The Mises Institute Revisionist History of War Conference
EPub Format
On May 15-17, the libertarian Mises Institute hosted a “Revisionist History of War Conference” at its Auburn headquarters.
I was one of sixteen speakers invited to make a presentation, with my topic being “The True History of World War II.” I thought my thirty-five minute talk went well, and the audio version is now available:
Each speaker was invited to submit a written article roughly corresponding to his presentation, and these will be published in the conference proceedings. Mine appears below, with many portions of my text being drawn from the numerous previous articles on this same subject that I have published since 2018.
Considering the Analogy of the Russia-Ukraine War
World War II was certainly the most colossal military conflict in human history and it became the shaping event of our modern world, with its consequences and influence still extremely important nearly eighty years after the guns fell silent.
Major wars are naturally accompanied by a great deal of governmental media propaganda, and this was certainly the case with the Second World War.
Over time that propaganda eventually congealed into a distorted historical narrative that has become so ubiquitous across our schools, news media, and popular entertainment that it is casually assumed to be true and correct by nearly our entire population more than three generations after the events in question, sometimes with seriously damaging political consequences.
This powerful synthetic narrative of “the Good War” still greatly influences American politics and foreign policy down to the present day, so trying to accurately reconstruct the reality of what actually happened long before almost any of us were born seems a useful and important project.
In attempting to pierce the many thick layers of those government-sponsored distortions regarding World War II, I think it is helpful to start with a recent and analogous case, one that is far better understood by large portions of the more thoughtful American public.
As the late Prof. Stephen Cohen pointed out several years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin probably ranks as the most consequential political figure of our young twenty-first century.
Yet over the last decade or so, no national leader since Adolf Hitler has been so massively demonized by the Western media, and this almost unprecedented campaign of vilification went into overdrive following the outbreak of the Ukraine war in February 2022.
Once Russian troops crossed the Ukraine border, the response of America and the rest of the West was closer to an outright declaration of war against Russia rather than merely a reversion to the decades of old Cold War policies directed against the Soviet Union.
Some $300 billion of Russia’s financial assets held in Western banks were frozen, Russian institutions were disconnected from supposedly neutral international systems such as SWIFT, Russian civilian flights were banned over Western territory, and even Russian musical compositions were removed from the performances of Western symphonies.
An enormous wave of very harsh Western economic and trade sanctions was imposed against Russia, while the Western property holdings of wealthy Russian private citizens were seized.
The obvious intent of all these coordinated measures was to inflict severe economic and psychological damage upon ordinary Russian society and its ruling elites, thereby destabilizing the government of that country and perhaps leading to its collapse or overthrow.
Indeed, some prominent American political and media figures explicitly called for the assassination of President Putin, the sort of public statements that would have been absolutely unthinkable during our long Cold War struggle against the hostile Soviet Communist regime.
As part of this process, nearly all of our mainstream media organs began loudly promoting an extremely distorted and dishonest narrative of how the conflict began. The Russian attack on Ukraine was so universally described as an “unprovoked invasion” that this two-word phrase almost seemed triggered by a single keystroke press.
But as most of us know, the actual facts were entirely different. Instead the military conflict that began in early 2022 was arguably one of the most “provoked” major wars in modern history, with the military and political provocations of the West and its Ukrainian client state [have been] gone on for at least eight years, finally reaching a fever-pitch just before the Russians attacked.
In 2014, Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, one of our most distinguished political scientists, gave a lengthy lecture explaining how the recent Western-backed coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically-elected and Russian-leaning government might eventually lead to a war with Russia, especially given the widespread talk of bringing Ukraine into NATO.
Once the war began in 2022, his prescient presentation went super-viral on YouTube, quickly attracting a worldwide audience of many millions, and its current total of 30 million views probably ranks it as the most widely-watched academic lecture in the history of the Internet.
Although the mainstream Western media almost totally boycotted and ignored his analysis, Mearsheimer was hardly alone in his description of the causes of the Ukraine war, a bloody conflict that has now probably taken more than a million European lives.
Many other very highly-regarded academic scholars and former government officials soon explained the roots of the war in similar terms.
These individuals included Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and former Ambassador Chas Freeman, as well as Ray McGovern, the former head of the CIA’s Soviet Policy Branch and a longtime Presidential Intelligence Briefer.
These knowledgeable experts and many others of similar views have become regular weekly interview guests on the YouTube channel of Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Dialogue Works channel, and various other venues.
This has allowed them to challenge the official media narrative by presenting their completely contrary analyses on all these controversial matters. Some of them have also regularly published articles providing their written perspectives, as have many bloggers and websites of similar views.
For years, Tucker Carlson had been the most popular host on cable television. So when he was fired by FoxNews last year, he quickly created his own new interview show, easily available on Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms, and it soon became hugely popular, sometimes attracting an audience larger than almost anything similar featured on traditional media.
Last year, he traveled to Moscow to interview President Putin for 90 minutes, and the resulting show attracted many tens of millions of viewers across his various platforms, leaving his former television colleagues green with envy.
So although the mainstream media continues to stubbornly promote a very distorted view of the facts, anyone who seeks to get the other side of the Ukraine war story from highly-regarded individuals can easily do so.
But suppose these powerful video platforms did not exist, nor their social media distribution channels, nor any other elements of today’s Internet.
Under those conditions, Mearsheimer, Sachs, McGovern, and all these other highly-credentialed experts might still hold exactly the same contrary views of our conflict with Russia, but would anyone have ever heard about them?
Mearsheimer’s 2014 lecture would have only been seen by its original audience of several hundred, and when the war broke out eight years later, perhaps a few of them might have dimly remembered his arguments, rather than the thirty million who then discovered his presentation and watched it in 2022.
After Carlson was fired by FoxNews, he would have disappeared almost without a trace, never attracting the many millions of viewers who have continued to watch him on the Internet.
Furthermore, suppose that the Western conflict with Russia had ultimately been entirely successful, with military reverses or economic devastation eventually leading to the collapse of the Russian government.
If Putin and his entire political circle had been overthrown, then killed or driven into exile, while his country was subdued and firmly brought into the American orbit, would anyone have much questioned the exact circumstances under which the war began?
I think these thoughts should be firmly kept in mind as we begin exploring the history of the Second World War, a conflict whose standard historical narrative all of us have absorbed throughout our entire lives from every mainstream media source.
The Origins of World War II According to A.J.P. Taylor
There exist countless starting points for those who seek to discover the true history of World War II. But I think that one of the best of these comes in a relatively short book published in 1961 by A.J.P. Taylor, a renowned Oxford historian.
As a Harvard freshman, I had taken an introductory history course, and one of the primary required texts on World War II had been Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War. In that book, he persuasively laid out a case for how the conflict began that was radically different from what I had always been told in all my media accounts. That sharp difference was true at the time and it has remained so during the decades since then.
As most of us know from our standard history books, the flashpoint of the conflict had been Germany’s demand for the return of Danzig. But that border city under Polish control had a 95% German population, which overwhelmingly desired reunification with its traditional homeland after twenty years of enforced separation following the end of the First World War.
According to Taylor only a dreadful diplomatic blunder by the British had led the Poles to refuse that reasonable request, thereby provoking the war. The widespread later claim that Hitler sought to conquer the world was totally absurd, and instead the German leader had actually made every effort to avoid war with Britain or France.
The 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II naturally prompted numerous historical discussions in the media, and these led me to dig out my old copy of Taylor’s short volume, which I reread for the first time in nearly forty years.
I found it just as masterful and persuasive as I had back in my college dorm room days, and the glowing cover-blurbs suggested some of the immediate acclaim the work had received.
The Washington Post lauded the author as “Britain’s most prominent living historian,” World Politics called it “Powerfully argued, brilliantly written, and always persuasive,” The New Statesman, Britain’s leading leftist magazine, described it as “A masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written,” and the august Times Literary Supplement characterized it as “simple, devastating, superlatively readable, and deeply disturbing.”
As an international best-seller, it surely ranked as Taylor’s most famous work, and I could easily understand why it was still on my required college reading list nearly two decades after its original publication.
Yet in revisiting Taylor’s ground-breaking history, I made a surprising discovery. Despite all the international sales and critical praise, the book’s findings soon aroused tremendous hostility in certain quarters.
Taylor’s lectures at Oxford had been enormously popular for a quarter century, but as a direct result of the controversy “Britain’s most prominent living historian” was summarily purged from the faculty not long afterwards.
At the beginning of his first chapter, Taylor had noted how strange he found it that more than twenty years after the start of the world’s most cataclysmic war no serious history had been produced carefully analyzing the outbreak. Perhaps the retaliation that he encountered led him to better understand part of that puzzle.
Despite the intense mainstream hostility to any such candid account of the origins of the world war, others have occasionally undertaken that same project, and sometimes with considerable difficulty they have managed to get their books into print.
Decades after Taylor’s pioneering volume, an outstanding historical analysis reaching very similar conclusions was published in German by Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, who had spent his career as a fully mainstream professional military man, rising to the rank of major general in the German army before retiring. A couple of years ago I finally read the English translation of 1939 – The War That Had Many Fathers, which appeared in 2011, released exactly a half-century after Taylor’s seminal work.
The author considerably extended Taylor’s analysis, with his 700 pages describing in great detail the enormous efforts that Hitler had taken to avoid war and settle that boundary dispute, even spending many months on fruitless negotiations and offering extremely reasonable terms. Indeed, the German dictator had made numerous concessions to Poland that none of his democratic Weimar predecessors had ever been willing to consider.
But these proposals were all rejected, while Polish provocations escalated, including violent attacks on their own country’s sizeable German minority population, until war seemed the only possible option.
The historical account presented in both these major works suggested eerie echoes of the factors behind Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Then as now, politically influential elements in the West seemed quite eager to provoke the war, using Danzig as the spark to ignite the conflict much like the simmering bloodshed in the Donbass had been used to force Putin’s hand.
The Remarkable Historical Discoveries of David Irving
Taylor had spent twenty-five years as one of Oxford’s leading academic lights, but after he published his controversial but important book demonstrating that British diplomacy had been responsible for the outbreak of war with Germany, he was purged from his university.
Several decades later another great British historian suffered an even worse fate for somewhat similar reasons, seeing his career destroyed, being driven into personal bankruptcy, and eventually even almost spending the rest of his life in a foreign prison.
With many millions of his books in print, including a string of bestsellers translated into numerous languages, David Irving ranks as one of the most internationally-successful British historians of the last one hundred years. Irving’s remarkable archival research allowed him to publish numerous ground-breaking books whose primary source discoveries have completely overturned our knowledge of World War II.
I expect that the huge corpus of his writings will constitute a central pillar that generations of future historians will rely upon for understanding that conflict after most of its other recent chroniclers are long forgotten.
Given Irving’s uncommonly strong scholarly integrity, it was hardly surprising that his career was eventually destroyed by some of those mediocre figures who have devoted their lives to maintaining cherished historical myths, and he became involved in a rancorous 1998 lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Theology and Holocaust Studies.
The case culminated in a celebrated 2000 British libel trial that Irving lost.
That legal battle was certainly a David-and-Goliath affair, with wealthy Jewish movie producers and corporate executives providing Lipstadt with a huge war-chest of $13 million, allowing her to hire a veritable army of 40 researchers and legal experts, captained by one of Britain’s most successful Jewish divorce lawyers.
By contrast, Irving, being an impecunious historian, was forced to defend himself without benefit of legal counsel.
In real life unlike in fable, the Goliaths of this world are almost invariably triumphant, and this case was no exception, with Irving being driven into personal bankruptcy, resulting in the loss of his fine central London home.
But seen from the longer perspective of history, I think the victory of his tormentors was a remarkably Pyrrhic one.
Although the target of their unleashed hatred was Irving’s alleged “Holocaust denial,” as near as I can tell, that particular topic was almost entirely absent from all of Irving’s dozens of books, and exactly that very silence was what had provoked their spittle-flecked outrage.
Therefore, lacking such a clear target, their lavishly-funded corps of researchers and fact-checkers instead spent a year or more apparently performing a line-by-line and footnote-by-footnote review of everything Irving had ever published, seeking to locate every single historical error that could possibly cast him in a bad professional light.
With almost limitless money and manpower, they even utilized the process of legal discovery to subpoena and read the thousands of pages in his bound personal diaries and correspondence, thereby hoping to find some evidence of his “wicked thoughts.” Denial, a 2016 Hollywood film co-written by Lipstadt, may provide a reasonable outline of the sequence of events as seen from her perspective.
Yet despite such massive financial and human resources, they apparently came up almost totally empty, at least if Lipstadt’s triumphalist 2005 book History on Trial may be credited. Across four decades of Irving’s research and writing, which had produced a multitude of controversial historical claims of the most astonishing nature, they only managed to find a couple of dozen rather minor alleged errors of fact or interpretation, most of these being ambiguous or disputed.
And the worst they discovered after reading every page of the many linear meters of Irving’s personal diaries was that he had once composed a short “racially insensitive” ditty for his infant daughter, a trivial item which they naturally then trumpeted as proof that he was a “racist.”
Thus, they seemingly admitted that Irving’s enormous body of historical writing was perhaps 99.9% accurate.
I think this silence of “the dog that didn’t bark” echoes with thunderclap volume. I’m not aware of any other academic scholar in the entire history of the world who has had all his decades of lifetime work subjected to such painstakingly exhaustive hostile scrutiny.
And since Irving apparently passed that test with such flying colors, I think we can regard almost every astonishing claim in all of his books—as recapitulated in his riveting public lectures—as absolutely accurate.
This conclusion has important consequences given the startling nature of Irving’s historical discoveries.
Whereas Taylor and others had demonstrated that the decisions taken by the British government had provoked the Second World War, Irving’s remarkable archival research uncovered some of the sordid reasons that those British officials had taken the actions that they did.
Although Winston Churchill had only become a member of the British cabinet on the day that war was declared against Germany, for many years prior both he and his numerous parliamentary allies had been heavily pressing from the outside for a strong anti-German policy, pressure that had a powerful influence upon government policy.
In 1987 Irving published the first volume of Churchill’s War, and his exhaustive archival research produced huge revelations regarding the character of that historic figure, demonstrating the latter’s tremendous venality and corruption.
Churchill was a huge spendthrift who lived lavishly and often far beyond his financial means, employing an army of dozens of personal servants at his large country estate despite frequently lacking any regular and assured sources of income to maintain them.
This predicament naturally put him at the mercy of those individuals willing to support his sumptuous lifestyle in exchange for determining his political activities.
And somewhat similar pecuniary means were also used to secure the backing of a network of other elected representatives from across all the British parties, who became Churchill’s close allies in that project.
To put things in plain language, during the years leading up to the Second World War, both Churchill and numerous other fellow British MPs were regularly receiving sizable financial stipends—cash bribes—from Jewish and Czech sources in exchange for promoting a policy of extreme hostility toward the German government and actually advocating for war.
The sums involved were quite considerable, with the Czech government alone probably making payments that amounted to tens of millions of dollars in present-day money to British elected officials, publishers, and journalists working to overturn the official peace policy of their existing government.
A particularly notable instance occurred in early 1938 when Churchill suddenly lost all his accumulated wealth in a foolish gamble on the American stock-market, and was soon forced to put his beloved country estate up for sale to avoid personal bankruptcy, only to quickly be bailed out by a foreign Jewish millionaire intent upon promoting a war against Germany.
Indeed, the early stages of Churchill’s sordid involvement in this activity were recounted in a chapter that Irving aptly entitled “The Hired Help.”
Ironically enough, German Intelligence learned of this massive bribery of British parliamentarians, and passed the information along to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was horrified to discover the corrupt motives of his fierce political opponents, but apparently remained too much of a gentleman to have them arrested and prosecuted.
I’m no expert in the British laws of that era, but for elected officials to do the bidding of foreigners on matters of war and peace in exchange for huge secret payments seems almost a textbook example of treason to me, and I think that Churchill’s timely execution might surely have saved tens of millions of lives.
My impression is that individuals of low personal character are those most likely to sell out the interests of their own country in exchange for large sums of foreign money, and as such they usually constitute the natural targets of foreign spies and other nefarious plotters.
Churchill certainly seemed to fall into this category, with rumors of his massive personal corruption swirling around him from early in his long political career. Later, he supplemented his income by engaging in widespread art-forgery, a fact that Roosevelt eventually discovered and probably used as a point of personal leverage against him.
Also quite serious was Churchill’s constant state of drunkenness, with his inebriation being so widespread as to constitute clinical alcoholism. Indeed, Irving noted that in his private conversations FDR routinely referred to Churchill as “a drunken bum.”
During the late 1930s, Churchill and his clique of similarly bought-and-paid-for political allies had endlessly attacked and denounced Chamberlain’s government for its peace policy, and he regularly made the wildest sort of unsubstantiated accusations, claiming that the Germans were undertaking a huge military build-up aimed against Britain.
Such roiling charges were often widely echoed by a media heavily influenced by Jewish interests, doing much to poison the state of German-British relations.
Eventually, these accumulated pressures forced Chamberlain into the extremely unwise act of providing an unconditional guarantee of military backing to Poland’s irresponsible dictatorship.
As a result, the Poles then rather arrogantly refused any border negotiations with Germany, thereby lighting the fuse that eventually led to the German invasion six months later and Britain’s subsequent declaration of war.
The British media had widely promoted Churchill as the leading pro-war political figure, and once Chamberlain was forced to create a wartime government of national unity, his leading critic was brought into it and given the naval affairs portfolio.
Irving’s 1987 book on Churchill had laid bare his subject’s extremely lavish lifestyle as well as his lack of any solid income, along with the terrible political consequences of that dangerous combination of factors.
This shocking historical picture was fully confirmed in 2015 by a noted financial expert whose own book focused entirely on Churchill’s tangled finances, and did so with full cooperative access to his subject’s family archives.
The story told by David Lough in No More Champagne was actually far more extreme than what had been described by Irving almost three decades earlier, with the author even suggesting that Churchill’s financial risk-taking was almost unprecedented for anyone in public or private life.
For example, at the very beginning of his book, Lough explained that Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940, the same day that German forces began their invasion of the Low Countries and France.
But aside from those huge military and political challenges, Britain’s new wartime leader faced an entirely different crisis as well. He found himself unable to cover his personal bills, debt interest, or tax payments, all of which were due at the end of the month, thereby forcing him to desperately obtain a huge secret payment from the same Austrian Jewish businessman who had previously rescued him financially.
Stories like this may reveal the hidden side of larger geopolitical developments, which sometimes only come to light many decades later.
John T. Flynn on Franklin Roosevelt’s Plans for War
Although Churchill and his political allies had continually pressed the British government into the uncompromising diplomatic policies that ultimately resulted in the war, they were merely parliamentary backbenchers, while far greater pressure along very similar lines came from an entirely different direction.
The name John T. Flynn is probably unknown today to all but one American in a hundred, if even that. But as a writer on politics and economics, he had spent the 1930s as one of America’s most influential progressive journalists.
During that decade, his weekly column in The New Republic allowed him to serve as a lodestar for America’s liberal elites, while his regular appearances in Colliers, an illustrated mass circulation weekly reaching many millions of Americans, provided him a platform comparable to that of a major television personality in the later heyday of network TV.
Although initially sympathetic to Franklin Roosevelt’s goals, he soon became skeptical about the effectiveness of the president’s methods, noting the sluggish expansion of public works projects and wondering whether the vaunted NRA was actually more beneficial to big business owners than to ordinary workers.
As the years went by, his criticism of the Roosevelt Administration turned harsher on economic and eventually foreign policy grounds, and he incurred its enormous hostility as a consequence.
Prof. Ralph Raico later described how Roosevelt finally began sending personal letters to leading editors demanding that Flynn be barred from any prominent American print outlet, and perhaps as a consequence the latter lost his longstanding New Republic column immediately following FDR’s 1940 reelection, with his name permanently disappearing from mainstream periodicals.
But as late as 1948, he still retained enough of his once huge national reputation that when a small Irish-American press released his book The Roosevelt Myth, it soon became a top national bestseller.
In that book, Flynn noted that by the mid-1930s FDR’s various governmental schemes had failed to revive the American economy, while in 1937 a new economic collapse spiked unemployment back to the same levels as when the president had first entered office, confirming that harsh verdict of failure.
Therefore, Flynn alleged that by late 1937, FDR had turned towards an aggressive foreign policy aimed at involving the country in a major foreign war, primarily because he believed that this was the only route out of his desperate economic and political box, a stratagem not unknown among national leaders throughout history.
Indeed, in his January 5, 1938 New Republic column, Flynn had already alerted his disbelieving readers to the looming prospect of a large naval military build-up and warfare on the horizon after a top Roosevelt adviser had privately boasted to him that a large bout of “military Keynesianism” and a major foreign war would cure the country’s seemingly insurmountable economic problems.
At that time, war with Japan, possibly over Latin American interests, seemed the intended goal, but developing events in Europe soon persuaded FDR that orchestrating a general war against Germany was the best course of action. Flynn fleshed out many of the additional details in his later 1948 book.
Flynn’s remarkable January 1938 prediction that Roosevelt planned to foment a major war for domestic political reasons seems fully confirmed by diplomatic disclosures, with memoirs and other historical documents obtained by later researchers revealing that FDR ordered his diplomats to exert enormous pressure upon both the British and Polish governments to avoid any negotiated settlement with Germany, thereby leading to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
The last point is an important one since the confidential opinions of those closest to important historical events should be accorded considerable evidentiary weight.
In a 2019 article John Wear mustered the numerous contemporaneous assessments that implicated FDR as a pivotal figure in orchestrating the world war by his constant pressure upon the British political leadership, a policy that he even privately admitted could mean his impeachment if revealed.
Among other testimony, we have the statements of the Polish and British ambassadors to Washington and the American ambassador to London, who also passed along the concurring opinion of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain himself.
Indeed, the German capture and publication of secret Polish diplomatic documents in 1939 had already revealed much of this information, and journalist William Henry Chamberlin confirmed their authenticity in his 1950 book.
But since the mainstream media never reported any of these facts, they remain little known even today.
Our 1940 Media Purge and the Nomination of Wendell Willkie
Flynn was hardly the only prominent American public figure purged from the media around 1940 for his strong public opposition to FDR’s bellicose foreign policy and our growing involvement in the large European war whose outbreak the president had successfully helped to instigate.
Many such individuals lost their long-held standing in the media during the years around World War II, and permanently vanished from public view.
A leading example, somewhat analogous to that of Taylor, was Harry Elmer Barnes, an academic figure of great influence whose name today means almost nothing to the vast majority of highly-educated Americans.
Barnes had actually been one of the most frequent early contributors to Foreign Affairs, serving as a primary book reviewer for that venerable publication from its 1922 founding onward, while his reputation as one of America’s premier liberal academics was indicated by his scores of appearances in The Nation and The New Republic throughout that decade.
Indeed, he was widely credited with having played a central role in “revising” the history of the First World War so as to remove the cartoonish picture of unspeakable German wickedness left behind as a legacy of the dishonest wartime propaganda produced by the opposing British and American governments.
And his professional stature was demonstrated by his thirty-five or more books, many of them influential academic volumes, along with his numerous articles in The American Historical Review, Political Science Quarterly, and other leading journals.
By the end of the 1930s, Barnes had become a leading critic of America’s proposed involvement in World War II, and he was permanently “disappeared” as a consequence, barred from all mainstream media outlets, while a major national newspaper chain was heavily pressured into abruptly terminating his long-running syndicated column in May 1940.
Over a dozen years after his disappearance from our national media, Barnes managed to publish Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, a lengthy 1953 collection of essays by scholars and other experts discussing the circumstances surrounding America’s entrance into World War II.
The volume was produced and distributed by a small press in Idaho, and his own contribution was a 30,000 word essay entitled “Revisionism and the Historical Blackout,” discussing the tremendous obstacles faced by the dissident thinkers of that era.
The book itself was dedicated to the memory of his friend, historian Charles A. Beard.
Since the early years of the 20th century, Beard had been regarded as one of the towering figures of American scholarship, co-founding The New School in New York City and serving terms as president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association.
Yet when he attempted to publish a book analyzing America’s entrance into World War II, publishers shut their doors to him and only his personal friendship with the head of Yale University Press allowed his critical 1948 volume President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 to even appear in print.
Another major contributor to the Barnes volume was William Henry Chamberlin, who for decades had ranked among America’s leading foreign policy journalists, with more than 15 books to his credit, most of them widely and favorably reviewed.
Yet America’s Second Crusade, his critical 1950 analysis of America’s entry into World War II, failed to find a mainstream publisher, and when it did appear was widely ignored by reviewers.
Once it was published, his writing vanished from the influential national magazines that had regularly featured his byline, and henceforth his work was almost entirely confined to smaller circulation newsletters and periodicals, appealing to narrow conservative or libertarian audiences.
There was also the important case of Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Communist radio priest whose enormous national audience of perhaps 30 million Americans made him the most influential media figure in our own country, and quite possibility throughout the entire world.
Coughlin was a very strong opponent of Roosevelt’s efforts to involve America in the European war, so during late 1939 and into 1940 enormous government pressure was exerted to steadily remove him from the airwaves, and by September 1940 he was finally forced to completely end his radio broadcasts.
The year 1940 seemed to mark the point at which some of the most significant dissenting voices in the national media were either removed or intimidated into silence. Once that had been accomplished, the strategic landscape obviously shifted, facilitating political maneuvers that might have been far more difficult under a climate of robust press scrutiny.
Opinion surveys showed that some 80% of the American public strongly opposed involvement in the European war.
Thus, Roosevelt’s prospects for an unprecedented third term in 1940 might have seemed very difficult, since he would either be forced to strongly commit himself to that position or else risk defeat against his Republican opponent, drawn from a party that was wholeheartedly anti-interventionist.
But in one of the most unlikely twists in all of American political history, the June 1940 Republican convention held in Chicago selected as its nominee the obscure Wendell Willkie, a strongly pro-interventionist individual who had never previously held any public office and until just a few months earlier had been a committed lifelong Democrat.
Two decades ago, historian Thomas E. Mahl thoroughly documented that British intelligence agents played a crucial role in that extremely unexpected turn of events, quite possibly even employing lethal means.
The resulting Roosevelt-Willkie race thus provided voters with virtually no choice on foreign policy matters, and FDR was reelected in a huge landslide, thereby largely freeing his hands to pursue a much more aggressive foreign policy.
Despite all of FDR’s carefully laid plans, assisted by the mercenary politics of Churchill and many others, the early months of 1940 almost saw a turn in the course of the war that could have easily ensured an Allied defeat and doomed any chances of American intervention in the conflict.
For eighty-five years, one of the single most crucial turning points of World War II has been omitted from nearly every Western history written about that conflict and as a result, almost no educated Americans are today even aware of it.
It is an undeniable, documented fact that just a few months after the war began, the Western Allies—Britain and France—decided to attack the neutral Soviet Union, which they regarded as militarily weak and a crucial supplier of natural resources for Hitler’s war machine.
Based upon their experience in World War I, the Allied leadership believed that there was little chance of any future breakthrough on the Western front, so they felt that their best chance of overcoming Germany was by defeating Germany’s Soviet quasi-ally.
However, the reality was entirely different. The USSR was vastly stronger than they realized at the time and during the later course of the war it ultimately became responsible for destroying 80% of Germany’s military formations, with America and the other Allies only accounting for the remaining 20%.
Therefore, an early 1940 Allied attack on the Soviets would have brought the latter directly into the war as Hitler’s full military ally, and the combination of Germany’s industrial strength and Russia’s natural resources would have proved invincible, almost certainly reversing the outcome of the war.
Also, some of the most far-reaching political consequences of an Allied attack upon the Soviet Union would have been totally unknown to the British and French leaders then planning it.
Although they were certainly aware of the powerful Communist movements present in their own countries, all of which were closely aligned with the USSR, only many years later did it become clear that the top leadership of the Roosevelt Administration was honeycombed by numerous agents fully loyal to Stalin, with the final proof awaiting the release of the Venona Decrypts in the 1990s.
So if the Allied forces had suddenly gone to war against the Soviets, the fierce opposition of those influential individuals would have greatly reduced any future prospects of substantial American military assistance, let alone eventual intervention in the European conflict.
From the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Allies had been intensely hostile to the Soviet Union and they became even more so after Stalin attacked neutral Finland in late 1939.
That Winter War went badly as the heavily outnumbered Finns very effectively resisted the invading Soviet forces, leading to an Allied plan to send several divisions to fight alongside Finland’s army.
According to Sean McMeekin’s ground-breaking 2021 book Stalin’s War, the Soviet dictator became aware of this dangerous threat, and his concerns over looming Allied military intervention persuaded him to quickly settle the war with Finland on relatively generous terms.
Despite this, the Allied plans to attack the USSR continued, now shifting to Operation Pike, the idea of using their bomber squadrons based in Syria and Iraq to destroy the Baku oilfields in the Soviet Caucasus, while also trying to enlist Turkey and Iran into their planned offensive against Stalin.
By this date, Soviet agriculture had become heavily mechanized and dependent upon oil, and Allied strategists believed that the successful destruction of the Soviet oilfields would eliminate much of that country’s fuel supply, thereby possibly producing a famine that might bring down the despised Communist regime, while also cutting Germany off from that vital resource.
Yet virtually all of these Allied assumptions were completely mistaken. Only a small fraction of Germany’s oil came from the Soviets, so its elimination would have little impact upon the German war effort, and as subsequent events soon proved, the USSR was enormously strong in military terms rather than weak.
The Allies also incorrectly believed that just a few weeks of aerial attacks by dozens of their bombers would totally devastate the oil fields, but later in the war far larger air campaigns elsewhere had only a limited impact upon oil production.
Whether successful or not, the planned Allied attack against the USSR would have represented the largest strategic bombing offensive in world history to that date, and it had been scheduled and rescheduled during the early months of 1940, only finally abandoned after Germany’s armies crossed the French border, surrounded and defeated the Allied ground forces, and knocked France out of the war.
The victorious Germans were fortunate enough to capture all the secret documents regarding Operation Pike, and they achieved a major propaganda coup by publishing these in facsimile and translation, so that all knowledgeable individuals soon knew that the Allies had been on the verge of attacking the Soviets.
This crucial fact, omitted from nearly all subsequent Western histories, helps to explain why Stalin remained so distrustful the following year of Churchill’s diplomatic efforts prior to Hitler’s Barbarossa invasion.
The first detailed coverage of this pivotal turning point came in 2000 when historian Patrick Osborn published Operation Pike, an academic monograph based upon declassified government archives.
But despite its fully respectable author and publishing house, it has received very little attention in the quarter-century since its appearance, with a short 2017 article in The National Interest and McMeekin’s recent book being among the very rare exceptions.
The Suvorov Hypothesis of Stalin’s Invasion Plans
Once we recognize that for eighty-five years virtually all our World War II history books have totally excluded a fully-documented story of such enormous importance as the massive 1940 attack the Allies had planned against the USSR, we realize that their silence on other important matters can hardly be trusted.
Furthermore, the sole major exception to that generations-long historiographical embargo against the facts of Operation Pike came from McMeekin, a highly-regarded and fully mainstream historian who has specialized in the Russian and Soviet history of the first half of the twentieth century.
This is particularly significant because his same 800 page volume on the Soviet side of the Second World War also confirmed the reality of another very important aspect of that conflict almost totally ignored for decades by nearly all of our mainstream English-language historians.
It is widely understood that the Eastern Front of World War II was the decisive theater of operations, and the crucial turning point of the global conflict was Hitler’s June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, the largest military invasion in human history.
But nearly a half-century after that campaign began, a remarkable book appeared that sought to completely overturn our long-settled understanding of the circumstances of that colossal attack.
In 1990, the still magisterial Times of London devoted nearly the whole of its books section to a highly-favorable discussion of Icebreaker, a newly published book whose potentially seminal importance was fully recognized and emphasized by the reviewer:
[Suvorov] is arguing with every book, every article, every film, every NATO directive, every Downing Street assumption, every Pentagon clerk, every academic, every Communist and anti-Communist, every neoconservative intellectual, every Soviet song, poem, novel and piece of music ever heard, written, made, sung, issued, produced, or born during the last 50 years. For this reason, Icebreaker is the most original work of history it has been my privilege to read.
Writing under the pen-name Viktor Suvorov, the author was a veteran Soviet military intelligence officer who had defected to the West in 1978 and subsequently published a number of well-regarded volumes on the Soviet military and intelligence services. But in his new book he advanced a far more radical thesis.
His “Suvorov Hypothesis” claimed that during the summer of 1941 Stalin was on the very verge of mounting a massive invasion and conquest of Europe when Hitler’s sudden attack on June 22nd of that year anticipated that looming blow.
Since 1990, Suvorov’s works have been translated into at least 18 languages and an international storm of scholarly controversy has swirled around the Suvorov Hypothesis in Russia, Germany, Israel, and elsewhere. Numerous other authors have published books in support or more often in strong opposition, and international academic conferences have even been held to debate the theory.
But for decades our own English-language media has almost entirely blacklisted and ignored this major ongoing international debate, hiding those facts to such an extent that the name of the most widely-read military historian who ever lived had remained totally unknown to me.
Finally in 2008, the prestigious Naval Academy Press of Annapolis decided to break this eighteen year intellectual embargo and published an updated English edition of Suvorov’s work.
But once again, our media outlets almost entirely averted their eyes, and only a single review appeared in an obscure ideological publication, where I chanced to encounter it.
This conclusively demonstrated that throughout most of the twentieth century a united front of English-language publishers and media organs could easily maintain a boycott of any important topic, ensuring that almost no one in America or the rest of the Anglosphere would ever hear of it.
Only with the recent rise of the Internet has this disheartening situation begun to change.
The Eastern Front was the decisive theater of World War II, involving military forces vastly larger than those deployed in the West or the Pacific, and the standard narrative has always emphasized the ineptitude and weakness of the Soviets.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, a sudden, massive surprise attack on the USSR, which caught the Red Army completely unaware. Stalin has been regularly ridiculed for his total lack of preparedness, with Hitler often described as the only man the paranoid dictator had ever fully trusted.
Although the defending Soviet forces were enormous in size, they were poorly led, with their officer corps still not recovered from the crippling purges of the late 1930s, while their obsolete equipment and poor tactics were absolutely no match for the modern panzer divisions of Germany’s hitherto undefeated Wehrmacht.
The Russians initially suffered gigantic losses, and only the onset of winter and the vast spaces of their territory saved them from a quick defeat. After that, the war seesawed back-and-forth for four more years, until superior numbers and improved tactics finally carried the Soviets to the streets of a destroyed Berlin in 1945.
Such is the traditional understanding of the titanic Russo-German struggle that we see endlessly echoed in every newspaper, book, television documentary, and film around us.
But according to Suvorov’s remarkable research, the reality was entirely different.
First, although there has been a widespread belief in the superiority of Germany’s military technology, including its tanks and its planes, this was almost entirely mythological.
In actual fact, Soviet tanks were far superior in main armament, armor, and maneuverability to their German counterparts, so much so that the overwhelming majority of the panzers of 1941 were almost obsolescent by comparison.
And the Soviet superiority in numbers was even more extreme, with Stalin deploying many times more tanks than the combined total of those held by Germany and every other nation in the world, around 27,000 against just 4,000 in Hitler’s forces.
Even during peacetime, a single Soviet factory in Kharkov produced more tanks in every six month period than the entire Third Reich had built prior to 1940. The Soviets held a similar superiority, though somewhat less extreme, in their ground-attack bombers. The totally closed nature of the USSR meant that such vast military forces had remained entirely concealed from outside observers.
There was also little evidence that the quality of Soviet officers or military doctrine fell short. Indeed, we often forget that history’s first successful example of a “blitzkrieg” in modern warfare had been the crushing August 1939 defeat that Stalin inflicted upon the Japanese 6th Army in Outer Mongolia, relying upon a massive, coordinated surprise attack of tanks, bombers, and mobile infantry.
Certainly, many aspects of the Soviet military machine were primitive, but exactly the same was true of their Nazi opponents.
Perhaps the most surprising detail about the technology of the invading Wehrmacht in 1941 was that its transportation system was still almost entirely pre-modern, relying upon wagons and carts drawn by 750,000 horses to maintain the vital flow of ammunition and replacements to its advancing armies.
During Spring 1941 the Soviets had assembled a gigantic armored force on Germany’s border, one that even contained enormous numbers of specialized tanks whose unusual characteristics clearly demonstrated Stalin’s purely offensive aims.
For example, the Soviet juggernaut included 6,500 high-speed autobahn tanks, almost useless within Soviet territory but ideally suited for deployment on Germany’s network of highways, as well as 4,000 amphibious tanks, able to navigate the English Channel and conquer Britain.
The Soviets also fielded many thousands of heavy tanks, intended to engage and defeat enemy armor, while the Germans had none at all.
In direct combat, a Soviet KV-1 or KV-2 could easily destroy four or five of the best German tanks, while remaining almost invulnerable to enemy shells. Suvorov recounts the example of a single KV which took 43 direct hits before finally becoming incapacitated, surrounded by the hulks of the ten German tanks it had first managed to destroy.
Suvorov’s reconstruction of the weeks immediately preceding the outbreak of combat in 1941 is a fascinating one, emphasizing the mirror-image actions taken by both the Soviet and German armies.
Each side moved its best striking units, airfields, and ammunition dumps close to the border, ideal for an attack but very vulnerable in defense. Each side carefully deactivated any residual minefields and ripped out any barbed wire obstacles, lest these hinder the forthcoming attack.
Each side did its best to camouflage such preparations, talking loudly about peace while preparing for imminent war. The Soviet deployment had begun much earlier, but since their forces were so much larger and had far greater distances to cross, they were not yet quite ready for their attack when the Germans struck, and thereby shattered Stalin’s planned conquest of Europe.
All of the above examples of Soviet weapons systems and strategic decisions seem very difficult to explain under the conventional defensive narrative, but make perfect sense if Stalin’s orientation from 1939 onward had always been an offensive one, and he had decided that summer 1941 was the time to strike and enlarge his Soviet Union to incorporate all the European states, just as Lenin had originally intended.
And Suvorov provides many dozens of additional examples, building brick by brick a very compelling case for his theory.
Given the long years of trench warfare on the Western front during the First World War, almost all outside observers expected the new round of the conflict to follow a very similar static pattern, gradually exhausting all sides, and the world was shocked when Germany’s innovative tactics allowed it to achieve a lightning defeat of the allied armies in France during 1940.
At that point, Hitler regarded the war as essentially over, and was confident that the extremely generous peace terms he quickly offered the British would soon lead to a settlement. As a consequence, he returned Germany to a regular peacetime economy, choosing butter over guns in order to maintain his high domestic popularity.
Stalin, however, was under no such political constraints, and from the moment he had signed his long-term peace agreement with Hitler in 1939 and divided Poland, he ramped up his total-war economy to an even higher notch.
Embarking upon an unprecedented military buildup, he focused his production almost entirely upon purely offensive weapons systems, while even discontinuing those armaments better suited for defense and dismantling his previous lines of fortifications. By 1941, his production cycle was complete, and he made his plans accordingly.
And so, just as in our traditional narrative, we see that in the weeks and months leading up to Barbarossa, the most powerful offensive military force in the history of the world was quietly assembled in secret along the German-Russian border, preparing for the order that would unleash its surprise attack.
The enemy’s unprepared airforce was to be destroyed on the ground in the first days of the battle, and enormous tank columns would begin deep penetration thrusts, surrounding and trapping the opposing forces, achieving a classic blitzkrieg victory, and ensuring the rapid occupation of vast territories.
But the forces preparing this unprecedented war of conquest were Stalin’s, and his military juggernaut would surely have seized all of Europe, probably soon followed by the remainder of the Eurasian landmass.
Then at almost the last moment, Hitler suddenly launched his own attack, ordering his heavily outnumbered and outgunned troops into a surprise assault of their own on the assembling Soviets, fortuitously catching them at the very point at which their own final preparations for sudden attack had left them most vulnerable, and thereby snatching a major initial victory from the jaws of certain defeat.
Huge stockpiles of Soviet ammunition and weaponry had been positioned close to the border to supply the army of invasion into Germany, and these quickly fell into German hands, providing an important addition to their own woefully inadequate resources.
Although I would urge reading the very detailed contents of Suvorov’s books, for those who prefer to absorb the information in a different format, his October 2009 public lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy is available on YouTube:
Over the years, there have been some supposed efforts to refute the Suvorov Hypothesis, notably in the books by military historians David M. Glantz and Gabriel Gorodetsky, and I have read those. But I found them quite unpersuasive, discovering that they failed to directly address almost any of Suvorov’s striking evidence and instead merely reiterated the traditional narrative.
Meanwhile, a far superior book, generally supportive of Suvorov’s framework, was Stalin’s War of Annihilation, by prize-winning German military historian Joachim Hoffmann, originally commissioned by the German Armed Forces and published in 1995 with an English revised edition appearing in 2001.
The cover carried a notice that the text was cleared by German government censors, and the author’s introduction recounted the repeated threats of prosecution he endured from elected officials and the other legal obstacles he faced, while elsewhere he directly addressed himself to the unseen government authorities whom he knew were reading over his shoulder.
When stepping too far outside the bounds of accepted history carries the serious risk that a book’s entire print-run will be burned and the author imprisoned, a reader must necessarily be cautious at evaluating a work whose important sections may have been skewed or preemptively excised in the interests of self-preservation.
Scholarly debates on historical issues become difficult when one side faces incarceration if their arguments are too bold.
Most recently, Sean McMeekin’s outstanding 2021 history Stalin’s War has provided a wealth of additional evidence strongly supporting the theory that the Soviet dictator had massed his enormous offensive forces on the German border and was probably preparing to invade and conquer Europe when Hitler struck first.
This provided the first mainstream affirmation of major elements of the Suvorov Hypothesis, coming more than thirty years after its original appearance.
The America First Movement and the Political Battle Over Intervention
Even as Hitler and Stalin were each massing their enormous respective invasion forces on their mutual border in 1941 and preparing to strike, a different sort of battle was taking place in America over the question of our own military involvement in the ongoing European war.
Soon after Willkie, an interventionist Democrat, had mysteriously been lofted into the 1940 presidential nomination of the overwhelmingly anti-interventionist Republican Party, a group of Yale Law students became alarmed that America might be drawn into another world war without the voters having had any say on the matter.
This led them to launch an anti-interventionist political organization that they named “The America First Committee,” and it quickly grew to 800,000 members, becoming the largest grass-roots political organization in our national history.
Numerous prominent public figures joined or supported it, with the chairman of Sears, Roebuck serving as its head, and its youthful members included future presidents John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford as well as other notables such as Gore Vidal, Potter Stewart, and Sargent Schriver.
Flynn served as chairman of the New York City chapter, and the organization’s leading public spokesman was famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who for decades had probably ranked as America’s greatest national hero.
Throughout 1941, enormous crowds across the country attended anti-war rallies addressed by Lindbergh and the other leaders, with many millions more listening to the radio broadcasts of those events.
Mahl showed that British agents and their American supporters continued their covert operations to counter that effort by organizing various political front-groups advocating American military involvement, while also employing fair means or foul to neutralize their political opponents.
Jewish individuals and organizations seem to have played an enormously disproportionate role in that effort.
At the same time, the Roosevelt Administration escalated its undeclared war against German submarines and other naval forces in the Atlantic, unsuccessfully seeking to provoke an incident that might stampede the country into war.
FDR also promoted the most bizarre and ridiculous propaganda inventions aimed at terrifying naive Americans.
In one such notorious example, FDR announced in a nationwide radio broadcast he had proof that the Germans—who possessed no large surface navy and were completely stymied by the English Channel—had formulated concrete plans to leap across two thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean and seize control of Latin America. British agents supplied some of the crude forgeries that he cited as evidence.
These facts, now firmly established by decades of scholarship, provide some necessary context to Lindbergh’s famously controversial speech at an America First rally in September 1941.
At that event, he charged that three groups in particular were “pressing this country toward war[:] the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration,” and thereby unleashed an enormous firestorm of media attacks and denunciations, including widespread accusations of anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies.
Given the realities of the political situation, Lindbergh’s statement constituted a perfect illustration of Michael Kinsley’s famous quip that “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”
But as a consequence, Lindbergh’s once-heroic reputation suffered enormous and permanent damage, with the campaign of vilification echoing for the remaining three decades of his life, and even well beyond. Although he was not entirely purged from public life, his standing was certainly never even remotely the same.
The Suspicious Aspects of the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor
Meanwhile, FDR also pursued other means of bringing America into the war despite enormously strong public sentiment to the contrary.
Over the years, diplomatic historians have demonstrated that faced with such stubborn domestic opposition to direct military intervention in Europe, the Roosevelt Administration undertook a wide range of deeply hostile actions against Japan, directly intended to provoke an attack and thereby achieve a “back door to war” as Prof. Charles C. Tansill later entitled his important 1952 book on that history.
These measures included a complete freeze on Japanese assets, an embargo on the oil absolutely vital to the Japanese military, and the summary rejection of the Japanese Prime Minister’s personal plea to hold top-level governmental negotiations aimed at maintaining peace.
As early as May 1940, FDR had ordered the Pacific Fleet relocated from its San Diego home port to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, a decision strongly opposed as unnecessarily provocative and dangerous by its commanding admiral James Richardson, who was fired as a result.
Thus, the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 actually marked the successful conclusion of Roosevelt’s diplomatic strategy by putting America into the war.
Indeed, some scholars have even pointed to considerable evidence that the highest levels of the U.S. government were fully aware of the impending attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor and allowed it to proceed.
This was intended to ensure that sufficiently heavy American casualties would produce a vengeful nation united for war, thus sweeping aside all popular obstacles to our full-scale involvement in the global military conflict.
By 1941 the U.S. had broken all the Japanese diplomatic codes and was freely reading their secret communications, raising obvious questions about why our local commanders in Hawaii were not warned of the planned attack on their forces.
Tansill and a former chief researcher for the Congressional investigating committee made this case in the 1953 Barnes volume, and the following year a former US admiral published The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, providing similar arguments at much greater length. This book also included an introduction by one of America’s highest-ranking World War II naval commanders, who fully endorsed the controversial theory.
In 2000, journalist Robert M. Stinnett published a wealth of additional supporting evidence, based upon his eight years of archival research.
A telling point made by Stinnett was that if Washington had warned the Pearl Harbor commanders, their resulting defensive preparations would have been noticed by the local Japanese spies and relayed to the approaching task force; and with the element of surprise lost, the attack probably would have been aborted, thus frustrating all of FDR’s long-standing plans for war.
There was also a very strange domestic incident that immediately followed the Pearl Harbor attack, one that has attracted far too little attention.
In that era, films were the most powerful popular media, and although Gentiles constituted 97% of the population, they controlled only one of the major studios; perhaps coincidentally, Walt Disney was also the only high-ranking Hollywood figure perched squarely within the anti-war camp.
And the day after the surprise Japanese attack, hundreds of U.S. troops seized control of Disney Studios, allegedly in order to help defend California from Japanese forces located thousands of miles away, with the military occupation continuing for the next eight months.
Consider what suspicious minds might have thought if on September 12, 2001, President Bush had immediately ordered his military to seize the CBS network offices, claiming that such a step was necessary to help protect New York City against further Islamicist attacks.
Pearl Harbor was bombed on a Sunday and unless FDR and his top aides were fully aware of the pending Japanese assault, they surely would have been totally preoccupied with the aftermath of the disaster.
It seems highly unlikely that the U.S. military would have been ready to seize control of Disney studios early Monday morning following an actual “surprise” attack.
The Central Jewish Role in Orchestrating World War II
The December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into the war, succeeding where all of FDR’s previous efforts had failed, and the America First Committee immediately disbanded.
But that huge anti-interventionist organization had already been tottering after the enormously hostile public reaction to Lindbergh’s very controversial September speech mentioning that Jewish groups were among those playing a central role in pushing America towards war against Nazi Germany.
Indeed, some of the America First leaders had even considered closing up shop in the aftermath of that major media firestorm.
Throughout this entire period and even long afterward, everyone deeply involved in the events leading up to the initial outbreak of war or the political battles over America’s own entrance into that conflict was probably fully aware of the huge Jewish role, but almost no one dared publicly mention it.
The explosion caused by Lindbergh’s brief but candid remarks on Jews demonstrated this, and the famed aviator’s private journals recorded his puzzlement over the extremely negative reaction of Flynn, one of his leading colleagues in the America First movement:
Flynn says he does not question the truth of what I said at Des Moines, but feels it was inadvisable to mention the Jewish problem. It is difficult for me to understand Flynn’s attitude. He feels as strongly as I do that the Jews are among the major influences pushing this country toward war. He has said so frequently, and he says so now. He is perfectly willing to talk about it among a small group of people in private.
But apparently he would rather see us get into the war than mention in public what the Jews are doing, no matter how tolerantly and moderately it is done.
Irving’s seminal research had uncovered that Churchill and many of the key British political figures pressing for war against Germany had been receiving huge, secret financial payments from Jewish sources, and Irving’s stellar career was subsequently destroyed by Jewish groups and Jewish activists.
By late 1937, America’s festering economic problems had led Roosevelt to seek a foreign war, but it was probably the overwhelming Jewish hostility to Nazi Germany that pointed him in that particular direction.
In an article a few years ago, John Wear quoted a passage from the confidential report of the Polish ambassador to the U.S., providing his striking description of the political situation in America at the beginning of 1939:
There is a feeling now prevalent in the United States marked by growing hatred of Fascism, and above all of Chancellor Hitler and everything connected with National Socialism. Propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100% [of the] radio, film, daily and periodical press.
Although this propaganda is extremely coarse and presents Germany as black as possible–above all religious persecution and concentration camps are exploited–this propaganda is nevertheless extremely effective since the public here is completely ignorant and knows nothing of the situation in Europe.
At the present moment most Americans regard Chancellor Hitler and National Socialism as the greatest evil and greatest peril threatening the world. The situation here provides an excellent platform for public speakers of all kinds, for emigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia who with a great many words and with most various calumnies incite the public. They praise American liberty which they contrast with the totalitarian states.
It is interesting to note that in this extremely well-planned campaign which is conducted above all against National Socialism, Soviet Russia is almost completely eliminated. Soviet Russia, if mentioned at all, is mentioned in a friendly manner and things are presented in such a way that it would seem that the Soviet Union were cooperating with the bloc of democratic states.
Thanks to the clever propaganda the sympathies of the American public are completely on the side of Red Spain.
Knowledgeable individuals certainly recognized the central role of organized Jewish groups in provoking the world war. Indeed, the Forrestal Diaries recorded this very telling statement by our ambassador in London, reporting the views of the British Prime Minister whose government had declared war on Germany:
Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the Jews had forced England into the war.
For many years, the ongoing struggle between Hitler and international Jewry had already been receiving considerable public attention.
During his political rise, Hitler had hardly concealed his intent to dislodge Germany’s tiny Jewish population from the stranglehold it had gained over German media and finance, promising instead to run his country in the best interests of the 99% German majority, a proposal that provoked the bitter hostility of Jews everywhere.
Indeed, immediately after he came into office, a major London newspaper carried a memorable 1933 headline announcing that the Jews of the world had declared an economic war against Germany, and were organizing an international boycott to starve the Germans into submission.
Despite all of this very powerful documentary evidence, for decades the huge Jewish role in orchestrating World War II against Nazi Germany was carefully airbrushed out of nearly all subsequent historical narratives, even those that sharply challenged the mythology of the official account.
The index of Taylor’s iconoclastic 1961 work contained absolutely no mention of Jews, and the same was true of the previous book by Chamberlin.
In 1953, Harry Elmer Barnes, the dean of historical revisionists, edited his major volume aimed at demolishing the falsehoods of World War II, and once again any discussion of the Jewish role was almost entirely omitted, with only part of one single sentence and Chamberlain’s dangling short quote appearing across more than 200,000 words of text.
Both Barnes and many of his contributors had already been purged and their book was only released by a tiny publisher in Idaho, but they still sought to carefully avoid touching upon certain extremely dangerous unmentionables.
Prof. John Beaty and The Iron Curtain Over America
During the years prior to World War II and even long afterward, only a tiny sliver of writers were willing to break this fearsome taboo regarding the central Jewish role in fostering the conflict, but one of those had particular importance.
Some years ago, I came across a totally obscure 1951 book entitled The Iron Curtain Over America by John Beaty, a well-regarded university professor. Beaty had spent his wartime years in Military Intelligence, being tasked with preparing the daily briefing reports distributed to all top American officials summarizing available intelligence information acquired during the previous 24 hours, which was obviously a position of considerable responsibility.
As a zealous anti-Communist, he regarded much of America’s Jewish population as deeply implicated in subversive activity, therefore constituting a serious threat to traditional American freedoms.
In particular, the growing Jewish stranglehold over publishing and the media was making it increasingly difficult for discordant views to reach the American people, with this regime of censorship constituting the “Iron Curtain” described in his title.
He blamed Jewish interests for the totally unnecessary war with Hitler’s Germany, which had long sought good relations with America, but instead had suffered total destruction for its strong opposition to Europe’s Jewish-backed Communist menace.
Then as now, a book taking such controversial positions stood little chance of finding a mainstream New York publisher, but it was soon released by a small Dallas firm and then became enormously successful, going through some seventeen printings over the next few years.
According to Scott McConnell, founding editor of The American Conservative, Beaty’s book became the second most popular conservative text of the 1950s, ranking only behind Russell Kirk’s iconic classic, The Conservative Mind.
Books by unknown authors that are released by tiny publishers rarely sell many copies, but the work came to the attention of George E. Stratemeyer, a retired general who had been one of Douglas MacArthur’s commanders, and he wrote Beaty a letter of endorsement.
Beaty began including that letter in his promotional materials, drawing the ire of the ADL, whose national chairman contacted Stratemeyer, demanding that he repudiate the book, which was described as a “primer for lunatic fringe groups” all across America.
Instead, Stratemeyer delivered a blistering reply to the ADL, denouncing it for making “veiled threats” against “free expression and thoughts” and trying to establish Soviet-style repression in the United States.
He declared that every “loyal citizen” should read The Iron Curtain Over America, whose pages finally revealed the truth about our national predicament, and he began actively promoting the book around the country while attacking the Jewish attempt to silence him.
Numerous other top American generals and admirals soon joined Stratemeyer in publicly endorsing the work, as did a couple of influential U.S. senators, leading to its enormous national sales.
In contrast to nearly all the other World War II narratives discussed above, whether orthodox or revisionist, the index of Beaty’s volume is absolutely overflowing with references to Jews and Jewish activities, containing dozens of separate entries and with the topic mentioned on a substantial fraction of all the pages in his fairly short book.
I therefore suspect that any casual modern reader who encountered Beaty’s volume would be stunned and dismayed by such extremely pervasive material, probably dismissing the author as being delusional and “Jew-obsessed”; but I think that Beaty’s account was probably by far the most honest and realistic one. As I noted some years ago on a related matter:
…once the historical record has been sufficiently whitewashed or rewritten, any lingering strands of the original reality that survive are often perceived as bizarre delusions or denounced as “conspiracy theories.”
Beaty’s wartime role at the absolute nexus of American Military Intelligence certainly gave him a great deal of insight into the pattern of events, and the glowing endorsement of his narrative by many of our highest-ranking military commanders supported that conclusion.
More recently, Prof. Joseph Bendersky, a prominent mainstream historian, published a weighty volume based upon a decade of his archival research, and in that work he revealed that Beaty’s views were privately shared by most of our other Military Intelligence professionals and many top generals of that era, being quite widespread in such circles.
During the war, Classics Prof. Revilo Oliver led a large 175 person code-breaking group in the War Department, and he was decorated for his important service in that conflict. Oliver later became a leading early contributor to William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review and a co-founder of the John Birch Society.
As an important figure in the anti-Semitic Far Right, his published 1981 memoirs fully matched the claims made by his former colleague Beaty. Beaty’s 1951 book also contained a minor aside that was totally ignored at the time but may ultimately have great significance.
In a couple of paragraphs, Beaty casually dismissed what we today call the Holocaust as long-discredited wartime atrocity-propaganda that almost no one still believed to be true.
And oddly enough, although the ADL, other Jewish activists, and liberal academics all fiercely denounced his book on numerous grounds, none of them seemed to have challenged or even noticed his very explicit declaration of “Holocaust denial.”
Beaty was also scathing toward the Nuremberg Tribunals, denouncing them as dishonest judicial proceedings that constituted as a “major indelible blot” upon America and “a travesty of justice,” a farce that merely taught the Germans that “our government had no sense of justice.”
When Oliver published his memoirs three decades later, he took exactly the same position as Beaty on these matters, but did so at much greater length, condemning Nuremberg and ridiculing the Holocaust as the most absurd sort of fraudulent propaganda.
Bendersky’s thick academic volume, based upon his ten years of archival research, provides further insight on these matters. The author was an academic specialist in Holocaust Studies, so it was hardly surprising that his longest chapter focused upon that particular subject, as did another closely-related one.
In producing his text, Bendersky had exhaustively examined the personal papers and correspondence of a hundred-odd Military Intelligence officers and top commanding generals, but a careful reading of those two chapters reveals that he was unable to find a single one of those individuals who expressed his belief in the reality of the Holocaust, suggesting they probably shared the views that their former colleagues Beaty and Oliver had explicitly declared in published books.
Robert Faurisson, a French academic who became a prominent Holocaust Denier in the 1970s, once made an extremely interesting observation regarding the memoirs of Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle:
Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages.
In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war.
Similarly, the voluminous published diaries of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and Gen. George Patton along with the wartime journals of Charles Lindbergh contain no hint of the monumental event that we today call the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, the diary of another prominent figure provided a very surprising perspective on that era. A few years ago, the 1945 diary of a 28-year-old John F. Kennedy travelling in post-war Europe was sold at auction, and the contents revealed his rather favorable fascination with Hitler.
The youthful JFK predicted that “Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived” and declared that “He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”
These sentiments are particularly notable for having been expressed just after the end of a brutal war against Germany and despite the tremendous quantity of hostile propaganda that had accompanied it.
A decade later when Kennedy had reached the U.S. Senate, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1956 bestseller Profiles in Courage, devoting one of his chapters to praising Republican Sen. Robert Taft for his public condemnation of the legal proceedings at Nuremberg.
This suggested that Kennedy’s views on many of these matters may not have been so very different from those of Beaty or Oliver.
The Nazi-Zionist Economic Partnership of the 1930s
The vast majority of Jews and Jewish organizations across the world were fiercely hostile to Nazi Germany and just as Beaty claimed, they played a central role in leading the U.S. and Britain to war against that country. But there was one very notable and surprising exception to this pattern.
During the 1930s, the Zionist movement represented a relatively small fraction of Jews in most countries, with an overwhelming majority of that community being non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. And that same decade saw the establishment of an important Nazi-Zionist economic partnership that played a huge role in the growth and development of the Palestine colonization project that eventually culminated in the creation of the State of Israel.
This thoroughly documented but long-suppressed history only came to widespread attention with the 1983 publication of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators by Lenni Brenner, an anti-Zionist Jew of the Trotskyite persuasion.
In many respects, there was a natural commonality of interests between Nazis and Zionists. After all, Hitler regarded Germany’s one percent Jewish population as a disruptive and potentially dangerous element that he wanted gone, and the Middle East seemed as good a destination for them as any other.
Meanwhile, the Zionists had very similar objectives, and the creation of their new national homeland in Palestine obviously required both Jewish immigrants and Jewish financial investment.
After Hitler had became Chancellor in 1933, outraged Jews worldwide had quickly launched an economic boycott, hoping to bring Germany to its knees, with London’s Daily Express famously running the banner headline “JUDEA DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY.”
Jewish political and economic influence, then just like now, was very considerable, and in the depths of the Great Depression, impoverished Germany needed to export or die, so a large scale boycott in major German markets posed a potentially serious threat.
But this exact situation provided Zionist groups with an excellent opportunity to offer the Germans a means of breaking that trade embargo, and they demanded favorable terms for the export of high-quality German manufactured goods to Palestine, together with accompanying German Jews.
Once word of this major Ha’avara or “Transfer Agreement” with the Nazis came out at a 1933 Zionist Convention, many Jews and Zionists were outraged, and it led to various political splits and controversies. But the economic deal was too good to resist, and it went forward and quickly grew.
The importance of the Nazi-Zionist pact for Israel’s establishment is difficult to overstate. According to a 1974 analysis in Jewish Frontier cited by Brenner, between 1933 and 1939 over 60% of all the investment in Jewish Palestine came from Nazi Germany.
The worldwide impoverishment of the Great Depression had drastically reduced ongoing Jewish financial support from all other sources, and Brenner reasonably suggested that without Hitler’s financial backing, the nascent Jewish colony, so tiny and fragile, might easily have shriveled up and died during that difficult period.
Once Hitler consolidated power in Germany, he quickly outlawed all other political organizations for the German people, with only the Nazi Party and Nazi political symbols being legally permitted.
But a special exception was made for German Jews, and Germany’s local Zionist Party was accorded complete legal status, with Zionist marches, Zionist uniforms, and Zionist flags all fully permitted. Under Hitler, there was strict censorship of all German publications, but the weekly Zionist newspaper was freely sold at all newsstands and street corners.
The clear notion seemed to be that a German National Socialist Party was the proper political home for the country’s 99% German majority, while Zionist National Socialism would fill the same role for the tiny Jewish minority.
In 1934, Zionist leaders invited an important SS official to spend six months visiting the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and upon his return, his very favorable impressions of the growing Zionist enterprise were published in Joseph Goebbel’s Der Angriff, the flagship media organ of the Nazi Party in Berlin, with that massive 12-part series bearing the descriptive title “A Nazi Goes to Palestine.”
The Nazi newspaper even struck a commemorative medal in honor of the partnership, with a Star-of-David on the front face and a Swastika on the obverse.
In his very angry 1920 critique of Jewish Bolshevik activity, Churchill had argued that Zionism was locked in a fierce battle with Bolshevism for the soul of European Jewry, and only its victory might ensure amicable future relations between Jew and Gentile.
Based on available evidence, Hitler and many of the other Nazi leaders seemed to have reached a somewhat similar conclusion by the mid-1930s.
The very uncomfortable truth is that the harsh characterizations of Diaspora Jewry found in the pages of Mein Kampf were not all that different from what was voiced by Zionism’s founding fathers and its subsequent leaders, so the cooperation of those two ideological movements was not really so totally surprising.
Also quite ironic was the role of Adolf Eichmann, who today probably ranks as one of the half-dozen most famous Nazis in history due to his postwar 1960 kidnapping by Israeli agents, followed by his public show-trial and execution as a war-criminal.
As it happens, Eichmann had been a central Nazi figure in the Zionist alliance, even studying Hebrew and apparently becoming something of a philo-Semite during the years of his close collaboration with top Zionist leaders.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the Nazi Alliance
Once war broke out in 1939, trade relations between Nazi Germany and British-ruled Palestine were immediately severed, so the economic partnership between Hitler’s Germany and the main Zionist movement necessarily came to an end. But around that same time, an even more surprising relationship developed.
From its earliest origins, the mainstream Zionist movement led by Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had always had leftist roots and a Marxist ideology, but during the early 1930s there also appeared smaller, rightwing Zionist factions.
These eventually gave rise to the Likud Party that currently governs Israel, and their early leaders of that era included future Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
Rather than Marxism, these factions drew their political inspiration from Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, with one of their top ideologists even writing a weekly newspaper column under the heading “Diary of a Fascist.”
Thus, it was not entirely surprising that after World War II broke out, Shamir’s small Zionist faction made repeated attempts during 1940 and 1941 to enlist in the Axis Powers as their Palestine affiliate. Shamir offered to undertake a campaign of sabotage attacks and espionage against the local British forces, hoping to share in the political booty after Hitler’s inevitable triumph.
Shamir was Israel’s prime minister during the 1980s when Brenner’s ground-breaking book appeared, so there was naturally something of a scandal when these facts came to light in the international media.
Among other things, Western newspapers published long excerpts from the official letters sent to Mussolini ferociously denouncing the “decadent” democratic systems of Britain and France and assuring Il Duce that such ridiculous political notions would have no future place in the totalitarian Jewish client state that he and his colleagues hoped to establish under Fascist auspices in Palestine.
As it happens, both Germany and Italy were preoccupied with larger geopolitical issues at the time, and given the small size of Shamir’s Zionist faction, not much seems to have ever come of those efforts.
But the idea of the sitting prime minister of the Jewish State having spent his early wartime years as an unrequited Nazi ally was certainly something that sticks in one’s mind, not quite conforming to the traditional narrative of that era that most people had always accepted.
Most remarkably, the revelation of Shamir’s pro-Axis past seemed to have had only a relatively minor impact upon his political standing within Israeli society.
I would think that any American political figure found to have supported a military alliance with Nazi Germany during the Second World War would have had a very difficult time surviving the resulting political scandal, and the same would surely be true for politicians in Britain, France, or most other western nations.
But although there was certainly some embarrassment in the Israeli press, especially after the shocking story reached the international headlines, apparently most Israelis took the whole matter in stride, and Shamir stayed in office for another year, then later served a second, much longer term as Prime Minister during 1986-1992.
The Jews of Israel apparently regarded Nazi Germany quite differently than did most Americans, let alone most American Jews. Furthermore, there is actually an interesting coda to Shamir’s wartime views regarding Nazi Germany.
Following the establishment of the State of Israel, Shamir went on to spend a decade serving in the Israeli Mossad, most of that time as head of its assassination department. He held that position in 1963 at the time of the JFK Assassination, so if as many believe the Mossad played a central role in that event, Shamir would have certainly been one of the key figures involved.
While later serving as Israeli prime minister during the early 1990s, he became involved in a very bitter dispute with President George H.W. Bush over loan guarantees for West Bank settlements.
According to Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky, elements of his organization targeted Bush for assassination at that time, with the American government apparently taking Ostrovsky’s warning very seriously.
In 1995, British author Gordon Thomas, a noted expert on intelligence matters, published Gideon’s Spies, an 800 page history of the Israeli Mossad based upon information provided in dozens of interviews with its members and other Israeli sources.
Indeed, this volume almost seemed to constitute an authorized history of Israel’s intelligence service, so the publication project had probably been set into motion by the Israelis as a means of counter-balancing the very embarrassing revelations contained in Ostrovsky’s huge 1990 bestseller.
Shamir naturally appeared as a prominent figure in this hefty volume, and according to the author’s Israeli sources, the political leader held a seething hatred for America, something that I’d already read elsewhere. But I’d never previously heard the main reason for that hatred.
According to Thomas, even after the passage of a half-century Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had still never forgiven America for failing to support Adolf Hitler in World War II.
By Ron Unz
Published by Unz.com
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com
Related Reading:
- Bibliography
- American Pravda: Putin as Hitler?
- Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
- American Pravda: Understanding World War II
- More Falsehoods of World War II
- Hitler, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the War in Ukraine
- American Pravda: Charles A. Lindbergh and the America First Movement
- American Pravda: Jews and Nazis