Introduction

Summary and Conclusions

I charge that the articulate publicists of our country, by their semi-hysterical words in print and speech in which they champion extremes of diplomatic and military policy, are driving us rapidly into a war of unlimited and unattainable objectives which will bring on a gigantic catastrophe of ruin and revolution at home and abroad….

By articulate publicists I mean those speakers and writers ranging from editors, novelists, magazine writers, columnists, dramatists, radio writers, lecturers, college professors, and educators, to senators and other elected officials, cabinet members, political leaders and presidents. When what they write and talk about becomes a united theme of agreement, action follows as certainly as butter follows the churning of sour cream….

After fighting two world wars within a generation to defend democracy and freedom, with no result other than to see those ideals recede throughout the world, we shall be blind if we do not understand that a third such war, fought for equally unlimited and unattainable objectives, will end in one of the great catastrophes of history. For us to imagine that we can fight such a war without exhausting ourselves and destroying much of the good faith required for the functioning of democracy is to indulge in the same wishful thinking that twice has proved our political undoing.

— WILLIAM R. MATHEWS, Editor, Arizona Daily Star

With profit we may now briefly review the main facts and conclusions to which we are led by the material in the preceding chapters.

1 - Revisionism and the Historical Blackout

The first chapter, by the editor, indicates how two world wars, and especially the needless American entry therein, have converted the libertarian American dream of pre-1914 days into a nightmare of fear, regimentation, destruction, insecurity, inflation, and ultimate insolvency.

Revisionism, which means no more than the establishment of historical truth, when applied to the First World War, revealed the mistakes in our earlier interpretation of the causes and merits of that conflict, the folly of our entering it, and the disastrous results which followed. Revisionism helped us to return to national sanity, to the continentalism and peace of the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover administrations, and to the neutrality legislation of the first administration of Roosevelt.

There is now a far more determined and ruthless resistance to revisionism, as applied to the Second World War, than there was in the 1920s when revisionists dealt with the conflict which began in 1914. This is due to the fact that the United States was much more directly involved in the diplomacy which led to the Second World War. The intense hostility to revisionism is prompted by the dictates of political expediency; by the hostility of special pressure groups interested in the promotion of war hysteria; by our indoctrination, for a decade and a half, with globaloney; and by the attitude of those with a vested professional and personal interest in upholding the official mythology expounded by the historians and social scientists who participated in great numbers in the propaganda and allied activities of the government during the war epoch.

The methods followed by the opponents of revisionism fall mainly into these modes of operation:

1. denying revisionist historians access to public documents;
2. intimidating publishers who might otherwise be willing to print revisionist materials;
3. ignoring or smearing revisionist books and articles; and
4. smearing and otherwise seeking to intimidate revisionist authors.

To counter the progress of revisionism still further, many free and private historians voluntarily perpetuate the popular fictions relative to the Second World War. They have either succumbed to globaloney or have a vested interest in sustaining the fictions. Then we have a considerable number of "court historians," who operate in a quasi-official manner and who are given full access to official documents on the tacit understanding that their books will defend the official version of events. Finally, we have an ever-growing body of official historians connected with the military establishment and executive departments who are paid to write history as their employers prescribe. This is a long step toward the official falsification of documents portrayed by George Orwell in his classic work, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This antirevisionist historical bias has destroyed all semblance of accuracy in recent world history, and it gravely distorts the history of a more remote past by drawing false analogies with a fictitious recent past and present and by pointing up strained and mistaken causal relationships. In this way the antirevisionist historians are hurrying us along the path to the conditions of the "Nineteen Eighty-Four" system in which even the very concept of history is taboo and outlawed, because there must be no knowledge of the past against which existing mistakes and miseries can be tested and condemned.

2 - The United States and the Road to War in Europe

The second chapter, by Dr. Tansill, provides a comprehensive survey of European diplomacy and international relations between the two World Wars and of the extent and results of American participation in international affairs during this era.

It is made clear how the Allied betrayal of President Wilson's Fourteen Points and the terms of the Armistice of November 11, 1918, laid the basis for the Second World War. This became ever more likely when the League of Nations failed to use its power to rectify the fatal terms of the vindictive postwar treaties. The