Reflections

...On November 28, 1934, former Prime Minister David Lloyd George told the House of Commons, "In a very short time, perhaps a year or two, the Conservative element in this country will be looking to Germany as a bulwark against communism in Europe...

...his unification of the Germans, his destruction of communism, his training of the young, his creation of a Spartan state animated by patriotism, his curbing of parliamentary government so unsuited for the German character, his protection of the rights of private property, are all good...

...Though governments in Paris, London, and Washington did not officially endorse Hitler's pledge in Mein Kampf to obtain Germany's needed lebensraum by seizing territory from the Soviet Union, they were neither appalled nor alarmed by the threat...

...Germany and Italy supplied arms, aircraft, pilots, and technicians to the fascist forces led by Francisco Franco, openly treating the struggle in Spain as a dress rehearsal for World War II...

...Among the plotters, many felt that with some encouragement-let alone assistance—from the West, they might have succeeded...

...The former U.S...

...In 1931, communists and Nazis in Prussia joined forces to oppose a socialist government...

...Government had already decided on...

...This image has taken such firm hold that to challenge it today is to invite instant rejection and opprobrium...

...Time and again the Allies could have helped topple Hitler or derail his aggressive plans, but invariably their hatred and fear of Bolshevism intervened to save him and his Axis partners in Rome and Tokyo...

...Another myth deeply entrenched in public consciousness is the contention that World War II had to be fought to keep the Nazi military machine from overrunning all of Europe and, eventually, the entire world...

...their line was that social democracy and fascism were twin ideologies—that "social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism," as Stalin said...

...It was, said Britain's minister of production, Oliver Lyttelton, "a travesty on history even to say that America was forced into the war...

...Plots against the Ftthrer were repeatedly foiled in the late 1930s and during the war years...

...I hold, rather, that we were attacked at Pearl Harbor because we had gone to war...

...The war came about because of an economic and political struggle between the "have" and "have-not" nations...

...World War II was essentially a replay of World War I: a contest between nations trying to hold on to what they had and other nations trying to take it away...

...Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who had tried but failed to persuade President Roosevelt to launch a first strike against Japan, recorded in his diary entry for November 25, 1941, that he, Roosevelt, General George C. Marshall, Admiral Harold I. Stark, and Navy Secretary Frank Knox had discussed that day "how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot...

...In March 1935, Hitler imposed universal military service—a flagrant breach of the Versailles Treaty that had ended World War I—but France and Britain took no action...

...France, Britain, and the United States remained "neutral...

...In France, "Rather Hitler than Stalin" was an important conservative slogan...

...But the communists refused to enter into any such alliance...

...The Japanese "surprise attack" on the home port of America's Pacific fleet was, in fact, not a cause but an effect...

...This is the lie agreed upon...

...Markets for German, Italian, and Japanese finished goods were controlled by the haves—France, Britain, and the United States...

...This year, as the world celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the end of the costliest war in history (fifty-two million lives lost, trillions of dollars in property destroyed), some dubious propositions are being repeated as if they were absolute and irrefutable truths...

...A few years later, in 1927, Winston Churchill told Mussolini, "I am sure that I should have been wholeheartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism...

...None of the myths pertaining to World War II is more tenuous—or more durable—than the assertion that the United States was forced into the war by an aggressive act: the Japanese bombing of the U.S...

...On the contrary, they were pleased to have Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Tojo's Japan function as roadblocks in the path of worldwide Bolshevism...

...It has buttressed the notion that diplomacy and social reform are ineffective weapons against tyranny, and that only armed might can prevail...

...ambassador to Germany, James W. Gerard, wrote in The New York Times for October 15, 1933, that "Hitler is doing much for Germany...

...Of the twenty-five vital primary goods a modern society needs to survive, Japan had less than adequate supplies of twenty-two, including oil...

...Do not forget," said Alvin Owsley, commander of the American Legion in 1923, "that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States...

...Three years later, Lloyd George, joined by Churchill, Lord Halifax, and other prominent and distinguished Britons, were pleased to inform Hitler that they "were fully aware that the Fuhrer had not only achieved a great deal inside Germany herself, but that, by destroying communism in his country, he had barred its road to Western Europe____Germany could rightly be regarded as a bulwark of the West against Bolshevism...

...Before he was installed as Chancellor, the Nazis never won more than 37 per cent of the popular vote, and in 1933 their share had dropped to 32 per cent...

...Within Germany, Hitler's divided and faction-ridden opposition helped pave his way to power...

...It suits the purposes of the victorious powers to insist that only military force could possibly have driven Hitler to his knees...

...Even when the understanding began to dawn that German control of the Eurasian heartland would pose its own threat to Allied interests, the hope was voiced that the Reich and the Soviet Union would somehow bleed each other to death...

...have-nots, in desperate need of the raw materials possessed by the haves...

...The possibility that the Germans themselves might have overthrown Hitler was rarely discussed in the West forty years ago, and it is hardly even a footnote today...

...Five years later, Stimson testified before a Congressional committee that "in spite of the risk involved...

...naval base at Pearl Harbor...

...The all but universal assumption is that World War II was both necessary and unavoidable...

...Also neglected by most historians and biographers is the awkward truth that leading figures in the United States and Western Europe were hardly offended by the emergence of right-wing totalitarianism...

...Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, made a similar point: "We did not go to war because we were attacked at Pearl Harbor...

...If we see that Germany is winning the war," said Senator Harry S. Truman on the day Hitler sent his armies across the Soviet frontier, "we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible...

...The worst capitulation to Hitler and Mussolini was the Western democracies' policy of nonintervention in the Spanish civil war...

...Germany, Italy, and Japan were among the Sidney Lens, a veteran peace activist, is The Progressive's Senior Editor...

...Because it happened that the have-nots were ruled by totalitarian regimes, it was easy to depict an economic and political struggle as a moral showdown between democracy and fascism...

...Were it not for the Allied victories on the battlefield, we are told, all of humanity would have been subjected to the twin horrors of fascist domination and genocidal extermination...

...If ever needed, the American Legion stands ready to protect the country's institutions and ideals as the Fascisti dealt with obstructionists who menaced Italy...

...in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people, we had to be sure that the Japanese be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone's mind as to who were the aggressors...

...In our time no less than in his, historians and entire nations distort or misrepresent the past to justify policies pursued in the present...

...Every Allied concession to Hitler, including acquiescence in the annexation of Austria and the seizure of Czechoslovakia, was rationalized as a way of encouraging Nazi Germany to take on the Soviets...

...The purveyors of this myth don't bother to tell us about the many ways Hitler could have been stopped—before he came to power in 1933, during his period of war preparations from 1933 to 1939, and during the war itself—if the great powers had really wanted to stop him...

...Still, there always was some opposition to Hitler, and particularly to his war plans, within Germany and even within the Nazi apparatus...

...policy throughout the Cold War years...

...A year later, German troops occupied the Rhineland in violation of the Locarno Pact as well as the Versailles Treaty, but again there was silence from the great Treaty nations...

...Such sentiments were not confined to Europe...

...If communists and social democrats had united behind a single slate of candidates, as many urged at the time, they could have contained the Nazi threat...

...This has been the basis for the "peace through strength" rationale that has guided U.S...

...The attack was induced by the United States as a means of rallying the American people behind a war the U.S...