Articles
The 100th Anniversary of the Great State Crime, by
Sheldon Richman,
The Goal Is Freedom, 8 Aug 2014
Reflections on the start of the Great War, 100 years ago, the second act (World War II) and wars in general
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War ... [T]he conflict was merely Act One in a much bigger war. The "peace" settlement vindictively branded Germany uniquely culpable and imposed border adjustments that made Act Two a virtual certainty. The so-called Second World War, which began after the 21-year intermission from 1918 to 1939, claimed at least 60 million lives, at least 19 million of which were noncombatants. Act Two culminated in President Harry Truman's two gratuitous atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ...
Atrocities in the 'Good War': A Tract for Today, by
Robert Higgs, 19 Jun 2006
Introduces excerpt from Edgar L. Jones' article "One War is Enough",
Atlantic Monthly Feb 1946, pp. 49-50, as "valuable lessons" for those reflecting on the atrocities committed in the Iraq War
Even Americans who detest war ... generally make an exception for World War II, the so-called Good War. They believe that the Americans fought for an entirely good and proper cause, that they fought only after having been attacked without provocation, that their enemies were vile monsters ... Some of the actions [Jones] described ... may come as a shock to many readers today; they're not the sort of actions John Wayne was taking in all those postwar movies about World War II. Yet, over the years, many soldier-memoirists ... and many historians ... have confirmed them.
Bill Kauffman: American Anarchist, by Laurence M. Vance, 4 Dec 2006
Review of Kauffman's
Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists (2006)
On the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kauffman defers to Dorothy Day ...:
Mr. Truman was jubilant. ... True man. What a strange name, come to think of it. ... Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese ... We have killed 318,000 Japanese ... they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers, scattered, men, women, and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton.
The Colonial Venture of Ireland, Part 4, by
Wendy McElroy,
Freedom Daily, Aug 2004
Historical account of the partitioned Ireland from 1922 to the 1970's, including Éamon de Valera, the creation of the Republic of Ireland, the conflicts with and eventual split up of the IRA, and civil rights marches and riots in the North
In September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, thus entering World War II. The South [of Ireland] was generally sympathetic to the Allied cause but de Valera maintained official neutrality. (The more radical IRA, however, worked rather ineffectively to sabotage the British war effort.) On the occasion of Hitler's death, Éire was one of the few governments to express official condolences to the German ambassador. World War II further defined the separate identities of the North and South and cemented Ulster's ties to Britain. Neutrality by the South had been a statement of sovereignty ...
Conscience on the Battlefield, by
Leonard E. Read, 1981
Pamphlet written in 1951, during the Korean War, revised edition in 1981; Read recalls the 1918 incident when the troopship he was on was sunk by a German submarine and wonders about his thoughts if he were dying (in 1951) on a Korean battlefield
Coercion ... generates a voluntary unity and a real strength among the very people at whom the involuntary unity is aimed. In one of the little-publicized chapters of World War II, for example, one million Russian officers and men voluntarily joined the invading Germans, considering them as their liberators. The German dictator, hearing of this, ordered that these officers and men be imprisoned or killed. This action, dictated by Hitler, caused a like-mindedness among the Russian people. Their subsequent action at Stalingrad against the Germans became very much of a voluntary action.
Felix Morley – Washington Post & his Career, by
Leonard Liggio
Review of Morley's autobiographical
For the Record (1979)
With the onset of war in Europe (September, 1939), Morley intensified his deep contacts with foreign embassies and state department leaders. One event he continued to refer to with regret thirty years after was his intervention at the state department with Adam von Trott zu Solz, a German noble who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Von Trott represented the anti-Nazi German Resistance Movement which sought a reasonable peace if Hitler could be overthrown by the German military ... Von Trott was executed in August, 1944 consequent to the unsuccessful attempt to kill Hitler.
The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, by
John T. Flynn, Oct 1945
Written shortly after the release of the U.S. Army and Navy reports on the Pearl Harbor attack, Flynn claims it was the result of "three incredible blunders" and that President Roosevelt "personally managed the whole crisis"
By January 1, 1941, Roosevelt had decided to go to war with Japan ... He felt the moment to provoke the attack had come by November ... He was certain the attack would be against British territory, at Singapore perhaps, and perhaps on the Philippines or Guam ... He did not order Short to change his alert and he did not order Kimmel to take his fleet out of Pearl Harbor, out where it could defend itself, because he wanted to create the appearance of being completely at peace and surprised when the Japs started shooting. Hence he ordered Kimmel and Short not to do anything to cause alarm or suspicion. He was completely sure the Japanese would not strike at Pearl Harbor.
Forgotten Lessons, by
Richard Ebeling,
Freedom Daily, Mar 1996
Review of
Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays of John T. Flynn (1995), edited by Gregory P. Pavlik
[In] the 1940s, with the coming of America's participation in World War II many [anti-New Dealers] lined up behind FDR ... The wars in Europe and Asia gave FDR the rationale for bipartisan support for even greater deficits ... But once nations begin down the path of big spending for war preparedness, actual wars often are not far behind. With war comes ... the grand expansion of state power, with the freedoms of the people taken away or suspended in the name of the national emergency. This is exactly the road down which FDR took America, a road that finally led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Harry Elmer Barnes as Revisionist of the Cold War, by
Murray N. Rothbard,
Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader, 1968
Contrasts Court Intellectuals with revisionists and the narrow with the broad revisionists, and then discusses Harry Elmer Barnes' contributions as a broad revisionist of the Cold War
Two ... examples are the policy of Finland toward Russia in 1940, and of Poland toward Germany and Russia in 1939. The Finns (Poles) insisted up to the moment of outbreak of a war that could only be disastrous for them that the Russians (Germans) were only "bluffing," and that a rigid, inflexible, hard-line, no-negotiation policy would force Russia (Germany) to back down and cease their demands. After adamantly proclaiming this view throughout, the ruling Finnish (Polish) hard-liners suddenly found ... that the Enemy had not been "bluffing," and that war had indeed broken out.
Henry Grady Weaver's Classic Vision of Freedom, by John Hood,
The Freeman, Aug 1997
Expanded version of Hood's introduction to the 1997 edition of Weaver's
The Mainspring of Human Progress; discusses the changing attitudes towards business during the second half of the 20th century
There was a sense of euphoria after the surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945, a commonly held belief that the United States had managed to extricate itself from turmoil and disaster to unparalleled strength and influence around the world. ... The lingering economic controversies from the New Deal ... had been left unresolved during a half decade of world war. Indeed, the growth of the federal government during World War II and the unprecedented role it assumed of directing and managing the wartime economy was just being realized and debated.
How Franklin Roosevelt Lied America Into War, by
William Henry Chamberlin,
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 1953
Excerpted from chapter 8, "The Bankruptcy of a Policy", of the anthology edited by Harry Elmer Barnes; describes several actions by Roosevelt and his administration which contradicted his campaign pledges "to keep our country out of war"
The negative Japanese reply ... was delivered almost simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor. There was a strange ... failure to prepare for this attack by giving General Short and Admiral Kimmel, commanders on the spot, a clear picture of the imminent danger. As Secretary of War Stimson explained the American policy, it was to maneuver the Japanese into firing the first shot, and it may have been feared that openly precautionary and defensive moves ... would scare off the impending attack by the Japanese task force which was known to be on its way to some American outpost.
How to Become a Teacher [PDF], by
Robert LeFevre,
The Voluntaryist, Feb 1983
Autobiographical summary of the events in LeFevre's life that led to the founding of the Freedom School, including his relationship with Baldy Harper and the offer to Harper to lead the School
I had enlisted in the Army in 1942 filled with noble thoughts of helping to free the world from totalitarianism ... I had learned, bitterly and reluctantly, that the Army was filled with officers, many of whom hoped and even labored for a continuation of the war. They had never experienced such pay, power and prestige and dreaded the war's termination ... [A]n astonishingly large percentage were in this category. I had also found that the government ... was abundantly supplied with opportunists ... who feared that peace might shrink the power base from which they flaunted their petty authority.
Related Topics:
Frank Chodorov,
Colorado,
Communism,
Foundation for Economic Education,
Government,
F. A. Harper,
Learning,
Los Angeles,
Leonard Read,
Socialism,
Rose Wilder Lane
The Humanitarian with the Guillotine, by
Isabel Paterson,
Ideas on Liberty, Sep 1955
Reprinted from
The God of the Machine (1943), chapter XX; analyzes the negative consequences of "humanitarians" (or professional philanthropists) and politicians actions to provide relief to the needy
The present war, begun with a perjured treaty made by two powerful nations (Russia and Germany), that they might crush their smaller neighbors with impunity, the treaty being broken by a surprise attack on the fellow conspirator, would have been impossible without the internal political power which in both cases was seized on the excuse of doing good to the nation ... With the war, Russians in German prison camps, [and vice versa], are enduring no worse and no other fate than that their compatriots in as great numbers have endured and are enduring from ... governments in their own countries.
Iraq: The Hidden Horror, by
Justin Raimondo, 13 Oct 2006
Discusses the responses to a study by John Hopkins University professors estimating, as of July 2006, 654,965 "excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the [Iraq] war"
This argument assumes that the conventional wisdom can't be wrong: by Blairite standards, the West's early ignorance about what was happening in Hitler's concentration camps is all we need know about the Holocaust. It means that low-ball estimates of the toll taken by Stalin in the former Soviet Union never required revision. ... When Truman dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was no national outcry: rather, there was a celebration of unassailable American power. Likewise, the bombing of Dresden caused nary a ripple of protest.
It's Not War, by
Sheldon Richman, 9 Oct 2006
Counters George W. Bush's contention about a the "war on terror" being a "decisive ideological struggle" by contrasting it to how Americans behaved during World War II
Last weekend I watched my daughter Emily perform in a play about women who replaced men in factory jobs during World War II. The theme of "American Rosies" is that the war was such a dominant fact of life that these women were determined to participate. Going to work making military equipment was their best opportunity. The characters spoke of the disruption of normal life, typified by separation from their husbands and the rationing of food, gasoline, and other consumer goods. The war was topic No. 1, and everything else took a back seat.
John Kerry's Tender Sensibilities, by
Kevin Carson, 29 Aug 2013
Highlights the hypocrisy of State Secretary Kerry's comments on violation of international norms in Syria vis-à-vis the U.S.'s record in previous wars
For that matter, US "redlining" of a country for using chemical weapons is also a bit odd. In the same press conference, Kerry spoke of holding Iraq accountable for violating international, historically established norms. But the US itself has quite a history of violating such norms. In WWII, for instance, the U.S. holds pride of place not only for the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, but for being the first and only military power in history to burn hundreds of thousands of civilians alive with atomic weapons in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Machiavelli and U.S. Politics, Part 5: War Crimes and Atrocities, by
Lawrence M. Ludlow, 24 Aug 2005
President Truman's bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a prime example. Those nuclear explosions yielded approximately 200,000 innocent civilian victims. Their real purpose was to 'send a message' to America's World War II ally, the Soviet Union, informing its leaders that the United States indeed possessed a formidable weapon.
A Modest Proposal for the Next Drug-War Shootdown, by
James Bovard,
Freedom Daily, Aug 2001
Offers recommendations (some tongue in cheek, later serious) after the shootdown by the Peruvian air force of a Cessna carrying American Baptist missionaries (but claimed to carry traffickers)
When German U-boats would rise to the surface and machine-gun the survivors of a merchant marine ship they had torpedoed, Americans rightly considered the conduct to be a war crime. But there is no difference between what the Nazi U-boats did in 1942 and what U.S.-bankrolled fighter jets are doing in 2001.
The Myth of War Prosperity, Part 1, by
Anthony Gregory,
Freedom Daily, Dec 2006
Introduction to the review of
Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (2006) by Robert Higgs
The most common examples [of the myth of government spending as an economic boon] are probably the New Deal and especially the Second World War, which are credited with ending the Great Depression, effecting general prosperity, and finally repudiating America's devotion to laissez faire, replacing it with a regular commitment to central administration ... On the Left, Right, and Center, the idea that Franklin Roosevelt dragged America out of its economic rut is by now as American as apple pie. But World War II, ... was probably the largest government program in American history ...
The Myth of War Prosperity, Part 2, by
Anthony Gregory,
Freedom Daily, Jan 2007
Main part of the review of
Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (2006) by Robert Higgs
"According to the orthodox account," [Higgs] writes, "the war got the economy out of the Depression. Evidence for this claim usually includes ... the large increase in the standard measure of real gross national product (GNP), and the slight increase in the standard measure of real personal consumption." ... [Higgs] demonstrates how government expansion during World War II might explain why "from 1941 to 1943, real gross private domestic investment plunged by 64 percent; during the four years of the war, it never rose above 55 percent of its 1941 level [and] only in 1946 did it reach a new high."
Not Just Japanese Americans: The Untold Story of U.S. Repression During 'The Good War', by
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel,
The Journal of Historical Review, 1986
Detailed and well-annotated survey of United States government's repression of civil liberties during World War II, both before and after the attack on Pearl Harbor
All the aforementioned events, entailing enormous gains for State power, occurred, we should stress, at a time when the United States was technically at peace. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor merely accelerated the civil liberties trends already in motion. The only well-known World War II civil liberties outrage is the internment of Japanese-Americans. Actually, the U.S. government amplified its harassment of aliens from all enemy nations at the first news of the Japanese attack. Within seventy-two hours of the attack, the FBI had 3,846 Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants in custody.
Orwell, George (1903-1950), by David Ramsay Steele,
The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, 15 Aug 2008
Biographical essay
Despite his military service in the doomed Spanish republic, Orwell, like many on the Left, saw the coming world war as a Tweedledum–Tweedledee struggle between rival imperialisms. ... For the first few years of the war, he attributed Germany's military successes to its socialist economy ... He came to see that this idea was mistaken, and he acknowledged his error. During the war, he worked for a time as an organizer of broadcasts to India for the British Broadcasting Corporation, which later provided some of the material he was to use in describing Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth in 1984.
Patriotism along the Southern Border, Part 2, by
Jacob G. Hornberger,
Freedom Daily, Jan 1999
Continues discussing patriotism and treason in the historical context of Mexico and the territories annexed by the U.S. after the Mexican-American War, up to the early 20th century; includes parallels in more modern contexts
Were these men patriots or traitors? At first blush, it seems like a fairly easy question to answer. But what about German citizens who took up arms against their own government in World War II? Would they be considered patriots or traitors? Or what about the Russian soldiers who had been captured by the Nazis and who joined up with Germany in the hope of defeating the Soviet communists in World War II? They considered themselves patriots for trying to free their nation from communism, while Stalin and the communists ultimately executed them for being traitors ...
Patriotism along the Southern Border, Part 3, by
Jacob G. Hornberger,
Freedom Daily, Feb 1999
Continues discussing patriotism along the Mexico-United States border starting with the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), through the creation of the INS, the repatriation policy of Franklin Roosevelt and present day immigration policies
Roosevelt's treatment of Mexican citizens in the 1930s didn't stop Mexican-Americans from serving in World War II ... Meier and Ribera write: "More than 300,000 Mexican Americans served in the armed forces during World War II. Most enlisted in the army, and based on their percentage of the total population, more Chicanos served in combat divisions than any other ethnic group. Their valor helped them garner proportionately more military honors ... Of 14 Texans awarded the Medal of Honor, five were Mexican Americans. By the end of the war 17 Mexican Americans had earned the Medal of Honor ..."
Peace and Pacifism, by
Robert Higgs,
The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, 15 Aug 2008
Reviews what prominent classical liberals and libertarians had to say on the subject of peace and war, as well as the history of United States wars from the War of 1812 to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the efforts of those who opposed them
After war broke out in Europe in September 1939, a fierce debate ensued between those who supported and those who opposed U.S. involvement in the war. According to public opinion surveys and other evidence, the great majority of Americans favored well-armed neutrality. The Roosevelt administration, however, ... ardently desired U.S. entry to aid Great Britain, and the president worked relentlessly, if often deviously, to bring about conditions that would justify entry—for example, by carrying out a series of increasingly stringent economic warfare measures against Japan ...
Related Topics:
War,
American War Between the States,
Libertarianism,
Ludwig von Mises,
Murray N. Rothbard,
Adam Smith,
Freedom of Speech,
Lysander Spooner,
William Graham Sumner,
Vietnam War,
World War I
Percy L. Greaves, Jr., 1906-1984, by J. Marcellus,
The Journal of Historical Review, 1984
Memorial note
Since 1944 Percy Greaves had relentlessly pursued clarification of the facts about the Pearl Harbor attack. At the time of his death he was putting the finishing touches on a volume, The Real Infamy Of Pearl Harbor, which would have been the definitive summation of his decades of research. He was perhaps more qualified than any other man to speak and write with authority on the Washington events contributing to the attack, a point made by historian Harry Elmer Barnes in his introduction to Mr. Greaves's chapter 'The Pearl Harbor Investigations' in Barnes's classic 1953 anthology Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.
The Political Sterility of Jon Stewart, by
Sheldon Richman, 7 Nov 2014
Laments the dearth of poltical satire, as evidenced by Jon Stewart's backtracking on his answer about not having voted and recanting a 2009 comment about Harry Truman being a war criminal
Remember when in 2009 [Stewart] called President Harry Truman a "war criminal" for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed or maimed nearly 200,000 Japanese civilians? ... that statement was neither satirical nor ironic. It was the unvarnished truth. Truman's victims threatened no one, and the war was essentially over. Yet those civilians were subjected to the most ghastly of fates. Some were vaporized on the spot, literally leaving only their shadows behind. And ... Truman dropped the second bomb three days later. He considered dropping a third, but decided he didn't want to kill any more children.
The Secret of Pearl Harbor: FDR's Role Exposed – in 1944, by
Justin Raimondo, 25 May 2001
Introduction to a republishing of Flynn's 1945 pamphlet "The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor", coincident with the release of the film
Pearl Harbor
Flynn makes the case that FDR had every reason to expect the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, that he ignored the advice of his generals, and that he deliberately bottled up the fleet there. He reveals that the Japanese code had been cracked ... But what he didn't know – couldn't know – was that much more than that had been intercepted. As revealed in Robert Stinnett's book, Day of Deceit, a whole series of military messages sent by Japanese commanders betrayed the day and the hour of the attack – and Stinnett shows that FDR had to have known this.
Seventy Years Since FDR: A Time To Remember John T. Flynn, by
Lawrence Reed, 10 Mar 2003
Review of John T. Flynn's
The Roosevelt Myth on the 70th anniversary of the inauguration of FDR, highlighting the defying attitudes of Henry Ford and Sewell Avery, the president of Montgomery Ward
Joining Ford in support of free competition was Sewell Avery ... During World War II, Avery challenged government efforts to unionize warehouse and retail workers ... Not even America's entry into World War II was without its shameful lies and prevarications from an administration whose one consistency was to place its own preservation above the long-term welfare of the nation. Indeed, for a fresh perspective on FDR's wartime leadership, the interested reader should see a remarkable recent book The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II by the noted historian, Thomas Fleming.
The Shame of Medicine: The Case of Alan Turing, by
Thomas S. Szasz, 24 Apr 2009
Recounts the life story of Alan Turing as an example of the dangers of psychiatry, with closing quotes from the "founding quack" of psychiatry, Benjamin Rush
Alan Mathison Turing (1912–1954) was one of the legendary geniuses of the twentieth century. The only child of a middle-class English family, the Cambridge-educated Turing played a crucial role in breaking the German Enigma code during World War II, an achievement often credited with saving Britain from defeat in the dark days of 1941. Because of the secrecy surrounding the British code-breaking effort, for a long time only a few colleagues and high-ranking politicians were aware of Turing’s towering contribution to science and the war effort.
Thinking about Foreign Policy, by
Sheldon Richman,
Freedom Daily, Dec 2006
Analyzes why most people, even libertarians, tend to think about foreign policy as if it were decided upon by "the people" or at least with their interests in mind, rather than the "ruling elite" and its desire "to preserve and augment its own power"
Any analogy that omits the state is irrelevant and ought to be dismissed. Another reason for this is that in the world of state relations, threats and aggressive acts rarely come out of the blue but rather are preceded by provocations. Americans grow up believing that the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was an unexpected act of treachery, but that's because their schoolbooks and news media never told them of the long prelude of economic warfare committed against the Japanese by the Roosevelt administration. The point is not to excuse the attack, but to understand it.
A Tribute to John T. Flynn, by
John T. Flynn, Adam Young, 31 Jan 2003
Biographical overview followed by quotes from Flynn's writings on Franklin Roosevelt, Roosevelt's monument, the New Deal, the Second World War and the Roosevelt myth
On Roosevelt and the War:In January, 1938, I talked with one of the President's most intimate advisers. I asked him if the President knew we were in a depression. He said that of course he did. I asked what the President proposed to do. He answered: "Resume spending." I then suggested he would find difficulty in getting objects on which the federal government could spend. He said he knew that. What, then, I asked, will the President spend on? He laughed and replied in a single word: "Battleships." I asked why. He said: "You know we are going to have a war." And when I asked whom we were going to fight he said "Japan" ...
Truman, A-Bombs, and the Killing of Innocents, by
Sheldon Richman,
The Goal Is Freedom, 9 Aug 2013
Written on the 68th anniversary of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, discusses whether that bombing and the previous one at Hiroshima were really necessary and whether they should be considered war crimes
Sixty-eight years ago today [president Harry Truman] dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a city full of innocent Japanese. It was the second time in three days that [he] had done such a thing: He had bombed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The fatalities in the two cities totaled 150,000–246,000 ... The bombings–and other atrocities committed by the U.S. government during World War II, [included] the "conventional" firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 noncombatants; the destruction of Dresden, a German city of no strategic value; and the continued bombing of Tokyo after the A-bombings ...
Vindication, by
Thomas Sowell, 6 Mar 1998
Compares the vilification of Larry Elder and other "black conservatives" to the similar tribulations and eventual vindication of Billy Mitchell, criticizing "race hustlers" for emphasizing 1960's problems rather than dealing with today's issues
A ... television special ... made me think back to World War II ... As a teenager then, I noticed that there was a Billy Mitchell bomber and a Billy Mitchell airfield, so naturally I wondered who this man was. When I looked him up in the library, I discovered that, when Billy Mitchell was alive, he was court-martialed for saying the very things for which he was now being honored. ... Billy Mitchell did not convince people that he was right, events proved that he was right. He said that planes could sink a battleship but many did not believe him until Japanese bombers sank four American battleships at Pearl Harbor.
Warfare-Welfare in Yugoslavia, by
Jacob G. Hornberger,
Freedom Daily, Jun 1999
Criticizes U.S. involvement in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) during the Kosovo War, viewing it as continuation of the American warfare-welfare empire that stretches back to U.S. entry in World War I
Democrats and Republicans have always billed World War II as the "good war" because Adolf Hitler was killed and the Nazi army was defeated .. [H]owever, the dark consequences of that war are rarely discussed. The reason that Great Britain and France declared war on Germany ... was to ensure that Poland did not fall under totalitarian rule. Yet, at the end of the war, Eastern Europe, including Poland, found itself under the ... fist of the Soviet Union. Were the Eastern Europeans that much better off suffering under Joseph Stalin and the Communists than under Adolf Hitler and the Nazis?
Warring as Lying Throughout American History, by
James Bovard,
Freedom Daily, Feb 2008
Recounts how U.S. Presidents and their administrations since James Polk have been deceitful about wars and military engagements
In August 1945, Harry Truman announced to the world that "the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians." Hiroshima was actually a major city with more than a third of a million people prior to its incineration. But Truman's lie helped soften the initial impact on the American public of the first use of the atomic bomb. (The U.S. government also vigorously censored photographs of Hiroshima and its maimed survivors.)
The Way of All Cash, Part I, by Bill Bonner,
The Daily Reckoning, 26 May 2006
Continuing from "Don't Cry for Evita", begins to relate the story of Argentine President Juan Perón and the Peronist movement
[Perón] was not only sympathetic to the Nazis and Mussolini's fascists, he was envious of them. Argentina stayed out of Word War II and even looked the other way when German submarines occasionally holed up in remote harbors in Patagonia. "They have chosen to dally with evil," declared Churchill of the Argentinians, "but not only with evil but with the losing side." Two months before the action was over, the Argentines corrected their mistake, declaring war on the nearly defeated Axis powers. But ... [w]hen the war was over, Perón provided blank passports to war criminals, in exchange for cash.
Why Are We Afraid To Be Free?, by
Butler Shaffer, 27 Nov 2001
Examines the question of how to bring about freedom in individuals' lives, discussing how government influences people to be in conflicted states and how one must look within oneself and act accordingly to begin to be "free"
I recall, as a child during World War II, pictures of American soldiers giving chocolate bars to children whose homes and neighborhoods had just been destroyed by these same soldiers! ... After [it] was over, the allied forces endeavored to synchronize such contrarieties through the "Nuremberg trials." In punishing German government officials for their atrocities–while carefully insulating American and British officials for their wrongs to humanity–the state employed psychological "projection," a device by which some condemn others for their own felt sense of moral or ethical shortcoming.
Why Intellectuals Still Support Socialism, by Peter G. Klein,
Mises Daily, 15 Nov 2006
Examines the underlying reasons why so many academics support socialist ideas, not reflecting those of the general population, and how this changed from the mid-20th century
World War II ... was a watershed event for the [economics] profession. For the first time, professional economists joined the ranks of government planning bureaus
en masse:
- To control prices, as with the Office of Price Administration ...
- To study military procurement (what later became known as "operations research") with Columbia University's Statistical Research Group ... or with the Army's Statistical Control Group ...
... [I]t is likely the taste of central planning that economists ... got during World War II that forever changed the direction of the discipline.
Why We Fight, by
Justin Raimondo, 1 Feb 2006
Detailed review of the 2005 documentary
Why We Fight
Gore Vidal contributes his perspective ... by pointing out that Eisenhower opposed the decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though 99.9 percent of the military fighting in the Pacific at the time were for it ... Japan had been trying desperately to surrender, but ... the malevolent pygmy Harry Truman ... wouldn't let them. We did it to "show off," says Vidal, but "Eisenhower hated the bombs" ... Why We Fight ... is the title of a famous series of World War II propaganda films directed by Frank Capra that sought to mobilize the country, and there was a consensus back then that the war was not only necessary but also just.
