Professor Graeme McQueen presents a timely historical viewpoint which is routinely “censored” by the mainstream media as well by the search engines. The danger of World War III is not front-page news.
Kindly consider forwarding it Professor McQueen’s article to your friends and colleagues, crosspost it on alternative media and blog sites.
The threat of World War III is real, yet there is no anti-war movement in sight. In the US, Canada and the EU, the peace movement is defunct, ignorant of the broader implications of nuclear war.
This is why, dear readers, we call upon your support and endorsement. There is a real “conspiracy” to trigger war. That’s the truth. Establish community networks, spread the word, organize at the grassroots level.
In the words of Prof. McQueen:
“Our task is clear. We must mobilize both our investigative resources and our communication resources to nullify the efforts of those who specialize in the construction and encouragement of war triggers and who wish to keep the war system robust. We lost over 100 million people to war in the 20th century. Are we really going to let this happen again?”
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research Editor, March 18, 2018
***
As we watch Western governments testing their opponents – today Iran, the next day the DPRK, and then Russia and China – we hold our breaths. We are waiting with a sense of dread for the occurrence of a catalytic event that will initiate war. Now is the time to reflect on such catalytic events, to understand them, to prepare for them.
The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo led to the outbreak of World War I. The Gulf of Tonkin incidents on August 2 and August 4, 1964 enabled what we call the Vietnam War.
Both events were war triggers. A “war trigger”, as I am using the term, is an event that facilitates an outbreak or expansion of hot war–that phase of the war system in which active killing takes place.
War triggers can lead affected populations to cast aside their critical faculties and their willingness to dissent from government narratives. They can also disable moral values and ideological commitments. At the outbreak of World War I the peace movement, the women’s movement and the socialist movement were all shattered.
While there is debate among scholars today about the extent of the frenzy in Europe as World War I began, it is difficult to dismiss sophisticated eyewitnesses such as Rosa Luxemburg (image on the right), who referred to what she saw as:
“mad delirium”; “patriotic street demonstrations”; “singing throngs”; “the coffee shops with their patriotic songs”; “the violent mobs, ready to denounce, ready to persecute women, ready to whip themselves into a delirious frenzy over every wild rumour”; “the atmosphere of ritual murder”. (Luxemburg, 261)
What Luxemburg described was a subjective state produced by a successful war trigger, in which a population becomes extremely lethal as it readies itself to rush at its foe while simultaneously battering anyone in its own ranks that dares to dissent.
Luxemburg herself dared to dissent. This led to two and a half years in a German prison cell. During this time she wrote the Junius Pamphlet, criticizing Europe’s socialist leaders for having been captured by the spirit of war, and pointing to the consequences of their folly:
“the cannon fodder that was loaded upon the trains in August and September is rotting on the battlefields of Belgium and the Vosges…Cities are turned into shambles, whole countries into deserts, villages into cemeteries, whole nations into beggars, churches into stables; popular rights, treaties, alliances, the holiest words and the highest authorities have been torn into scraps”. (Luxemburg, 261-2)
Luxemburg’s anger had a solid basis in what has become known as “the August madness” that struck Europe. For example, on August 3, 1914, when the war had just begun, the following call went out to university students from the most senior officials in the Bavarian universities:
“Students! The muses are silent. The issue is battle, the battle forced on us for German culture, which is threatened by the barbarians from the East, and for German values, which the enemy in the West envies us. And so the furor teutonicus bursts into flame once again. The enthusiasm of the wars of liberation flares, and the holy war begins”. (Keegan, 358)
In response to this hysterical appeal, the German university students volunteered in large numbers. Untrained, they were thrown into battle. In the space of three weeks 36,000 of them were killed.
Germany was not unique, of course, in its vulnerability. Randolph Bourne, in an unfinished essay generally known as “War is the Health of the State”, described what he saw somewhat later in the United States as that country flipped from anti-war to pro-war and joined in the global disaster. He observed that once the executive branch had made the decision to go to war the entire population suddenly changed its mind. “The moment war is declared… the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves.”
Therefore, the people, “with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction.”
It is true that war madness of the kind that accompanied WWI has been less common in the years since then, partly because that war turned out to be an unprecedented catastrophe. But I believe it is entirely wrong to think that in today’s era of high technology and digitalized war the arousing of the spirit of war in a population is no longer sought or needed. A highly influential analysis of American Vietnam War strategy, carried out by one Col. Harry Summers, concluded some years ago that a chief cause of the US downfall was the failure of leaders to arouse their population’s emotions. The American people, said Summers, had been forced to fight that war “in cold blood”, which they found intolerable. In fact, this failure to arouse the war spirit was taken by many US analysts to have led to the “Vietnam syndrome” – a reluctance to intervene in the affairs of other countries militarily. This was a timidity unsuitable, they felt, for an imperial power.
One of the purposes of the September 11, 2001 operation, in my view, was precisely to change that situation – to arouse intense feelings of unity, aggression and support for government in order to banish once and for all the Vietnam Syndrome and to launch with great energy the new global conflict formation (the “War on Terror”) so that the 21st century, with the military leading the way, would become another American Century.
Still, war triggers are not all the same, and we need to create categories. We can distinguish three broad types: accidental war triggers, managed war triggers and manufactured war triggers.
An accidental war trigger is an event that triggers hot war in the absence of intention. The pressure of events, random clashes, the everyday quest to satisfy physical needs – all these may, in the absence of warlike intent, produce a war trigger. After the event occurs it may lead, again without conscious plotting, directly to a hot and violent conflict between contending parties.
No doubt many war triggers throughout history fit the category of accidental war trigger. However, the more I have studied recent human wars the less ready I have become to promote the triggering events as accidental.
Years ago when I gave talks on war triggers I used to give the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand as an example of an accidental war trigger. True, I understood that the assassin of the Archduke did not act alone: Gavrilo Princip, the young Serbian nationalist, was certainly not a “lone wolf”; he was one of several armed men stationed along the route of the Archduke’s carriage, and although he was committed to this plan it is also pretty clear that he was deliberately used by a group with high-level connections to carry out the assassination. But I felt that the planners were unlikely to have sought the large-scale conflagration they ended up getting, and I was impressed by the variety of elements in the “Balkan cauldron” that seemed to defy rational planning. Likewise, I was impressed by the numerous systemic factors operative in the wake of this event that led to a major war, ranging from a flourishing arms industry, through genuinely deluded ruling classes and entangling state alliances, to systems such as railways that gave an advantage to the first party to mobilize. All in all, I felt that non-deliberate factors outweighed deliberate factors, so I called this an accidental war trigger.
Recent reading, however, has made me less confident of this position. Especially since encountering Docherty and McGregor’s book, Hidden History: the Secret Origins of the First World War, I am inclined to reclassify the World War I war trigger as a managed trigger.
A managed war trigger is one in which a party of influence consciously acts to increase the chances of hot war, either by deliberately creating conditions where a war trigger is likely to arise, or by seizing an event after the fact and shaping it into a war trigger.
If World War I’s war trigger must be moved from accidental to managed, this increases the number of cases in this already well-stuffed category. The Pearl Harbor attack that caused the US entry into World War II was certainly managed. The factors that would increase the chances of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, thereby overcoming the US population’s resistance to entering this war, were studied and made part of a deliberate program. The Japanese advance on Pearl Harbor was consciously allowed to proceed. The declaration of war on Japan was the immediate fruit of this managed attack.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident also falls into this category. This was no accidental dustup in the Gulf of Tonkin. US leaders had created a systematic program of naval raids on the coast of North Vietnam (the DESOTO raids) intended to stimulate responses. While there is still debate about the degree to which this incident was planned, I am on the side of those who see it as highly deliberate provocation by US leaders, constructed and used to create hot war. The North Vietnamese response to the intrusion of the Maddox and the Turner Joy was remarkably mild, but it was magnified and distorted by US Cold Warriors so that it could be portrayed as “communist aggression” that required violent response.
The success of these last two managed war triggers can be seen in the record of voting in the US Congress. On December 8, 1941 there was only one vote in Congress against the declaration of war on Japan. On August 7, 1964 the House voted unanimously in favour of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, while in the Senate the vote was 88-2.
These voting statistics are sobering. The readiness of the group mind to revert to a pre-rational state—to take aggressive action with dire consequences without seeking any serious confirmation of the facts of the matter—puts humanity in a state of profound risk.
A manufactured war trigger carries the manipulation of populations even further. Here, deliberateness is extreme: it is not simply a matter of increasing the chances that this or that incident will occur, or making a mountain out of a molehill after the event. Here, those desirous of war write the script, choreograph the action, plan the output, and carry out, or subcontract, the actual event. Typically, they will also prepare to demonize and marginalize anyone who dares to challenge the narrative they present to the world.
The War on Terror is a master class in manufactured and managed war triggers. My own studies have concentrated on the two-part operation of the fall of 2001 – the September 11 airplane incidents and the immediately following anthrax letter attacks. These were manufactured war triggers, and they were successful in winning the support of both the US population and its representatives for foreign wars and restrictions on domestic civil rights.
A Washington Post-ABC poll initiated on the evening of 9/11 reportedly found that:
“nearly nine in 10 people supported taking military action against the groups or nations responsible for yesterday’s attacks even if it led to war. Two in three were willing to surrender ‘some of the liberties we have in this country’ to crack down on terrorism”. (MacQueen, 36)
Meanwhile, on September 11 cowed members of Congress fled for their lives on receiving information that a plane was headed toward the Capitol. That evening they assembled on the Capitol steps to sing God Bless America and to begin what was, in effect, their complete capitulation to those who had manufactured this war trigger.
On September 14, 2001 the Authorization for Use of Military Force was passed with a vote of 98-0 in the Senate and 422-1 in the House.
By late October members of Congress had begun to recover somewhat, and the USA Patriot Act, restricting domestic civil rights, met more opposition in the House than had the rush to war, passing by a vote of 357-66. Its fate in Senate, however, was more typical of such cases: 98 to 1.
These outcomes in Congress demonstrate the remarkable success, in the short term, of the manufactured war triggers of the fall of 2001. The effects of such operations, however, are temporary, so the perpetrators have had no choice but to continue managing and manufacturing war triggers to maintain the fraudulent War on Terror. The FBI (and parallel federal police agencies in other Western countries) busily entrap and recruit young people as fodder for the War on Terror, while in other cases False Flag attacks are carried out using wholesale invention. These initiatives have had a mixed success. For example, the official account of the Boston Marathon bombing is widely accepted despite its contradictions and absurdities; but the story of the Syrian chemical weapons attack of 2013 failed to accomplish its apparent aim of greatly expanded direct US military involvement in Syria. Likewise, sceptics of the recent claim of Russian “novichok” use in the UK are already vocal.
We would do well to remember that the on-going production of managed and manufactured war triggers takes great resources and cannot forever remain leak-proof. It carries serious risks for war planners. The successful and definitive exposure of even one of these frauds before the people of the world could affect the balance of power overnight.
Our task is clear. We must mobilize both our investigative resources and our communication resources to nullify the efforts of those who specialize in the construction and encouragement of war triggers and who wish to keep the war system robust. We lost over 100 million people to war in the 20th century. Are we really going to let this happen again?
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Graeme MacQueen is a former Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University, a member of the 9/11 Consensus Panel, and a past co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies.
Professor McQueen is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Sources
The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in the German Social Democracy, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, edited by Mary-Alice Waters. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970.
John Keegan, A History of Warfare. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993.
Randolph Bourne, “The State (‘War is the Health of the State’)”, 1918.
Col. Harry Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. Presidio Press, 1982.
Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor, Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2013
Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor. New York: Touchstone, 2001.
Graeme MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy. Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2014.
The original source of this article is Global Research
(Russia) “It saved the world from Nazism. It did it at a horrific price of 25 million men, women and children, but it did it; courageously, proudly and altruistically. The West never forgave the Soviet Union for this epic victory either, because all that is unselfish and self-sacrificing, is always in direct conflict with its own principles, and therefore ‘extremely dangerous’.”
By the way, as Russia lost 25 million souls during WW2, how come all we hear is of the 6 million Jews killed during that time? Of course, genocide and death is wrong for any reason but it applies to all nations, not just the “chosen ones”.
When it comes to Russia or the Soviet Union, reports and historical accounts do get blurry; in the West they do, and consequently in all of its ‘client states’.
Fairytales get intermingled with reality, while fabrications are masterfully injected into sub consciousness of billions of people worldwide. Russia is an enormous country, in fact the largest country on Earth in terms of territory. It is scarcely inhabited. It is deep, and as a classic once wrote: “It is impossible to understand Russia with one’s brain. One could only believe in it.”
The Western mind generally doesn’t like things unknown, spiritual and complex. Since the ‘old days’, especially since the crusades and monstrous colonialist expeditions to all corners of the world, the Westerners were told fables about their own “noble deeds” performed in the plundered lands. Everything had to be clear and simple: “Virtuous Europeans were civilizing savages and spreading Christianity, therefore, in fact, saving those dark poor primitive souls.”
Of course, tens of millions were dying in the process, while further tens of millions were shackled and brought to the “New Worlds” as slaves. Gold, silver, and other loot, as well as slave labor had been (and still are) paying for all those European palaces, railroads, universities and theatres, but that did not matter, as the bloodshed was most of the time something abstract and far away from those over-sensitive eyes of the Western public.
Westerners like simplicity, particularly when it comes to moral definitions of “good and evil”. It matters nothing if the truth gets systematically ‘massaged’, or even if the reality is fully fabricated. What matters is that there is no deep guilt and no soul-searching. Western rulers and their opinion makers know their people – their ‘subjects’ – perfectly well, and most of the time, they give them what they are asking for. The rulers and the reigned are generally living in symbiosis. They keep bitching about each other, but mostly they have similar goals: to live well, to live extremely well, as long as the others are forced to pay for it; with their riches, with their labor and often with their blood.
Culturally, most of the citizens of Europe and North America hate to pay the bill for their highlife; they even detest to admit that their life is extremely ‘high’. They like to feel like victims. They like to feel that they are ‘used’. They like to imagine that they are sacrificing themselves for the rest of the world.
And above all, they hate real victims: those they have been murdering, raping, plundering and insulting, for decades and centuries.
Recent ‘refugee crises’ showed the spite Europeans feel for their prey. People who made them rich and who lost everything in the process are humiliated, despised and insulted. Be they Afghans or Africans, the Middle Easterners or South Asians. Or Russians, although Russians are falling to its own, unique category.
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Many Russians look white. Most of them eat with knife and fork, they drink alcohol, excel at Western classical music, poetry, literature, science and philosophy.
To Western eyes they look ‘normal’, but actually, they are not.
Russians always want ‘something else’; they refuse to play by Western rules.
They are stubbornly demanding to remain different, and to be left alone.
When confronted, when attacked, they fight.
They rarely strike first, almost never invade.
But when threatened, when assaulted, they fight with tremendous determination and force, and they never lose. Villages and cities get converted into invader’s graves. Millions die while defending their Motherland, but the country survives. And it happens again and again and again, as the Western hordes have been, for centuries, assaulting and burning Russian lands, never learning the lesson and never giving up on their sinister dream of conquering and controlling that proud and determined colossus.
In the West, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight against them, and especially those who win.
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It gets much worse than that.
Russia has this terrible habit… not only it defends itself and its people, but it also fights for the others, protecting colonized and pillaged nations, as well as those that are unjustly assaulted.
It saved the world from Nazism. It did it at a horrific price of 25 million men, women and children, but it did it; courageously, proudly and altruistically. The West never forgave the Soviet Union for this epic victory either, because all that is unselfish and self-sacrificing, is always in direct conflict with its own principles, and therefore ‘extremely dangerous’.
The Russian people had risen; had fought and won in the 1917 Revolution; an event which terrified the West more than anything else in history, as it had attempted to create a fully egalitarian, classless and racially color-blind society. It also gave birth to Internationalism, an occurrence that I recently described in my book The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and the Birth of Internationalism.
Soviet Internationalism, right after the victory in WWII, helped greatly, directly and indirectly, dozens of countries on all continents, to stand up and to confront the European colonialism and the North American imperialism. The West and especially Europe never forgave the Soviet people in general and Russians in particular, for helping to liberate its slaves.
That is when the greatest wave of propaganda in human history really began to roll. From London to New York, from Paris to Toronto, an elaborate web of anti-Soviet and covertly anti-Russian hysteria was unleashed with monstrously destructive force. Tens of thousands of ‘journalists’, intelligence officers, psychologists, historians, as well as academics, were employed. Nothing Soviet, nothing Russian (except those glorified and often ‘manufactured’ Russian dissidents) was spared.
The excesses of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the pre-WWII era were systematically fabricated, exaggerated, and then engraved into the Western history textbooks and mass media narrative. In those tales, there was nothing about the vicious invasions and attacks coming from the West, aimed at destroying young Bolshevik state. Naturally, there was no space for mentioning the British, French, U.S., Czech, Polish, Japanese, German and other’s monstrous cruelties.
Soviet and Russian views were hardly ever allowed to penetrate the monolithic and one-sided Western propaganda narrative.
Like obedient sheep, the Western public accepted the disinformation it was fed with. Eventually, many people living in the Western colonies and ‘client states’, did the same. A great number of colonized people were taught how to blame themselves for their misery.
The most absurd but somehow logical occurrence then took place: many men, women and even children living in the USSR, succumbed to Western propaganda. Instead of trying to reform their imperfect but still greatly progressive country, they gave up, became cynical, aggressively ‘disillusioned’, corrupt and naively but staunchly pro-Western.
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It was the first and most likely the last time in the history, Russia got defeated by the West. It happened through deceit, through shameless lies, through Western propaganda.
What followed could be easily described as genocide.
The Soviet Union was first lulled into Afghanistan, then it was mortally injured by the war there, by an arms race with the United States, and by the final stage of propaganda that was literally flowing like lava from various hostile Western state-sponsored radio stations. Of course, local ‘dissidents’ also played an important role.
Under Gorbachev, a ‘useful idiot’ of the West, things got extremely bizarre. I don’t believe that he was paid to ruin his own country, but he did almost everything to run it into the ground; precisely what Washington wanted him to do. Then, in front of the entire world, a mighty and proud Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics suddenly shook in agony, then uttered a loud cry, and collapsed; died painfully but swiftly.
A new turbo-capitalist, bandit, pro-oligarch and confusedly pro-Western Russia was born. Russia which was governed by an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin; a man loved and supported by Washington, London and other Western centers of power.
It was a totally unnatural, sick Russia – cynical and compassionless, built with someone else’s ideas – Russia of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, of the BBC, of black marketers, of oligarchs and multi-national corporations.
Is the West now daring to say that Russians are ‘interfering’ in something in Washington? Are they out of their minds?
Washington and other Western capitals did not only ‘interfere’, they openly broke the Soviet Union into pieces and then they began kicking Russia which was at that point half-alive. Is it all forgotten, or is Western public again fully ‘unaware’ of what took place during those dark days?
The West kept spitting at the impoverished and injured country, refused to honor international agreements and treaties. It offered no help. Multi-nationals were unleashed, and began ‘privatizing’ Russian state companies, basically stealing what was built by the sweat and blood of Soviet workers, during long decades.
Interference? Let me repeat: it was direct intervention, invasion, a grab of resources, shameless theft! I want to read and write about it, but we don’t hear much about it, anymore, do we?
Now we are told that Russia is paranoid, that its President is paranoid! With straight face, the West is lying; pretending that it has not been trying to murder Russia.
Those years… Those pro-Western years when Russia became a semi-client state of the West, or call it a semi-colony! There was no mercy, no compassion coming from abroad. Many of those idiots – kitchen intellectuals from Moscow and provinces – suddenly woke up but it was too late. Many of them had suddenly nothing to eat. They got what they were told to ask for: their Western ‘freedom and democracy’, and Western-style capitalism or in summary: total collapse.
I remember well how it was ‘then’. I began returning to Russia, horrified, working in Moscow, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Leningrad. Academics from Akadem Gorodok outside Novosibirsk were selling their libraries in the bitter cold, in dark metro underpasses of Novosibirsk… Runs on the banks… Old retired people dying from hunger and cold behind massive doors of concrete blocks… unpaid salaries and starving miners, teachers…
Russia under the deadly embrace of the West, for the first and hopefully last time! Russia whose life expectancy suddenly dropped to African Sub-Saharan levels. Russia humiliated, wild, in terrible pain.
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But that nightmare did not last long.
And what happened – those short but horrible years under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but above all under the Western diktat – will never be forgotten, not forgiven.
Russians know perfectly well what they do not want, anymore!
Russia stood up again. Huge, indignant and determined to live its own life, its own way. From an impoverished, humiliated and robbed nation, subservient to the West, the country evolved and within a few years, the free and independent Russia once again joined ranks of the most developed and powerful countries on Earth.
And as before Gorbachev, Russia is once again able to help those nations which are under unjust and vicious attacks of the Western empire.
A man who is leading this renaissance, President Vladimir Putin, is tough, but Russia is under great threat and so is the world – this is no time for weaklings.
President Putin is not perfect (who is, really?), but he is a true patriot, and I dare say, an internationalist.
Now the West, once again, hates both Russia and its leader. No wonder; undefeated, strong and free Russia is the worst imaginable foe of Washington and its lieutenants.
That’s how the West feels, not Russia. Despite all that was done to it, despite tens of millions of lost and ruined lives, Russia has always been ready to compromise, even to forgive, if not forget.
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There is something deeply pathological in the psyche of the West. It cannot accept anything less than full and unconditional submission. It has to control, to be in charge, and on top of everything; it has to feel exceptional. Even when it murders and ruins the entire Planet, it insists on feeling superior to the rest of the world.
This faith in exceptionalism is the true Western religion, much more than even Christianity, which for decades has not really played any important role there. Exceptionalism is fanatical, it is fundamentalist and unquestionable.
It also insists that its narrative is the only one available anywhere in the World. That the West is seen as a moral leader, as a beacon of progress, as the only competent judge and guru.
Lies are piling on top of lies. As in all religions, the more absurd the pseudo-reality is, the more brutal and extreme are the methods used to uphold it. The more laughable the fabrications are, the more powerful the techniques used to suppress the truth are.
Today, hundreds of thousands of ‘academics’, teachers, journalists, artists, psychologists and other highly paid professionals, in all parts of the world, are employed by the Empire, for two goals only – to glorify the Western narrative and to discredit all that is standing in its way; daring to challenge it.
Russia is the most hated adversary of the West, with China, Russia’s close ally being near second.
The propaganda war unleashed by the West is so insane, so intense, that even some of the European and North American citizens are beginning to question tales coming from Washington, London and elsewhere.
Wherever one turns, there is a tremendous medley of lies, of semi-lies, half-truths; a complex and unnavigable swamp of conspiracy theories. Russia is being attacked for interfering in U.S. domestic affairs, for defending Syria, for standing by defenseless and intimidated nations, for having its own powerful media, for doping its athletes, for still being Communist, for not being socialist anymore; in brief: for everything imaginable and unimaginable.
Criticism of the country is so thorough and ludicrous, that one begins to ask very legitimate questions: “what about the past? What about the Western narrative regarding the Soviet past, particularly the post-Revolutionary period, and the period between two world wars?”
The more I analyze this present-day Western anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda, the more determined I am to study and write about the Western narrative regarding Soviet history. I’m definitely planning to investigate these matters in the future, together with my friends – Russian and Ukrainian historians.
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In the eyes of the West, Russians are ‘traitors’.
Instead of joining the looters, they have been standing by the ‘wretched of the world’, in the past, as well as now. They refused to sell their Motherland, and to enslave their own people. Their government is doing all it can to make Russia self-sufficient, fully independent, prosperous, proud and free.
Remember that ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and many other terms, mean totally different things in distinctive parts of the world. What is happening in the West could never be described as ‘freedom’ in Russia or in China, and vice versa.
Frustrated, collapsing, atomized and egotistic societies of Europe and North America do not inspire even their own people, anymore. They are escaping by millions annually, to Asia, Latin America, and even to Africa. Escaping from emptiness, meaninglessness and emotional cold. But it is not Russia’s or China’s business to tell them how to live or not to live!
In the meantime, great cultures like Russia and China do not need, and do not want to be told by the Westerners, what freedom is, and what democracy is.
They do not attack the West, and expect the same in return.
It is truly embarrassing that the countries responsible for hundreds of genocides, for hundreds of millions of murdered people on all continents, still dare to lecture others.
Many victims are too scared to speak.
Russia is not.
It is composed, gracious, but fully determined to defend itself if necessary; itself as well as many other human beings living on this beautiful but deeply scarred Planet.
Russian culture is enormous: from poetry and literature, to music, ballet, philosophy… Russian hearts are soft, they easily melt when approached with love and kindness. But when millions of lives of innocent people are threatened, both the hearts and muscles of Russians quickly turn to stone and steel. During such moments, when only victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about the Russian armor.
There is no match to Russian courage in the sadistic but cowardly West.
Irreversibly, both hope and future are moving towards the east.
And that is why Russia is desperately hated by the West.
Here’s a fun piece of history we all love to not think about. Truthfully, it’s always struck me as a bit strange how Hollywood gives us plenty of war movies chock full of overly stylized brutal violence that conveniently stop short of the creepy sex stuff. The way these supposedly religious values have been continuously exploited by our capitalist media apparatus is in fact gloriously insane in a way.
Not to downplay how serious this stuff is, I actually read this and was like, wow, the numbers this lady is proposing are way higher than what I would have thought, and I would have already guessed on the high end. (From The Local):
“A German historian estimates in a new book that French, British and American soldiers raped 860,000 Germans at and after the end of the Second World War, including 190,000 sexual assaults by American soldiers.
Professor Miriam Gebhardt’s book When the Soldiers Came, published this week, includes interviews with victims, stories of the children of rape and research that she conducted over the course of a year and a half into birth records in Allied-occupied West Germany and West Berlin.
“Now, 70 years after the war, it’s long past the time when one could be suspected of dealing with German victimhood,” Gebhardt, an author and lecturer at the University of Konstanz, told The Local.
“There is no longer the question that one might want to relativize the responsibility of the Germans for the Second World War and the Holocaust.”
Gebhardt said she arrived at that number of sexual assaults by estimating that of the so-called ‘war-children’ born to unmarried German women by the 1950s, five percent were products of rape.
She also estimates that for each birth, there were 100 rapes, including of men and boys.
Gebhardt’s numbers are higher than previous estimates. A well-received 2003 book by American professor of criminology J. Robert Lilly, Taken by Force, estimated that American soldiers committed around 11,000 rapes in Germany.
While an article published by Der Spiegel on Monday raised questions about whether Gebhardt’s figures accurately reflected the incidence of sexual assault in post-war Germany, Lilly told The Local that her estimates were certainly reasonable.
“Gebhardt’s numbers are plausible, but her work is not a definitive account,” said Lilly in an interview with The Local, explaining that no exact number could ever be known because of a lack of records.
“It is confirmation of research that I have done and it adds to this ongoing discussion of what happens in the underbelly of war – What goes on that we haven’t talked about.”
Much of the discussion of sexual assaults against Germans has focused on the Soviet troops in east Germany, who are estimated to have committed between one to two million rapes during the time.”
Thad McKraken is a psychedelic writer, musician, visual artist, filmmaker, Occultist, and pug enthusiast based out of Seattle. He is the author of the books The Galactic Dialogue: Occult Initiations and Transmissions From Outside of Time, both of which can be picked up on Amazon super cheap.
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” So said Oscar Wilde and so describes the life and legacy of Britain’s most famous and revered leader, Winston Churchill, a political giant who wore his racism and imperialism proudly.
New Churchill movie: history or hagiography?
In the wake of the release of the Hollywood biopic on Churchill, ‘Darkest Hour,’ which is attracting rave reviews and features Gary Oldman as Churchill and Kristin Scott Thomas as his long-suffering wife Clementine, a raft of articles on the man and his legacy has been produced, confirming that his place in history remains the subject of dispute and conjecture over half a century after his death in 1965.
‘Darkest Hour’ focuses on the period of Churchill’s life for which he is most famous, when as prime minister he led Britain during the darkest period in its history after the military disaster of Dunkirk in May 1940.
Prior to his ascension to the role of the nation’s prime minister, Churchill had spent years on the backbenches as a lone Cassandra, warning of the threat posed by Hitler. As far back as 1932, after returning to Britain from a trip to Germany, he addressed the House of Commons thus: “All these bands of Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for their Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons.”
At the end of May 1940, with Hitler’s panzers at the Channel ports of northern France, it would have come as small comfort to know that he had been proven right, and the bulk of a British political establishment in which Nazi sympathies ran deep throughout the 1930s was proven wrong.
The movie depicts the seminal struggle that took place between Churchill and those within his cabinet, led by the country’s Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax (played by Stephen Dillane), who believed there was no prospect of defeating the Germans militarily after Dunkirk, and who were adamant that the country should now seek terms with the Nazi dictator with the objective of saving the empire.
Churchill, as history reveals, saw things differently. This is powerfully depicted in the film when, exasperated at Halifax’s repeated urgings that the time had come to negotiate, he slams his desk and bellows, “When will the lesson be learned? You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!”
But, if 1940 was Churchill’s finest hour, there were countless hours of ignominy and mendacity in his life too, which his legion of fawning admirers have done their utmost to elide in favor of the legend.
Winston Spencer Churchill, born in 1874, was a scion of class privilege in a British society suffering the dead weight of aristocracy in the late 19th century. From a young age he was captivated by war and military life, developing a Nietzschean attachment to conflict as the testing ground of so-called manly virtues of courage, honor and discipline. He experienced war up close, when as a young army officer he saw combat in India, Sudan and on the Western Front during the First World War.
This sets him apart from contemporary British ‘war leaders,’ the likes of Tony Blair and David Cameron, who’ve sent British military forces into combat with the objective of establishing their own Churchillian legacy, resulting in disaster.
The ugly side of Churchill’s legacy is, as averred in the opening paragraph, the racism and imperialism that underpinned his worldview. His belief in racial hierarchy was outlined in the testimony he gave to the Peel Commission in 1937, which was established to investigate the 1936 Arab revolt against the influx of European Jewish settlers to Palestine with the connivance of the British.
When asked about the rights of the indigenous people in Palestine, Churchill refused to accept that they had any: “I do not admit, for example, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the Black people of Australia. I do not admit that wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, to put it in that way, has come in and taken their place.”
Years previously, as Britain’s secretary for war, Churchill had championed the use chemical weapons to put down rebellion in India and Iraq, writing in a memo, “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” He was also responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Russia in 1919 with the aim, in conjunction with various other imperialist powers, of crushing the Russian Revolution.
During the Second World War, Churchill’s disdain for non-white European peoples was laid bare with his culpability in the deaths of three million men, women and children in the Bengal Famine of 1943.
Despite the starvation that had swept through this blighted province of India, Churchill ordered the diversion of desperately needed food from India to Europe. The fact that the 70,000 tons of food exported by the British from India in the first seven months of 1943 would have kept 400,000 people alive for a year is a chilling one. “I hate Indians,” Britain’s most venerated prime minister is said to have told one of his underlings. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
Veneration and vilification in equal measure
The veneration accorded Winston Churchill for his leadership of a country on its knees after the military disaster of Dunkirk in 1940 must be weighed in the balance against his disgusting racism and fanatical imperialism. And though Churchill’s defiance of Hitler and his Nazi war machine was important, it should be pointed out that Hitler’s military and strategic priority had never been war with Britain.
On the contrary, the fascist dictator was an admirer of the British empire, which he sought to emulate in Eastern Europe with the colonization and plunder of large swathes of Russia. As William L. Shirer writes in his landmark work, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,’ after the fall of France, convinced that Britain would see sense and seek peace terms, Hitler expressed “his admiration of the British empire and [was] stressing the necessity for its existence. All he wanted from London, he said, was a free hand on the continent.”
The answer to the question of who Winston Churchill was can never be answered in a movie made with the purpose of reinforcing the reverence in which he is held in the West. Born with the blood of the English aristocracy running through his veins, he was a man for whom the world was divided between racially and culturally superior white European peoples and non-white Europeans fated to occupy the role of latter day Helots.
Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943, captured the contradictions that defined Churchill, when in his voluminous diaries he noted, “For all his seriousness, Churchill is a rather amusing man!”
Churchill the great wartime leader or Churchill the racist and imperialist? The simple answer is that he was both.
John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. John is currently working on a book exploring the role of the West in the Arab Spring. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnWight1
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese planes, launched from aircraft carriers, attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking or heavily damaging 18 ships (including eight battleships), destroying 188 planes, and leaving over 2,000 servicemen killed.
The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced this “day of infamy” before Congress, from whom he secured an avid declaration of war.
Up until then, however, Americans had overwhelmingly opposed involvement in World War II. They had been thoroughly disillusioned by the First World War:
although they had been told they would be fighting for “democracy” in that previous war, taxpayers learned from the postwar Graham Committee of Congress that they’d been defrauded out of some $6 billion in armaments that were never manufactured or delivered1;
atrocity tales about German soldiers (such as cutting the hands off thousands of Belgian children) had turned out to be fabrications;
the sinking of the Lusitania – the central provocation that ultimately led to the U.S. declaration of war – had been committed by Germany not to kill women and children (as propaganda claimed), but to prevent tens of tons of war munitions from reaching the European front. (Click here for a debunking of the Lusitania myth.)
When the Maine sank, the proactive Assistant Secretary of the Navy had been Teddy Roosevelt. After the 1898 Spanish-American War he became governor of New York, and by 1901 was President of the United States. When the Lusitania sank, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy was his distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt – who likewise went on to become governor of New York and then President.
Just as coincident: during the Lusitania affair, the head of the British Admiralty was yet another cousin of Franklin D. – Winston Churchill. And in a chilling déjà vu, as Pearl Harbor approached, these two men were now heads of their respective states.
In a 1940 (election-year) speech, Roosevelt stated typically: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”2 But privately, the President planned just the opposite: to bring America into the World War as Britain’s ally, exactly as Woodrow Wilson had done in World War I. Roosevelt dispatched his closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, to meet Churchill in January 1941. Hopkins told Churchill: “The President is determined that we [the United States and England] shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it. He has sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him – there is nothing he will not do so far as he has human power.”3 William Stephenson, who ran British intelligence operations in the U.S., noted that American-British military staff talks began that same month under “utmost secrecy,” which, he clarified, “meant preventing disclosure to the American public.”4
The President offered numerous provocations to Germany: freezing its assets; occupying Iceland; shipping 50 destroyers to Britain; and having U.S. warships escort Allied convoys. Roosevelt and Churchill hoped to duplicate the success of the Lusitania incident. But the Germans gave them no satisfaction. They knew America’s entry into World War I had shifted the balance of power against them, and they shunned a repetition of that scenario.
As Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of Germany’s U-boat fleet, stated during the Nuremburg trials:
A 300 mile safety zone was even granted to America by Germany when international law called for only a three mile zone. I suggested mine fields at Halifax and around Iceland, but the Fuehrer rejected this because he wanted to avoid conflict with the United States. When American destroyers in the summer of 1941 were ordered to attack German submarines, I was forbidden to fight back. I was thus forced not to attack British destroyers for fear there would be some mistake.5
After being pursued by the destroyer USS Greer for more than three hours, the German submarine U-652 fired at (but did not hit) the Greer. President Roosevelt bewailed this to the American public as an unprovoked att.ack
But most Americans were unmoved. Not even another Lusitania would have motivated them to send their sons to die in another European war.
It was going to take a whole cluster of Lusitanias, and since this would not come from the cautious Germans, it could only come from Germany’s Axis partner, Japan. As Interior Secretary Harold Ickes put it in 1941: “For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan.”6 This required three steps: (1) build anti-Japanese sentiment in America; (2) provoke Japan to the flashpoint of war; (3) set up an irresistible target to serve as a false flag.
Demonizing Japan
Americans were subjected to a stream of propaganda depicting Japan as bent on “world conquest” even though it is smaller than Montana. In the wartime government-produced film, Our Enemy: The Japanese, narrator Joseph Grew (CFR) told the public the Japanese believed it was the “the right and destiny of Japan’s emperors to rule the whole world . . . to destroy all nations and peoples which stand in the way of its fulfillment. . . . [Their] national dream is to see Tokyo established as the capital of the world . . . . world conquest is their national obsession.”
Grew neglected to mention that Japan had been a closed isolationist country until Commodore Perry compelled them to sign a trade agreement under threat of U.S. naval bombardment. Perry was the father-in-law of August Belmont, the Rothschilds’ leading financial agent in America during the 19th century.7
As proof of “Japan’s plot to conquer the world,” the American press played up Japanese troops entering Manchuria in the 1930s. But the fact that the Soviets had first seized Outer Mongolia and China’s northwestern province of Sinkiang drew no notice. As Dr. Anthony Kubek, chairman of the history department at the University of Dallas, wrote in How the Far East Was Lost:
It was apparent to Japanese statesmen that unless bastions of defense were built in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, Communism would spread through all of North China and seriously threaten the security of Japan. . . . But the Department of State seemed not to regard Japan as a bulwark against Soviet expansion in North China. As a matter of fact, not one word of protest was sent by the Department of State to the Soviet Union, despite her absorption of Sinkiang and Outer Mongolia, while at the same time Japan was censured for stationing troops in China.8
Dr. Kubek’s remarks highlight a policy consistent throughout the Second World War: condemn “fascist aggression” while tolerating – without limit – communistaggression. For example, when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Yet when the Soviet Union invaded Poland that same month, the West . . . yawned.
Above: Japanese tank crew rests during 1939 fighting against the Soviets near Mongolia.
To those who might contend Japan had no right to enter China to oppose communism, let’s remember that the United States sent its troops around the globe to Vietnam on the principle that stopping communism was in its national interests. By what logic, then, could Japan not oppose communism on its doorstep? A glance at a map shows how close communism was drawing to Japan, having methodically enslaved all the nations embodying the Soviet Union, and it was now boring southward into China. In sending troops to Manchuria and China, Japan was invoking her own version of the Monroe Doctrine.
The Soviets, for their part, wanted war between the United States and Japan, knowing that with Japan neutralized, Communism would engulf Asia. In 1935, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow William C. Bullitt sent a dispatch to Secretary of State Cordell Hull:
It is . . . the heartiest hope of the Soviet Government that the United States will become involved in war with Japan. . . . The Soviet Union would certainly attempt to avoid becoming an ally until Japan had been thoroughly defeated and would then merely use the opportunity to acquire Manchuria and Sovietize China.9
Benjamin Gitlow, founding member of the U.S. Communist Party, wrote in I Confess (1940):
When I was in Moscow, the attitude toward the United States in the event of war was discussed. Privately, it was the opinion of all the Russian leaders to whom I spoke that the rivalry between the United States and Japan must actually break out into war between these two.10
Roosevelt Provokes Japan
On June 23, 1941, Interior Secretary Ickes wrote in a memo to Roosevelt:
There will never be so good a time to stop the shipment of oil to Japan as we now have. . . . There might develop from embargoing of oil such a situation as would make it, not only possible but easy, to get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus indirectly be brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of communistic Russia. 11
The memo’s date is significant: the day after Germany and her allies (Italy, Hungary, Romania, Finland and Croatia) launched Operation Barbarossa: the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Why did Ickes say an oil embargo would make it “easy to get into this war”? The answer lies in an eight-point plan of provocation toward Japan which had been previously drawn up by Lt. Commander Arthur McCollum of Naval Intelligence. The eighth of the eight-step plan was: “Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.” McCollum’s next sentence was: “If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.”12
Ickes; McCollum
What McCollum, Ickes and Roosevelt envisioned was antagonizing Japan to the point that it would attack the United States. And thus – in the tradition of the Maine and Lusitania – America, as the “innocent victim of unprovoked aggression” – would go to war. Here is how War Secretary Henry Stimson (CFR, Skull and Bones) phrased it in his diary, after meetings with the President that autumn: “We face the delicate question of the diplomatic fencing to be done so as to be sure that Japan is put into the wrong and makes the first bad move – overt move.”13 “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot….”14
Between July 26 and August 1, 1941, FDR seized Japanese assets in America, closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping, and enacted the sweeping trade embargo that McCollum and Ickes had urged. Britain and the Netherlands followed suit with similar embargoes. For the Japanese, this constituted a death threat. Japan heavily depended on imports for raw materials, for 88 percent of its oil and 75 percent of its food.
The timing of these measures was again significant. In July 1941, all reports indicated the Germans and their allies were crushing the Red Army. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were surrendering; as they did, many shouted “Stalin kaput!” Stalin himself was nearly paralyzed with fear. He had only fought wars of aggression and was unprepared for defense. If Japan, Germany’s ally, joined Operation Barbarossa from the East, Stalin would be trapped in a vise, and communism – which was an Illuminati creation – destroyed.
Roosevelt’s trade embargo guaranteed that Japan would not join Operation Barbarossa, but would instead turn its attention south. No nation can prosecute war without oil. Tanks, trucks, ships and aircraft require it. If Japan attacked Russia through Siberia, there would be no oil to be confiscated. But there was abundant oil to the south, in the Dutch East Indies. And Southeast Asia held many other resources the embargo denied Japan, such as rubber, tin and iron ore.
Why Did Japan Go to War with America?
British historian Russell Grenfell, a captain in the Royal Navy, wrote In 1952:
No reasonably informed person can now believe that Japan made a villainous, unexpected attack on the United States. An attack was not only fully expected but was actually desired. It is beyond doubt that President Roosevelt wanted to get his country into war, but for political reasons was most anxious to ensure that the first act of hostility came from the other side; for which reason he caused increasing pressure to be put on the Japanese, to a point that no self-respecting nation could endure without resort to arms. Japan was meant by the American President to attack the United States.15
Grenfell; Lyttelton
On June 20, 1944, Oliver Lyttelton, Britain’s minister of production, said before the American Chamber of Commerce in London: “America provoked Japan to such an extent that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history ever to say that America was forced into war.”16 Why did Lyttelton make this startling accusation (for which he was later compelled to apologize)?
Following the U.S. embargo, Japan’s representatives in Washington earnestly negotiated for the embargo’s repeal, to no avail. On November 26, 1941, the State Department delivered an ultimatum to Japan: sanctions would only be lifted if all overseas Japanese troops were withdrawn to Japan. Although the ultimatum or “Hull note” was officially credited to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, it is now known that it was drafted by Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, a Soviet operative.
Harry Dexter White
The White/Hull ultimatum was a deliberate catch-22. If the Japanese refused it, the embargo would continue, and they would collapse from economic strangulation. If they complied, and withdrew all troops from the mainland, communism would sweep Eastern Asia (exactly as happened after the war, resulting in Communist China, and the Korean and Vietnam wars). The Japanese were thus given a two-headed coin: die by starvation, or die by communism. They decided to reject both options, and fight instead.
To have any hope of success in a war against the mighty USA, Japan would need an edge. Franklin D. Roosevelt made sure they got one in the form of attractive bait.
The Decision to Base the Fleet at Pearl Harbor
In 1940, President Roosevelt decided that the Pacific Fleet should be based indefinitely at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, instead of its usual berths on the U.S. West Coast. This was a bad idea for many reasons:
In the middle of the Pacific, Hawaii is surrounded by uninhabited waters, making it susceptible to surprise attack from 360 degrees. By contrast, no surprise attack could have been launched if the fleet was kept on the West Coast; assailants would have encountered innumerable commercial vessels before reaching it.
At Pearl Harbor, the fleet was boxed together like sardines, making them ideal targets for bombers.
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In Hawaii, oil and others supplies had to be brought across 2,000 miles of the Pacific.
Pearl Harbor lacked adequate fuel and ammunition storage facilities, dry docks, and support craft (such as tugs and repair vessels). The fleet could have been maintained on a superior war footing if kept on the West Coast.
37 percent of Hawaii’s population was ethnically Japanese, rendering the fleet vulnerable to espionage and sabotage.
Basing the fleet in Hawaii would separate sailors from their families, creating morale problems.
U.S. Fleet Commander Admiral J. O. Richardson was outraged by Roosevelt’s decision and met with him on October 8, 1940 to protest it. Richardson presented the President with a list of logical reasons why the fleet should not be based in Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt could not rebut these objections and simply said that having the fleet there would exert a “restraining influence on the actions of Japan.”17
Richardson said: “I came away with the impression that, despite his spoken word, the President was fully determined to put the United States into the war if Great Britain could hold out until he was reelected.”18
On February 1, 1941, Richardson was relieved of his command without any explanation. Richardson met with Navy Secretary Frank Knox to inquire about it, and related: “When I saw the Secretary, I said, ‘In all my experience in the Navy, I have never known of a flag officer being detached in the same manner as I, and I feel I owe it to myself to know why.’ The Secretary said the President would send for me and talk the matter over.” However, Roosevelt never sent for Richardson; the only explanation the admiral ever received were these words from Secretary Knox: “The last time you were here you hurt the President’s feelings.”19
Roosevelt’s sole pretext for basing the fleet in Pearl Harbor – that it would deter Japanese aggression – was resoundingly discredited on December 7, 1941. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Roosevelt was never held accountable for his action. All blame was instead leveled at the Navy, especially Richardson’s successor as Pacific Fleet Commander, Admiral Husband Kimmel, who accepted the position believing Washington would notify him of any intelligence pointing to a threat.
This trust proved misplaced. As Washington watched Japan prepare for the attack, it kept Kimmel and his army counterpart in Hawaii, General Walter C. Short, well out of its intelligence loop.
Kimmel and Short
The False Flag Foreknown (1): “Magic”
The Japanese used a code called “Purple” to communicate to their embassies and major consulates throughout the world. Its complexity required that it be enciphered and deciphered by machine. The Japanese considered the code unbreakable, but in 1940 talented U.S. Army cryptanalysts cracked it and devised a facsimile of the Japanese machine. As the result, U.S. intelligence was reading Japanese diplomatic messages, often on a same-day basis.
A U.S. Purple decoding machine
Copies of the deciphered texts, nicknamed “Magic,” were promptly delivered in locked pouches to select individuals, including President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark. Copies also went to Harry Hopkins, FDR’s shadowy advisor who held no cabinet position.20
(It is worth digressing for a paragraph about Hopkins, who lived in the White House; he has been aptly compared to Woodrow Wilson’s Wall Street controller, Edward Mandell House, who also lived in the White House. Like House, Hopkins acted as a special emissary, paying visits to Churchill and Stalin. After the war, it was revealed that as head of Lend-Lease, he secretly shipped both the materials and blueprints for the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. This was documented by Lend-Lease expediter George Racey Jordan in From Major Jordan’s Diaries. Some may find interesting John T. Flynn’s remarks in The Roosevelt Myth on the favors bestowed upon Hopkins by British press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook and bankster Bernard Baruch on the occasion of Hopkins’s third wedding.)
Although Hopkins had access to “Magic” intercepts, our commanders in Hawaii did not. And what did these intercepts reveal?
that Tokyo had ordered its Consul General in Hawaii to divide Pearl Harbor into five areas and, on a frequent basis, report the exact locations of American warships there. Nothing is unusual about spies watching ship movements – but reporting precise whereabouts of ships in dock has only one implication.
that on November 29th (three days after the U.S. ultimatum), Japan’s envoys in Washington were told a rupture in negotiations was “inevitable,” but that Japan’s leaders “do not wish you to give the impression that negotiations are broken off.”
that on November 30th Tokyo had ordered their Berlin embassy to inform the Germans (their allies) that “the breaking out of war may come quicker than anyone dreams.”
that on December 1st, the Japanese had ordered all of their North American diplomatic offices to destroy their secret documents.21 (Once war breaks out, the offices of a hostile power lose their diplomatic immunity and are seized.)
In the 1970 movie Tora, Tora, Tora, a Hollywood depiction of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor, Japan’s ambassadors are shown presenting their message breaking relations (meaning war) to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, after the attack on Hawaii, and Hull reacts with surprise and outrage.
In reality, however, Hull was not shocked at all. On the previous day (December 6), he had already read the translated intercept of Japan’s declaration – 13 parts of the 14-part message – as had President Roosevelt.
The False Flag Foreknown (2): East Wind, Rain
An additional warning came via the so-called “Winds” message. A November 18th intercept indicated that, if a break in U.S. relations was forthcoming, Tokyo would issue a special radio warning. This would not be in the Purple code, as it was intended to reach consulates and lesser agencies of Japan not equipped with the code or one of its machines. The message, to be repeated three times during a weather report, was “Higashi no kaze ame,” meaning “East wind, rain.” “East wind” signified the United States; “rain” signified diplomatic split (war).
This prospective message was deemed so significant that U.S. radio monitors were constantly watching for it, and the Navy Department typed it up on special reminder cards. On December 4th, “Higashi no kaze ame” was broadcast and picked up by Washington intelligence.
The False Flag Foreknown (3): Personal Warnings
During 1941, the Roosevelt administration also received several personal warnings regarding Pearl Harbor:
On January 27th, our ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, reported to Washington: “The Peruvian Minister has informed a member of my staff that he has heard from many sources, including a Japanese source, that in the event of trouble breaking out between the United States and Japan, the Japanese intended to make a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor with all their strength. . . .”22
Brigadier General Elliott Thorpe was the U.S. military observer in Java, then under Dutch control. In early December 1941, the Dutch army decoded a dispatch from Tokyo to its Bangkok embassy, forecasting an attack on Hawaii. The Dutch passed the information to Thorpe, who considered it so vital that he sent Washington a total of four warnings. Finally, the War Department told him to send no further warnings.23
The Dutch Military attaché in Washington, Colonel F. G. L. Weijerman, personally warned U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall about Pearl Harbor just days before the attack.24
Dusko Popov was a Yugoslavian double agent whose true allegiance was to the Allies. Through information furnished by the Germans, Popov deduced the Japanese were planning to bomb Pearl Harbor. He notified the FBI; subsequently FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warned Roosevelt.25
Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa received information from Kilsoo Haan of the Sino-Korean People’s League that the Japanese intended to assault Hawaii “before Christmas.” Gillette briefed the President, who said the matter would be looked into.26
U.S. Congressman Martin Dies of Texas came into possession of a map revealing the Japanese plan to attack Pearl Harbor. He later wrote:
As soon as I received the document I telephoned Secretary of State Cordell Hull and told him what I had. Secretary Hull directed me not to let anyone know about the map and stated that he would call me as soon as he talked to President Roosevelt. In about an hour he telephoned to say that he had talked to Roosevelt and they agreed that it would be very serious if any information concerning this map reached the news services . . . I told him it was a grave responsibility to withhold such vital information from the public. The Secretary assured me that he and Roosevelt considered it essential to national defense.27
Thorpe (on the left); Popov; Dies
The False Flag Foreknown: (4) Naval Intercepts
In his book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (2000), Robert Stinnett proved, from documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, that Washington was not only deciphering Japanese diplomatic messages, but naval dispatches also.
It had long been presumed that as the Japanese fleet approached Pearl Harbor, it maintained complete radio silence. This was not the case. The fleet observed discretion, but not complete silence. U.S. Naval Intelligence intercepted and translated numerous dispatches, which President Roosevelt had access to through his routing officer, Lieutenant Commander McCollum, who had also authored the original eight-point plan of provocation. The most significant message was sent by Admiral Yamamoto to the Japanese First Air Fleet on November 25, 1941:
The task force, keeping its movement strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet and deal it a mortal blow. The first air raid is planned for the dawn of x-day. Exact date to be given by later order.28
Here is more on the interception of this message:
Maximizing the Risks
MSM historians have traditionally censured the Hawaiian commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Short, for failing to detect the approaching Japanese carriers. What goes unsaid: Washington denied them the means to do so.
During the week before December 7th, naval aircraft searched more than two million square miles of the Pacific29 – but never saw the Japanese force. This is because Kimmel and Short had only enough planes to survey less than one-third of the 360-degree arc around them, and intelligence had advised (incorrectly) that they should concentrate on the southwest.
There were not enough trained surveillance pilots. Many of the reconnaissance craft suffered from lack of spare parts. Repeated requests to Washington for additional patrol planes were turned down. As George Morgenstern noted in Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War: “While the Hawaiian air commanders were clamoring for planes to safeguard the base, 1,900 patrol planes were being lend-leased to foreign countries between February 1 and December 1, 1941. Of these, 1,750, or almost ten times the number which would have rendered Oahu safe, went to Great Britain.”30
Rear Admiral Edward T. Layton, who served at Pearl Harbor, stated: “There was never any hint in any intelligence received by the local command of any Japanese threat to Hawaii. Our air defenses were stripped on orders from the army chief himself. Of the twelve B-17s on the island, only six could be kept in the air by cannibalizing the others for spare parts.”31
Radar, too, was insufficient. And when General Short attempted to build a radar station on Mount Haleakala, Harold Ickes’ Interior Department withheld permission, stating that it would harm the beauty of the landscape.32
Advance Damage Control: the “War Warning”
It was clear, of course, that once disaster struck Pearl Harbor, there would be demands for accountability. Washington seemed to artfully take this into account by sending an ambiguous “war warning” to Kimmel, and a similar one to Short, on November 27th. This has been used for years by Washington apologists to allege that the commanders should have been ready for the Japanese.
Indeed, the message began conspicuously: “This dispatch is to be considered a war warning.” However, it went on to state: “The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organizations of naval task forces indicates an amphibious expedition against the Philippines, Thai or Kra Peninsula, or possibly Borneo.” None of these areas were closer than 5,000 miles to Hawaii (that is further than the distance from New York to Moscow). No threat to Pearl Harbor was hinted at. It ended with the words: “Continental districts, Guam, Samoa take measures against sabotage.” The message further stated that “measures should be carried out so as not repeat not to alarm civil population.” Both commanders reported the actions taken to Washington. Short followed through with sabotage precautions, bunching his planes together (which hinders saboteurs but makes ideal targets for bombers), and Kimmel stepped up air surveillance and sub searches. If their response to the “war warning” was insufficient, Washington said nothing. The next day, a follow-up message from Marshall’s adjutant general to Short warned only: “Initiate forthwith all additional measures necessary to provide for protection of your establishments, property, and equipment against sabotage, protection of your personnel against subversive propaganda and protection of all activities against espionage.”33
Short testifies before Congress after the war:
On December 1, Naval intelligence sent Kimmel its fortnightly intelligence summary entitled “The Japanese Naval Situation.” It stated: “Major capital ship strength remains in home waters, as well as the greatest portion of the carriers.”34 Contrast that to the diary of Captain Johann Ranneft, the Dutch naval attaché in Washington, who was awarded the Legion of Merit for his services to America. Ranneft recorded that on December 2nd, he visited the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Ranneft inquired about the Pacific. An American officer, pointing to a wall map, said, “This is the Japanese Task Force proceeding East.” It was a spot midway between Japan and Hawaii. On December 6th, Ranneft returned and asked where the Japanese carriers were. He was shown a position on the map about 300-400 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. Ranneft wrote: “I ask what is the meaning of these carriers at this location; whereupon I receive the answer that it is probably in connection with Japanese reports of eventual American action. . . . I myself do not think about it because I believe that everyone in Honolulu is 100 percent on the alert, just like everyone here at O.N.I.”35
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Admiral Kimmel testifiying after the war:
Strange Activity on December 7
On the morning of the Sunday the 7th, the final portion of Japan’s lengthy message to the U.S. government (rupturing relations, effectively declaring war) was intercepted and decoded. Tokyo added two special directives to its envoys. The first, which the message called “very important,” was to deliver the statement at 1 PM. The second directive ordered that the last copy of code, and the machine that went with it, be destroyed. The gravity of this was not lost in the Navy Department: Japan had a long history of synchronizing attacks with breaks in relations (e.g., in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, it had attacked Port Arthur on the same day it notified Russia that it was declaring war). Sunday was an abnormal day to deliver diplomatic messages — but the best for trying to catch U.S. armed forces at low vigilance; and 1 PM in Washington was shortly after dawn in Hawaii.
Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, arrived at his office at 9:25 AM. He was shown the message and important delivery time. One junior officer pointed out the possibility of an attack on Hawaii; another urged that Kimmel be notified. But Stark refused; he did nothing all morning. Years later, he told the press that his conscience was clear concerning Pearl Harbor because all his actions had been dictated by a “higher authority.”36 As Chief of Naval Operations, Stark had only one higher authority: Roosevelt.
In the War Department, where the statement had also been decoded, Colonel Rufus Bratton, head of Army Intelligence’s Far Eastern section, understood the message’s terrible significance. But the head of intelligence told him nothing could be done until Chief of Staff General Marshall arrived. Bratton tried reaching Marshall at home, but was repeatedly told the general was out horseback riding. The horseback ride turned out to be a very long one. When Bratton finally reached Marshall by phone and explained the emergency, Marshall said he would come to the War Department. Marshall took 75 minutes to make the 10-minute drive. He didn’t come to his office until 11:25 AM – an extremely late hour with the nation on the brink of war. He perused the Japanese message and was shown the delivery time. Every officer in Marshall’s office agreed these indicated an attack in the Pacific at about 1 PM EST. The general finally agreed that Hawaii should be alerted, but time was running out.
Marshall had only to pick up his desk phone to reach Pearl Harbor on the transpacific line. Doing so would not have averted the attack, but at least our men would have been at their battle stations. Instead, the general wrote a dispatch, which was not even marked “priority” or “urgent.” After it was encoded it went to the Washington office of Western Union. From there it was relayed to San Francisco. From San Francisco it was transmitted via RCA commercial radio to Honolulu. General Short received it six hours after the attack. Two hours later it reached Kimmel. One can imagine their exasperation on reading it.
Despite all the evidence accrued through Magic and other sources during the previous months, Marshall had never warned Hawaii. To historians – ignorant of that classified evidence – it would appear the general had tried to save Pearl Harbor, “but alas, too late.” Similarly, FDR sent a last-minute plea for peace to Emperor Hirohito. Although written a week earlier, he did not send it until the evening of December 6th.37 It was to be delivered by Ambassador Grew, who would be unable to receive an audience with the emperor before December 8th. Thus the message could not conceivably have forestalled the attack – but posterity would think that FDR, too, had made “a valiant, last effort.”
Marshall BUSTED
As for Marshall’s notorious “horseback ride” which allegedly prevented him from warning Pearl Harbor in time, that cover story was unintentionally blown by Arthur Upham Pope, in his 1943 biography of Maxim Litvinoff, the Soviet ambassador to the United States. Litvinoff arrived in Washington on the morning of December 7th, 1941 – a highly opportune day to seek additional aid for the Soviets – and, according to Pope, was met at the airport that morning by General Marshall.
The Coverup
Pearl Harbor’s secrets had been successfully preserved before the fact – but what about after? Many people around the nation, including some vocal congressmen, demanded to know why America had been caught off guard.
President Roosevelt said he would appoint an investigatory commission. Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts – a pro-British internationalist friendly with FDR – was selected to head it. Also appointed to the group: Major General Frank McCoy, General George Marshall’s close friend for 30 years; Brigadier General Joseph McNarney, who was on Marshall’s staff and chosen on his recommendation; retired Rear Admiral Joseph Reeves, whom FDR had given a job in Lend-Lease; and Admiral William Standley, a former fleet commander. Only the last seemed to have no obvious fraternity with the Washington set.
The Roberts Commission. L-R: McNarney, Standley, Roberts, Reeves, McCoy
The commission conducted only two to three days of hearings in Washington. Admiral Standley, arriving late, was startled by the inquiry’s chummy atmosphere. Admiral Harold Stark and General Marshall were asked no difficult or embarrassing questions. Furthermore, all testimony was taken unsworn and unrecorded – an irregularity that, at Standley’s urging, was corrected.
The commission then flew to Hawaii, where it remained 19 days. When Admiral Kimmel was summoned, he brought a fellow officer to act as counsel. Justice Roberts disallowed this on grounds that the investigation was not a trial, and the admiral not a defendant. Because Kimmel and General Walter Short were not formally “on trial,” they were also denied all traditional rights of defendants: to ask questions and cross-examine witnesses. Kimmel was also shocked that the proceeding’s stenographers – one a teenager, the other with almost no court experience – omitted much of his testimony and left other parts badly garbled. Permission to correct the errors – other than adding footnotes to the end of the commission’s report – was refused.38
The Roberts Commission laid all blame for Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian commanders: they had underestimated the import of the November 27th warning; they had not taken sufficient defensive or surveillance actions; they were guilty of “dereliction of duty.” On the other hand, it said, Stark and Marshall had discharged their duties in exemplary fashion. Remarkably, the report’s section declaring this was first submitted to Stark and Marshall for revisions and approval. Admiral Standley dissented with the findings but did not write a minority opinion after being told that doing so might jeopardize the war effort by lowering the nation’s confidence in its leaders. Standley later called Roberts’s handling of the investigation “as crooked as a snake.”39 Admiral Richardson, Kimmel’s predecessor as Pacific Fleet commander, said of the report: “It is the most unfair, unjust, and deceptively dishonest document ever printed by the Government Printing Office.”40
Roberts brought a final copy of the report to FDR. The President read it and delightedly tossed it to a secretary, saying, “Give that in full to the papers for their Sunday editions.”41 The words “dereliction of duty” were emblazoned in headlines across the country. America’s outrage fell on Kimmel and Short. They were traitors, it was said; they should be shot! The two were inundated with hate mail and death threats. The press, with its ageless capacity to manufacture villains, stretched the commission’s slurs. Even the wives of the commanders were subjected to vicious canards.
There was great outcry for courts-martial – which was exactly what the two officers sought: to resolve the issue of Pearl Harbor in a bona fide courtroom, using established rules of evidence, instead of Owen Roberts’s personal methods. The Roosevelt administration, of course, did not desire that – in an orthodox courtroom, a sharp defense attorney might start digging into Washington’s secrets. So the issue was sidestepped by again invoking security concerns due to the war effort. It was announced that courts-martial would be held – but postponed “until such time as the public interest and safety would permit.”
Sufficient delay would also cause the three-year statute of limitations that applied in such cases to elapse. But that was the last thing Kimmel and Short wanted; court-martial was their only means of clearing themselves. Thus they voluntarily waived the statute of limitations.
Their Day in Court
By 1944, the Allies were clearly winning the war, and national security would no longer wash as a barrier to courts-martial. A joint Congressional resolution mandated trials. At last, the former Hawaiian commanders would have their day in court.
In August, the Naval Court of Inquiry opened. A source inside the Navy Department had already tipped Kimmel and his attorneys about the scores of Magic intercepts kept from the admiral in 1941. One of the attorneys, a former Navy captain, managed to get at the Department’s files, and authenticated the existence of many. Obtaining their release was another matter. Obstruction after obstruction appeared – until Kimmel tried a ploy. Walking out of the courtroom, he bellowed to his lawyer that they would have to tell the press that important evidence was being withheld.
By the next day, the requested intercepts had been delivered – 43 in all. The admirals on the Court listened to them being read with looks of horror and disbelief. Two of the admirals flung their pencils down. More than 2,000 died at Pearl Harbor because those messages had been withheld. Navy Department officers gave additional testimony. After nearly three months, the inquiry finished. The verdict of the Roberts Commission was overturned. Admiral Kimmel was exonerated on all charges. Admiral Stark — who had rejected pleas of juniors to notify Hawaii on the morning of the attack – was severely censured.
The Naval Court of Inquiry
News of the intercepts leaked to the Army Pearl Harbor Board, convening at the same time. The Board secured copies of Magic from War Department files. The Board’s conclusions still expressed modest criticism of General Short, but found overwhelming guilt in General Marshall and his Chief of War Plans, General Gerow. Its report bluntly concluded: “Up to the morning of December 7, 1941, everything that the Japanese were planning to do was known to the United States.”42
Direct criticism of the President was forbidden to these proceedings as beyond their jurisdiction. But FDR held ultimate responsibility for Pearl Harbor, and the warnings he had received – some of which only later came to light – far exceeded anything they might have dreamed.
The verdicts wrought dismay in the Roosevelt administration. But a solution was swiftly concocted. It was announced that, in the interest of national security, the findings would not become public until the war’s end. (This would give Washington time to conduct “new” investigations.) Navy Secretary Knox told the press that the Naval Court of Inquiry had marked its conclusions “secret,” and therefore nothing could be published. A stunned Admiral Orin Murfin, who had presided over the Court, protested to the Secretary. It was true that the breaking of Japan’s diplomatic code was not for public knowledge – but, he pointed out, the Court had only marked part of its determinations secret. Charles Rugg, Kimmel’s attorney, telegrammed Knox demanding to know how the “innocent” verdict granted the admiral could be deemed classified. Nevertheless, the reports were suppressed.
Damage Control
Washington now explained that it would conduct additional investigations supplementing the courts of inquiry. Henry Stimson picked Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Henry Clausen – known to disagree with the Army Board findings – to carry out the War Department’s investigation. The Navy Secretary appointed Admiral W. Kent Hewitt. Hewitt’s role, however, was largely titular; most of the operation was carried out by Lieutenant Commander John F. Sonnett.
The ventures were without precedent: a major was to investigate (and overturn) a verdict rendered by generals; a lieutenant commander was to challenge a verdict of admirals.
The game rules were reminiscent of those of the Roberts Commission. Kimmel and his attorneys were refused permission to attend the Hewitt Inquiry, which operated under this directive: “Except that the testimony you take should be taken under oath so as to be on equal status in this respect with the testimony previously taken, you will conduct your examination in an informal manner and without regard to legal or formal requirements.”43
Not surprisingly, witnesses who had testified against Washington now reversed themselves. Colonel Rufus Bratton had informed the Army Pearl Harbor Board that on December 6, 1941, he had delivered the first 13 parts of Japan’s terminative message to General Marshall via his secretary, and to General Gerow, Chief of the War Plans Division. Now in Germany, Bratton was flagged down on the Autobahn by Clausen, who handed him affidavits from Marshall’s secretary and Gerow denying the deliveries were ever made. Confronted with denials from the Army’s highest levels, Bratton recanted, signing a new affidavit.44
Other officers, their memories similarly “refreshed,” retracted their statements about seeing the “Winds” message; now, it seemed, the message never existed. These individuals faced a dilemma. They were career military men. They knew telling the truth would pit them against the Army Chief of Staff and end all hope of promotion.
But one man wouldn’t bend – Captain Laurance Safford, father of naval cryptography. Safford had overseen that branch of naval intelligence for many years. He personally invented some 20 cryptographic devices, including the most advanced used by our armed forces. For his work, he was ultimately awarded the Legion of Merit.
READ MORE:Far Worse than Hiroshima — The US Bombings on Japan the Govt Wants You to Forget
Safford, who had testified before the Naval Inquiry that he had seen the “Winds” message, was confronted by Sonnett. Safford wrote of this meeting: “His purpose seemed to be to refute testimony (before earlier investigations) that was unfavorable to anyone in Washington, to beguile ‘hostile’ witnesses into changing their stories. . . .” In a memorandum written immediately after the encounter, Safford recorded some of Sonnett’s verbal prods, such as: “It is very doubtful that there ever was a Winds Execute [message]”; “It is no reflection on your veracity to change your testimony”; and, “It is no reflection on your mentality to have your memory play you tricks – after such a long period.”45 Safford realized a colossal coverup was underway, but was not surprised. He had already discovered that all copies of the “Winds” message in Navy files, along with other important Pearl Harbor memos, had been destroyed. Just four days after Pearl Harbor, Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, director of naval communications, told his subordinates: “Destroy all notes or anything in writing.”46 This was an illegal order – naval memoranda belong to the American people and cannot be destroyed except by Congressional authority. Stories circulated of a similar information purge in the War Department. Some files, however, escaped destruction.
The Clausen and Hewitt inquiries pleased Washington. Equipped with fresh sophistries, the administration produced highly revamped versions of the Army and Navy inquiry findings. The dual Army/Navy announcement came on August 29, 1945 – the very day American troops arrived in Japan, when a rejoicing public was unlikely to care about Pearl Harbor’s origins. The War Secretary’s report shifted the blame back to Short, while saying of General Marshall that “throughout this matter I believe that he acted with his usual great skill, energy, and efficiency.”47 It admitted the Army Board had criticized Marshall, but said this was completely unjustified. The Navy Secretary’s statement again imputed guilt to Kimmel, while asserting that Washington had not been negligent in keeping him informed. It did acknowledge that Admiral Stark should not be given a future position requiring “superior judgement.”
Consequently, Americans didn’t learn what the original inquiries had determined. Of course, anyone wanting to find out for himself could do so when the government released the official record of the hearings connected with Pearl Harbor – if he didn’t mind wading through 40 volumes.
Congress Enters the Act
Only one obstacle remained to burying Pearl Harbor. Congress had long made noises about conducting its own investigation; with the war over, it was sure to do so.
To nip any threat in the bud, the administration sent a bill to both the House and Senate forbidding disclosure of coded materials. It was promptly passed by the Senate, whose members had never heard of Magic and had no idea that the bill would hamstring their forthcoming investigation.
Admiral Kimmel read about the bill in the papers. He and his attorneys notified the press and congressmen about the measure’s implications. As a result, the House voted it down and the Senate rescinded it.
Capitol Hill’s Pearl Harbor probe began in November 1945, when the Joint Congressional Committee assembled. It comprised six Democrats and four Republicans. A split along party lines quickly emerged. The Democrats knew that, even though Roosevelt had recently died, a Pearl Harbor scandal could devastate them at the ballot box. But so long as all six Democrats maintained unswerving party loyalty, a majority decision favoring the administration was inevitable.
Admiral Richardson testifies before Joint Congressional Committee
The Democrats used their edge to jockey things their way. The counsel chosen for the committee was a Democrat who previously served with Henry Stimson; his assistant was a former New Dealer working for the law firm of Dean Acheson, the Under Secretary of State. A majority vote determined what evidence the committee would review. Several witnesses Kimmel wanted introduced were never called.
Coercion prevented others from testifying. Major Warren J. Clear, who had warned the War Department in early 1941 that the Japanese were planning to attack a series of islands including Hawaii, was ordered not to appear before the committee.48 So was Chief Warrant Officer Ralph T. Briggs, the man who had originally intercepted the “Winds” message at a United States monitoring station. He was summoned before his commanding officer, who forbade him to testify. “Perhaps someday you’ll understand the reason for this,” he was told. Briggs had a blind wife to support. He did not come forward as a witness.49
The treatment of Lieutenant Commander Alwin Kramer was cruder. Kramer, who had been in charge of the Navy Department’s Translation Section at the time of Pearl Harbor, and had once testified to having seen the “Winds” message, was confined to a psychiatric ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Representative Frank Keefe, a committee Republican, learned of this and vigorously protested.50 Kramer was told that his testimony had better change or he’d be in the ward for the rest of his life. The officer went before the committee, but gave a confusing narrative that essentially denied existence of the “Winds” message.
Captain Laurance Safford, however, remained fearless in his revelations. A campaign to “nail” him was soon evidenced among committee Democrats. Congressman John Murphy, a former assistant DA, put him through a wringer of cross-examination. Safford’s personal mail was read aloud before the committee in an effort to humiliate him. Artful polemics made the captain – naval cryptography’s most eminent man – look forgetful on one hand, vindictive toward superiors on the other.
Safford was accused of being the only one to believe in the “Winds” message. In fact, no less than seven officers had acknowledged seeing it before having their memories “helped.” Perhaps the browbeating of Safford helped inspire Colonel Otis Sadtler of the Signal Corps. During the Clausen investigation, Sadtler had recanted his testimony about the message. Now he came forward and corroborated Safford. (Any doubts about the “Winds” affair have since been dispelled. As historian John Toland reported, both Japanese assistant naval attachés posted at the Washington embassy in 1941, Yuzuru Sanematsu and Yoshimori Terai, have verified that the message was transmitted on December 4th, exactly as Safford said.)51
Sadtler
The Congressional investigation battled on for over six months. In the end, all six Democrats held to the party. One Republican (Congressman Bertrand Gearhart) signed the majority report, reportedly for political reasons,52 and a second, Representative Frank Keefe, signed in exchange for modifications in the findings. An 8-2 majority decision was handed down on Pearl Harbor assigning most of the blame to the Hawaiian commanders, some blame to the War and Navy departments, and none at all to Roosevelt and his civilian administration.
That was the last major official inquiry into Japan’s attack. The lie of Kimmel and Short’s guilt was perpetuated and Washington’s secrets sealed. Congress did conduct a “mini-probe” in 1995, at the urging of the families of General Short (died 1949) and Admiral Kimmel (died 1968). The families hoped to restore the ranks of their libeled, demoted fathers. The 1995 probe requested that the Pentagon reinvestigate Pearl Harbor in light of new information. However, on December 1, 1995, Undersecretary of Defense Edwin Dorn concluded his own investigation with these comments: “I cannot conclude that Admiral Kimmel and General Short were victims of unfair official actions and thus I cannot conclude that the official remedy of advancement on the retired list is in order.”53
Collaboration Pays
Those who cooperated with the Pearl Harbor coverup were generously rewarded. As to the men who served with Owen Roberts on the Roberts Commission:
Though he had been retired since 1936, five months after signing the commission’s report Rear Admiral Reeves was advanced to full admiral for “eminent and conspicuous service in the Spanish-American war,” his gallantry discovered by Roosevelt 44 years after the fact.54
In January 1942, the same month that he signed the commission’s report, Brigadier General McNarney was promoted to major general, and subsequently lieutenant general, full general, and after the war commanding general of American occupation forces in Germany.
After signing the report, Admiral Standley received the Distinguished Service Medal, and the following month (April 1942) was appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union.
Retired General Frank McCoy became chairman of the Far Eastern Commission.
As to other major figures in the coverup:
General Marshall was made America’s first five-star general (no such designation had previously existed). Subsequently he enjoyed stints as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.
Brigadier General Gerow was made a lieutenant general and commander of the 15th U.S. Army.
Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clausen, who oversaw the inquiry that revamped the findings of the Army Pearl Harbor Board, went on to spend 16 years as the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite in the Southern Jurisdiction, same position Albert Pike held. In other words, he became the highest-ranking Freemason in America. (Given that President Roosevelt was a 33rd degree Freemason, and that Marshall was a Freemason as well, it is perhaps not surprising that Clausen’s report absolved Roosevelt and Marshall of any wrongdoing. One would not be unjustified in wondering if Masonic handshakes and countersigns preceded the launching of the Clausen investigation.)
Secretary of State Cordell Hull received the 1945 Nobel Peace Prize.
As to men who sought to tell the truth about Pearl Harbor, such as Captain Laurance Safford, Colonel Otis Sadtler, and Colonel Rufus Bratton, their careers did not advance.
Some postscripts
On May 25, 1999, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution that Kimmel and Short had performed their duties “competently and professionally” and that our losses at Pearl Harbor were “not a result of dereliction of duty.” “They were denied vital intelligence that was available in Washington,” said Senator William V. Roth, Jr. Senator Strom Thurmond called Kimmel and Short “the last victims of Pearl Harbor.”55
Former Justice Dept. official Daryl Borgquist discovered from examination of the drafts of Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech that work on it was begun on December 6, the day before the actual attack. And from Helen E. Hamman, daughter of Don Smith, who directed the Red Cross’s War Service before World War II, we have the following quote which appeared in the June 2, 2001 Washington Times:
Shortly before the attack in 1941, President Roosevelt called him [my father] to the White House for a meeting concerning a top‑secret matter. At this meeting, the president advised my father that his intelligence staff had informed him of a pending attack on Pearl Harbor, by the Japanese. He anticipated many casualties and much loss; he instructed my father to send workers and supplies to a holding area. When he protested to the president, President Roosevelt told him that the American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe unless they were attacked within their own borders. . . . He followed the orders of his president and spent many years contemplating this action, which he considered ethically and morally wrong. I do not know the Kimmel family, therefore would gain nothing by fabricating this situation, however, I do feel the time has come for this conspiracy to be exposed and Admiral Kimmel vindicated of all charges. In this manner perhaps both he and my father may rest in peace.
BBC, Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor (1989). Watch it on YouTube:
Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 8-9, 275.
Toland, 262.
George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007), 257.
Russell Grenfell, Main Fleet to Singapore (New York: MacMillan, 1952), 107.
Morgenstern, 116.
Ibid., 58.
Stinnett, 18.
Morgenstern, 63-64.
Ibid., 261.
For a summary of transcripts of these and many other relevant intercepts, see Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Contribution to the Japanese Attack (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair, 1954) 42-74.
Theobald, 43.
Victor, 48; Toland, 281-82; 290-91; interview with Thorpe, Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor, produced by Roy Davies (London: BBC, 1989); 41:48-42:56.
Toland, 317.
Victor, 35-36, 50-51.
Toland, 261; see especially the paperback edition (New York: Berkley Books, 1982), which contains an additional postscript, pp. 349-50.
Martin Dies, “Assassination and Its Aftermath,” American Opinion (April 1964): 33.
Stinnett, 46.
Husband E. Kimmel, Admiral Kimmel’s Story (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), 65.
Morgenstern, 77.
Edwin T. Layton, with Roger Pineau and John Costello, “And I Was There “: Pearl Harbor and Midway – Breaking the Secrets (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 217.
Morgenstern, 71.
Percy L. Greaves; Bettina Greaves, ed., Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2010), 174.
Kimmel, 51.
Toland, 282-83, 298.
Theobald, 26.
Stinnett, 179.
Kimmel, 147-48; Toland 33-35.
Toland, 321.
Stinnett, 255.
Toland, 37.
“Top Secret Report, Army Pearl Harbor Board,” Hearings before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office), 230. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/pha/army/tsreport.html.
Kimmel, 165.
Toland, 141-42.
Ibid., 135-36.
Stinnett, 255.
Greaves, 609.
Toland, 261.
Ibid., 197-98.
Greaves, 764; Toland, 153.
Toland, Infamy, postscript to paperbound edition, 346-47.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 