A Century of War

PREFACE

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY MUST take the path less traveled and reverse the direction taken in the war-torn twentieth century, the bloodiest in history. When the First World War, where ten million soldiers were killed, evolved into the Second World War, where fifty million people were killed, we experienced the concept of total war. A large percentage of the fifty million were civilians (women and children) killed by British and American aircraft which dropped bombs on nonmilitary targets in order to demoralize the enemy. In other words, the end justified the means.

The Second World War ended with the first atomic bombs being dropped on Japan, despite the fact that for months Japan had been offering to surrender if they could keep their Emperor. This offer was refused because of Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender policy which Truman also adopted. After America dropped the bombs, and after Russia had been in the war for six days, we accepted their surrender and let the Japanese keep their Emperor.

The war was followed by the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials which established, for the future, that the political and military leaders who lose a war will be tried by the victors and then executed. This established the pattern that no military or political leader will be willing to lose a war, therefore ensuring it will escalate into a total war to avoid losing and being executed.

The twenty-first century, I believe, will be the nuclear century since this amazing source of energy, i.e., uranium, holds the promise of future prosperity for the rapidly growing industrialized world. However, if nuclear power is used in a total war, we literally face the possible extinction of the human race, or at least the destruction of Western Civilization.

We must learn to avoid war and develop a general will to peace. I believe the key to this development is to learn the truth about the real causes and effects of wars so that we can see through the false propaganda which is used by political leaders to convince us to go to war.

I am advocating the careful study of history for the purpose of developing this will to peace. One of my favorite history professors is Ralph Raico who tells the story of asking his college students, “What is history?” and one of the students replied, “It’s just one damn thing after another.” Henry Ford said, “History is bunk,” meaning that it is usually false and misleading rather than unimportant when correctly written. In Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, he defined history as “an account, mostly false of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” However, when history is written truthfully I believe that Bolingbroke gave the best definition, “History is philosophy teaching by example.” If we can read history by looking at past events to determine what ideas were being followed, we can see how those ideas worked out in practice and learn lessons from the experience of others and avoid the same mistakes. The extreme importance of history and its study was cogently stated by Patrick Henry, “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no other way of judging the future but by the past.”

The big question about history is usually “What are the true facts?” You cannot always rely on eyewitnesses since they may have a bias. Sometimes diaries and writings made contemporaneously are true but are not found for many years, decades, or centuries. It is almost impossible for history to be written without the writer’s judgment or bias being expressed in the form of an interpretation. Therefore, history is always evolving and it is always subject to revision by better and more reliable evidence.

This brings us to the controversial question of “What is revisionism?” Usually when some establishment position is questioned as to its authenticity and a new version is proposed, it is condemned as “revisionism” or an effort to distort the truth, when in fact, the revisionism may state the correct facts. The best definition of revisionism was stated by one of America’s foremost revisionist historians, Harry Elmer Barnes, “Revisionism is bringing history into accord with the facts.” In George Orwell’s famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four he depicts “revisionism” as a word of opprobrium and demonstrates it with the governmental department entitled “The Ministry of Truth” where history is intentionally falsified to obscure the past because people who do not know the truth about the past, and cannot learn lessons from history, are more easily controlled by the government, not only in the present, but for the future. Therefore, when the word revisionism is used, it must be determined in what context it is being used, i.e., whether the definition stated by Barnes, or in the sense of George Orwell’s novel.

One of the most dramatic examples of true revisionism concerns the “Donation of Constantine.” This was a document widely circulated for centuries throughout Western Civilization which was alleged to be a document composed by the Emperor Constantine (272–337) which made a gift of Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester while the eastern part of the empire was established at the capital of Constantinople. This alleged donation constituted the cornerstone of the papal claim for both religious and secular power in Rome, which is one of the reasons, for instance, that Charlemagne traveled to Rome to be crowned as emperor by the Pope on Christmas day in 800. It was not until the fifteenth century that Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) exposed this document as a complete forgery, thereby causing tremendous repercussions in Western Civilization from that time forward relating to both the secular and papal sovereignty and power of Rome.

It is in regard to war, however, that most revisionism becomes necessary because truth is almost always the first casualty of war. In most wars throughout history, the political leaders first need to gain the support of the citizens who must fight, pay taxes, and sacrifice their lives. To obtain popular approval leaders have often used false propaganda to state the reasons for the war. False propaganda often continues throughout the war to instill hatred of the enemy and finally, it is used at the end to prove that it was a just war, thereby justifying the sacrifices made by the citizens. Since winners write the history, the false propaganda used from the beginning to the end is often accepted as the true history of the war.

One clear and dramatic incident relating to war and “good revisionism” was an incident known as the Katyn Forest massacre which was used during World War II, and in many history books since that date, to show the Germans’ atrocities. The Katyn Forest is located in modern-day Belarus. In September of 1939 both Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and occupied it jointly. It was reported later that thousands of Polish army officers, political leaders, intellectuals, and teachers had been rounded up, massacred, and buried in mass graves. In 1943 a grave was discovered which contained over 15,000 of these missing persons, piled on top of each other and each had a single bullet hole in the back of the head. The wartime propaganda of America, the British, and the Soviets was that the Germans were guilty of this atrocity. The graves of the remaining persons have never been disclosed or discovered.

This allegation of mass murder helped to fuel hatred toward the Germans, as did other false allegations, all clearly revealed in The Propaganda Warriors: America’s Crusade Against Nazi Germany by Clayton D. Lauria and ‘Twas a Famous Victory: Deception and Propaganda in the War Against Germany, by Benjamin Colby. During the 1970s and 80s I read various accounts that cast doubt about the truth of the wartime propaganda relating to the Katyn Forest massacre. But it was not until 1989 that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev produced the actual documents which revealed conclusively that the Soviet secret police, under the specific orders of Joseph Stalin in 1940, murdered 21,587 Polish enemies of the Soviet state and buried most of them in this particular grave. Gorbachev did not reveal any documents showing the location of the remaining graves.1

The false propaganda against the Germans in World War I is shown in detail by an excellent book entitled Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War by Arthur Ponsonby, a member of the British Parliament. False propaganda was also employed by government officials leading up to and during World War II. A study of the false propaganda in World War II shows that no lie was too large to prevent its use against Hitler and no crime of Stalin was too large to prevent its being hidden from the American public.

We now know since new documents have been discovered by the research of R.J. Rummel and revealed in his books Death by Government and Power Kills that Stalin was the world’s foremost murderer and that Mao of China was number two, making communism the deadliest political philosophy in all history. At the end of World War II far more people were living under tyranny than before the war. This tyranny was communism. However, the war was labeled as a great victory over tyranny because of the defeat of Hitler.

One of the purposes of this book is to show the importance of revisionism because I believe it is one of the main keys to developing a general will to peace for the future. The following essays were written at various times and for different purposes, i.e., book reviews, a speech, and then articles for books. They all relate to history primarily involving the real causes of war as well as the actual results. A study of history like this, I believe, will help make people more aware of the fabricated propaganda that appears as history today, not only in the history books, but often in the news media about the causes and the effects of war. Americans, in particular, seem to be very naïve about the real causes and effects of wars and tend to accept at face value the reasons given by politicians. If Americans would be more skeptical and question the reasons given by politicians to enter into war, and further insist that only Congress can declare war (which the Constitution specifically requires), rather than letting presidents get us into wars, we will see fewer wars. Also, if history is studied to understand the real causes and effects of war and the loss of freedom that results even in winning a war, this would increase that skepticism.

An excellent introduction to revisionism can be obtained by reading a book by Harry Elmer Barnes entitled Revisionism: A Key to Peace and Other Essays, which was published by the Cato Institute in 1980. Another good introduction to the subject is James J. Martin’s Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition. These books will introduce the reader to many other detailed histories which delve into the real background of American wars. Much excellent research has been done and published, but the public-at-large is not aware of these books because there are certain gatekeepers such as the Council on Foreign Relations, who have reasons to prevent this knowledge from reaching the general public.

After World War I there was a tremendous amount of revisionism showing the false propaganda used by President Wilson and others to get America into that war. After the war a thorough investigation also showed there were certain economic interests of bankers and munition makers who encouraged the war for their own financial profit, which was the first real indication of the industrial-military-banking complex. Congressional investigations that followed exposed the abuse of power that took America into World War I and resulted in the Neutrality Acts being passed to try to prevent future unnecessary or unjust American wars.

By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, public opinion polls showed that over 80 percent of the American public was opposed to entering another European war. It took the dramatic event of the attack on Pearl Harbor to shift public opinion overwhelmingly to support our entry into the war. The public was unaware of the evidence that we now have that Roosevelt had provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor and actually withheld information from the military commanders stationed there, which, if furnished to them, would have probably prevented the attack. There is also much excellent revisionist history that President Lincoln provoked the firing on Fort Sumter for economic reasons having nothing to do with the abolition of slavery. Two essays in this book address these subjects of provoking the first shot in some detail.

As Americans become aware of this revisionist history, it could very well create a general will to peace. There are some hopeful signs that the gatekeepers will not be able to prevent revisionist history from reaching the general public because of the internet. Of course, the internet can contain false as well as truthful information, so much discretion will be required. Another hopeful sign is the use of the Freedom of Information Act. One of the best and most recent disclosures of Roosevelt’s acts provoking the attack at Pearl Harbor is contained in a book published in the year 2000 entitled Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor by Robert D. Stinnett which is discussed fully in the essay on Roosevelt which follows herein. Stinnett’s book is dedicated to the late Congressman, John Moss (D., CA) who was the author of the Freedom of Information Act and Stinnett states that without this Act, “the information revealed in this book would never have surfaced.”

Finally, the last essay in this book is about the Christmas Truce in which the German and British soldiers realized that by the first Christmas of World War I, they could not figure out why they were fighting each other. The soldiers, on both sides of the trenches, in direct disregard of orders not to fraternize with the enemy, and probably facing certain court-martial for their actions, put down their arms and celebrated Christmas together in 1914. When the officers saw that they could not prevent the Christmas celebration they joined with the soldiers. The entire twentieth century would have been very different if the war had ended at that point. This essay contains the statement by Sir Kinglsey Wood, a cabinet minister in Britain during World War II who stated during a debate in the House of Commons on March 31, 1930, his recollection of being a participant in the Christmas Truce:

“The fact is that we did it, and I then came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left by ourselves there would never have been another shot fired. For a fortnight the truce went on. We were on the most friendly terms, and it was only the fact that we were being controlled by others that made it necessary for us to start trying to shoot one another again.” He blamed the resumption of the war on “the grip of the political system which was bad, and I and others who were there at the time determined there and then never to rest . . . . Until we had seen whether we could change it.” But they could not.

This book is not advocating either pacifism or isolationism. If a rogue nation launches an unprovoked attack then those attacked must defend themselves. But as is so often the case, history reveals the first shot was provoked by the other side and that the war was unnecessary and was promoted by certain insiders for hidden reasons. We have now reached the point in the nuclear age however, when we can no longer take the chance of going to war because our own leaders may have secretly provoked the attack, nor can we afford to go to war for reasons other than those which are just and for the defense of our own country. I believe that the survival of the human race may well depend upon developing a will to peace in the nuclear age. This book, hopefully, will contribute to creating that general will to peace by showing the benefits of true revisionism and how important it is to learn the lessons of history in order to prevent wars in the future.

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1The plaque at this grave site blaming the Germans for the Katyn Forest atrocity was removed once this information was made known.