Monday, April 27, 2009

False Saviors - Harry Truman

This is the greatest thing in history.

-----Harry Truman, on receiving news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima

The war was almost over, Hitler and Mussolini gone, Japan in ruins, when Harry Truman gave the order to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Upwards of 200,000 people were killed, a few eerily vaporized into the concrete on the Aioi Bridge (Hiroshima), thousands more hurled through the air like missiles, then buried under piles of fallen debris, countless others doomed to a slow, agonizing death from radiation poisoning. While Truman gloated, saner minds recoiled in shocked horror: cultural historian Lewis Mumford accused the U.S. government of having reverted to Bronze Age barbarism and “reversed the whole course of human history.”

That Japan was already putting out peace feelers through its emissary in Moscow did not induce Truman to call off the atomization of defenseless cities, nor did the awesome nuclear destruction itself bring an end to the slaughter. Five days after Nagasaki, General “Hap” Arnold staged a 1000-plane raid that bombarded what remained of Japanese cities, killing thousands as leaflets fluttered to the ground announcing the Japanese surrender. This is how Truman ended "the good war."

For the cocky new president, the end of one war was but the prelude to beginning another - the Cold War. He was not concerned with the crimes of the USSR, real or imagined, but with the apparent success of the Soviet model of development, which enjoyed wide appeal. There was also concern that the Soviets might be considering offering support to working people in the West, and for that matter, exploited and oppressed people wherever they might be. The failure of Eastern Europe to resume its customary role of supplying food and raw materials to the West, aggravated these worries. The problem was not Communist human rights abuses, but political independence and the appeal of its example.

So with the U.S. public tired of killing and eager for demobilization and disarmament, Truman whipped up an atmosphere of permanent crisis and hysteria against "Communism," sharply escalating the military budget and shaking his fist at the USSR, which had just suffered 20 million dead (roughly every third male was killed) defeating a German army that destroyed the Soviet economy and vast reaches of its territory for the second time in a generation. If the U.S. had suffered proportionate destruction, William Mandel points out, it would have been as if everything east of Chicago had been burned to the ground.

Given the amazingly favorable circumstances Truman inherited, there was no need for a revived Cold War. The U.S. had 75% of the world’s investment capital, two-thirds of its industrial capacity, and a GNP that had doubled while Europe, Japan, and the USSR were reduced to rubble. It exercised military control over both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and had twelve million soldiers under arms throughout the world, backed up by an atomic monopoly. Both economically and militarily the U.S. enjoyed a security unparalleled in modern history.

But rather than establish peace, Truman turned his attention to instituting an American national security state. Although Joseph McCarthy carries the stigma of the repressive era that bears his name, it is Truman who deserves more of the credit. For it was his demand for loyalty oaths that formed the basis of a nationwide attack on unions, working class culture, and independent thought that eliminated the prospects for post-war democracy and plunged the country into an anti-Communist hysteria that did not abate until the popular revolts of the 1960s, and was not eradicated even then.

The anti-Communist purge started with Truman’s signing of Executive Order 9835, which authorized the government to probe the beliefs and associations of all its federal employees and “ferret out any infiltration of disloyal persons.” The accused were denied the right to confront their accusers or even to know the charges against them, while Attorney General Howard McGrath was granted the power to deny jobs, passports, federal housing, and even tax exemptions to anyone displaying “sympathetic association” with any of hundreds of “subversive organizations." Thus were ideas converted into crimes and petition-signing into treason.

While trembling government workers attempted to recall dollar donations and any deviant publications they may have read, Seth Richardson, Truman's point man in the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, explained that "the government is entitled to discharge any employee for reasons which seem sufficient to the government, and without extending to such employee any hearing whatsoever." Truman assured federal workers that the loyalty police existed "to safeguard their rights," then announced that "subversive elements must be removed from the employ of government."

Referring to the scope of the problem, Attorney General McGrath warned in 1949 that “Communists . . . are everywhere---in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses . . . each carry[ing] in himself the germ of death for society.” Millions of investigations were carried out using secret evidence, undercover and often paid informers, but without a judge or jury. In 1951, with the nation in the grip of utter panic, Truman expressed concern that civil liberties were being adversely affected, then amended his program for the worse, signing a new Executive Order altering the basis of dismissal from “reasonable grounds” of disloyalty to “reasonable doubt” of loyalty, thus shifting the burden of proof onto the accused. After years of traumatic upheaval, not a single case of espionage was ever uncovered.

Thus did Truman subordinate U.S. democracy to the needs of a world empire. As WWII approached its savage conclusion, he and his advisors planned a “Grand Area,” - a region “strategically necessary for world control” - to be subordinated to the needs of U.S. capital and administered by Wall Street financiers and Washington power brokers. The area modestly included the Western hemisphere, the former British domains, the Far East, the Pacific, and the richer half of Europe. The Communist world was regretfully considered out of reach, but only temporarily. Hopes were high that it could be obtained later through conquest or collapse. Such vast U.S. control was necessary, future Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas said, “as part of our obligation to the security of the world.”

With Europe and much of Asia in ruins, Truman’s main goal became dissuading desperate peoples from forging an accommodation with the Soviets that would leave important sectors of the world independent of U.S. control. To head off this threat his administration backed fascist collaborators and traditional right-wing business interests in putting down popular formations that had been instrumental to winning the war, but threatened the terms of capitalist peace. In Greece, Truman backed the fascist-riddled Tsaldaris regime and denounced anti-fascist guerrillas challenging monarchists and Axis collaborators as an example of “outside forces” attacking “free peoples.” In France, the U.S. withheld desperately needed food aid to insure popular obedience while paying gangsters to organize goon squads and crush labor agitation. In Italy, the American military government rekindled friendly relations with fascism, banned politics, imposed censorship, and crushed a thriving labor movement that had achieved alarming levels of self-government and direct democracy before American troops arrived to “liberate” it.

Elsewhere the pattern was much the same, with methods often considerably more brutal. In China, the Truman administration backed Chiang Kai-shek’s bloody dictatorship until the bitter end, then declared his Formosa regime the “real” China against 400 million Communist impostors on the mainland. In Korea, the U.S. blasted and napalmed the country into a vast, barren graveyard to preserve Japan’s pre-war dictatorship. In Japan, General MacArthur beat back a surging labor movement, prohibiting a general strike and restoring authority to the militarists and ultranationalists. In the Phillipines, U.S. forces rounded up and shot Huk guerrillas who had helped Washington expel the Japanese, then burned their villages to the ground. In Vietnam, Truman ignored France’s deliberate policy of starvation, which Ho Chi Minh claimed had killed two million people, and never responded to his letters reminding the U.S. president of the self-determination commitments of the Atlantic Charter. In Latin America, the Truman administration insisted the region not entertain “excessive industrial development,” and opposed policies “designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.”

Meanwhile, in Germany, the U.S. shut down the operations of anti-fascist worker councils that had taken over hundreds of German companies, returned Nazis to power, and forced the division of the country by insisting that “West” Germany join an anti-Soviet military alliance (NATO). The Truman administration supported the Atlantic alliance, not to deter Soviet aggression against Western Europe, but to integrate Germany in a capitalist bloc permanently hostile to the USSR. In the early postwar years a neutralist movement in Europe was considered intolerable. Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson warned in 1952 that the Soviets might be disposed to exploit Third World political conflicts in an effort to “force the maximum number of non-Communist countries to pursue a neutral policy and to deny their resources to the principal Western powers,” which meant, of course, to deny them on the preferential terms the capitalist powers insisted on. Preparing for the meeting that established NATO in April 1949, U.S. policymakers became convinced that the Soviets might actually be interested in negotiating a deal that would unify Germany and end the division of Europe. This was regarded not as a welcome opportunity to end the Cold War, but as a threat to the primary national security goal of harnessing Germany’s economic and military potential to the anti-Communist Atlantic Community while blocking the “suicide of neutralism.” “The trend of our thinking,” George Kennan, a leading State Department dove wrote, “means . . . that we do not really want to see Germany reunified at this time, and that there are no conditions on which we would really find such a solution satisfactory.” Therefore, the U.S. occupation of Germany would continue, even if the Soviets proposed a mutual withdrawal. Germany was to be integrated as a subisidiary part of the anti-Communist West headed by the U.S. The Soviets would have no significant say in the outcome, would not receive reparations, and would not influence German industrial development. This, after having absorbed 80% of the casualties in defeating the Nazi war machine.

Encouraged by Senator Vandenberg to “scare hell out of the American people” to extract financing for its fledgling world empire, Truman falsely presented permanent war as a defensive reaction to Communism’s alleged drive for world domination and called for a Holy War against the Godless Red Hordes. But the idea that the U.S. was required by the Cold War to project force beyond its borders ignores the fact that it was independent nationalism, not Bolshevism, that U.S. planners really feared, while dismissing the abundant evidence that U.S. imperialism long pre-dated Communism. In truth, Truman’s invoking of the Red Menace was simply a convenient pretext to justify U.S. interventions taken for quite other reasons, typically greed for cheap labor, strategic resources, profits, markets, and a secure overall system of U.S. global power. These motives were paramount in the Truman administration’s post-war Pax Americana, as the U.S. repeatedly intervened abroad to destroy incipient independence movements and make the world safe for U.S. domination.

Seeking to avert “economic, social and political” chaos, prevent the collapse of American exports, achieve “multilateralism” and dissipate the growing strength of indigenous communist parties throughout Europe, Truman unveiled the Marshall Plan, dangling economic assistance before war-ravaged Europe with powerful effect. In the absence of massive aid, his administration feared, the devastated continent might forsake capitalism for “experiments with socialist enterprise and government controls,” which could “jeopardize private enterprise,” even in the U.S. A major anxiety was the “dollar gap,” which kept Europe from being a market for U.S. manufactures, threatening to produce a glut of unbought goods that could drag the U.S. into economic chaos. Habitually presented as confirmation of the Robin Hood nature of U.S. foreign policy, the Marshall Plan in fact advanced U.S. strategic designs to subordinate Europe to American corporations, narrowing the European political spectrum, coercing choices, limiting welfare and wages, and paving the way for “large amounts of private U.S. direct investment in Europe,” in the words of President Reagan’s Commerce Department. A non-negotiable element of the plan called for the exclusion of “Communists” from power, a broadly defined demon class that included major elements of the wartime anti-fascist resistance and trade union movements. Through 1948, Truman’s Secretary of State George Marshall made it clear that U.S. aid would cease should the wrong candidates be voted into office, a blackmail policy that carried considerable force given European conditions at the time.

In addition to his disastrous anti-Communism, Truman was also responsible for succumbing to Zionist lobbying pressure to recognize the new state of Israel. On the afternoon of May 14, 1948 a group of Jewish leaders met in a museum in Tel Aviv, Palestine to decide the future of their “homeland” on the edge of Western Asia. As midnight struck, the British Mandate over Palestine expired, and the Jewish leaders declared a Jewish state “in the name of the Jewish people,” making no mention of borders or the indigenous Arab majority. Minutes later, President Truman extended official recognition to the state, whose citizens were not the inhabitants of the land, but the Jewish people wherever in the world they happened to be. Whereas a Jew from Brooklyn belonged, a fortieth generation Palestinian from Haifa did not. Under the circumstances, war was inevitable.

According to U.S. historian Walter LaFeber Truman’s recognition of Israel was “astonishing” in that the Arab nations, who were on good terms with the U.S. and whose oil was a strategic resource of fantastic value to Washington’s national security state, were violently opposed to a Jewish state and had been for decades. Nevertheless, Truman ignored bitter opposition from Secretary of State George Marshall and Defense Secretary James Forrestal, opting instead to win the Jewish vote in the fall elections that year. While he got out the Jewish vote, Israel kicked out the Arabs, ethnically cleansing Palestine of hundreds of thousands of them in bloody massacres that have continued in one form or another for sixty-one years.

Truman liked to declare that "The Buck Stops Here." But in this case the buck was passed to transnational Jewry, with permanently disastrous results for the Palestinians and the world.

Few policies seem quite so difficult to forgive.

The Sources:

Michael Hogan, "The Marshall Plan," (Cambridge, 1987)

Noam Chomsky, "Year 501 - The Conquest Continues," (South End, 1993)

Noam Chomsky, "What Uncle Sam Really Wants," (Odonian, 1993)

Cedric Belfrage, "The American Inquisition," (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973)

Lewis Mumford, "My Works and Days," (Harcourt, 1979)

Griffin Fariello, "Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition," (Avon, 1995)

Lawrence S. Wittner, "Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate," (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)

Alfred M. Lilienthal, "The Zionist Connection," (Dodd, Mead, 1978)

Carolyn Eisenberg, "Drawing The Line - The American Decision To Divide Germany, 1944-1949," (Cambridge, 1996)

Laurence Shoup and William Mintner, "The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy," (Monthly Review, 1977)

Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States," (Harper, 1995)

Peter Wyden, "Day One," (Simon and Schuster, 1984)

Richard D. Walton, "Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War," (Viking, 1976)

Walter LaFeber, "The American Age," (Norton, 1989)

William Mandel, "Saying No To Power - Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker," (Creative Arts, 1999)

Howard Wachtel, "The Money Mandarins," (M. E. Sharpe, 1990)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Origins of World War 2 -

The unexpected views of four key diplomats who were close to events

Just consider the following:

Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to Britain during the years immediately preceding WW2 was the father of the famous American Kennedy dynasty. James Forrestal the first US Secretary of Defense (1947-1949) quotes him as saying "Chamberlain (the British Prime Minister) stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war". (The Forrestal Diaries ed. Millis, Cassell 1952 p129).

Count Jerzy Potocki, the Polish Ambassador in Washington, in a report to the Polish Foreign Office in January 1939, is quoted approvingly by the highly respected British military historian Major-General JFC Fuller. Concerning public opinion in America he says "Above all, propaganda here is entirely in Jewish hands…when bearing public ignorance in mind, their propaganda is so effective that people have no real knowledge of the true state of affairs in Europe… It is interesting to observe that in this carefully thought-out campaign… no reference at all is made to Soviet Russia. If that country is mentioned, it is referred to in a friendly manner and people are given the impression that Soviet Russia is part of the democratic group of countries… Jewry was able not only to establish a dangerous centre in the New World for the dissemination of hatred and enmity, but it also succeeded in dividing the world into two warlike camps…President Roosevelt has been given the power.. to create huge reserves in armaments for a future war which the Jews are deliberately heading for." (Fuller, JFC: The Decisive Battles of the Western World vol 3 pp 372-374.)

Hugh Wilson, the American Ambassador in Berlin until 1938, the year before the war broke out, found anti-Semitism in Germany ‘understandable’. This was because before the advent of the Nazis, "the stage, the press, medicine and law [were] crowded with Jews…among the few with money to splurge, a high proportion [were] Jews…the leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia, a movement desperately feared in Germany, were Jews. One could feel the spreading resentment and hatred." (Hugh Wilson: Diplomat between the Wars, Longmans 1941, quoted in Leonard Mosley, Lindbergh, Hodder 1976).

Sir Nevile Henderson, British Ambassador in Berlin ‘said further that the hostile attitude in Great Britain was the work of Jews and enemies of the Nazis, which was what Hitler thought himself’ (Taylor, AJP: The Origins of the Second World War Penguin 1965, 1987 etc p 324).


Is all of this merely attributable to antisemitism?

The economic background to the war is necessary for a fuller understanding, before casting judgement on the originators of these viewpoints.

At the end of the First World War, Germany was essentially tricked [see Paul Johnson A History of the Modern World (1983) p24 and H Nicholson Peacemaking 1919 (1933) pp13-16] into paying massive reparations to France and other economic competitors and former belligerent countries in terms of the so-called Treaty of Versailles, thanks to the liberal American President Woodrow Wilson. Germany was declared to be solely responsible for the war, in spite of the fact that ‘Germany did not plot a European war, did not want one, and made genuine efforts, though too belated, to avert one.’ (Professor Sydney B Fay The Origins of the World War (vol. 2 p 552)).

As a result of these massive enforced financial reparations, by 1923 the situation in Germany became desperate and inflation on an astronomical scale became the only way out for the government. Printing presses were engaged to print money around the clock. In 1921 the exchange rate was 75 marks to the dollar. By 1924 this had become about 5 trillion marks to the dollar. This virtually destroyed the German middle class (Koestler The God that Failed p 28), reducing any bank savings to a virtual zero.

According to Sir Arthur Bryant the British historian (Unfinished Victory (1940 pp. 136-144):

‘It was the Jews with their international affiliations and their hereditary flair for finance who were best able to seize such opportunities.. They did so with such effect that, even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich. Most of it came into their hands during the inflation.. But to those who had lost their all this bewildering transfer seemed a monstrous injustice. After prolonged sufferings they had now been deprived of their last possessions. They saw them pass into the hands of strangers, many of whom had not shared their sacrifices and who cared little or nothing for their national standards and traditions.. The Jews obtained a wonderful ascendancy in politics, business and the learned professions (in spite of constituting) less than one percent of the population.. The banks, including the Reichsbank and the big private banks, were practically controlled by them. So were the publishing trade, the cinema, the theatres and a large part of the press – all the normal means, in fact, by which public opinion in a civilized country is formed.. The largest newspaper combine in the country with a daily circulation of four millions was a Jewish monopoly.. Every year it became harder and harder for a gentile to gain or keep a foothold in any privileged occupation.. At this time it was not the ‘Aryans’ who exercised racial discrimination. It was a discrimination that operated without violence. It was exercised by a minority against a majority. There was no persecution, only elimination.. It was the contrast between the wealth enjoyed – and lavishly displayed – by aliens of cosmopolitan tastes, and the poverty and misery of native Germans, that has made anti-Semitism so dangerous and ugly a force in the new Europe. Beggars on horseback are seldom popular, least of all with those whom they have just thrown out of the saddle.’

Goodness gracious, Sir Arthur! What made you get out of the wrong side of the bed?

Strangely enough, a book unexpectedly published by Princeton University Press in 1984, Sarah Gordon (Hitler, Germans and the "Jewish Question") essentially confirms what Bryant says. According to her, ‘Jews were never a large percentage of the total German population; at no time did they exceed 1% of the population during the years 1871-1933.’ But she adds ‘Jews were over-represented in business, commerce, and public and private service.. They were especially visible in private banking in Berlin, which in 1923 had 150 private Jewish banks, as opposed to only 11 private non-Jewish banks.. They owned 41% of iron and scrap iron firms and 57% of other metal businesses.. Jews were very active in the stock market, particularly in Berlin, where in 1928 they comprised 80% of the leading members of the stock exchange. By 1933, when the Nazis began eliminating Jews from prominent positions, 85% of the brokers on the Berlin Stock exchange were dismissed because of their "race".. At least a quarter of full professors and instructors (at German universities) had Jewish origins.. In 1905-6 Jewish students comprised 25% of the law and medical students.. In 1931, 50% of the 234 theatre directors in Germany were Jewish, and in Berlin the number was 80%.. In 1929 it was estimated that the per capita income of Jews in Berlin was twice that of other Berlin residents..’ etc etc.

Arthur Koestler confirms the Jewish over-involvement in German publishing. ‘Ullstein’s was a kind of super-trust; the largest organization of its kind in Europe, and probably In the world. They published four daily papers in Berlin alone, among these the venerable Vossische Zeitung, founded in the eighteenth century, and the B.Z. am Mittag, an evening paper.. Apart from these, Ullstein’s published more than a dozen weekly and monthly periodicals, ran their own news service, their own travel agency, etc., and were one of the leading book publishers. The firm was owned by the brothers Ullstein - they were five, like the original Rothschild brothers, and like them also, they were Jews.’ (The God that Failed (1950) ed. RHS Crossman, p 31).

Edgar Mowrer, Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, wrote an anti-German tract called Germany Puts the Clock Back (published as a Penguin Special and reprinted five times between December 1937 and April 1938). He nevertheless notes ‘In the all-important administration of Prussia, any number of strategic positions came into the hands of Hebrews.. A telephone conversation between three Jews in Ministerial offices could result in the suspension of any periodical or newspaper in the state.. The Jews came in Germany to play in politics and administration that same considerable part that they had previously won by open competition in business, trade, banking, the Press, the arts, the sciences and the intellectual and cultural life of the country. And thereby the impression was strengthened that Germany, a country with a mission of its own, had fallen into the hands of foreigners.’

Mowrer says ‘No one who lived through the period from 1919 to 1926 is likely to forget the sexual promiscuity that prevailed.. Throughout a town like Berlin, hotels and pensions made vast fortunes by letting rooms by the hour or day to baggageless, unregistered guests. Hundreds of cabarets, pleasure resorts and the like served for purposes of getting acquainted and acquiring the proper mood..’ (pp. 153-4). Bryant describes throngs of child prostitutes outside the doors of the great Berlin hotels and restaurants. He adds ‘Most of them (the night clubs and vice-resorts) were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews.. among the promoters of this trade who were remembered in after years.’ (pp. 144-5).

Douglas Reed, Chief Central European correspondent before WWII for the London Times, was profoundly anti-German and anti-Hitler. But nevertheless he reported: ‘I watched the Brown Shirts going from shop to shop with paint pots and daubing on the window panes the word "Jew", in dripping red letters. The Kurfürstendamm was to me a revelation. I knew that Jews were prominent in business life, but I did not know that they almost monopolized important branches of it. Germany had one Jew to one hundred gentiles, said the statistics; but the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, according to the dripping red legends, had about one gentile shop to ninety-nine Jewish ones.’ (Reed Insanity Fair (1938) p. 152-3). In Reed’s book Disgrace Abounding of the following year he notes ‘In the Berlin (of pre-Hitler years) most of the theatres were Jewish-owned or Jewish-leased, most of the leading film and stage actors were Jews, the plays performed were often by German, Austrian or Hungarian Jews and were staged by Jewish film producers, applauded by Jewish dramatic critics in Jewish newspapers.. The Jews are not cleverer than the Gentiles, if by clever you mean good at their jobs. They ruthlessly exploit the common feeling of Jews, first to get a foothold in a particular trade or calling, then to squeeze the non-Jews out of it.. It is not true that Jews are better journalists than Gentiles. They held all the posts on those Berlin papers because the proprietors and editors were Jewish’ (pp238-9).

The Jewish writer Edwin Black notes ‘For example, in Berlin alone, about 75% of the attorneys and nearly as many of the doctors were Jewish.’ (Black, The Transfer Agreement (1984) p58.

To cap it all, Jews were perceived as dangerous enemies of Germany after Samuel Untermeyer, the leader of the World Jewish Economic Federation, declared war on Germany on August 6 1933. (Edwin Black The Transfer Agreement: the Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third Reich and Palestine (1984) pp272-277) According to Black, ‘The one man who most embodied the potential death blow to Germany was Samuel Untermeyer.’ (p 369). This was the culmination of a worldwide boycott of German goods led by international Jewish organizations. The London Daily Express on March 24, 1933 carried the headline Judea Declares War on Germany. The boycott was particularly motivated by the German imposition of the Nuremberg Laws, which ironically were similar in intent and content to the Jewish cultural exclusivism practiced so visibly in present-day Israel (Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem p 7).

Hitler saw the tremendous danger posed to Germany by Communism. He appreciated the desperate need to eliminate this threat, a fact that earned him the immense hatred and animosity of the Jewish organisations and the media and politicians of the west which they could influence. After all, according to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant, although Jews formed less than five percent of Russia's population, they formed more than fifty percent of its revolutionaries. According to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant in his book The Jews (1977, chapter 8):

‘It must be added that most of the leading revolutionaries who convulsed Europe in the final decades of the last century and the first decades of this one, stemmed from prosperous Jewish families.. They were perhaps typified by the father of revolution, Karl Marx.. Thus when, after the chaos of World War I, revolutions broke out all over Europe, Jews were everywhere at the helm; Trotsky, Sverdlov, Kamenev and Zinoviev in Russia, Bela Kun in Hungary, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria, and, most improbable of all, Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin.

‘To many outside observers, the Russian revolution looked like a Jewish conspiracy, especially when it was followed by Jewish-led revolutionary outbreaks in much of central Europe. The leadership of the Bolshevik Party had a preponderance of Jews.. Of the seven members of the Politburo, the inner cabinet of the country, four, Trotsky (Bronstein), Zinoviev (Radomsky), Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Sverdlov, were Jews.’ Other authors agree with this:

"There has been a tendency to circumvent or simply ignore the significant role of Jewish intellectuals in the German Communist Party, and thereby seriously neglect one of the genuine and objective reasons for increased anti-Semitism during and after World War 1.. The prominence of Jews in the revolution and early Weimar Republic is indisputable, and this was a very serious contributing cause for increased anti-Semitism in post-war years.. It is clear then that the stereotype of Jews as socialists and communists.. led many Germans to distrust the Jewish minority as a whole and to brand Jews as enemies of the German nation." (Sarah Gordon Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question’ Princeton University Press (1984) p 23).

"The second paroxysm of strong anti-Semitism came after the critical role of Jews in International Communism and the Russian Revolution and during the economic crises of the 1920s and 30s… Anti-Semitism intensified throughout Europe and North America following the perceived and actual centrality of Jews in the Russian Revolution.. Such feelings were not restricted to Germany, or to vulgar extremists like the Nazis. All over Northern Europe and North America, anti-Semitism became the norm in 'nice society', and 'nice society' included the universities." (Martin Bernal, Black Athena vol. 1 pp. 367, 387).

"The major role Jewish leaders played in the November (Russian) revolution was probably more important than any other factor in confirming (Hitler's) anti-Semitic beliefs." (J&S Pool, Who Financed Hitler, p.164).



Hitler came to power in Germany with two main aims, the rectification of the unjust provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and the destruction of the Soviet/ Communist threat to Germany. Strangely enough, contrary to the mythology created by those who had an opposing ethnic agenda, he had no plans or desire for a larger war of conquest. Professor AJP Taylor showed this in his book The Origins of the Second World War, to the disappointment of the professional western political establishment. Taylor says, "The state of German armament in 1939 gives the decisive proof that Hitler was not contemplating general war, and probably not intending war at all" (p.267), and "Even in 1939 the German army was not equipped for a prolonged war; and in 1940 the German land forces were inferior to the French in everything except leadership" (p104-5). What occurred in Europe in 1939-41 was the result of unforeseen weaknesses and a tipping of the balance of power, and Hitler was an opportunist ‘who took advantages whenever they offered themselves’ (Taylor). Britain and France declared war on Germany, not the other way around. Hitler wanted peace with Britain, as the German generals admitted (Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill 1948, Pan Books 1983) with regard to the so-called Halt Order at Dunkirk, where Hitler had the opportunity to capture the entire British Army, but chose not to. Liddell Hart, one of Britain’s most respected military historians, quotes the German General von Blumentritt with regard to this Halt Order:

"He (Hitler) then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilisation that Britain had brought into the world. He remarked, with a shrug of the shoulders, that the creation of its Empire had been achieved by means that were often harsh, but ‘where there is planing, there are shavings flying’. He compared the British Empire with the catholic Church – saying they were both essential elements of stability in the world. He said that all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge Germany’s position on the Continent. The return of Germany’s colonies would be desirable but not essential, and he would even offer to support Britain with troops if she should be involved in difficulties anywhere.." (p 200).

According to Liddell Hart, "At the time we believed that the repulse of the Luftwaffe in the ‘Battle over Britain’ had saved her. That is only part of the explanation, the last part of it. The original cause, which goes much deeper, is that Hitler did not want to conquer England. He took little interest in the invasion preparations, and for weeks did nothing tospur them on; then, after a brief impulse to invade, he veered around again and suspended the preparations. He was preparing, instead, to invade Russia" (p140).

David Irving in the foreword to his book The Warpath (1978) refers to "the discovery.. that at no time did this man (Hitler) pose or intend a real threat to Britain or the Empire."

This gives a completely different complexion, not only to the war, but to the successful suppression of this information during the war and afterwards. Historians today know only too well where the boundaries lie within which they can paint their pictures of the war and its aftermath, and the consequences of venturing beyond those boundaries, irrespective of the evidence. Unfortunately, only too few of them have been prepared to have the courage to break out of this dreadful straitjacket of official and unofficial censorship.

E-mail comment received:

I worked and studied in Berlin for three years, have an MA in International Relations and a BA in Government with a minor in History. I am embarrassed to say that until I read this article, I had no idea of the scope and cause for the anti-Semitism in Germany before WWII. The Halt Order at Dunkirk was never mentioned in my studies, nor was the ownership of the media, banks and businesses.

Thank you for the excellent article. It certainly gives me a new perspective. I have always questioned the actual numbers of Jewish victims of the concentration camps, as the numbers didn't make sense based upon Germany's population. Perhaps it was fear of failing or being labeled an anti-Semite by my history professors (all but two were Jewish) and classmates that I refrained from demanding an honest discussion during my classes. I once said that the only reason Israel existed was out of Holocaust guilt, and I was immediately labeled a terrorist sympathizer.

I see what is now happening in Israel and I am aghast. The parallels to WW II are frightening. Even today, one cannot bring up this subject without being labeled a Holocaust denier or white supremacist.

Thanks again for an excellent article. I am forwarding it to several friends.

JBP

Anonymous said...

It's official - there is no actual shortage of Holocaust survivors:

'The Israeli Prime Minister's office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million' (extract from The Holocaust Industry by Norman G. Finkelstein of the City University of New York, published by Verso, London and New York, 2000, p.83).

Statement by Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus
University of Ulster, December 5, 2005:

"I've checked out Churchill's Second World War and the statement is quite correct - not a single mention of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war.
Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill's Second World War total 4,448 pages; and De Gaulle's three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages.
In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war."