For Pacifica Radio, November 11th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com and author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And by the way, I'm celebrating 10 years on the radio here at KPFK in LA.
If you're not used to hearing me, that might be because my usual time slot is Sunday mornings, 830 to 9 here on 90.7.
But we've got a special one for you today, for Armistice Day, otherwise known as Veterans Day.
And I am so happy to introduce the great David Swanson.
David really is absolutely one of the very most important antiwar activists in our society and has been at least since the days of the W. Bush years, maybe even since the Clinton years, I'm not sure.
But he was famously behind the website After Downing Street, after the Downing Street memos came out.
He wrote the great book, Daybreak, Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.
And he's written a ton of books since then.
One of the most important books I've ever read is by David Swanson.
It's called War is a Lie from 2010.
And yeah, he means it.
And he debunks the lies behind every American war you've ever heard of, and then some.
And it's really just incredible.
And this new book that I'm just absolutely blown away by it.
It's so important.
And it's so well written, but it's exactly the point.
It's exactly what Americans need to know, to hear and to understand.
It's called Leaving World War Two Behind.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing, sir?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for that nice introduction.
Oh, well, you certainly deserve it.
And I'm so happy to have you here with me on KPFK for Armistice Day.
That's what it originally was.
It's Veterans Day now, but we already have a Memorial Day.
I don't know.
Anyway, Armistice Day, that was to celebrate the end of World War One.
And to skip around a little bit from the order of the book, it seems as good enough a place to start as any would be the aftermath of World War One, which everybody from Winston Churchill to my seventh grade social studies teacher agree was really the cause of World War Two 20 years later.
And you outline a couple of different versions of agreement on that same premise.
If you could talk about that for us for a little bit here, please, sir.
Yeah, glad to.
I'm glad to be on KPFK.
I don't think I have been since the world lost the great Lila Garrett.
It's interesting, whenever you ask anyone about opposing war, ending war, demilitarizing, they always shout, what about World War Two?
Or if you ask, is there a war that's justified or justifiable anywhere in human history?
If it's any war in the past century and a half, they tell you it's World War Two.
And yet everyone wants to get in their magic time machine and fly back to the moment that Poland is invaded or the moment that London is bombed.
Nobody wants to just turn the dial back a bit more to a week or a month or a decade earlier.
And yet the most obvious place to zoom to if you had that power would be Paris after World War One, where the Treaty of Versailles was so horribly put together that smart people of all political persuasions were predicting World War Two on the spot.
And this was something of a comic tragedy, right, because you had Woodrow Wilson, I mean, the liberal hero, the Barack Obama peace bringing war maker of his day, who had just, the world just adored the promise of this man bringing peace to these negotiations and promising to restrain the vengeance of the British and the French, not make it all about punishing Germany, create a peace without victory, a stable, unified world going forward that would settle its differences without war.
And where was Woodrow Wilson during the negotiations?
Lying, coughing, hacking in bed, sick with the disease, with the so-called Spanish flu that had been spread across the United States by all the wonderful, you know, maskless super spreader events that we adore so much today.
And so who knows what Wilson would have accomplished if he'd tried, but he didn't really try.
The guy was actually delusional, talking nonsense in Paris.
And so you come out with this treaty that blames Germany, punishes Germany, humiliates Germany, divides German speaking territories, takes, you know, payment for many years to come, not from wealthy Germans, but from ordinary, you know, the German public, forbids Germany from joining the League of Nations or talking with other countries and negotiating anything peacefully in the years to come, you know, and then you have the years that follow with Western nations supporting or turning a blind eye to the rise of Nazism, arming and funding the the rearmament of Germany.
I mean, if you were if you were going to try to produce a second world war, how could you do it better than all the stupid things that were done?
And have you ever read the book Wilson's War by Jim Powell?
I'm not sure that I have.
Maybe I should.
It's a great one.
It's, you know, from this one, he goes back a little bit further and says, well, what if America just stayed out of World War One altogether?
Then the allies wouldn't have been in any position to impose a Treaty of Versailles situation on Germany whatsoever.
And that not only that, that when America got in the war, Wilson also paid millions of dollars to bribe Kerensky and the new revolutionary government in Russia to stay in the war and even gave them supplies, trucks and all kinds of things.
And that was the number one reason that they were overthrown later, what, six, eight months later by Lenin and Trotsky was they were promising peace and finally an end to the war.
So it wasn't just Nazi Germany, but it was the Soviet Union that owed its existence to American intervention in World War One in the first place.
At the time that Wilson got in, the thing was a stalemate.
Nobody was going anywhere that the trench lines were essentially solid.
They had peace without victory already.
And America came and tilted the balance so out of whack that that's what really ruined it all.
The Treaty of Versailles you're talking about was just the insult to injury, just stripping the Germans of all their territory.
And as you say, the reparations, which the German government paid by hyperinflation and completely destroying the economy, destabilizing everything.
And then Hitler, as Jim Powell writes, Hitler began every speech denouncing quote, the traitors of 1918 who were the Democrats, because Wilson, maybe this was part of his delusional Spanish flu.
He insisted that he wouldn't accept surrender from the German militarists.
He wanted regime change in Germany first and he wanted surrender from the Democrats.
So it was the German Democrats who had not been responsible for the war, who then got saddled with the responsibility for signing the horrid treaty.
And Hitler made his entire career denouncing that specifically.
Yeah, absolute disaster.
What Europe needed before and during that war was negotiation and peacemaking.
It didn't need the United States jumping into the war, setting a precedent and a habit and various obligations to drag it into future wars.
Very few Americans know as well that after World War One, the U.S. troops didn't all come home.
Some of them went to try to topple the newly born Soviet Union and and fought in Russia for a couple of years and kicked off, you know, a century of unending hostility toward Russia from the United States.
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And thanks.
All right.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with the great David Swanson about his new book, Leaving World War II Behind.
And you know, I've always said, David, that, well, for a long time anyway, that George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln don't count anymore, that the true founding fathers of America now are FDR and Truman, the founders of the American world empire, such as it has existed since the end of World War II.
And then as, you know, the major premise of your book that you're attacking here, World War II is perpetually used to justify anything else we do.
Even Manuel Noriega is Hitler.
Even David Koresh is Hitler.
Saddam Hussein, who ruled about four out of ten cities of his country in 2003, was Hitler.
And in fact, even just a couple of weeks ago, McMaster, General McMaster, attacked Donald Trump's peace deal with the Taliban, the withdrawal deal from Afghanistan, as appeasement, like Neville Chamberlain.
And it seems, I mean, I know this is why he really wrote the book in the first place, right, is to try to stop this from being the kind of world where all McMaster has to do is drop the name Nazi Germany, and then he gets whatever he wants forever, right?
Exactly.
It's not just that World War II was the very worst thing humanity has done to itself in any short space of time by every measurement of cost and destruction and suffering and lasting environmental damage, but the world that it created, that it left behind, and the propaganda that it created and left behind.
I mean, World War II is the top subject of U.S. fiction and entertainment and nonfiction.
It's just, it's just an obsession.
And so when I talk to classes of students about wanting to end war, they all talk about World War II.
And it's not that I want this subject.
It's not that I'm fascinated with who used what kind of tanks and all of this nonsense.
It's that unless we can overcome the myths around World War II, we can't overcome the dependency on war, the acceptance of war, the willingness to dump a trillion dollars a year into preparing for more wars.
And unless we can do that, the wars or the climate change that we actually need the money to address are going to kill us.
We cannot go on this way.
And so, and so I sat down and wrote a book trying to tackle each and every myth about World War II and all of the arguments for what could have been done differently, what should have been done differently, and what was absolutely indefensible.
Isn't it funny how, I mean, obviously the bottom line, the reason all the students and everyone you talk to, the reason any, the man on the street will raise World War II as the excuse for militarism from, you know, Liz Cheney to the guy down the block is because of the unique evil, which is it's almost comic book caricature, pure evil of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party regime and the Japanese militarists who raped Nanking and the absolute horrors of Japanese militarism during that war.
And so it is a clear cut case of the good guys, the Democrats led by the heroic FDR are going to save the world from these absolute monsters.
That's a hell of a hill for you to have to get over, right?
Because this is what everybody, this is everybody else's starting point, David.
It really is.
It really is.
I mean, you talk with professors, I mean, Stephen Wertheim at Columbia University who wrote this book that just came out about the, called Tomorrow the World, about the decision being made by foreign policy elites in the U.S. in 1940, mid-1940 to really dominate the world and coat it with military bases.
This was a new strategy that of course has been upheld ever since.
You talk with professors like this and they've never heard of the idea that World War II had anything to do with saving people from, from death camps in Germany, right?
It's never occurred to them.
It would be nuts to bother to refute the notion.
But you talk to ordinary people, I talked to high school classes, you know, it's not just World War II is the, is the justification for, you know, the past, you know, I don't know, even know what the, what the next thing is after trillion dollars spent on war, but it's, the Holocaust is the reason, right?
And so you have to start with explaining to people that the war had absolutely nothing to do with saving anyone from death camps, that the war killed several times the number of people killed in the death camps, that the peace activists were asking the U.S. and British governments to save the people from the death camps and were being refused, you know, allegedly because it couldn't be done, but actually because it wasn't desired.
And that, that there was not a single effort made diplomatically or militarily, that in fact the Nazis wanted to expel all of the Jews and nobody would take them, that all that had to be done was say, yes, we'll take them.
You know, that, that there was a camp in upstate New York with a thousand Jewish refugees while there were 425,000 German POWs in the United States.
That many, many times what was, what was done was easily doable and there was no interest in doing it.
Right.
Sorry, go ahead.
Oh, I was just saying, right, again, it's David Swanson, we're talking about leaving World War II behind and I want to get right back to this because it's an important point that you really thoroughly go through just what all the Western democracies did to refuse to help the Jewish refugees long before the Holocaust ever started.
That's so important.
But the one thing I was trying to get at was the irony there was about the unique evil of Hitler and Tojo on one hand, you would think it, since that's the argument for World War II was just how obvious it is, the unique evil of these characters, then you would think that even if you accept that, that that would be a great anti-war argument for all the rest of the time because you can't compare Ho Chi Minh to Hitler.
Not really.
I mean, if he, if Hitler's a unique evil, then Ho Chi Minh doesn't rise to that level.
Right.
I mean, Pol Pot was pretty bad, but you know, Manuel Noriega or Saddam Hussein, when Saddam Hussein killed a lot of Kurds, he worked for Ronald Reagan and by the time America attacked him, he was retired writing a romance novel, as I know you know.
And so, you know, semi-retired basically.
So that's the thing of it.
If, if all, if World War II is justified because of the unique evil of these dictators, then how is it that World War II justifies all the rest of the wars against all these far lesser dictators than Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito?
Yeah, it really is an argument for uniqueness, which does weaken it in some ways.
I mean, but World War II really became the good war during the war on Vietnam so that there was, so that war wouldn't be all bad.
And Michael Walzer, a professor of just war theory, you know, wrote an article in support of World War II and against Vietnam, you know, the good wars, not the bad wars.
And his argument was World War II's evil is immeasurable.
It's irrational.
It's beyond scope of human understanding.
I mean, it's all this mystical almost argument for why World War II, the evil of Hitler justified any criminal murderous act.
But in the future, it would be very unlikely, you know, that there could be a justifiable war because this was unique.
Well, that's a very weak argument for dumping a trillion dollars a year into getting ready for more Hitlers.
And of course, Hitler himself wasn't good enough by, by the standards of war propaganda.had to lie about Nazi plans to eliminate religion, Nazi plans to take over and settle South America.
You know, he had, Hitler had to be made into something even worse than what Hitler was, which was legitimately horrible, in order to try to sell the war, which still didn't work.
Pearl Harbor is what pushed, you know, the U.S. public over.
But ever since, there's hardly been a war without a Hitler, without, you know, some enemy being designated as the new Hitler.
And it's not that these people aren't in some cases horrible, offensive people in their personal lives, in their domestic policies, in their war policies, but they aren't threats to take over huge territories of the earth.
That doesn't happen anymore.
With glaring and important exceptions, conquest has ended, colonialism has ended, nuclear weapons change people's thinking, and international law in limited and distorted ways has been established in an extent that's just radically different from the day when, when the actual first Hitler came.
And so that the big, wealthy, well-armed nations have not gone to war with each other ever again since Hitler.
And if we are to survive, they never will.
The problem is getting them to stop arming and, and using the small nations of the world to fight each other and to, and to make money.
And you know, that's what, that's what we have to work on.
And that's what makes the, the Hitler argument even more absurd.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, again, it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with the great David Swanson, author of Leaving World War II Behind.
We're celebrating Armistice Day here for you, with you on KPFK.
And so, you know what, I'm really glad that you spend a lot of time in the book talking about how much the Nazis borrowed from the Americans when they were getting their start.
And I knew a lot about the eugenics and how they always quoted the American pioneers of the eugenics movement and this kind of thing.
But you blew my mind with all the direct quotes, making the comparisons to American manifest destiny.
Just great.
Can you talk about that for us a little bit, David?
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of people don't know the extent to which Hitler consciously and publicly modeled himself on the United States and talked about Eastern Europe as the U.S. West, but you know, the Wild East, go East, young man, this sort of thing, with heavy borrowing from U.S. policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing and concentrating people on reservations, not exclusively U.S.
Other European nations had engaged in concentration camps and genocide, just not so much in Europe.
More in Africa and Asia and elsewhere in the world.
And it was not, of course, just eugenics.
There were U.S. eugenicists who really developed the theories, I don't want to call it science exactly, but the theories of eugenics and the Nordic race and the Aryan race.
And there were, it was absolutely mainstream, absolutely acceptable, not something secret or shameless in U.S. society in the 1920s.
And there were doctors who engaged in eugenicide.
There was, you know, sort of collegial sharing of reports, you know, U.S. and German colleagues and U.S. eugenicists very proud of their influence in Germany.
And of course, this has never entirely ended.
You have forced sterilizations by ICE, the U.S. immigration agency, in the news just in recent months.
And in racist segregation, Hitler always admired and borrowed from the U.S. model of racist segregation laws.
And Nazis came over and were hosted by the New York City Bar Association to study the U.S. apartheid laws.
And they were protested, you know, to the credit of the protesters, but they were hosted by these legal groups to study and borrow, because it was the U.S. that had the model for how do you create partial citizens, how do you define who's in what race, et cetera.
And the Nazis needed to figure all that stuff out.
Even the one-arm salute and the pledge of obedience, you know, has roots in U.S. society that ought to create enough shame that people would get that out of U.S. schools today.
And then, of course, after the war, after the U.S., you know, you could imagine, outgrows all of its Nazistic tendencies and defeats Nazism, well, the U.S. brings 1,600 Nazis into the U.S. military.
And it's Nazis that put nuclear weapons on missiles and create intercontinental ballistic missiles and design the underground fortresses, you know, west of D.C. on the model of the ones in Germany, and develop the anti-Soviet propaganda in the U.S. military, develop the chemical and biological weapons, the VX, the Agent Orange, the weapons that destroy Vietnam are developed by former Nazis working for the country that has supposedly rid the world of Nazism.
Man.
And, you know, this one really got to me, too, David.
You talk about in the book how this sort of, I don't want to call it pseudo-slavery and diminish it, really.
It's to a great degree the re-institution of chattel slavery in the South after the end of Reconstruction under the guise of, you know, the 13th Amendment loophole about conviction of a crime and then loaning these quote-unquote convicts out to farmers and miners and whoever to be worked the same.
I guess I had always thought that that even, you know, type of re-institution of slavery had come to an end right around the time of the abolishing of the company towns and all that in the New Deal.
And I know that there were some small exceptions in Alabama and Louisiana where this kind of thing went on even until the early 60s.
But anyway, I thought that this was mostly abolished, David, in like sometime in the mid-30s or something.
But no, you say in the book it wasn't until it got into the war and then they realized that this is really bad propaganda for the Nazis and Japanese to use against us, that we still allow this kind of pseudo-slavery.
So now finally FDR and his Democrats come and I don't even know what they did to make it better, but they began to try to reform it only with the start of the war.
Is that really right?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't want to be too simplistic here.
It's not as if the Civil War didn't largely end plantation slavery.
It's not as if it didn't do any good, although most of the world ended that sort of slavery without a disastrous Civil War.
It's bizarre to be defending such a thing because it gets attached to such a good cause.
But it did not come anywhere close to fully ending slavery.
And when Reconstruction was effectively destroyed, slavery was back with a vengeance and drawing largely on this fairly well-known book by Douglas Blackman called Slavery by Another Name, the Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
We find that in fact slavery for many African Americans was worse in those later years because their lives had no value.
They could be replaced by simply going out and getting another for the crime of loitering or whatever.
And that it really wasn't until World War II that that was effectively put to an end, although there's remnants and exceptions to this day.
But even then it was for public relations purposes, basically, that we can't have Hitler being able to bring this up.
And so now we'll finally get rid of it.
That was essentially the motive.
Or the commies being able to bring it up, right?
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right, I'm talking with David Swanson.
The book is Leaving World War II Behind for Armistice Day here on KPFK.
Now, so look, on the subject of the racism, let's talk about the anti-Japanese racism.
As you mentioned, even Dr. Seuss got in on this.
And the way they firebombed, I know they got their start in Germany, but the way they firebombed and nuked the Japanese cities is essentially the mindset was this is no different than kicking over an ant pile to a 10-year-old boy or something.
So how can that be?
Can you explain and help?
I mean, I know everybody understands racism, but this is to the nth degree, man.
This is making candle holders out of people's skulls.
Well, remember, there was a great deal of racism and anti-Semitism, and it was widely accepted and it was public opinion.
Majority of public opinion, even after the war, not to help the Jews.
And it was widely accepted in U.S. media and in the U.S. military and among the public that the Japanese were, you know, worth less than nothing, that the Japanese all needed to be killed.
U.S. commanders who said Japanese should be spoken only in hell.
And these cities were firebombed.
A couple of them were nuked, but Japan was, you know, brutally attacked, just as the Japanese had brutally attacked others.
And racism was a huge part of it.
So that when you hear people sort of pondering how could Harry Truman possibly have done such a horrible thing as drop those nuclear bombs, and these are presumably people who have some contact with reality in terms of the lack of justification, you know, overcoming the myths about the bombs saving lives and so forth.
How could he have possibly done that?
But for Harry Truman, the more people who died, the better.
That was a pro, not a con in the calculation.
I mean, this is the same guy who stood up in the Senate and said, you know, if the Russians are winning, help the Germans.
If the Germans are winning, help the Russians.
That way more people die.
Those were European people.
Those are the people, you know, you're supposed to value.
Valuing Japanese, you know, went way beyond that.
I mean, you had a mainstream media acceptance in the United States of destroying Japanese life.
And yeah, and even people like like Dr. Seuss, who, you know, was was outraged at the public disregard for Jewish lives in Europe and the U.S. government's disregard, and of course saw the solution as militarism.
You know, he saw the solution in Japan as extermination, you know, drawing cartoons with with pesticides, exterminating the the Japanese insects.
He also drew cartoons with American Japanese all lined up sneakily with bombs behind their backs as saboteurs, you know, determined to take California from within for the Japanese empire and all this, which, of course, you know, led right to or helped to, you know, in that same spirit of the internment of Japanese Americans.
It's funny.
This is one, isn't it, David, that everybody knows about, but nobody knows very much about.
And somehow it seems like, well, you know, that was a thing that happened.
But I don't know.
One of them got to be on Star Trek later.
So it's fine or something.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It's not as bad as other concentration camps.
Right.
Somebody else was worse.
So it's OK.
You know, I think it's it's it's worth knowing that, you know, there's controversy about who knew exactly what from what cable about Japanese plans to attack the United States.
But there is no plausible claim that the United States was the innocent bystander of mythology.
Right.
This this was a buildup to a war with Japan over a period of decades with public protests and demands for alternatives to to this growing threat of war.
And the list of the list of the people, the Japanese Americans, to be rounded up was, you know, created and put out there before Pearl Harbor and created with, you know, IBM technology that had been, you know, in part developed by the Nazis, because, of course, it was the same technology for the concentration camps in in Germany and in part by the U.S. government for Social Security and other programs less nefarious than extermination camps.
And and so before Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and the war, you had you had the U.S. military told it was at war.
You had the draft underway.
You had the list of Japanese Americans.
You had the weapons being manufactured.
The bases gained from the United Kingdom.
Complete open public understanding that the United States government wanted the war and wanted the Japanese to fire first.
I mean, there's there's just no controversy about that.
And people get so tied up in arguing about the details that I think they they miss the forest for the trees.
Yeah.
You know what?
Here's some details that I like that you bring up in the book.
And that is the Arthur McCallum memo, the eight point plan, how to provoke Japan into attacking us first, which, as you note, they immediately implemented beginning the next day after he wrote it.
And in fact, I'll tell you a story, because I knew Robert Stinnett and I interviewed him numerous times in the past before he died.
And he found that memo just stuffed in some files where it did not belong.
It was in like kind of a random place.
Someone had put it there to be found and he found it in these long top secret documents.
It's tremendous work that he did.
And I think a major contribution, because whatever you think of individuals' motivations and whichever of those steps you think were taken with the intention of provoking Japan, the fact remains that here was a memo outlining knowledge of what would provoke Japan.
And most of the most of the things on the list were done by the United States government.
For whatever reason, they were done.
There's little question that Japan doesn't remotely in any way, shape or form excuse anything Japan did.
But Japan was provoked.
Right.
And seemingly deliberately so.
I mean, you talk about even just having war games off of the coast of Japan.
And I think you even quote somebody contemporaneously saying, well, geez, what if they were doing that off the coast of Los Angeles?
How might we react to that?
That's a deliberate provocation.
One of many.
And in fact, if people agree, it's in the Day of Deceit is the book by Robert Stinnett, where he publishes that.
And you reproduce the whole thing there.
And it was what?
Embargo their oil, embargo their steel, surface your submarines off of Tokyo, keep your fleet at Pearl Harbor.
I forget three or four more things there that sure seem to do the trick.
And you even quote the Secretary of War saying, by all means, they must be maneuvered into firing the first shot.
That was the name of the game.
Stimson even wrote it in his diary.
That's about all the proof you need right there.
Yeah, I mean, on the big picture, there's no controversy.
Right.
I mean, Roosevelt told his top staff the Japanese were going to attack.
He was off by a few days.
Right.
But apart from the details, there isn't any dispute that there's no question that the United States was not taking steps toward peace.
There's no question that the United States was not this innocent bystander out of the picture until Pearl Harbor shocked everyone.
I mean, it's just nonsense.
Right.
And nor were they dispersing their fleet.
They kept them all right there in Pearl Harbor.
Oh, except the new good carriers.
But all those old obsolete World War One destroyers, those things can go.
And then you point out an even more seemingly cut and dry case of treason in the case of MacArthur in the Philippines, who had all the warning in the world that they just hit Pearl Harbor.
And now they're probably coming for you.
And then what did he do about it, David Swanson?
Yeah, apparently nothing.
You know, did he knock himself out?
Was he drunk in his room?
I don't know if anyone knows, but he did nothing.
And so hours go by after the attack on Pearl Harbor, with the attack on the Philippines coming, and like these big ships in Pearl Harbor, which could hardly be sunk because it's not a deep harbor, and I think all but one of them were, you know, recovered and restored and put to use in World War Two, in the Philippines, you had all the airplanes lined up in rows on the runways.
And those were destroyed, much more significant loss to the U.S. military than what was lost at Pearl Harbor.
And an actual invasion of an actual U.S. colony, unlike Hawaii, which wasn't, and it just wasn't of interest to the propagandists because Hawaii had some white people in it, and it was sort of thought of as on a possible track towards statehood, whereas the Philippines was just a little bit too Asian and was on a track to, you know, either liberation or remaining a colony.
And so it's interesting that, you know, the U.S. victims of World War Two, the majority of them were Filipinos in the Philippines, but no one knows it because no one knows they were Americans.
Man, this whole thing.
You know, I think a great solution, any young people listening to this, read Joseph Heller Catch-22, because it's the comedic take, but if that's the good war, then we really have a problem.
You know, this is the kind of irony that David Swanson is honing in on here.
And then didn't MacArthur leave a bunch of guys behind for no reason?
He had ships that had plenty of room to take everybody, but he left them to be kidnapped and death-marched and all of this stuff?
You'd think they could have used that for PR, except maybe it was too obviously MacArthur's fault that he just ditched them there.
I will return.
You guys wait here.
What?
Right.
Absolute disaster.
And yet the public response was to deify him.
You know, I think it's an example of the power of the media to choose what to tell you, because it would have been so easy to paint MacArthur as, if not treasonous, incompetent in the extreme.
And instead, he was glorified, almost deified, became such a hero.
You know, although he remained the same jerk he was and, you know, eventually got himself fired.
It's absolutely bizarre how these things are depicted.
All right.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with David Swanson, author of Leaving World War II Behind.
And now, I love this stuff.
And for a lot of people, this is a great entry into how politics and power really work.
And that is all of these international corporations that you discuss.
You briefly mentioned IBM there, but you go on about Standard Oil of New Jersey, which to this day is the most powerful corporation in the world, known as Exxon.
Their CEO was recently the Secretary of State.
They're the, that was the bedrock of the Rockefeller World Empire, as Murray Rothbard called it.
But then you have, there's the great book, The Sovereign State of ITT, and there are all these companies.
And you go through just how much American capital was invested in the development, not just of the German state under the Nazis, but the Nazis' war machine, David.
Yeah, there were top US corporate CEOs, executives, plutocrats who supported Nazism, who were leading funders and supporters of the rise of the Nazis.
And then there were others that simply did business with the Nazis, brought in needed materials, manufactured weapons, manufactured the machines for deciding who should be worked to death and who should be put to death and so forth.
And with some of these corporations, the best, the most favorable accounts defending their behavior, in the case of General Motors, for example, you have a very pro-General Motors book paid for by General Motors that doesn't claim they didn't work with the Nazis, doesn't claim they didn't make trucks and weapons for the Nazis, just claims that they had a corporate obligation to maximize their profits for their shareholders.
So they had no choice.
Which, you know, if there's not a better denunciation of the structure of corporations than that, I don't know.
But it doesn't satisfy me as an excuse for what they did.
And you have various scholars and you have various Nazis, like Albert Speer, the Hitler's architect, who said that without the U.S. corporations providing synthetic fuels, quote, Hitler would never have considered invading Poland, end quote.
I mean, so this is not just that the U.S. wasn't the angelic good in contrast to the demonic evil, but there wouldn't have been the demonic evil without these U.S. contributions.
There wouldn't have been World War II without the materials and the technologies and the corporate support from DuPont and GM and ITT and the U.S. banks and international banks and the lawyers that, you know, that made all this possible.
All right.
Now, you said something so important.
Well, you said a lot of important things there, but one of them, it only got space between two commas that I'd like you to go back to.
You said that these IBM punch card machines were used to help the Nazis determine which Jews in the death camps should be worked to death or simply murdered.
Is that really right?
And then is that just because, well, the Nazis just had their machines and used them how they wanted?
And so IBM wasn't really responsible for it?
Or is there more to the story than that?
Well, there's a very long, detailed account in Edwin Black's book from 2001 called IBM and the Holocaust, where he looks at all the intrigue and ins and outs over the years as legal statuses changed and so forth.
And there is no question that IBM worked through its subsidiary in Nazi Germany for the Nazis, that it sought to profit from the Nazis, that it continued these operations illegally, knowingly illegally, operating through Switzerland and other parts of Europe as needed, and that its machines were not just misused by the Nazis and IBM thought they were simply going to count people or something, that they were used for the prison camps and the death camps.
And it was IBM employees who would go and do the system updates, who would maintain the machines for the Nazis.
There was no ignorance on the part of IBM with regard to what was happening.
And it's not as though IBM and its top officials didn't support the Nazis.
They were quite, quite enthusiastic.
Thomas Watson, you know, famous big corporate hero, business leader, was a wonderful supporter of the Nazis, defended the Nazis in the U.S. press until it became absolutely impossible to do so, and hung on to his awards bestowed on him by the Nazis for as long as he could.
So, you know, there's a combination of just amoral desire to make money and actual enthusiastic support for Nazism that you find in many of these companies.
Yeah.
I'd like to recommend just a couple of books here, too, and I'd like to give you space to recommend other books on this subject if you want to add to it.
But the three most important ones that I know of are Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Anthony C. Sutton.
And then there are two by a guy named Charles Higgin.
And the first one is American Swastika.
And the second one is called Trading with the Enemy, the Nazi American Money Plot.
I think it's 1932 or 33 through 1946.
In other words, or 45, I guess.
In other words, it never stopped through the entire war is the point of the book.
And the reason it has the title Trading with the Enemy, it's not just a figure of speech, it's because that's a reference to the Trading with the Enemy Act of, I guess, 1917 from Woodrow Wilson years that FDR used to license every bit of what you just described was personally, you know, or not personally, but was approved by the Roosevelt government under licensing under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
The Trading with the Enemy Act says you can't trade with the enemy unless you have a license to do so.
And here's your license, IBM and Standard Oil and whoever.
You talk in the book, David, about Standard Oil, this American bohemian, the Rockefeller's flagship, Standard Oil of New Jersey, gave all of their patents for synthetic rubber to the Nazis and kept them from the Americans.
At the same time, they were American planes refueling.
I mean, American ships, Standard Oil ships refueling German U-boats at the Canary Islands off of the coast of Africa.
This is all high treason, all through the whole war.
And it wasn't illegal, or I guess a little bit of it was, right?
Like Truman held some hearings and went after Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush and a couple others.
But that was about it, right?
Well, there was not anything resembling an all out effort to prosecute those trading with the enemy.
I think some of them were considered too big to fail, too powerful to go after, or for whatever reasons they were permitted to get away with a great deal.
In fact, many of these companies that had factories in Germany through the war got compensation from the U.S. government for the Allies' destruction of their factories.
I think there's a lot of stories about this that make it hard to pin down the facts in some cases.
And some of these books, like Sutton's and Higgum's, that have no footnotes and very little documentation, you have to find other sources to be sure, because they get a lot right and they get some things wrong.
I tried to only put into my book what I could document with multiple sources and be pretty sure of, because there are stories of the Allies avoiding bombing the Ford plant in Cologne, Germany.
And the best research I can find suggests that, in fact, it was just good luck for Ford that its plant didn't get bombed.
And so I think it's critically important not to get some little detail wrong, because then everybody will focus on that and miss the broader picture.
Well, all right.
Sutton is one thing, but Charles Higgum was not a kook.
I mean, I think he was clear when he was speculating his best interpretation, as far as he could tell, versus making a specific claim.
That was the way I remember it, although I guess it has been about 25 years now.
I'm 100 percent in favor.
And I didn't mean to imply anybody was a kook, and I didn't use any word in that.
Well, Sutton kind of was.
I mean, it's OK to say, and I respect Anthony Sutton, but he was a kook, and that's all right, too.
But I'm just saying, I think Higgum, the way I remember it, Higgum was a scholarly level type of a thing.
It seemed like you thought it fell short.
So I was just, you know.
I think in some way, I mean, I'm sure we all fall short in various ways, but I thought that some of his claims fell short, and that made me reluctant to rely on any of his claims, unless I could find them elsewhere, too.
Which, of course- So which are the best books on that, do you think?
Those are good ones.
I've got in my book not just endless footnotes, but a list of recommended books at the end on, I think, all kinds of topics through this book.
I, of course, love Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke.
I think David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard is a great place to start on some of these topics.
I think The Untold History of the United States series that Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick put together is very well done.
I don't know, I've got dozens of books in a list I recommend at the end of mine.
Well, I guess I meant specifically on the topics like IBM and the Holocaust, and as far as Standard Oil and ITT.
I mentioned The Sovereign State of ITT.
Did you ever read that one?
I don't think I did.
I may need to.
There's also one called I Paid Hitler, but I can't remember the guy's name anymore.
I think he was a Dutch banker who had been involved in- You know, part of Higgum's thing, right, is about the Bank for International Settlements and how they helped to lubricate all the international business and trade before and even during the war between even the warring states at that time.
And it was all caught up in that.
But anyway, I'm talking with David Swanson.
I'm Scott Horton.
The book is called Leaving World War II Behind.
And David, you know, back to the beginning here about the mythology that America entered this war to go and rescue the Jews from the Holocaust and how that just isn't right at all.
What was the major motivation of the U.S. government to get involved in the war in Europe, do you think?
Well, I think part of it is pretty well discussed in a book I may have already mentioned, Stephen Wertheim's book out last week called Tomorrow the World that looks at this decision made around mid-1940 into beginning of 41 by the White House and the Council on Foreign Relations types that, you know, worst case scenario, there was going to be a big sphere of Nazi influence in much of Europe and a little bit of Asia, maybe.
And the United States, if it wanted to have the power and freedom of trade and operation in the rest of the world that it desired, it would need to start taking over the war and the world.
And there was as much, if not more effort put into what the world would look like after as into how to get there.
And, you know, you had the Atlantic Charter put out by Churchill and Roosevelt before the United States was even in the war, declaring what they would make of the world after the war.
And of course, after the war, they didn't still quite feel free to announce the intention of domination of the globe for its own sake.
And so the United Nations came in very handy as a way to give a relatively powerless body with membership from all the little countries the ability to air grievances and to vent their feelings.
But a very restricted Security Council with a handful of permanent members with veto power over anything, the ability to actually make the decisions for this new global body.
And that was, you know, that was the U.S. vision to have global domination in the name of democracy and self-determination, but not the reality.
Yeah.
Well, FDR wanted to be the first secretary general, which would have been a hoot if he had lived.
Yeah, I don't know how that would have changed the subsequent years of the U.N., but it would have been very different at its start, for sure.
You know what?
Yeah.
I mean, I think the decisions made by Truman and his group that they came to in 46 and 47 to approach the Cold War the way it was, it absolutely did not have to be that way any more than Bush getting us into Iraq.
But now, so back to the real point is people still think that, okay, despite what you just said about all of these important business interests and their concern about trade access to Eastern Europe that the Nazis might, you know, preclude them from and this kind of thing, but that no, still back to the Holocaust and the total evil of the totalitarian Nazi regime and the horror of their clash, you know, their conquest of virtually all of Europe, our allied democracies of, you know, Denmark and France and all of them and the Netherlands and all of these things, it still, it had to be done.
This is the one, David, you're right about Panama and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Yemen and Somalia, and I could go on and on and on, of course, but no, this one, man, it absolutely had to be done.
But you argue, no, in the end of this book, you say World War II does not prove that violence is necessary to resist even this evil, even this time.
It's not an exception.
It could have been another way.
How's that?
Well, I think that's absolutely right.
I think not only could you have avoided building up toward World War II, but you could have had different responses, proposals to negotiate uses of nonviolent resistance during World War II.
And of course, you had scattered, immature examples of the use of nonviolent resistance that effectively disempowered the Nazi occupation in places like Norway and Denmark.
And you had even women in the streets of Berlin protesting the Nazis and scaring the pants off them and winning their demands, but then not taking them any further.
And of course, since then, we've had the development of a field of study of people analyzing the tools of nonviolent action and the scholarship documenting that nonviolent campaigns can and have overthrown coups and occupations and tyranny and are more than twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns, quite likely to fail, but more than twice as likely to succeed as principally violent campaigns.
And so, you know, but if somebody wants to cling to World War II or the U.S. Civil War or some other relic of the past and agree with me that we can't survive having any more wars going forward, well, then I don't care.
The problem is the impact of beliefs about World War II on the U.S. federal budget and foreign policy today.
That's my concern.
Right.
And back to that, you know, endless thing where no matter the unique evil of the Nazis, every opponent of America is equivalent to them and therefore something must be done about them.
And, you know, we see it in our domestic politics as well.
Every president that one side doesn't like is Hitler to the other, for example.
As bad as they are, they ain't quite the Nazis, you know.
Yeah.
The resistance is, you know, how you characterize yourself now, you model yourself on, you know, the anti-fascist resistance, you know, which then glorifies World War II, which empowers the warmongers and the war propagandists and the U.S. military.
And so that now, if you're a good enemy of Trump, as I think everyone should have been, you're also a supporter of NATO and a Cold War with Russia and keeping every troop possible in Korea and Germany and Afghanistan and, you know, selling weapons left and right.
These are the good liberal positions because they're against, you know, this caricature of Trump that's, you know, 90 percent fiction.
So, you know, there is a problem with World War II mythology and with mixed up magical thinking in general in U.S. politics that we have to overcome.
All right, you guys, that is David Swanson.
His website is davidswanson.org.
Let's try democracy.
And his latest book is called Leaving World War II Behind.
Thank you so much for your time, David.
Really appreciate talking with you.
I enjoyed it.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys, and that has been Anti-War Radio for today.
Armistice Day, November 11th, 2020.
You guys can catch me here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., apsradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
