NS Euthanasia Propaganda Poster, around 1938. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Abstract
I have been asked the question: Why do you think the German euthanasia program happened during World War II, but not the Holocaust? This article will show that the evidence for the German euthanasia program is overwhelming, while the evidence to support the Holocaust story is severely lacking.
Written Order
In August 1939, Hitler let it be known to his close associates that he approved any measure which could be seen as delivering handicapped patients from pain and suffering. Probably in the late autumn or winter of 1939, Hitler backdated a document to Sept. 1, 1939, that authorized the euthanasia program. The authorization states:[1]
“Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Med Brandt are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the powers of specific physicians, designated by name, so that patients who, on the basis of human judgment, are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death after the most careful assessment of their condition.”
Historians have acknowledged that no similar document of a plan by Germany to exterminate European Jewry has ever been found. In his well-known book on the Holocaust, French-Jewish historian Leon Poliakov states that “…the campaign to exterminate the Jews, as regards its conception as well as many other essential aspects, remains shrouded in darkness.” Poliakov adds that no documents of a plan for exterminating the Jews have ever been found because “perhaps none ever existed.”[2] British historian Ian Kershaw states that when the Soviet archives were opened in the early 1990s:[3]
“Predictably, a written order by Hitler for the ‘Final Solution’ was not found. The presumption that a single, explicit written order had ever been given had long been dismissed by most historians.”
The lack of a written order for the extermination of European Jewry led to Raul Hilberg’s famous explanation of how the Holocaust happened:[4]
“What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”
On Jan. 16, 1985, under cross-examination at the first Ernst Zündel trial in Toronto, Raul Hilberg confirmed that he said these words.[5] Thus, Hilberg states that the so-called Holocaust was not carried out by a written order or plan, but rather by an incredible mind reading among far-flung German bureaucrats.
Defenders of the Holocaust story sometimes explain the absence of a written order to exterminate European Jewry by saying that the Nazis destroyed the evidence. However, an operation as big as the so-called Holocaust would have required written orders that would have been referred to in countless different ministerial bodies. It would have been impossible for all of these documents to have been completely destroyed at the end of the war. There would always have been carbon copies of the extermination order somewhere.[6]
Confessions of Defendants
The Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, which opened on Dec. 9, 1946 and ended on July 19, 1947, tried German doctors for their participation in the euthanasia program. Dr. Karl Brandt readily admitted his involvement in the euthanasia program, since too many records and affidavits directly linked him to the killing operation. Brandt argued that the only rationale for the euthanasia program had been to free handicapped and incurably ill patients from suffering. Brandt considered his involvement in the euthanasia program authorized by Hitler to be absolutely legal.[7]
By contrast, none of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials stated that they knew anything about a program to exterminate Jews during the war. Hermann Göring, Hans Frank, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Albert Speer, Gen. Alfred Jodl, and the other Nuremberg defendants all denied knowing anything of an extermination program of European Jewry. While such testimony is often dismissed as lying, the categorical and consistent nature of their testimony, sometimes by men who assumed they would be hanged, suggests that they are telling the truth.[8]
Hermann Göring in particular had no reason to lie about his lack of knowledge of a plan by Germany to exterminate European Jewry. As the highest ranking surviving Nazi, Göring’s execution was certain. Göring told his wife Emmy to give up all hope that he would not be executed at Nuremberg.[9] Yet Göring repeatedly and emphatically denied any knowledge of the so-called Holocaust. Göring confided to American psychologist Dr. Gustave Gilbert in his jail cell at Nuremberg:[10]
“I wish I could have Himmler here – just for 10 minutes – to ask him what on earth he was up to out there.”
It is most unfortunate that Heinrich Himmler was a “suicide” while in British captivity. However, since Himmler was in a position to know the true story of the alleged Holocaust, it was not within the bounds of political possibility that Himmler live to testify at the Nuremberg trials.[11]
Discussion of Killing Methods
German doctors determined that carbon monoxide gas was the most painless and humane way to euthanize people. The use of carbon monoxide gas therefore became the standard technique to kill people in the adult euthanasia program, with the first killings probably beginning in January 1940. Dr. Karl Brandt, Albert Widmann, Dr. Leonardo Conti and others all stated that they determined carbon monoxide gas to be the most humane method of euthanizing adults.[12]
Dr. Karl Brandt wrote in his personal notebook:[13]
“Adolf Hitler asked me which method, based on current considerations and experiences, was the mildest, that is to say the safest, quickest and the most effective and painless one. I had to concede that this was death through the inhalation of carbon monoxide gas. He then said that this was also the most humane. I myself then took on board this position and put to one side my medical concerns for external reasons… I am convinced that the procedure with carbon monoxide was right.”
No such planning has been found regarding the use of homicidal gas chambers in German concentration camps. The Holocaust story claims that the first gassings occurred at Auschwitz using Zyklon B in September 1941. These gassings were allegedly done without any prior engineering considerations.[14] According to the officially accepted version of the Holocaust story, the SS at Auschwitz quickly built homicidal gas chambers that were capable of killing thousands of people out of ordinary buildings .[15]
This official version of the so-called Holocaust is pure nonsense. Homicidal gas chambers using Zyklon B cannot be built “on the fly” by SS men with no engineering background. This is shown by a comparison to the delousing chambers used in the German concentration camps. The German delousing chambers were patented by the German firm Degesch, involved extremely advanced engineering, and were carefully constructed to be gastight and safe for the operators.[16]
Feasibility of Killing Methods
Carbon-monoxide gas can be used to efficiently kill people in homicidal gas chambers. The dead bodies from the gassings can also be safely removed by personnel wearing only a gas mask. Richard von Hegener observed that patients in the euthanasia program would lose consciousness within two to three minutes of the gas entering the room. Within five minutes all of the patients had fallen into a “kind of sleep.” The gas was left running for half an hour before a physician, protected by a gas mask, entered the room, examined the bodies, and pronounced that all of the patients were dead.[17]
By contrast, Zyklon B cannot be safely used to kill large numbers of people in homicidal gas chambers. Dr. Robert Faurisson states in regard to Zyklon-B poisoning: “The corpse of a man who has just been killed by this powerful poison is itself a dangerous source of poisoning, and cannot be touched with bare hands. In order to enter the HCN-saturated chamber to remove the corpse, special gear is needed, as well as a gas mask with a special filter.”[18] The danger of touching someone killed with Zyklon-B gas is confirmed in the scientific literature.[19]
The alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek could not have been used as homicidal gas chambers. The first scholar to make that observation was Dr. Robert Faurisson in the late 1970s.[20] He induced the American expert for execution technologies Fred Leuchter to come to similar conclusions in a 1988 study.[21] Leuchter’s research has since been revised, deepened and broadened by a number of subsequent technical studies coming to similar conclusions.[22]
The Diesel engines allegedly used at the Aktion Reinhardt camps of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor also could not have been used to mass murder people as claimed either. The first to point this out was U.S. engineer Friedrich Paul Berg in a 1984 paper.[23] In a revised paper of 2000, Berg stated that for any Diesel arrangement to have been even marginally effective for mass murder, it would have required an exceptionally well-informed team of experts to know and do all that was necessary. Berg mentions that, even if someone had tried for a time to commit murder with Diesel exhaust, after a few tries it would have become apparent that something better was needed. Berg concludes that the evidence for Diesel gassings in the German concentration camps fails to meet the most basic standards that credible evidence must pass to satisfy reasonable people.[24]
After reading Berg’s 1984 paper, Walter Lüftl, a prominent Austrian engineer and at that time the president of Austria’s Association of Civil Engineers, confirmed in his own research paper that mass murder with Diesel-exhaust gasses is a sheer impossibility for reasons of time alone. Lüftl states in his report:[25]
“The laws of nature apply both to Nazis and anti-fascists. Nobody can be killed with diesel exhaust gas in the manner described [in the Holocaust literature].”
Public Knowledge
Public knowledge of the German euthanasia program was widespread in Germany. This public knowledge led to growing criticism from churches, the judiciary, and the state bureaucracy. Church leaders, and especially Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, made it internationally known that National-Socialist Germany was killing handicapped children and adults on an unprecedented scale. In a sermon on Aug. 3, 1941, Galen openly attacked the hypocrisy and the economic rationale for killing handicapped people. Instead of punishing Galen, Hitler ordered a stop to the euthanasia program on Aug. 24, 1941.[26]
By contrast, the German public was not aware of a program of extermination of European Jewry during the war. Nowhere in the archives, which contain mountains of intercepted cipher messages and the reports on bags of mail captured from enemy ships and from overrun enemy positions, is there the slightest evidence that a program of genocide against Jews was known by the German public.[27]
The German public became aware of the alleged genocide of European Jewry only when U.S. and British troops entered German concentration camps at the end of World War II. The horrific scenes of huge piles of dead bodies and emaciated and diseased surviving inmates were filmed and photographed for posterity by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Films of the horrific scenes at the camps were made mandatory viewing for the vanquished populace of Germany, so that their national pride would be destroyed and replaced with feelings of collective guilt.
The tour of liberated concentration camps became a ritual in the occupied Germany of late April and early May. American officers forced local citizens and German POWs to view the camps. German civilians were paraded against their will in front of the sickening piles of dead bodies found in the German camps.[28]
What the general public was not told is that most of the inmates in these camps had died of typhus, typhoid, and other natural causes. None of the Allied autopsy reports shows that anyone died of poison gas. Also, contrary to publicized claims, no researcher has been able to document a German policy of extermination through starvation in the German camps. The virtual collapse of Germany’s food, transport, and public-health systems and the extreme overcrowding in the German camps at the end of the war led to the catastrophe the Allied troops encountered when they entered the camps.
Other Considerations
Defenders of the Holocaust story inevitably raise eyewitness testimony as proof that the genocide of European Jewry happened. However, as I discussed elsewhere, eyewitness testimony to the so-called Holocaust is notoriously unreliable.[29]
The large number of Jewish survivors at the end of World War II also makes impossible a program of genocide against European Jewry. Dr. Arthur Robert Butz states in regard to the large number of Jewish survivors: “The simplest valid reason for being skeptical about the extermination claim is also the simplest conceivable reason; at the end of the war they were still there.”[30] Norman Finkelstein, the author of The Holocaust Industry, quotes his mother as asking:[31]
“If everyone who claims to be a Holocaust survivor actually is one, who did Hitler kill?”
Defenders of the Holocaust story also inevitably quote speeches from Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler or writings from Hitler, Goebbels, and Hans Frank to prove that Germany had an extermination program of Jews during the war. In fact, Himmler’s Posen speech of Oct. 4, 1943 has been called “the best evidence” to prove the Holocaust happened.[32] Himmler states in this speech:[33]
“I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people… it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination.”
Most translations of Himmler’s Posen speech assume that the German word “ausrotten” means murder or extermination. David Irving, who is very fluent in the German language, testified at the second Ernst Zündel trial that this is an incorrect translation of the word “ausrotten”:[34]
“There is no doubt that in modern Germany the word ausrotten now means murder. But we have to look at the meaning of the word ausrotten in the 1930s and 1940s, as used by those who wrote or spoke these documents. In the mouth of Adolf Hitler, the word ausrotten is never once used to mean murder, and I’ve made a study of that particular semantic problem. You can find document after document which Hitler himself spoke or wrote where the word ausrotten cannot possibly mean murder.”
Since Hitler never used the word “ausrotten” to mean murder, and since Hitler and Himmler spoke the same language, there is no reason to believe that Himmler was speaking about the murder of the Jews in his Posen speech.
Other defenders of the Holocaust story assume that the Nazis used code words such as “special treatment” to hide their genocide of European Jewry.[35] This theory does not explain why the Nazis used explicit written orders for all of their other crimes. For example, Heinrich Himmler authorized in writing many illegal human medical experiments and executions in the German concentration camps. Adolf Hitler’s other crimes including the euthanasia program were all made in writing. It is absurd to think that only the genocide of European Jewry was hidden behind code words, while all other German war crimes were clearly stated in writing.
Conclusion
The German euthanasia program is a well-documented reality. Hitler authorized the euthanasia program in writing, the defendants at the Doctors’ Trial admitted their involvement in the program, the best method for killing victims was discussed among the participants in the program, the carbon-monoxide gas used in the German euthanasia program can safely and effectively kill people, and the euthanasia program was widely known by the German public. In fact, public opposition to the program was so strong in Germany that Hitler ordered the end of the first phase of the euthanasia program in August 1941.
By contrast, the genocide of European Jewry is not well documented. No order has ever been found authorizing the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The German defendants at the main Nuremberg trial all stated they knew nothing about the so-called Holocaust. The Holocaust story absurdly states that the first gas chambers were built at Auschwitz using Zyklon B by SS personnel with no engineering experience. None of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek or the claimed diesel gas chambers at the Aktion Reinhardt camps of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor could possibly have been used for mass murder. The alleged genocide of Jews was also not known by the German public during the war. The eyewitness testimony to the so-called Holocaust has consistently proven to be extremely unreliable. Finally, the large number of Jewish survivors at the end of the war makes impossible a program of genocide against European Jewry.
In conclusion, while the German euthanasia program is a well-documented reality, the Holocaust story is a fraud. Dr. Arthur Robert Butz has aptly stated:[36]
“The ‘Holocaust’ is such a gigantic fraud that it is a cornucopia of absurdities.”
Notes
[1] Schmidt, Ulf, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor, New York: Continuum Books, 2007, pp. 125, 132-133.
[2] Poliakov, Leon, Harvest of Hate, New York: Holocaust Library, 1979, p. 108.
[3] Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. 96.
[4] De Wan, George, “The Holocaust in Perspective,” Newsday: Long Island, N.Y., Feb. 23, 1983, Part II, p. 3.
[5] See trial transcript, pp. 846-848. Also Kulaszka, Barbara (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, p. 24.
[6] Kulaszka, Barbara (ed.), op. cit. (note 5), p. 370.
[7] Schmidt, Ulf, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 354, 370f.
[8] Weber, Mark, “The Nuremburg Trials and the Holocaust,” The Journal of Historical Review, 12(2) (1992), pp. 197-199.
[9] Irving, David, Nuremberg: The Last Battle, London: Focal Point, 1996, p. 276.
[10] Irving, David, Göring: A Biography, London: GraftonBooks, 1991, p. 493.
[11] Butz, Arthur R., The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry, 9th ed., Newport Beach, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, p. 240.
[12] Schmidt, Ulf, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 138f.
[13] Ibid., p. 138.
[14] Longerich, Peter, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 281. See also Wachsmann, Nikolaus, Kl: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, pp. 267-269. In extreme detail: Mattogno, Carlo, Auschwitz: The First Gassing. Rumor and Reality, 2nd ed., Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2016.
[15] See Mattogno, Carlo, Debunking the Bunkers of Auschwitz: Black Propaganda versus History, 2nd ed., Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2016. Also idem, Auschwitz: Crematorium I and the Alleged Homicidal Gassings, 2nd ed., ibid., 2016;
[16] Berg, Friedrich P., “The German Delousing Chambers,” The Journal of Historical Review, 7(1) (1986), pp. 73-94; http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p-73_Berg.html .
[17] Schmidt, Ulf, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 138f.
[18] Faurisson, Robert, “The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: A Challenge,” The Journal of Historical Review, 13(4) (1993), pp. 14-17; http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v13/v13n4p14_Faurisson.html.
[19] Padmakumar, K., “Postmortem Examination Cases of Cyanide Poisoning: A Biological Hazard,” Journal of Indian Academy of Forensic Medicine, 32(1) (2010), pp. 80f.; http://medind.nic.in/jal/t10/i1/jalt10i1p80.pdf .
[20] In English: Faurisson, Robert, “The Gas Chambers of Auschwitz Appear to be Physically Inconceivable,” The Journal of Historical Review, 2(4) (1981), pp. 312-317; https://codoh.com/library/document/1995 .
[21] Leuchter, Fred A., and Robert Faurisson, Germar Rudolf, The Leuchter Reports: Critical Edition, 4th ed., Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2015.
[22] See in addition to the works by Mattogno mentioned in notes 14f. also: Mattogno, Carlo, The Real Case for Auschwitz: Robert van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed, Uckfield, Castle Hill Publishers, 2015; idem, and Franco Deana, The Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz: A Technical and Historical Study, ibid.¸ 2015; Rudolf, Germar, The Chemistry of Auschwitz: The Technology and Toxicology of Zyklon B and the Gas Chambers, ibid., 2017; Graf, Jürgen, and Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Majdanek: A Historical and Technical Study, 3rd ed., ibid., 2016.
[23] Berg, Friedrich Paul, “The Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth within a Myth,” The Journal of Historical Review, 5(1) (1984), pp. 15-46; https://codoh.com/library/document/982 .
[24] Berg, Friedrich Paul, “The Diesel Gas Chamber: Ideal for Torture—Absurd For Murder,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, AL: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2000, pp. 454f.
[25] Lüftl, Walter, “The Lüftl Report,” The Journal of Historical Review, 12(4) (1992), pp. 403-406, 419; https://codoh.com/library/document/2383 .
[26] Schmidt, Ulf, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 162f., 166f. See also Evans, Richard J., The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, London: Penguin Books, 2008, pp. 99f.
[27] Irving, David, Nuremberg, op. cit. (note 9), p. 168.
[28] Abzug, Robert H., Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 128-132.
[29] Wear, John, “Holocaust Eyewitnesses: Is the Testimony Reliable?,” The Barnes Review, 19(4) (2013), pp. 26-29; https://katana17.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/holocaust-eyewitnesses-is-the-testimony-reliable/ .
[30] Butz, Arthur R., op. cit. (note 11), p. 10.
[31] Interview with Norman Finkelstein, by Viktor Frölke, in Salon.com, “Shoah business,” Aug. 30, 2000. See also Finkelstein, Norman, The Holocaust Industry, New York: Verso, 2000, p. 81.
[32] https://codoh.com/library/document/891/ .
[33] http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%204029.pdf .
[34] Kulaszka, Barbara (ed.), op. cit. (note 5), pp. 370f.
[35] For example, see http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/06/gauleiter-arthur-greiser.html .
[36] Butz, Arthur R., “Some Thoughts on Pressac’s Opus,” The Journal of Historical Review, 13(3) (1993), pp. 23-37, here p. 23; https://codoh.com/library/document/2425/ .
October 16, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular |
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Children learn what they live.
As family counselor Dorothy Law Nolte wisely observed, “If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn. If children live with hostility, they learn to fight. If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.”
And if children live with terror, trauma and violence—forced to watch helplessly as their loved ones are executed by police officers who shoot first and ask questions later—will they in turn learn to terrorize, traumatize and inflict violence on the world around them?
I’m not willing to risk it. Are you?
It’s difficult enough raising a child in a world ravaged by war, disease, poverty and hate, but when you add the toxic stress of the police state into the mix, it becomes near impossible to protect children from the growing unease that some of the monsters of our age come dressed in government uniforms.
Case in point: in Hugo, Oklahoma, plain clothes police officers opened fire on a pickup truck parked in front of a food bank, heedless of the damage such a hail of bullets—26 shots were fired—could have on those in the vicinity. Three of the four children inside the parked vehicle were shot: a 4-year-old girl was shot in the head and ended up with a bullet in the brain; a 5-year-old boy received a skull fracture; and a 1-year-old girl had deep cuts on her face from gunfire or shattered window glass. Only the 2-year-old was spared any physical harm, although the terror will likely linger for a long time. “They are terrified to go anywhere or hear anything,” the family attorney said. “The two-year-old keeps asking about ‘Am I going to get shot again.’”
The reason for the use of such excessive force?
Police were searching for a suspect in a weeks-old robbery of a pizza parlor that netted $400.
This may be the worst use of excessive force on innocent children to date. Unfortunately, it is one of many in a steady stream of cases that speak to the need for police to de-escalate their tactics and stop resorting to excessive force when less lethal means are available to them.
For instance, in Cleveland, police shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was seen playing on a playground with a pellet gun. Surveillance footage shows police shooting the boy two seconds after getting out of a moving patrol car.
In Detroit, 7-year-old Aiyana Jones was killed after a Detroit SWAT team launched a flash-bang grenade into her family’s apartment, broke through the door and opened fire, hitting the little girl who was asleep on the living room couch. The cops were in the wrong apartment.
In Georgia, Christopher Roupe, 17, was shot and killed after opening the door to a police officer. The officer, mistaking the remote control in Roupe’s hand for a gun, shot him in the chest.
These children are more than grim statistics on a police blotter. They are the heartbreaking casualties of the government’s endless, deadly wars on terror, on drugs, and on the American people themselves.
Then you have the growing number of incidents involving children who are forced to watch helplessly as trigger-happy police open fire on loved ones and community members alike.
In Texas, an 8-year-old boy watched as police—dispatched to do a welfare check on a home with its windows open—shot and killed his aunt through her bedroom window while she was playing video games with him.
In Minnesota, a 4-year-old girl watched from the backseat of a car as cops shot and killed her mother’s boyfriend, Philando Castile, a school cafeteria supervisor, during a routine traffic stop merely because Castile disclosed that he had a gun in his possession, for which he had a lawful conceal-and-carry permit. That’s all it took for police to shoot Castile four times as he was reaching for his license and registration.
A child doesn’t even have to be directly exposed to a police shooting to learn the police state’s lessons in compliance and terror, which are being meted out with every SWAT team raid, roadside strip search, and school drill.
Indeed, there can be no avoiding the hands-on lessons being taught in the schools about the role of police in our lives, ranging from active shooter drills and school-wide lockdowns to incidents in which children engaging in typically childlike behavior are suspended (for shooting an imaginary “arrow” at a fellow classmate), handcuffed (for being disruptive at school), arrested (for throwing water balloons as part of a school prank), and even tasered (for not obeying instructions).
What is particularly chilling is how effective these lessons in compliance are in indoctrinating young people to accept their role in the police state, either as criminals or prison guards.
If these exercises are intended to instill fear, paranoia and compliance into young people, clearly, our children are getting the message, but it’s not the message that was intended by those who fomented a revolution and wrote our founding documents. Their philosophy was that the police work for us, and “we the people” are the masters, and they are to be our servants.
Now that philosophy has been turned on its head.
Certainly, it’s getting harder by the day to insist that we live in a nation that values freedom and which is governed by the rule of law.
Yet unless something changes and soon, there will soon be nothing left to teach young people about freedom as we have known it beyond remembered stories of the “good old days.”
For starters, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it’s time to take a hard look at the greatest perpetrators of violence in our culture—the U.S. government and its agents—and do something about it: de-militarize the police, prohibit the Pentagon from distributing military weapons to domestic police agencies, train the police in de-escalation techniques, stop insulating police officers from charges of misconduct and wrongdoing, and require police to take precautionary steps before engaging in violence in the presence of young people.
We must stop the carnage.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
October 15, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, United States |
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Sam Husseini is a senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, independent journalist and contributor to The Nation and FAIR.
Slava Zilber: Sam, three years ago, you appeared on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson and spoke about the case of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. You pointed out that the people involved in the spying on the UN and the people authorizing the Iraq War were not held accountable:
“Virtually everybody who went along with the war, whether it is Kerry or Clinton, of course, the Bush administration themselves has falsified their own records in terms of why, what they did, when they did, why they did it, to the extent that they’ve been scrutinised at all.”
You also address it in a recent article. And recently, Joe Biden has been lying about his position on the Iraq War. How can such an important issue escape meaningful scrutiny?
Sam Husseini: Because the media and the political system uses constant distractions of other issues, of personalities, of punditry to distract from these core issues. The entire US establishment helped lie their way into the Iraq War. More than that, the Katharine Gun case, which is featured in a new movie, Official Secrets, shows how the US attempted to blackmail other members of the Security Council by spying on them to try to get a second UN Security Council resolution authorizing the Iraq War. It shows the length to which they wanted to go to make sure that they got their war, both the US and Britain and others.
So all of these diabolical efforts to launch an aggressive war haven’t been seriously held accountable to it. Biden is a very notable example. I mean, the entire political system is guilty, but he is incredibly important because he was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during the build-up of the Iraq War. It is not just that he voted wrong, as some people say. Even somebody like Bernie Sanders says it was the wrong vote. It was far worse than the wrong vote. Biden, in his hearings, prevented meaningful scrutiny and dissent and the basic facts from being highlighted in terms of the false case that was being put forward for war in 2002 and in 2003.
And he has continued to lie about his own record. Biden recently has said all kinds of things: That he was opposed to the war as soon as it started, which is totally false. He continued to back it. He even said at one point that he was always against it, which is utterly ridiculous. I mean, he always couched his criticism in bizarre ways basically agreeing with the war but saying that Bush had to do a better job of getting the UN on board. Well, as the Katharine Gun case shows, the Bush administration and the Blair government were going so far as to spy on other countries to blackmail them in order to get them on board. So saying that the US needed to do a better job of getting the UN on board is a way of saying that it should have been even more coercive than it was. His story is, in a sense, an indictment of the entire political system since before the Iraq War because he, in the 1990s, said all kinds of aggressive things about Iraq.
And it is also an indictment of the media. Do you see you a connection to what you describe in another FAIR article titled “Triumph of Conventional Wisdom: AP Expunges Iran/Contra Pardons from Barr’s Record”? Are they giving those lies a pass for the same reason they are doing this with the record of Attorney General William Barr?
It is funny that you mention that. Part of what I know about Barr is that Biden was a big backer of his.
The really notable thing about Barr’s record is that he was Attorney General for George H. W. Bush and when Iran/Contra pardons happened. This was a huge scandal during the Reagan/Bush years, and at the end of it, it was basically ended. As the prosecutor, L. Walsh, a straight-shooting Republican, said, it was a cover-up pardon. Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger and others. And Barr basically approved all of that. And what’s remarkable about that is that just as Barr was rehabilitated by the media, so too was – Biden helped rehabilitate him as well.
Biden’s record closely parallels that of the major media. Very often, his claims dovetail very strongly with them. He is sort of the closest thing that the Democrats have to a John McCain: Somebody who constantly appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows and pulled together what the late great journalist Robert Parry called conventional wisdom. So a whole series of fabrications about the Iraq War, before and after it happened, were perpetrated by the major media as well as people like Joe Biden. And Biden was rehabilitating criminal, basically, figures like Barr who was Bush’s Attorney General and helped cover-up the Iran/Contra scandal and who now is Trump’s Attorney General and, I think, playing a major role in terms of ensuring that the Trump administration maintains an establishment orientation in terms of foreign policy as well as other things. I think that he is playing a very nefarious role, and he was largely rehabilitated by Biden. We have transcripts of Biden in the mid-1990s talking him up: “What a great guy! And we have disagreements, but I have a lot of respect for you” and so on and so forth. So Biden continuously helps resurrect figures like that and does other things to maintain a very militaristic orientation in terms of foreign policy.
I had to think about a recent incident: The talkshow host Ellen DeGeneres attended a game with former President G.W. Bush. Could you please talk about what her response to the criticism that followed and the reactions from, for example, Obama administration officials Samantha Power and David Axelrod indicate? Is it also this kind of cooperation that you have just described with Mr. Barr and Mr. Biden?
Yes, I think since the Bush administration there’s been an attempt to rehabilitate it and that has gone into overdrive during the Trump administration: That is the establishment media attempt to contrast the gentlemanly Bushes, both of them, the father and the son now, as fundamentally decent, earnest people who are trying to do the right thing in contrast to this crass baffoon Donald Trump. So you had literal Obama embrace of the Bushes since Bush leaving the White House and then his father’s funeral a year ago. Barr was brought on as Attorney General just after Bush the father’s funeral at the National Cathedral. And in the Trump years, you had a total Trumpwashing of Bush and other people in his administration, much of the former CIA officials some of whom actually were already Trumpwashed before Trump because Obama brought them into his administration. Obama brought in Brennan. Obama even brought in Gates. He kept the same so-called “Defense Secretary” that Bush had. So there is a longstanding cooperation between what are sometimes called liberal interventionists and sometimes called neocons. But they all fundamentally share the same neo-imperial, colonialist mindset in terms of how the US should deal with the rest of the world. And I think that does include certain people like Samantha Power. Her rationale around the Iraq War – sort of backing it without backing it or backing it and facilitating it while attempting to pretend that they had a critique of how Bush was doing it – is actually quite similar to Biden’s as I recall. I have not looked at her record recently but recalling that record, there is a serious interplay there. So it is interesting that you’ve mentioned her as well. But it’s all based on the same sort of falsifications for war.
But again, they started and they were articulated by the major media and by figures like Biden before the Iraq War itself. For example, the weapons inspections regime of the 1990s was ended because then-President Clinton bombed Iraq and withdrew the weapons inspectors. And then he had to figure what the heck you were going to do after that. The media and people like Joe Biden continually talked about: ‘Saddam Hussein kicked out the weapons inspectors’ and ‘When are we going to get them back in?’ The weapons inspections regime didn’t end because Saddam Hussein kicked out the weapons inspectors. It ended because the US government pulled them out in order to launch a bombing campaign which people might recall happened just as Clinton’s scheduled impeachment vote was supposed to happen in 1998. And you saw much the same thing happen in 2003. How did the Iraq War begin? It didn’t begin because Saddam Hussein was not cooperating with the weapons inspectors. He was totally cooperating with the weapons inspectors. He said over and over again, including on US shows like 60 Minutes, that he had no weapons of mass destruction. So how did the war begin? The war began with G. W. Bush saying: ‘This process has gone on long enough. You, Saddam Hussein, have 48 hours to get out of Bagdad with your sons.’ And then they put out a statement that even if he got out of Iraq in 48 hours with his sons, they would still start the bombing. And they told the UN to get the weapons inspectors out of the country so they wouldn’t bomb them. And then they started their shock and awe bombing campaign. That’s how the war started.
Some people claim that Biden is now becoming senile or something. And that’s why he hasn’t been able to articulate his position on Iraq. Hardly! He has been lying about his position on Iraq for years. In 2007, he was asked about his Iraq War vote, and he actually had the temerity to say: ‘Why didn’t Saddam Hussein say that he didn’t have the weapons!’ Of course, Saddam Hussein was saying that he didn’t have the weapons! But there he is: Biden pretending that it wasn’t known that Saddam Hussein was denying they had the weapons. And that’s also another lie that major media themselves perpetrated, including 60 Minutes itself. 60 Minutes had an interview with Saddam Hussein before the Iraq War in which he said ‘I don’t have any weapons of mass destruction.’ And then several years later, after the Iraq War, they did some so-called reporting about: ‘Why didn’t Saddam Hussein say that he didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction?’ So it’s the level of absurdity you have with the record of establishment media and establishment figures like Joe Biden. And there is a remarkable lack of scrutiny, especially when it most matters. One of Biden’s falsifications, when he had an interview with NPR, got a little bit of scrutiny. It wasn’t nearly enough, and sometimes the scrutiny actually helped build up other Iraq War lies. But none of the scrutiny in the major media happened right after the Democratic debates. He has lied about his Iraq War record during each of the Democratic debates. It is Sanders who I think needs to be far more forceful if he is to comport with the indicting facts in this case. But he at least brought it up. In his words: He led the effort against the Iraq War in the Senate, and Biden voted for it. That’s an understatement again. But at least he has brought it up, and that has compelled Biden to explain his position and lie about it in the process.
It is such a loser strategy as well because it’s quite similar to Kerry’s position. You remember Kerry looked ridiculous in 2004 because he was forced to explain his position then, and he was saying things like ‘I was for the war before I was against it’ and this kind of doubletalk. Biden, if anything, is even worse than that. So it’s factually vacuous and demented, and it is probably not going to galvanize voters and be a very poor strategy electorally.
You have been covering the Iraq War and the discourse about the Iraq War. Do you have the impression that invading another country and causing immense suffering is either considered irrelevant or treated just as something one disagrees with, especially from episodes like the one with Ms. DeGeneres, Samantha Power, and David Axelrod? Do you think it would have been different had there been an Iran/Contra trial with convictions and had the Obama administration prosecuted the people involved in torture? Would it have made a difference?
Yes, I think it would have made a difference. All of those things could have made some difference to try to have some kind of meaningful accountability in US law and political life, that people who engage in torture or launching war of aggression or other war crimes be held accountable for that. It would get those people out of public life, make them pay some measure of penalty for their own conduct, and become an example so that others don’t simply perpetuate as it is. We have some of the same figures coming back. There you have Elliott Abrams, and John Bolton, who committed criminal acts under the Bush administrations, come back under the Trump administration. In spite of its isolationist veneer, it has basically adopted a Bush type of foreign policy in many respects.
And I mean this ‘Let’s all get along even if we have disagreements!’ Well, you know, ok. So I fully expect Ellen DeGeneres to have somebody from ISIS on to talk about how she can have disagreements with him. But perhaps they can be fond of each other personally. Or pick the group of your choice that is totally distasteful or allegedly totally distasteful. I mean, in some ways, people allege the US has coordinated with groups like ISIS in terms of destabilizing Syria. But pick whatever group the US establishment most despises, and it’s not as if their members or leadership are humanized. I mean Hezbollah and Hamas are regarded as terrorist organizations even though they are political parties that do a lot of good for people. I have serious disagreements with them. And they do use violence, on a far smaller scale than the US and Israel and other states do. But it would be very refreshing if Ellen DeGeneres and other political talk show hosts took their word seriously, that they want to have a dialogue with people, even people they disagree with, and they still view them as human. So let’s have Nasrallah and the leader of Hamas on late-night talk shows. Well, I don’t think it is going to happen any time soon. It is just an exercise in making the criminality of the US establishment palatable to the public.
And it is interesting that in this case there was a fair amount of pushback. I think that’s partially because you still have some semblance in social media of evenhandedness of discourse, but I think that that has been pushed away gradually as Twitter and Facebook and other social media are tilting the playing field more and more, excluding voices, using opaque algorithms to marginalize some voices further and increase others. So the war against accountability and for meaningful dialogue about issues of war and peace – on many levels, that fight is happening.
Sam, are there cases where the question of whether one opposed the war in Iraq or supported it is being reduced to a talking point, for example, in 2016 against Hillary Clinton? How many people actually care about the human cost of that war to Americans and Iraqis?
I think a lot of US political system is trying to make the Iraq War an irrelevant thing in the distant past and the decision and the mechanisms used to launch the Iraq War. It is not a coincidence that Obama cast himself as an anti-war candidate. And he won. Trump cast himself as an anti-war candidate. And he won. I think there is a hunger in the American public for a different way to orient itself to the rest of the world. It’s a very difficult thing for the American public to sort out because it doesn’t get adequate information. Instead, it gets lies upon lies upon lies. But it is notable that the candidates that were brazenly part of the pro-war establishment have generally lost on the national stage. Now, Obama and in different ways, Trump were deceitful in casting themselves as anti-war. But I think it doesn’t change the fact that there is this underlying hunger. And there are serious opportunities because the wars continue and they continue to threaten to spiral further out of control, and they continue to have this devastating effect as most recently Turkey killing Kurds not only on its side of the border but dramatically escalating their killing of Kurds on the Syrian side of the border. And the colonial prerogatives are still the same: We can invade Iraq because we can invade Iraq. And now we can do all kinds of things in Syria because we can do all kind of things in Syria.
I think there is an attempt to reduce the Iraq War to a mere talking point. And it is facilitated in part because virtually nobody left in ruling circles got it right. Sanders did not get the Iraq War right. He bought some of the establishment lines. And I think it would do him some good to say: ‘Even I bought part of the establishment line!’ Sanders was not out there saying: ‘Iraq doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction.’ There were some people like Scott Ritter, who was saying that. I was saying there has been no evidence for saying that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. But Sanders was not saying that. He was simply saying: ‘War is a bad idea. It is going to make things worse. It could compel Saddam Hussein to use his weapons of mass destruction.’ Sanders actually made that argument. Pelosi and others made even worse arguments even though they cast their votes against war. Some of them actually helped to facilitate war even though they technically cast their votes against it.
So the entire political system – right now, I feel the correct analogy is geology in the 17th century. Geology in the 17th century was a debate between people who thought that the earth was 5000 years old versus people who thought that the earth was maybe a hundred million years old. The correct answer – that the earth was over a billion years old – was off the charts. It wasn’t part of the mainstream discussion. And I think we have a similar thing right now with coming to grips with fundamental questions of US foreign policy like the Iraq War. The correct, empirically-driven answer is well outside the current acceptable discourse. And this leads to all kinds of perversities one of which is the rise of somebody like Trump who does say perverse truths at times and that grants him a measure of legitimacy because nobody who articulates those truths in a principled way is allowed to take part in a meaningful way in public discourse because of the constrictions of major media. So these are some of the problems that have to be overcome.
Do you see them being overcome? What can be done to change things?
There is a pat answer to that: Getting information out, doing what you can. And there are all kinds of good webpages and periodicals out there. And some people try to use social media as best they can. Your program is a very good example, as well.
But I think we need to get to concrete proposals. One proposal I wanted to start building for some time and perhaps some of your listeners can help is to build what would now be called a Wiki with the relevant lies and fabrications of the establishment figures: In very short concise format so there would be a go-to place for whatever establishment figure, whether it is Biden or Wolf Blitzer or Samantha Power, to in very concise form have a thing contríbuted to by many people doing research, but then distilled so it is not a mass of treaties. So it is literally about 500 words but linked to, with substantial documentation of their various fabrications, whether it is about Iraq WMDs or other issues that we might achieve a culture of accountability so that these people could be challenged when they speak at universities or elsewhere. You could have it as a PDF so that it can be printed out and then distributed at events where these individuals are speaking. It could be distilled into a graphic form that could proliferate over social media, for example. I think it is a matter of people who do have a commitment to relevant facts and to a fundamental humanity, driven by respect for things like opposing aggressive war to organise our efforts better so we can more effectively challenge and expose people who deceit on such a massive scale to do things that have caused such harm and will continue to cause more and more harm, potentially threatening nuclear war.
I’ve been doing work lately with the Institute for Public Accuracy about the Plowshares actions. They have had an action in Georgia with these religiously-driven activists to destroy nuclear weapons symbolically. And many of them have spent much of the last year and a half in jail. Now they are facing decades in prison, and their trial begins in a couple of weeks.
I wanted to be inspired by their dedication in terms of their actions: to try to have the same dedication for laying out the critical facts in a way that is irrefutable and solidly documented and working with others to do that so that the force of that is so great that it, in effect, winds its way into the mechanisms of war and the lies that feed them and causes them to come to a grinding halt.
Slava Zilber is the host of the political podcast “Conversations with Slava” and a guest contributor to The Canary.
October 14, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Iraq, Middle East, United States |
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In 1986, NASA’s James Hansen made some projections about how global warming was going to affect eight cities.
Mintzer distributed a chart showing a 1986 projection made by NASA climatologists of the likely impact of global warming on eight major U.S. cities in the year 2030.
Let’s see how he did.
Memphis, according to EPA statistics, would experience 145 days annually with temperatures surpassing 90 degrees, compared to 65 days now, and 42 days above 100 degrees, com-pared to four now.
Covington is the closest Tennessee USHCN station to Memphis. The frequency of 90 and 100 degree days has plummeted.
Denver, which almost never registers temperatures above 100 degrees, would do so on 16 days a year under the projection, and its 90-phis days would rise from 33 to 86.
Boulder is the closest USHCN station to Denver.There has been no trend over the past 65 years, and it almost never gets above 100 degrees.
In Chicago, the number of over-90 days would jump from 16 to 56, while six days would see temperatures above 100 degrees, a rarity today.
Aurora is the closest USHCN station to Chicago, and the frequency of 90 and 100 degrees days has dropped sharply since the 1930s.
Dallas, which already gets 100 days over 90 degrees and 19 over 100, would see the first figure grow to 162 and the second to 78
Weatherford is the closest USHCN station to Dallas, and the number of 90 and 100 degree days has dropped sharply.
Los Angeles would see the number of 90-plus degree days move up from five to 27, while four days would register more than 100 degrees, compared to one day a year currently.
Downtown LA is much hotter than those numbers, so I assume he meant the airport. The closest USHCN station to LAX is Newport Beach, which shows no trend in hot days.
In New York, four days would exceed 100 degrees annually, while in most years no days are that hot now. The number of over-90 days would rise from 15 to 48.
The frequency of hot days at New York City has dropped sharply since Hansen made his forecasts in 1986.
One hundred degree days in New York peaked in the 1950’s, so the Orwellian New York Times has tried to erase them.
Omaha would see 86 days hotter than 90 degrees, compared to 37 today. Days over 100 degrees would jump from three per year today to 21 in 2030.
The closest USHCN station to Omaha is at Ashland, and the number of hot days has plummeted to record lows.
Washington. D C , the number of days above 90 degrees would rise from 36 to 87 per year, while over-100 days would jump from one annually today to 12 in 2030
Purcellville is the closest Virginia USHCN station to Washington D.C., and the number of hot days there has plummeted. I used to live across the river in Maryland, and never needed air conditioning.
Hansen was wrong, because his CO2 climate model was based on superstition rather than science. But undaunted by their past failures, the New York Times continues to push the same nonsense.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has at least been clever enough to change over to “feels like 90 degrees”
In most professions there are consequences for being wrong, but not if you are employed by the climate religion – where facts simply don’t matter. There is no possible way for you to be wrong.
October 13, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | NASA, New York Times |
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Establishment historians claim that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt never wanted war and made every reasonable effort to prevent war. This article will show that contrary to what establishment historians claim, Franklin Roosevelt and his administration wanted war and made every effort to instigate World War II in Europe.
THE SECRET POLISH DOCUMENTS
The Germans seized a mass of documents from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs when they invaded Warsaw in late September 1939. The documents were seized when a German SS brigade led by Freiherr von Kuensberg captured the center of Warsaw ahead of the regular German army. Von Kuensberg’s men took control of the Polish Foreign Ministry just as Ministry officials were in the process of burning incriminating documents. These documents clearly establish Roosevelt’s crucial role in planning and instigating World War II. They also reveal the forces behind President Roosevelt that pushed for war.[1]
Some of the secret Polish documents were first published in the United States as The German White Paper. Probably the most-revealing document in the collection is a secret report dated January 12, 1939 by Jerzy Potocki, the Polish ambassador to the United States. This report discusses the domestic situation in the United States. I quote (a translation of) Ambassador Potocki’s report in full:
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.
This propaganda, this war psychosis is being artificially created. The American people are told that peace in Europe is hanging only by a thread and that war is inevitable. At the same time the American people are unequivocally told that in case of a world war, America also must take an active part in order to defend the slogans of liberty and democracy in the world. President Roosevelt was the first one to express hatred against Fascism. In doing so he was serving a double purpose; first he wanted to divert the attention of the American people from difficult and intricate domestic problems, especially from the problem of the struggle between capital and labor. Second, by creating a war psychosis and by spreading rumors concerning dangers threatening Europe, he wanted to induce the American people to accept an enormous armament program which far exceeds United States defense requirements.
Regarding the first point, it must be said that the internal situation on the labor market is growing worse constantly. The unemployed today already number 12 million. Federal and state expenditures are increasing daily. Only the huge sums, running into billions, which the treasury expends for emergency labor projects, are keeping a certain amount of peace in the country. Thus far only the usual strikes and local unrest have taken place. But how long this government aid can be kept up it is difficult to predict today. The excitement and indignation of public opinion, and the serious conflict between private enterprises and enormous trusts on the one hand, and with labor on the other, have made many enemies for Roosevelt and are causing him many sleepless nights.
As to point two, I can only say that President Roosevelt, as a clever player of politics and a connoisseur of American mentality, speedily steered public attention away from the domestic situation in order to fasten it on foreign policy. The way to achieve this was simple. One needed, on the one hand, to enhance the war menace overhanging the world on account of Chancellor Hitler, and, on the other hand, to create a specter by talking about the attack of the totalitarian states on the United States. The Munich pact came to President Roosevelt as a godsend. He described it as the capitulation of France and England to bellicose German militarism. As was said here: Hitler compelled Chamberlain at pistol-point. Hence, France and England had no choice and had to conclude a shameful peace.
The prevalent hatred against everything which is in any way connected with German National Socialism is further kindled by the brutal attitude against the Jews in Germany and by the émigré problem. In this action Jewish intellectuals participated; for instance, Bernard Baruch; the Governor of New York State, Lehman; the newly appointed judge of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter; Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, and others who are personal friends of Roosevelt. They want the President to become the champion of human rights, freedom of religion and speech, and the man who in the future will punish trouble-mongers. These groups, people who want to pose as representatives of “Americanism” and “defenders of democracy” in the last analysis, are connected by unbreakable ties with international Jewry.
For this Jewish international, which above all is concerned with the interests of its race, to put the President of the United States at this “ideal” post of champion of human rights, was a clever move. In this manner they created a dangerous hotbed for hatred and hostility in this hemisphere and divided the world into two hostile camps. The entire issue is worked out in a mysterious manner. Roosevelt has been forcing the foundation for vitalizing American foreign policy, and simultaneously has been procuring enormous stocks for the coming war, for which the Jews are striving consciously. With regard to domestic policy, it is extremely convenient to divert public attention from anti-Semitism which is ever growing in the United States, by talking about the necessity of defending faith and individual liberty against the onslaught of Fascism.[2]
On January 16, 1939, Potocki reported to the Warsaw Foreign Ministry a conversation he had with American Ambassador to France William Bullitt. Bullitt was in Washington on a leave of absence from Paris. Potocki reported that Bullitt stated the main objectives of the Roosevelt administration were:
1. The vitalizing foreign policy, under the leadership of President Roosevelt, severely and unambiguously condemns totalitarian countries.
2. The United States preparation for war on sea, land and air which will be carried out at an accelerated speed and will consume the colossal sum of $1,250 million.
3. It is the decided opinion of the President that France and Britain must put [an] end to any sort of compromise with the totalitarian countries. They must not let themselves in for any discussions aiming at any kind of territorial changes.
4. They have the moral assurance that the United States will leave the policy of isolation and be prepared to intervene actively on the side of Britain and France in case of war. America is ready to place its whole wealth of money and raw materials at their disposal.”[3]
Juliusz (Jules) Łukasiewicz, the Polish ambassador to France, sent a top-secret report from Paris to the Polish Foreign Ministry at the beginning of February 1939. This report outlined the U.S. policy toward Europe as explained to him by William Bullitt:
A week ago, the Ambassador of the United States, W. Bullitt, returned to Paris after having spent three months holiday in America. Meanwhile, I had two conversations with him which enable me to inform Monsieur Minister on his views regarding the European situation and to give a survey of Washington’s policy….
The international situation is regarded by official quarters as extremely serious and being in danger of armed conflict. Competent quarters are of the opinion that if war should break out between Britain and France on the one hand and Germany and Italy on the other, and Britain and France should be defeated, the Germans would become dangerous to the realistic interests of the United States on the American continent. For this reason, one can foresee right from the beginning the participation of the United States in the war on the side of France and Britain, naturally after some time had elapsed after the beginning of the war. Ambassador Bullitt expressed this as follows: “Should war break out we shall certainly not take part in it at the beginning, but we shall end it.”[4]
On March 7, 1939, Ambassador Potocki sent another remarkably perceptive report on Roosevelt’s foreign policy to the Polish government. I quote Potocki’s report in full:
The foreign policy of the United States right now concerns not only the government, but the entire American public as well. The most important elements are the public statements of President Roosevelt. In almost every public speech he refers more or less explicitly to the necessity of activating foreign policy against the chaos of views and ideologies in Europe. These statements are picked up by the press and then cleverly filtered into the minds of average Americans in such a way as to strengthen their already formed opinions. The same theme is constantly repeated, namely, the danger of war in Europe and saving the democracies from inundation by enemy fascism. In all of these public statements there is normally only a single theme, that is, the danger from Nazism and Nazi Germany to world peace.
As a result of these speeches, the public is called upon to support rearmament and the spending of enormous sums for the navy and the air force. The unmistakable idea behind this is that in case of an armed conflict the United States cannot stay out but must take an active part in the maneuvers. As a result of the effective speeches of President Roosevelt, which are supported by the press, the American public is today being conscientiously manipulated to hate everything that smacks of totalitarianism and fascism. But it is interesting that the USSR is not included in all of this. The American public considers Russia more in the camp of the democratic states. This was also the case during the Spanish civil war when the so-called Loyalists were regarded as defenders of the democratic idea.
The State Department operates without attracting a great deal of attention, although it is known that Secretary of State [Cordell] Hull and President Roosevelt swear allegiance to the same ideas. However, Hull shows more reserve than Roosevelt, and he loves to make a distinction between Nazism and Chancellor Hitler on the one hand, and the German people on the other. He considers this form of dictatorial government a temporary “necessary evil.” In contrast, the State Department is unbelievably interested in the USSR and its internal situation and openly worries itself over its weaknesses and decline. The main reason for the United States interest in the Russians is the situation in the Far East. The current government would be glad to see the Red Army emerge as the victor in a conflict with Japan. That’s why the sympathies of the government are clearly on the side of China, which recently received considerable financial aid amounting to 25 million dollars.
Eager attention is given to all information from the diplomatic posts as well as to the special emissaries of the President who serve as ambassadors of the United States. The President frequently calls his representatives from abroad to Washington for personal exchanges of views and to give them special information and instructions. The arrival of the envoys and ambassadors is always shrouded in secrecy and very little surfaces in the press about the results of their visits. The State Department also takes care to avoid giving out any kind of information about the course of these interviews. The practical way in which the President makes foreign policy is most effective. He gives personal instructions to his representatives abroad, most of whom are his personal friends. In this way the United States is led down a dangerous path in world politics with the explicit intention of abandoning the comfortable policy of isolation. The President regards the foreign policy of his country as a means of satisfying his own personal ambition. He listens carefully and happily to his echo in the other capitals of the world. In domestic as well as foreign policy, the Congress of the United States is the only object that stands in the way of the President and his government in carrying out his decisions quickly and ambitiously. One hundred and fifty years ago, the Constitution of the United States gave the highest prerogatives to the American parliament which may criticize or reject the law of the White House.
The foreign policy of President Roosevelt has recently been the subject of intense discussion in the lower house and in the Senate, and this has caused excitement. The so-called Isolationists, of whom there are many in both houses, have come out strongly against the President. The representatives and the senators were especially upset over the remarks of the President, which were published in the press, in which he said that the borders of the United States lie on the Rhine. But President Roosevelt is a superb political player and understands completely the power of the American parliament. He has his own people there, and he knows how to withdraw from an uncomfortable situation at the right moment.
Very intelligently and cleverly he ties together the question of foreign policy with the issues of American rearmament. He particularly stresses the necessity of spending enormous sums in order to maintain a defensive peace. He says specifically that the United States is not arming in order to intervene or to go to the aid of England or France in case of war, but because of the need to show strength and military preparedness in case of an armed conflict in Europe. In his view this conflict is becoming ever more acute and is completely unavoidable.
Since the issue is presented this way, the houses of Congress have no cause to object. To the contrary, the houses accepted an armament program of more than 1 billion dollars. (The normal budget is 550 million, the emergency 552 million dollars). However, under the cloak of a rearmament policy, President Roosevelt continues to push forward his foreign policy, which unofficially shows the world that in case of war the United States will come out on the side of the democratic states with all military and financial power.
In conclusion it can be said that the technical and moral preparation of the American people for participation in a war–if one should break out in Europe–is proceeding rapidly. It appears that the United States will come to the aid of France and Great Britain with all its resources right from the beginning. However, I know the American public and the representatives and senators who all have the final word, and I am of the opinion that the possibility that America will enter the war as in 1917 is not great. That’s because the majority of the states in the mid-West and West, where the rural element predominates, want to avoid involvement in European disputes at all costs. They remember the declaration of the Versailles Treaty and the well-known phrase that the war was to save the world for democracy. Neither the Versailles Treaty nor that slogan have reconciled the United States to that war. For millions there remains only a bitter aftertaste because of unpaid billions which the European states still owe America.[5]
These secret Polish reports were written by top-level Polish ambassadors who were not necessarily friendly to Germany. However, they understood the realities of European politics far better than people who made foreign policy in the United States. The Polish ambassadors realized that behind all of their rhetoric about democracy and human rights, the Jewish leaders in the United States who agitated for war against Germany were deceptively advancing their own interests.
There is no question that the secret documents taken from the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw are authentic. Charles C. Tansill considered the documents genuine and stated, “Some months ago I had a long conversation with M. Lipsky, the Polish ambassador in Berlin in the prewar years, and he assured me that the documents in the German White Paper are authentic.”[6]
William H. Chamberlain wrote , “I have been privately informed by an extremely reliable source that Potocki, now residing in South America, confirmed the accuracy of the documents, so far as he was concerned.”[7] Historian Harry Elmer Barnes also stated, “Both Professor Tansill and myself have independently established the thorough authenticity of these documents.”[8]
Edward Raczyński, the Polish ambassador to London from 1934 to 1945, confirmed in his diary the authenticity of the Polish documents. He wrote in his entry on June 20, 1940: “The Germans published in April a White Book containing documents from the archives of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, consisting of reports from Potocki from Washington, Łukasiewicz in Paris and myself. I do not know where they found them, since we were told that the archives had been destroyed. The documents are certainly genuine, and the facsimiles show that for the most part the Germans got hold of the originals and not merely copies.”[9]
The official papers and memoirs of Juliusz Łukasiewicz published in 1970 in the book Diplomat in Paris 1936-1939 reconfirmed the authenticity of the Polish documents. Łukasiewicz was the Polish ambassador to Paris, who authored several of the secret Polish documents. The collection was edited by Wacław Jędrzejewicz, a former Polish diplomat and cabinet member. Jędrzejewicz considered the documents made public by the Germans absolutely genuine, and quoted from several of them.
Tyler G. Kent, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in London in 1939 and 1940, has also confirmed the authenticity of the secret Polish documents. Kent says that he saw copies of U.S. diplomatic messages in the files which corresponded to the Polish documents.[10]
The German Foreign Office published the Polish documents on March 29, 1940. The Reich Ministry of Propaganda released the documents to strengthen the case of the American isolationists and to prove the degree of America’s responsibility for the outbreak of war. In Berlin, journalists from around the world were permitted to examine the original documents themselves, along with a large number of other documents from the Polish Foreign Ministry. The release of the documents caused an international media sensation. American newspapers published lengthy excerpts from the documents and gave the story large front-page headline coverage.[11]
However, the impact of the released documents was far less than the German government had hoped for. Leading U.S. government officials emphatically denounced the documents as not being authentic. William Bullitt, who was especially incriminated by the documents, stated, “I have never made to anyone the statements attributed to me.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull denounced the documents: “I may say most emphatically that neither I nor any of my associates in the Department of State have ever heard of any such conversations as those alleged, nor do we give them the slightest credence. The statements alleged have not represented in any way at any time the thought or the policy of the American government.”[12] American newspapers stressed these high-level denials in reporting the release of the Polish documents.
These categorical denials by high-level U.S. government officials almost completely eliminated the effect of the secret Polish documents. The vast majority of the American people in 1940 trusted their elected political leaders to tell the truth. If the Polish documents were in fact authentic and genuine, this would mean that President Roosevelt and his representatives had lied to the American public, while the German government told the truth. In 1940, this was far more than the trusting American public could accept.
MORE EVIDENCE ROOSEVELT INSTIGATED WORLD WAR II
While the secret Polish documents alone indicate that Roosevelt was preparing the American public for war against Germany, a large amount of complementary evidence confirms the conspiracy reported by the Polish ambassadors. The diary of James V. Forrestal, the first U.S. secretary of defense, also reveals that Roosevelt and his administration helped start World War II. Forrestal’s entry on December 27, 1945 stated:
Played golf today with Joe Kennedy [Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Great Britain in the years immediately before the war]. I asked him about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. He said Chamberlain’s position in 1938 was that England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going to war with Hitler. Kennedy’s view: That Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had not been for Bullitt’s urging on Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland; neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a cause of war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington. Bullitt, he said, kept telling Roosevelt that the Germans wouldn’t fight; Kennedy that they would, and that they would overrun Europe. Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war. In his telephone conversations with Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 the President kept telling him to put some iron up Chamberlain’s backside. Kennedy’s response always was that putting iron up his backside did no good unless the British had some iron with which to fight, and they did not….
What Kennedy told me in this conversation jibes substantially with the remarks Clarence Dillon had made to me already, to the general effect that Roosevelt had asked him in some manner to communicate privately with the British to the end that Chamberlain should have greater firmness in his dealings with Germany. Dillon told me that at Roosevelt’s request he had talked with Lord Lothian in the same general sense as Kennedy reported Roosevelt having urged him to do with Chamberlain. Lothian presumably was to communicate to Chamberlain the gist of his conversation with Dillon.
Looking backward there is undoubtedly foundation for Kennedy’s belief that Hitler’s attack could have been deflected to Russia….”[13]
Joseph Kennedy is known to have had a good memory, and it is highly likely that Kennedy’s statements to James Forrestal are accurate. Forrestal died on May 22, 1949 under suspicious circumstances when he fell from his hospital window.
Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British ambassador to Washington, confirmed Roosevelt’s secret policy to instigate war against Germany with the release of a confidential diplomatic report after the war. The report described a secret meeting on September 18, 1938 between Roosevelt and Ambassador Lindsay. Roosevelt said that if Britain and France were forced into a war against Germany, the United States would ultimately join the war. Roosevelt’s idea to start a war was for Britain and France to impose a blockade against Germany without actually declaring war. The important point was to call it a defensive war based on lofty humanitarian grounds and on the desire to wage hostilities with a minimum of suffering and the least possible loss of life and property. The blockade would provoke some kind of German military response, but would free Britain and France from having to declare war. Roosevelt believed he could then convince the American public to support war against Germany, including shipments of weapons to Britain and France, by insisting that the United States was still neutral in a non-declared conflict.[14]
President Roosevelt told Ambassador Lindsay that if news of their conversation was ever made public, it could mean Roosevelt’s impeachment. What Roosevelt proposed to Lindsay was in effect a scheme to violate the U.S. Constitution by illegally starting a war. For this and other reasons, Ambassador Lindsay stated that during his three years of service in Washington he developed little regard for America’s leaders.[15]
Ambassador Lindsay in a series of final reports also indicated that Roosevelt was delighted at the prospect of a new world war. Roosevelt promised Lindsay that he would delay German ships under false pretenses in a feigned search for arms. This would allow the German ships to be easily seized by the British under circumstances arranged with exactitude between the American and British authorities. Lindsay reported that Roosevelt “spoke in a tone of almost impish glee and though I may be wrong the whole business gave me the impression of resembling a school-boy prank.”
Ambassador Lindsay was personally perturbed that the president of the United States could be gay and joyful about a pending tragedy which seemed so destructive of the hopes of all mankind. It was unfortunate at this important juncture that the United States had a president whose emotions and ideas were regarded by a friendly British ambassador as being childish.[16]
Roosevelt’s desire to support France and England in a war against Germany is discussed in a letter from Verne Marshall, former editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, to Charles C. Tansill. The letter stated:
President Roosevelt wrote a note to William Bullitt [in the summer of 1939], then Ambassador to France, directing him to advise the French Government that if, in the event of a Nazi attack upon Poland, France and England did not go to Poland’s aid, those countries could expect no help from America if a general war developed. On the other hand, if France and England immediately declared war on Germany, they could expect “all aid” from the United States.
F.D.R.’s instructions to Bullitt were to send this word along to “Joe” and “Tony,” meaning Ambassadors Kennedy, in London, and Biddle, in Warsaw, respectively. F.D.R. wanted Daladier, Chamberlain and Josef Beck to know of these instructions to Bullitt. Bullitt merely sent his note from F.D.R. to Kennedy in the diplomatic pouch from Paris. Kennedy followed Bullitt’s idea and forwarded it to Biddle. When the Nazis grabbed Warsaw and Beck disappeared, they must have come into possession of the F.D.R. note. The man who wrote the report I sent you saw it in Berlin in October, 1939.[17]
William Phillips, the American ambassador to Italy, also stated in his postwar memoirs that the Roosevelt administration in late 1938 was committed to going to war on the side of Britain and France. Phillips wrote: “On this and many other occasions, I would have liked to have told him [Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister] frankly that in the event of a European war, the United States would undoubtedly be involved on the side of the Allies. But in view of my official position, I could not properly make such a statement without instructions from Washington, and these I never received.”[18]
When Anthony Eden returned to England in December 1938, he carried with him an assurance from President Roosevelt that the United States would enter as soon as practicable a European war against Hitler if the occasion arose. This information was obtained by Senator William Borah of Idaho, who was contemplating how and when to give out this information, when he dropped dead in his bathroom. The story was confirmed to historian Harry Elmer Barnes by some of Senator Borah’s closest colleagues at the time.[19]
The American ambassador to Poland, Anthony Drexel Biddle, was an ideological colleague of President Roosevelt and a good friend of William Bullitt. Roosevelt used Biddle to influence the Polish government to refuse to enter into negotiations with Germany. Carl J. Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner to Danzig, reported in his postwar memoirs on a memorable conversation he had with Biddle. On December 2, 1938, Biddle told Burckhardt with remarkable satisfaction that the Poles were ready to wage war over Danzig. Biddle predicted that in April a new crisis would develop, and that moderate British and French leaders would be influenced by public opinion to support war. Biddle predicted a holy war against Germany would break out.[20]
Bernard Baruch, who was Roosevelt’s chief advisor, scoffed at a statement made on March 10, 1939 by Neville Chamberlain that “the outlook in international affairs is tranquil.” Baruch agreed passionately with Winston Churchill, who had told him: “War is coming very soon. We will be in it and you [the United States] will be in it.”[21]
Georges Bonnet, the French foreign minister in 1939, also confirmed the role of William Bullitt as Roosevelt’s agent in pushing France into war. In a letter to Hamilton Fish dated March 26, 1971, Bonnet wrote, “One thing is certain is that Bullitt in 1939 did everything he could to make France enter the war.”[22]
Dr. Edvard Beneš, the former president of Czechoslovakia, wrote in his memoirs that he had a lengthy secret conversation at Hyde Park with President Roosevelt on May 28, 1939. Roosevelt assured Beneš that the United States would actively intervene on the side of Great Britain and France against Germany in the anticipated European war.[23]
American newspaper columnist Karl von Wiegand, who was the chief European newspaper columnist of the International News Service, met with Ambassador William Bullitt at the U.S. embassy in Paris on April 25, 1939. More than four months before the outbreak of war, Bullitt told Wiegand: “War in Europe has been decided upon. Poland has the assurance of the support of Britain and France, and will yield to no demands from Germany. America will be in the war soon after Britain and France enter it.”[24] When Wiegand said that in the end Germany would be driven into the arms of Soviet Russia and Bolshevism, Ambassador Bullitt replied: “What of it. There will not be enough Germans left when the war is over to be worth Bolshevizing.”[25]
On March 14, 1939, Slovakia dissolved the state of Czechoslovakia by declaring itself an independent republic. Czechoslovakian President Emil Hácha signed a formal agreement the next day with Hitler establishing a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia, which constituted the Czech portion of the previous entity. The British government initially accepted the new situation, reasoning that Britain’s guarantee of Czechoslovakia given after Munich was rendered void by the internal collapse of that state. It soon became evident after the proclamation of the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia that the new regime enjoyed considerable popularity among the people living in it. Also, the danger of a war between the Czechs and the Slovaks had been averted.[26]
However, Bullitt’s response to the creation of the German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia was highly unfavorable. Bullitt telephoned Roosevelt and, in an “almost hysterical” voice, Bullitt urged Roosevelt to make a dramatic denunciation of Germany and to immediately ask Congress to repeal the Neutrality Act.[27]
Washington journalists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen reported in their nationally syndicated column that on March 16, 1939, President Roosevelt “sent a virtual ultimatum to Chamberlain” demanding that the British government strongly oppose Germany. Pearson and Allen reported that “the President warned that Britain could expect no more support, moral or material through the sale of airplanes, if the Munich policy continued.”[28]
Responding to Roosevelt’s pressure, the next day Chamberlain ended Britain’s policy of cooperation with Germany when he made a speech at Birmingham bitterly denouncing Hitler. Chamberlain also announced the end of the British “appeasement” policy, stating that from now on Britain would oppose any further territorial moves by Hitler. Two weeks later the British government formally committed itself to war in case of German-Polish hostilities.
Roosevelt also attempted to arm Poland so that Poland would be more willing to go to war against Germany. Ambassador Bullitt reported from Paris in a confidential telegram to Washington on April 9, 1939, his conversation with Polish Ambassador Łukasiewicz. Bullitt told Łukasiewicz that although U.S. law prohibited direct financial aid to Poland, the Roosevelt administration might be able to supply warplanes to Poland indirectly through Britain. Bullitt stated: “The Polish ambassador asked me if it might not be possible for Poland to obtain financial help and airplanes from the United States. I replied that I believed the Johnson Act would forbid any loans from the United States to Poland, but added that it might be possible for England to purchase planes for cash in the United States and turn them over to Poland.”[29]
Bullitt also attempted to bypass the Neutrality Act and supply France with airplanes. A secret conference of Ambassador Bullitt with French Premier Daladier and the French minister of aviation, Guy La Chambre, discussed the procurement of airplanes from America for France. Bullitt, who was in frequent telephonic conversation with Roosevelt, suggested a means by which the Neutrality Act could be circumvented in the event of war. Bullitt’s suggestion was to set up assembly plants in Canada, apparently on the assumption that Canada would not be a formal belligerent in the war. Bullitt also arranged for a secret French mission to come to the United States and purchase airplanes in the winter of 1938-1939. The secret purchase of American airplanes by the French leaked out when a French aviator crashed on the West Coast.[30]
On August 23, 1939, Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s closest advisor, went to American Ambassador Joseph Kennedy with an urgent appeal from Chamberlain to President Roosevelt. Regretting that Britain had unequivocally obligated itself to Poland in case of war, Chamberlain now turned to Roosevelt as a last hope for peace. Kennedy telephoned the State Department and stated: “The British want one thing from us and one thing only, namely that we put pressure on the Poles. They felt that they could not, given their obligations, do anything of this sort but that we could.”
Presented with a possibility to save the peace in Europe, President Roosevelt rejected Chamberlain’s desperate plea out of hand. With Roosevelt’s rejection, Kennedy reported, British Prime Minister Chamberlain lost all hope. Chamberlain stated: “The futility of it all is the thing that is frightful. After all, we cannot save the Poles. We can merely carry on a war of revenge that will mean the destruction of all Europe.”[31]
Conclusion
U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers played a crucial role in planning and instigating World War II. This is proven by the secret Polish documents as well as numerous statements from highly positioned, well-known and authoritative Allied leaders who corroborate the contents of the Polish documents.
ENDNOTES
[1] Weber, Mark, “President Roosevelt’s Campaign to Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 , Summer 1983, pp. 136-137, 140.
[2] Count Jerzy Potocki to Polish Foreign Minister in Warsaw, The German White Paper: Full Text of the Polish Documents Issued by the Berlin Foreign Office; with a foreword by C. Hartley Grattan, New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, 1940, pp. 29-31.
[3] Ibid., pp. 32-33.
[4] Juliusz Lukasiewicz to Polish Foreign Minister in Warsaw, The German White Paper: Full Text of the Polish Documents Issued by the Berlin Foreign Office; with a foreword by C. Hartley Grattan, New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, 1940, pp. 43-44.
[5] Germany. Foreign Office Archive Commission. Roosevelts Weg in den Krieg: Geheimdokumente zur Kriegspolitik des Praesidenten der Vereinigten Staaten. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag, 1943. Translated into English by Weber, Mark, “President Roosevelt’s Campaign to Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents,” The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983, Vol. 4, No. 2 , pp. 150-152.
[6] Tansill, Charles C., “The United States and the Road to War in Europe,” in Barnes, Harry Elmer (ed.), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Newport Beach, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, p. 184 (footnote 292).
[7] Chamberlain, William Henry, America’s Second Crusade, Chicago: Regnery, 1950, p. 60 (footnote 14).
[8] Barnes, Harry Elmer, The Court Historians versus Revisionism, N.p.: privately printed, 1952, p. 10.
[9] Raczynski, Edward, In Allied London, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963, p. 51.
[10] Weber, Mark, “President Roosevelt’s Campaign to Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents,” The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983, Vol. 4, No. 2 , p. 142.
[11] Ibid., pp. 137-139.
[12] New York Times, March 30, 1940, p. 1.
[13] Forrestal, James V., The Forrestal Diaries, edited by Walter Millis and E.S. Duffield, New York: Vanguard Press, 1951, pp. 121-122.
[14] Dispatch No. 349 of Sept. 30, 1938, by Sir Ronald Lindsay, Documents on British Foreign Policy, (ed.). Ernest L. Woodard, Third Series, Vol. VII, London, 1954, pp. 627-629. See also Lash, Joseph P., Roosevelt and Churchill 1939-1941, New York: Norton, 1976, pp. 25-27.
[15] Dallek, Robert, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 31, 164-165.
[16] Hoggan, David L., The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1989, pp. 518-519.
[17] Tansill, Charles C., “The United States and the Road to War in Europe,” in Barnes, Harry Elmer (ed.), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Newport Beach, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, p. 168.
[18] Phillips, William, Ventures in Diplomacy, North Beverly, Mass.: privately published, 1952, pp. 220-221.
[19] Barnes, Harry Elmer, Barnes against the Blackout, Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1991, p. 208.
[20] Burckhardt, Carl, Meine Danziger Mission 1937-1939, Munich: Callwey, 1960, p. 225.
[21] Sherwood, Robert E., Roosevelt and Hopkins, an Intimate History, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948, p. 113.
[22] Fish, Hamilton, FDR The Other Side of the Coin: How We Were Tricked into World War II, New York: Vantage Press, 1976, p. 62.
[23] Beneš, Edvard, Memoirs of Dr. Edvard Beneš, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954, pp. 79-80.
[24] “Von Wiegand Says-,” Chicago-Herald American, Oct. 8, 1944, p. 2.
[25] Chicago-Herald American, April 23, 1944, p. 18.
[26] Hoggan, David L., The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1989, p. 250.
[27] Moffat, Jay P., The Moffat Papers 1919-1943, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956, p. 232.
[28] Pearson, Drew and Allen, Robert S., “Washington Daily Merry-Go-Round,” Washington Times-Herald, April 14, 1939, p. 16.
[29] U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (Diplomatic Papers), 1939, General, Vol. I, Washington: 1956, p. 122.
[30] Chamberlain, William Henry, America’s Second Crusade, Chicago: Regnery, 1950, pp. 101-102.
[31] Koskoff, David E., Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974, p. 207; see also Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second World War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005, p. 272.
October 13, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | United States |
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When a still-bewildered General Earl Charles Cornwallis surrendered his entire army to George Washington and to the Comte de Rochambeau at Yorktown in 1781, according to legend, a British military band heightened the humiliation by playing a ballad called, “The World Turned Upside Down.” The composer Lin Manuel Miranda later reimagined the song as a hit number in his acclaimed modern musical “Hamilton.”
In a time without speed of light communications, telegraph wires, radio or Internet, the fall of the British Empire in America still rocked the entire world. It was celebrated and welcomed from the Emir of Kuwait to the Tsarina Catherine in St. Petersburg.
Yet when the Houthi rebel movement that controls much of Yemen wiped out three Saudi Brigades and inflicted at least 2,500 casualties at the end of September, the Western media ignored it.
The outstanding analysis of Frederico Pierracini on this web site still stands virtually alone in offering unparalleled assessment of that event.
It is out of fashion among Western commentators to admit that any “decisive battles” can happen anywhere unless they are safely in the past and the United States has won them. But when the Nazi Wehrmacht overthrew the legendary French Army in six weeks of operations in 1940 and when the Red Army wiped out the elite combat forces of the Nazis at Stalingrad in the fall of 1942, those battles were indeed decisive and the clock could never be turned back from them.
The humiliating defeat that the Houthis have just inflicted on the Saudis is of comparable epochal significance. It does far, far more than confirm the victory of the Houthis in the long, needlessly prolonged civil war in Yemen that has killed at least 100,000 civilians over the past four years. The Houthis are now poised to bring the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia itself crashing down.
There is dark poetic justice to this development. The House of Saud will fall as it rose, by a clash of arms in which a young, harsh but dedicated revolutionary movement challenged a worthless old reactionary regime supported by the great imperial power of the day and then destroyed it.
Saudi Arabia’s founding father King Abdulaziz ibn Saud was a dashing, charismatic young tribal leader whose conquest of Arabia from the previously dominant but lethargic, petty, and corrupt Hashemite Dynasty eerily foreshadows the rise of the Houthis today.
The Hashemites enjoyed the religious leadership of the Holy Cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina. They had previously served the Ottoman Turkish Empire but during World War I, they eagerly embraced the British Empire whom the family correctly judged to be on the rise and certain to supplant the Turks as the dominant empire of the Middle East.
This Hashemite reading of global strategy was correct. But there was one insurmountable problem. Sherif Hussein of Mecca was such a uniformly despised, unjust and unsympathetic loser that he was capable of leading no one, and most of his family was no better.
The British led by Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill embraced the Hashemites in the 1920s and put one of Sherif Hussein’s sons, King Feisal I on the throne of Iraq. Even with British military support, the family was hated there too. In 1958, the entire Hashemite Royal Family of Iraq was machine gunned to death in Baghdad in a massacre that shocked the world.
Back in the mid-1920s, Sherif Hussein himself had already been driven out of Arabia by Abdelaziz and the House of Saud. Not all the might of the British Empire and not all the efforts of Winston Churchill could save him.
So when the time came to explore the oil resources of Arabia, Abdelaziz spurned the British and gave the vital concessions to American oil companies instead. In May 1933, the Saudi Arabian government granted a concession to SoCal – the Standard Oil Company of California – in preference to a rival bid from the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company. It was the forerunner of today’s giant Saudi Aramco oil corporation.
However, all the fabled Saudi oil wealth of the past 80 years was based on their previous conquest of the Arabian Peninsula. The core military lesson was clear: Brave, passionate troops with dynamic, energetic leaders will always beat wealthier, larger and better equipped forces led by tired, corrupt and worthless rulers.
Now history is repeating itself, except this time the Saudis are going to be its losers not its winners.
The Houthi victory serves notice that the Saudis have met their nemesis. Arrogant, reckless young Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman has had ample time over the past few years ago to call off his ferocious, cruel and bloody air campaign against the people of Yemen. He did not do so and it is too late now.
Payback is coming. And it will not stop at the borders of Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
The world is about to turn upside down again.
October 13, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular | Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Yemen |
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Amazing Polly | October 10, 2019
I discuss how *G.Soros* is pivotal to the Globalist takeover of countries by using the example of Ukraine.
This seems to involve the CIA in its capacity as part of an underground international Intelligence Apparatus which I believe was set up during & after WW2 in Project RUSTY.
I also focus on the major role Canadians have played in Ukraine.
There’s a lot going on here, so grab a pen. :)
NOTE: the photo I say is of Oleh Havrylyshyn is not him. I put in the wrong file.
If you would like to send a financial contribution so that I can keep doing this work, please click the following link or go to my website, amazingpolly.net and check the contact page for a P.O Box address.
Paypal: https://paypal.me/PollyStGeorge twitter: https://twitter.com/99freemind
Bitchute video backup: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/99Fr…
References:
472 page collection of CIA declassified documents re Project RUSTY & the Gehlen group, which eventually became the CIA and the BND in Germany. Astonishing info: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingro…
Chrystia Freeland Macleans: https://www.macleans.ca/news/liberal-…
Anti Trump Freeland Macleans: https://www.macleans.ca/politics/what…
The World According to Soros: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/19…
Halyna Freeland and Soros: https://www.kyivpost.com/article/cont…
Soros & Ukraine: http://willzuzak.ca/lp/soros01.html
US caused Orange Revolution: https://www.theguardian.com/world/200…
Orange Revolution aftermath: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/s…
NYT Clinton Pinchuk: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us…
Zelensky Pinchuk Kuchma together again: https://www.unian.info/politics/10581…
European Dev Bank, Ukraine, 2016: https://www.ebrd.com/work-with-us/pro…
Holowaty Supreme Constitutional Court, Ukraine: http://www.ccu.gov.ua/en/publikaciya/…
NGO Transparency measures: http://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/wp-cont…
Soros Information war: https://www.newspapers.com/image/4847…
Zlochevsky Burisma Biden: http://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/biden-i…
Ottawa Citizen Chomiak: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/nation…
Deeper dive into Chomiak: http://johnhelmer.net/michael-chomiak…
October 12, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | Canada, European Union, Ukraine |
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Washington D.C. – An unidentified flash on 22 September 1979 in the far South Atlantic had a “90% plus” probability of being a nuclear test, according to a CIA finding from later that year. The document, among others uncovered recently through archival research, adds significant weight to the argument that the flash, detected by a U.S. VELA satellite, was not a natural event, as White House science advisers later insisted.
On the fortieth anniversary of the Vela incident, the National Security Archive supplements its earlier postings with documents recently obtained from the Jimmy Carter Library.
The collection includes new information on scientific intelligence provided by the Arecibo Observatory (Puerto Rico) concerning an ionospheric disturbance on 22 September that corresponded to similar evidence from Soviet nuclear tests in the early 1960s.
The documents also put an unflattering cast on the methods of White House science experts who discounted the views of the intelligence agencies, eventually agreeing to hear them out only so “we can more safely ignore them later.” While chief White House scientist Frank Press argued that the intelligence community had no convincing case, recent scientific studies suggest that the case for a nuclear event interpretation is formidable.
____________________________________________________________
Forty years ago, on 22 September 1979, the bhangmeters on a U.S. VELA satellite picked up signals that were initially interpreted as most likely originating from a nuclear test in the far South Atlantic but which a high-level White House panel chaired by MIT professor Jack Ruina later interpreted as more probably the result of a non-nuclear event (e.g., a striking meteoroid) on or around the satellite. That view became the semiofficial public interpretation but it was contested and controversial. By contrast, according to a White House report published today by the National Security Archive, the Central Intelligence Agency had “assessed the probability of a nuclear test as 90% plus.” [See Document 5]
The CIA and White House science advisers raised their views almost entirely within the walls of government secrecy. In the intervening decade bits and pieces on the Vela incident—and the controversy over it—started to get declassified. Besides the CIA estimate of high probability, another release, a November 1979 memorandum from the Department of Energy included data from the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory in Puerto Rico on an ionospheric disturbance that some interpreted as corroborating evidence of a nuclear explosion [See document 2].
Today’s posting introduces for the first time previously declassified but obscure and previously unpublished documents from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. Collectively shedding light on the controversy over the Vela flash, the new documents supplement the two major collections published by the National Security Archive in 2006 and 2016.
These documents confirm that a number of senior government officials at the Energy Department, the Defense Department, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA, among others, held the view that a nuclear explosion had taken place on 22 September 1979. Nevertheless, White House scientific advisers and officials were so strongly committed to the Ruina panel’s non-nuclear interpretation that they dismissed alternative explanations. They only agreed to hear out the views of dissenting officials “so that we can more safely ignore them.” [See Document 5]
In recent years, the Ruina panel’s arguments have come under critical scrutiny with scientists in the security studies field systematically reinterpreting the Vela data to make the case for a nuclear event. In recent publications, Lars-Erik De Geer (Swedish Defence Force Institute) and Christopher M. Wright (Australian Defence Force Academy) reviewed the publicly available evidence and concluded that the argument for a nuclear explosion is “founded upon three pillars, which include the original optical signal, the iodine-131 evidence, and the hydroacoustic signal.” According to De Geer and Wright, each of the pillars “by itself, is a strong indicator of a nuclear explosion.” For example, they found that the Vela signals provided stronger evidence of a test than the Ruina panel would credit. They further argued that the hydroacoustic data indicated that the test took place on or around the barren Prince Edward Island, some 955 nautical miles off the southern coast of South Africa.[1]
If the Vela sensors did detect a nuclear explosion, who set it off has also been a matter of speculation and controversy. A leading theory, advanced by former Senate staffer Leonard Weiss and others, is that it was an Israeli test conducted with South African logistical assistance.[2] In a major report the CIA also looked at scenarios involving both Israel and South Africa, among other countries, but its conclusions remain classified. President Jimmy Carter shared the view that Israel most likely played a lead role. On 27 February 1980, he wrote in his diary that “We have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of South Africa.” [3]
By now, forty years later, it is clear enough that South Africa could not be a suspect. South Africa was not in a position to conduct such a test, as former South African scientists openly acknowledged years later. Israel, although presumably assisted by the South Africans, remained the sole suspect.[4]
It would be worth knowing which scientists President Carter had in mind, because the Ruina panel would have strongly disagreed with his assessment. He may have become acquainted with scientific intelligence reports as part of his daily briefing, but what they were is unknown. With major studies still classified, such as a critically important report by the Naval Research Laboratory (which the NRL cannot locate) and CIA studies as well as White House files still under declassification review or under appeal, much remains to be learned about U.S. government intelligence collection and analysis as well as the role that politics and diplomacy played in internal discussions of the Vela incident.
Documents
Document 1
White House Situation Room, Situation Room Log, “Reflections of South African Nuclear Event,” 25 October 1979, Secret
1979-10-25
Source: Zbigniew Brzezinski Material, Country Files [NSA 6] Box 72, South Atlantic Nuclear Event, 9/79-6/80
Since its creation during the Kennedy administration, the White House Situation Room has functioned as a communications center and a site for holding sensitive meetings. This record of situation room interactions with various agencies concerning the 22 September event provides an overview of the delayed and unsuccessful efforts to detect the radioactive debris that a nuclear test could have produced. The excised portions are probably a reference to the Air Force Technical Applications Center [AFTAC], which under various names has been monitoring overseas nuclear developments since the late 1940s and which played a role in the search for radioactive samples in the South Pacific after the Vela Incident..
Even though AFTAC found no traces of fallout, analysis of thyroid glands of sheep slaughtered in Australia in October 1979 showed “abnormally high levels” of Iodine 131, a “short-lived isotope that occurs as the result of a nuclear event.”
Document 2
John Deutch, Deputy Secretary of Energy, to Ambassador Henry Owen, enclosing “21-22-September Acoustic Gravity Wave Detection, Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory, Puerto Rico Facility,” 8 November 1979
1979-11-08
Source: Zbigniew Brzezinski Material, Country Files [NSA 6] Box 72, South Atlantic Nuclear Event, 9/79-6/80
Writing to Ambassador-at-Large Henry Owen, who had overlapping roles at the White House and the State Department, John Deutch sent a report of a “traveling ionospheric disturbance”—a wave in the upper atmosphere—detected by the Arecibo Observatory, a giant radio telescope nestled into the mountains of Puerto Rico. According to Deutch, the data on the ionospheric disturbance “possibly may confirm the signal from the VELA system.”
The Arecibo Observatory (now a National Science Foundation facility) can detect signals in the upper atmosphere that originate in violent events at Earth’s surface—including volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, nuclear explosions, and even rocket launches. Such events can produce strong sound waves of very low frequency (pitch), far below what the human ear can detect (the periods of these waves are measured in minutes or longer, as opposed to thousandths of seconds for humanly audible sound). These waves propagate upward through the atmosphere. When they reach the ionosphere, a layer of electrically charged particles beginning about 80 kilometers (50 miles) above Earth, they may induce so-called traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs).
The Arecibo Observatory is one of the best instruments in the world for observing TIDs. It does conventional radio astronomy for studying the cosmos, but it also sends powerful radar beams into the upper atmosphere to probe Earth’s ionosphere. Several hours after the VELA flash detection, Arecibo observed a TID. Initially downplayed in part because of Aricebo’s location thousands of miles from the VELA event, the observation produced a different perspective from DOE, which suggested that the TID was consistent with “an earthquake or explosion source” and that the wave speed was consistent with an event having come from the VELA source—although ambiguities in the exact type (mode) of the wave made a shorter distance also possible. The available declassified information notes that similar observations (although pre-Arecibo) have been associated with nuclear tests in the Soviet arctic in 1961.
The Department of Energy’s Los Alamos Laboratory developed its thinking on the Arecibo signal, treating it as a possible indicator of a nuclear event. Nevertheless, the Ruina panel would discount the Arecibo data on grounds of “mathematical errors,” although the defense and energy departments strongly disagreed. Pending declassification requests may shed more light on the debate over the Arecibo data.
Document 3
White House Science and Technology [Staff] Report to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Evening Report,” 9 November 1979, Secret
1979-11-08
Source: Staff Material Science and Technology Files [NSA 30], Box 5, [Marcum Chron file]: 1-12/79
According to national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s aides, a panel organized by White House science adviser Dr. Frank Press and chaired by MIT professor Jack Ruina was already reviewing data and heading toward a “preliminary finding” that the Vela flash was not a nuclear event. According to the early findings, “it is entirely possible that the September 22 signal could have been caused by a meteroid of somewhat different velocity, size and rotational motion.” Moreover, the Vela signal “itself differs in some important ways from previous nuclear signals.” Without corroborating data, “these facts tended to make the panel somewhat skeptical that a nuclear explosion actually occurred.”
The report also mentioned Deutch’s report on the newly interpreted data from the Arecibo Observatory. While noting that the Arecibo data “has a very different timescale” and that the “relationship between nuclear explosions and ionospheric disturbances is much less well understood than for optical signals recorded by bhangmeters [on VELA satellites],” it “represents the best lead yet in the search for corroborative data.”
Document 4
Henry Owen/Jerry Oplinger, White House Staff, to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, “South Atlantic Event,”9 January 1980, Secret
1980-01-09
Source: Staff Material Global Issues Files [NSA 28], Box 55, Proliferation – South Atlantic Nuclear Event, 1/80
On 9 January 1980, a “mini-SCC [Special Coordinating Committee]” meeting discussed the 22 September event. According to participants, “The consensus was that we don’t know what happened, and must proceed in policy terms accordingly.” The effort to politicize science is implicit. In a way, that conclusion matched the findings of the Ruina panel. Agnostic semi-official conclusions notwithstanding, important elements of the intelligence community continued to hold that a nuclear event had been detected, as evidenced in a report included in the National Security Archive’s 2016 posting.
Document 5
Jerry Oplinger, National Security Council/Science and Technology Staff, to Ambassador Henry Owen, “South Atlantic Event,” 25 January 1980, Secret, Excised copy
1980-01-25
Source: Staff Material Global Issues Files [NSA 28], Box 55, Proliferation – South Atlantic Nuclear Event, 1/80
This report conveys the approach that senior White House staff took toward dissenting views on the 22 September event. A scheduled presentation by representatives of the Departments of Energy and Defense would provide an opportunity for them to express arguments that a nuclear event had occurred; they would be heard out, according to this memo, “so that we can more safely ignore them.” This can arguably be seen as another possible demonstration of a “whitewash” effort to politicize scientific evidence.
According to Oplinger’s memorandum, the CIA’s “Safeguards-D” report had “assessed the probability of a nuclear test as 90% plus.” The Safeguards-D report was one required by the U.S. Senate when it ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Consistent with proposals by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the treaty be ratified on the basis of specific conditions, the Senate required the Kennedy administration to take specific implementing actions, such as recommendation D: “The improvement of our capability, within feasible and practical limits, to monitor the terms of the treaty, to detect violations, and to maintain our knowledge of Sino-Soviet nuclear activity, capabilities, and achievements.”
Having heard rumors that the CIA wanted to rewrite its safeguards report so that it corresponded to the findings of the Ruina panel, Oplinger wanted to make sure that CIA did no such thing because “nothing would suggest a whitewash more effectively.” If the CIA later decided that it wanted to update the earlier report that would be another matter as long as it could “provide solid and objective reasons.”
Document 6
Frank Press to Stan Turner, “Possible South Atlantic Nuclear Explosion,” 6 June 1980, Secret
1980-06-06
Source: Zbigniew Brzezinski Material, Country Files [NSA 6] Box 72, South Atlantic Nuclear Event, 9/79-6/80
In this memorandum to Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner, Frank Press, White House science adviser, explained the reasoning behind the Ruina panel’s conclusion that the Vela flash was “probably not from a nuclear explosion” and “more likely … caused by a natural event.” He could not have written to Turner, however, without acknowledging the dissents expressed by “key officials” at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA’s Nuclear Intelligence Panel (NIP), and the DOE weapons laboratories, who believed that the Vela signal detected a nuclear event. According to Press, “this is due primarily to the fact that the signal so closely resembles those from previous nuclear explosions, but the weapons laboratories have been unable to come up with a physical explanation that could explain the discrepancies observed in the signal.”
Press also noted that some of the agencies point to the “few pieces of geophysical data from September 22 that might have been related to a nuclear explosion.” He most likely referred to Arecibo data, and quite possibly also to the acoustic signals as analyzed by the naval Research Laboratory. Nevertheless, Press discounted it all: the data had “been thoroughly analyzed and none can be clearly correlated with the VELA signal.” We do not know if CIA Director Turner responded in writing to this memorandum. In the late 1990s, Turner told one of us (Avner Cohen) that he (and the Agency) had no doubt that it was a test and almost certainly an Israeli test.
Believing that White House scientists were not acting in good faith, by the spring of 1980, DIA experts saw the nuclear interpretation as settled in light of Naval Research Laboratory acoustic data that had not been available to the CIA or the Ruina panel. According to a senior DIA official, the acoustic signals were “unique to nuclear shots in a maritime environment.’”
Notes
[1]. Lars-Erik De Geer and Christopher M. Wright, “The 22 September 1979 Vela Incident: The Detected Double-Flash,” Science and Global Security 25 (2017): 95-124, and “The 22 September 1979 Vela Incident: Radionuclide and Hydroacoustic Evidence for a Nuclear Explosion,” Ibid, 26 (2018): 20-54.
[2]. Weiss has written extensively on this issue. See “Israel’s 1979 Nuclear Test and the U.S. Cover-up,” Middle East Policy,” Vol. 18 No.4 (2011); “The 1979 South Atlantic Flash: The Case for an Israeli Nuclear Test,” in Henry Sokolski, ed., Moving Beyond Pretense: Nuclear Power and Nonproliferation (Harrisburg, PA: Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press, 2014), 345-371; and “Flash from the Past: Why an Apparent Israeli Nuclear Test in 1979 Matters Today,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (8 September 2015). “Flash from the Past: Why an Apparent Israeli Nuclear Test in 1979 Matters Today.” See also Timothy McDonnell, “International Conference: The Historical Dimensions of South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program,”4 January 2013, Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.
[3]. Jimmy Carter, White House Diary, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 405.
[4]. See Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), at 136 and 141, and Nic von Wielligh and Lydai von Wielligh-Steyn, The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Programme (Pretoria: Litera Publications, 2015), at 157.
October 12, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, United States |
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Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II is a book by a science journalist Madhusree Mukerjee. It tells of British policy in India in the Second World War and how it relates to the Bengal Famine of 1943.
Mukerjee reminds the reader that before the British conquest India was a rich land. Certainly the conquerors drawn to Bengal in the 18th century were of the opinion they were adding a magnificently wealthy possession to their empire. Under colonial rule, however, Bengal soon became a synonym for poverty and a frequent setting of famine.
During the Second World War the colony was made to contribute heavily to the British war effort. India’s industries, manpower, and foodstuffs were made to serve requirements of the war the empire had involved itself in.
This was merely the latest escalation in a long lasting exploitation of the colony. The British deemed their unwanted presence in India a service and therefore extracted “payment” for it in the form of the Home Charge. As the British obstructed the expansion of manufacturing in India lest it provide competition for their domestic industry, the export of agricultural produce presented the only way of realizing this transfer.
Finally, since the empire set the transfer so high so much grain was extracted for export that the colony — which continued to produce more food than its need through the 19th century — was artificially kept in a condition of chronic malnutrition.
Unsurprisingly, there was strong resistance to colonial rule that could only be overcome by large scale repression. As part of the August 1942 crackdown against the Quit India Movement alone, more than 90,000 people were locked up and up to 10,000 were killed.
Short on manpower the British at times resorted to attacking crowds with aircraft. In particularly rebellious districts authorities burned down homes and destroyed rice supplies. British India was not unlike an occupied land.
The book exposes the manifold causes of the Bengal Famine. To begin with mortality rate in Bengal under British rule was atrocious even in a normal year with some of that attributable to malnutrition.
The immediate reasons why conditions deteriorated beyond this “normal” state of semi-famine was the catastrophic Midnapore Cyclone and the Japanese capture of Burma.
The Cyclone storm and subsequent floods disrupted life and ruined crops. The loss of Burma severed links with an important source of rice imports to India. These two factors which were outside British control, were probably enough for a disaster on their own, but subsequent British policies made the crisis far worse than it needed to be.
Anticipating the possibility the Japanese could advance further, the British carried out a scorched earth policy in coastal Bengal, seizing rice stocks, motor vehicles, bicycles and boats. Seizure of boats was particularly disruptive as they normally represented the primary means of transporting rice crops to the markets.
The loss of Burmese rice imports to India was not made up by imports from elsewhere, nor was India’s obligation to supply British Indian troops abroad lessened. Instead, India was made to cover the loss of Burmese rice imports to Ceylon, Arabia and South Africa even though these territories were already better provisioned with food than India.
Albeit in the years before WWII India had become a net importer of food, importing at least one million tons of cereal per year — a figure that was not actually sufficient to cover its needs, but represented what it could afford to import after paying the Home Charge — the British now undertook to export food from India.
Anticipating food shortages that were certain to follow, colonial administration moved to protect the strata of society most useful to the British Empire — administrators, soldiers and industrial workers. It set out to buy up huge quantities of grain and store it for their use. It would pay for these stocks in the same way it acquired supplies for the war effort — by printing money.
The government acquired some grain by requisitioning, but for the most part it simply bought it. Some purchases it made on its own, others it contracted out to private traders. Big merchant companies were given advances of vast sums of money and instructed to purchase grain at any price for the government.
The price of already precious grain skyrocketed and the Bengal peasant was priced out of the market. Between the purchases of the Bengal administration, the Government of India, the army and the industries which were recipients of government largesse, grain was sucked out from rural areas. Departments of government and industries crucial for the war effort secured huge stocks of grain — part of which would end up rotting as millions starved.
What made the looting of the countryside to this extent possible was that the transfer of purchasing power away from the peasant and to the government and those the government made business with that money printing entailed.
In the course of the war the money supply increased by between six and seven times, so that the British worried they were “within sight of collective refusal to accept further paper currency”. This confounded the problem of food scarcity since some cultivators understandably held onto their grain rather than release it to the market, as it was seen a better store of value than the rapidly depreciating currency.
The reason government purchases were so devastating for Bengal peasants was that most families owned tracts of land too small to sustain their families on their own.
Even in a normal year such families were not in position to store enough of their harvest to sustain them until the next one. They were not sellers of crops, they sold their labor to the big landowners and bought food.
Except now buying food meant competing with a government that could print money at will.
Prevalence of effectively landless peasants in Bengal in itself was the result of British policies in India which had created the landlord class from what had been tax collectors before the conquest.
Albeit crop failure and the loss of Burmese imports was enough to create a serious food deficit for India, there was actually no food problem for the British Empire taken as a whole. In fact London claimed that Bengal could not be fed — not for a lack of food, but for a lack of ships — supposedly shipping was so scarce that grain, which was available, could not be taken to India without disrupting the British war effort.
Prioritizing its war over the bare lives of three million of its subjects would have been bad enough, but Mukarjee shows that shipping was nowhere as scarce as London claimed, albeit it was certainly being mismanaged. For example there was shipping and food enough to build up a stockpile in the Eastern Mediterranean for the purpose of Allied invasion of the Balkans that would never come about. Also there were always ships aplenty to build up an enormous and ever growing stockpile of food in the British Isles that the London government was actually building up for post-war use.
In reality the biggest obstacle to secure food for famine-stricken India was not a lack of means, but the lack of will to allocate the resources necessary. Such readjustments would have clashed with the interest and the intent of the British Empire under Winston Churchill to exploit its colony for its purposes to the greatest extent possible.
To their credit, not every Brit was of a mind with the London government personified in Winston Churchill.
Many officials, including high ranking ones like the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery and the Viceroy of India, Field Marshal Wavell repeatedly called for a decisive effort to relieve the famine. Governments of Australia, New Zeeland and Canada offered grain for India if United Kingdom, which had taken control of their shipping, would transport it there.
British soldiers on the scene defied orders not to help famine refugees often handing over food from their own rations.
In addition to showing how the British Empire helped cause the Bengal Famine of 1943 and then denied it famine relief Churchill’s Secret War also provides the context for these two stories.
Mukarjee recounts a fair bit of the dynamic between colonial metropolis and the colony centering on exploitation and resistance, explains the consequences of British wartime policies for the political future of the colony — partition and independence — and paints a picture of famine and repression as seen from the ground by offering vivid first hand accounts by people who were affected.
It is a book rich in content, but probably the one thing to take from it is the way in which the famine was made worse and its victims selected by government abuse of paper currency.
British reaction to food shortages in Bengal was to protect the cities and industries at the expense of the peasants. Like the Soviet Union which had faced a food crisis of its own a decade earlier the British Empire figured it was up to it to decide who would live and who would die.
Only where the Soviet method of robbing the countryside of grain in 1932-33 was requisition, the British method of choice in India was money creation. It was a more elegant method, but no less deadly, and more difficult to effectively resist.
If the famine in 1932-33 in the Soviet Union was a requisition famine, the Bengal Famine of 1943 was a printing press famine.
October 10, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | India, UK |
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I doubt that any event in human history has been as thoroughly discussed and documented as the Second World War, the gigantic global struggle that ended three generations ago and shaped our modern world. Elements of that conflict have probably been the subject of hundreds of thousands of books over the decades along with countless articles in newspapers and magazines, and they still pervade our electronic media on a daily basis. Moreover, the story told by nearly all of these authors seems generally consistent, thereby appearing to constitute a very solid fabric of historical reality.
Yet there exists strong evidence that this factual consistency is more apparent than real, with those writers who substantially deviate from the accepted framework having long been denied distribution via mainstream channels of information. The growth of the Internet over the last two decades began bringing disturbing anomalies to my attention, and I gradually recognized this broader problem, which became the basis of my American Pravda articles published over the last few years.
As I described in one of my articles, as early as 1940 some of America’s most prominent and highly-regarded journalists and academics were purged from public life because they maintained their intellectual integrity while most of their peer-group bent to the prevailing ideological winds. When those who dispute a particular view of events quickly disappear from all public discussions, this may naturally intimidate the remainder, while any subsequent consistency becomes a synthetic artifact of selection-bias. And since the vast majority of later writers learn their histories within this sharply-restricted framework, the false reality they absorb gradually becomes self-perpetuating over time.
Many of the individuals cast out by the media for their discordant views had once stood at the pinnacle of public influence, and their thoughtful writings often continued long after their national audiences had been eliminated. Taken together, their works provide a perspective radically different from that of our official histories.
Over the last two years, many of my articles have used these sources to reconstruct what may be a more accurate history of the Second World War, and I recently drew upon my findings to publish American Pravda: Understanding World War II. This article is intended to provide a reasonably compact but comprehensive counter-narrative to our official histories of the central event of the twentieth century. Even 20,000 words of text hardly seems excessive when it seeks to challenge and rebut so many tens of millions of pages written on the other side.
The early response to this very long piece has certainly been quite heartening. In just over two weeks it has attracted more readership than almost any of our other website articles have accumulated over the last six months, while also provoking well over 200,000 words of commentary, much of it quite detailed and thoughtful.
Ron Unz • September 23, 2019 • 20,400 Words
Historical analysis is not entirely an intellectual exercise since it may often shed an important light on present-day events of great importance. Once we begin to accept that there is considerable evidence that the history of the twentieth century believed by nearly all Americans may be in serious error and perhaps actually inverted, we naturally become far more willing to question our ongoing official narratives on important foreign and domestic policy matters. Moreover, the past media purges of dissenting academics and journalists allows us to more easily recognize the exact same developments taking place today, sometimes with very grave consequences.
Consider the case of Stephen F. Cohen. With an academic career at Princeton and New York University that stretches back for more than a half-century, Prof. Cohen certainly ranks as one of our most eminent Russia scholars, and his presence had loomed very large throughout the Reagan Era and afterward, with his Sovieticus column being a regular mid-1980s feature of The Nation magazine, America’s left-liberal flagship publication.
Yet with the Cold War against Russia now recently revived in perhaps an even more dangerous and destructive form by his former liberal Democratic Party allies, his views seem almost nowhere to be found in the mainstream media organs that shape the reality of our ruling policy-elites. Instead, the ignorant journalists who function as our unofficial gatekeepers have crudely castigated him as one of Putin’s “American Dupes.”
In recent years, his regular appearances on the John Batchelor Show of WABC radio have represented one of his few remaining public platforms, and I’m very pleased to have recently made arrangements to republish all of these hundreds of broadcasts on our website, together with their brief descriptive summaries and several of Prof. Cohen’s other articles from this same period, thereby making this important material conveniently available to an additional audience at a very dangerous time. With Russiagate having finally collapsed only to be succeeded by Ukrainegate, I would particularly recommend his February interview entitled “How the Russiagate Investigation Is Sovietizing American Politics.”
Along with providing a helpful new distribution channel for such an eminent academic scholar, we have begun doing the same for Whitney Webb of MintPress News, whose remarkable investigative work has begun attracting a great deal of attention over the last year, breaking important new ground in the Jeffrey Epstein case and other controversial matters. Her long, copiously-reported articles have revealed important facts regularly excluded from the mainstream media, setting a new standard of courageous journalism.
October 9, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular |
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Adobe is to cut Venezuela off because of US sanctions, showing how vulnerable countries in the ‘line of fire’ are, due to their dependence on American computer software products.
We all know about US hard power. We know a lot about US soft power too (think Hollywood, rock-and-roll, and Marvel comics). But there is another way the US tries to maintain a pre-eminent role in world affairs. I call it software power.
The operating system on the computer you own is probably American. It’s odds on that the search engine you use to find things out online is American too. It‘s also very likely that the social media you log into on a daily basis is American. It might be overstating things, but it’s not far off to say that the ‘Computer World’ we all live in, and which Kraftwerk sang about almost forty years ago, is basically an American world, but it’s not far off.
It’s this dependence on US software and the products of Silicon Valley giants which makes countries which want to maintain their independence from Washington so vulnerable. The latest victim of US software power projection is Venezuela. Adobe, the Californian company which provides design tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator, and the document management system Acrobat Reader, announced that on the 28th October all subscriptions in the Bolivarian Republic will be cancelled without refund.
The firm cites President Donald Trump’s executive order from August which, as RT has reported, ‘basically bans all transactions between the countries.’
You can imagine the impact the Adobe ban will have on businesses in Venezuela. A whole country and not just Nicolas Maduro and his government will be hit. We can probably all survive without US food, or US films. But can we really get by in our daily lives without US software?
Here’s a few facts to show us how much we rely on US companies when we log in, or switch on our IPhones.
*Microsoft Windows has a 77.61% share of the world’s operating system market, with Apple, also from the US, in second place.
*In early 2018 Microsoft’s Outlook.com said it had 400m active users.
*As of June 2019 there were over 2.41 billion monthly users of Facebook.
*In Q2 of 2019 there were 139m Twitter users.
*Google has 90.46% of the search engine market share worldwide and receives over 63,000 searches per second every day, amounting to 2 trillion searches per year.
No one is arguing that the US companies named above don’t provide some great services to customers. Often the criticism of them (and particularly of Facebook), is over-the-top and lacks balance.
The problem is that the market dominance of the Silicon Valley giants can be, and has been, exploited by the US government, political agitators, and lobby groups in the US in order to achieve geo-strategic political goals. When the US sanctions a country it knows full well how dependent that country is likely to be on its computer products. It’s an additional and very important hold (and very 21st Century) hold the power elites of the country have over those who resist the writ of Washington.
There’s also the political pressure that can be and has been exerted on these hi-tech companies to withdraw services from users from ‘official enemy’ countries. Look at the way legislators have called on Facebook and Twitter to ban dissident voices and consider the hysteria over Russian ‘bots’ following the US presidential election in 2016.
Before I get wrongly accused here of ‘anti-Americanism’, let me acknowledge that it would probably be the same whoever had such a dominant market position. It just so happened that the computer revolution coincided with the emergence of the US as a global hegemon.
US-backed regime change efforts in Venezuela have, it’s worth noting, been backed enthusiastically by EU poster boy Guy Verhofstadt and other European ‘liberals.’ One assumes they are very happy with Adobe’s withdrawal of services to Venezuelan customers.
But Verhofstadt and co might end up with egg on their faces. Make no mistake, if US software power can be used against countries in Latin America, it can be used against European countries too, if and when it needs to be.
Only last week we saw the US slap 25% tariffs on French wines, Italian cheese, and Scottish whiskey, and announce it would add 10% duties on ’large civilian aircraft.’ The French finance minister said that Europe was ‘ready to react’ with retaliatory tariffs on its own. But if we do get a full-scale US-EU trade war, won’t America’s software power give it the edge and force an EU climbdown?
If Europeans were as smart as their smartphones, they’d be waking up to the fact that they are vulnerable and be planning accordingly.
October 9, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular | United States |
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