06/29/10 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on the Liberty Radio Network LRN.
FM and our guest for this half hour is Eric Margulies, he is a reporter for Sun National Media, he's a foreign correspondent for Sun National Media up there in Canada and of course is the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Welcome back to the show Eric, how are you doing?
Great to be back with you Will, I'm just back from Europe three days ago so I'm kind of half and half today.
Alright well I hope you had a cup of coffee or something, get ready for this one.
I'm ready.
Alright so, the most important myth in our entire civic religion, I think, is World War II.
It's the justification for all the evil that's come after it.
I interviewed a guy earlier on the show today and I'm not exactly sure how he calculated his number but he was counting into tens of millions of murdered civilians by the American government since the end of World War II and it's World War II that makes it all okay because our enemy is always Hitler and we are always FDR, the greatest leader ever.
Scott, that is a very interesting viewpoint and we certainly do have all Hitler all the time in all of our media and we certainly have our past Republican President George W. Bush who knew that he was the reincarnation of Winston Churchill, maybe Roosevelt too, and was continuing to wage World War II.
Well and this is why the American people accept it and the reason I'm so sure of all this is because I remember being seven or something, you know, and as I was explaining to the audience before and I'll go ahead and tell you too, it was just, you know, not very many years after the end of the Vietnam War at all.
I was born in 76, you know, so when I was a young kid it was, you know, late 70s, early 80s kind of thing.
Many of, I guess, I don't remember my parents explicitly talking about this, but certainly many of my friends' parents had very good friends in college who had gone and died in the war, who'd been drafted and died in Vietnam.
They were very angry about that, et cetera, et cetera, and yet still I didn't grow up with Vietnam as the basis of my understanding of American wars.
I still, despite all that, grew up with the idea that thou shalt not kill except when you wear green and your country tells you to and it's like World War II.
Well, that's true.
Unfortunately, we've changed this philosophy, expounded by our founding fathers, of defending our shores and now we've become so paranoid as a country that we have to wage war everywhere in the world to defend ourselves against these Orwellian threats that are really pretty much non-existent.
Indeed.
Indeed.
Well, so what's so great about World War II, anyway?
I mean, I guess there's no denying that the Imperial Japanese and the Nazi Germans were among the most vicious regimes ever to have existed under the sun, right?
They are, but we've created a huge mythology about World War II.
I mean, history is the propaganda of the victors.
I've just come back from Russia, where I was, and the Russians were celebrating the anniversary of the end of the war, the 70th anniversary, and they're very bitter about the fact that the Americans and the British seem to have arrogated the claim that they won the war against the Germans.
In fact, it was the Russians who destroyed 75% of all German armed forces.
It was us, the Americans and the British, who flattened all the German cities, but it was the Russians who did the bulk of the fighting and the dying.
On the other hand, America won a splendid and glorious victory in the Pacific on its own, defeating the Imperial Japanese forces.
In Europe, they landed and they fought what was essentially a defeated German army with no air cover or fuel.
Well, you know, one of the things that really changed my understanding of World War II was reading the anti-war writings of the right, I don't know if you can call them conservatives, but anyway, like Garrett Gurette wrote, there's a book called Defend America First, which is a collection of his essays for the Saturday Evening Post, and it seems also like even President Hoover and a lot of the anti-war right, they had, you know, a pretty good estimation of the situation, and they were saying, look, nobody's apologizing for this Hitler guy, all we're saying is, why should we get involved?
Why not let him go east and let the two dictators fight, if that's what it's going to be, why should we get involved?
And it seemed like all the Americans and the British did was make it where, rather than, you know, at least possibly, Stalingrad could have gone ahead and fallen, the Nazis would have been defeated anyway, you can't occupy Russia, ask Napoleon about it, and Nazism wouldn't have outlived Hitler, even though communism sure outlived Stalin, and it just seems like the people who opposed the war before it started were saying things like, you know what, all we're doing is helping Stalin, and he's going to end up owning all of Eastern Europe, and then we're going to have to have a problem with him.
They were saying this before Pearl Harbor even happened.
That's quite right.
Stalin had already murdered millions of people in his concentration gulag system before Hitler ever got started, so it's a very good point, but that's been blanked out of history, it's gone down the memory hole.
Patsy Cannon wrote a book on the subject, too, and of course he was tarred and feathered and blasted as being an anti-Semite for daring even to raise the subject.
It is taboo, and it will remain taboo.
The propaganda of World War II, the mythology is so deeply ingrained everywhere that it's very difficult even to begin to chip away at it without being accused of all kinds of vile things.
Well, now, your article on LewRockwell.com today is Yalta, the Great Betrayal, and I guess I take it you were sitting in Joe Stalin's chair overlooking the Black Sea or something?
I was indeed, and I really had a very eerie feeling that Stalin's hand was going to come out from the sky and grab me by the throat.
The ghost of the dictator is very, very powerful still in Russia.
His memory is being rehabilitated.
Everybody went down on Stalin, he was the scum of the earth, but now he's on the upsurge again.
Churchill said a great thing about Stalin, a very accurate thing.
He said when Stalin came to power, Russians were using wooden plows.
When he died, Russia was a nuclear power, and it's a remarkable achievement for one man, no matter how many tens of millions of people he killed.
Well, and also, I don't know, do you think it would be okay if I go ahead and blame George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush for the people of the former Soviet Union looking back with nostalgia at Joe Stalin?
Because they understand, probably as well as you and I do, the cost of that giant leap forward there.
Tens of millions of Russian lives, or Soviet lives anyway, as the cost to get there.
But isn't it America's fault for basically stabbing all the former Soviet states in the back and giving them this corrupt mercantilist imperial system as the opposite?
Isn't that why they all want the Soviet Union back?
Because at least then they felt more independent under Moscow, I guess.
Well, I spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and it wasn't all misery and suffering.
Actually, I was just down in Sochi on the Black Sea coast, and I was there, it was 1988, and it was the sort of Soviet Acapulco at the time.
Soviets didn't work very hard.
They were always on vacation, they had six weeks vacation, two to three weeks of sanatorium, which were glorified vacation retreats.
They had weekends off, they had tea breaks.
It was state-sponsored laziness, as I call it, and there was no competition, and everybody was guaranteed a job and an income, and everybody had lousy apartments and terrible food.
But the people enjoyed the companionship there, and there are a lot of people today who are indeed nostalgic for the Soviet Union, and a lot for the Soviet being a feared international power rather than a kind of semi-bankrupt third-world country.
Yeah.
Well, at least they saved money rather than borrowing it all.
Looks like, all things being equal, we're about to switch places with them again.
We are.
It's very embarrassing, too.
I was thinking of putting my money in some Russian banks, they're a lot more solid than Chase Manhattan.
Yeah.
Well, jeez, I always thought they did their banking at Chase Manhattan.
All right, we'll be back right after this.
Eric Margulies, Antiwar Radio.
You're listening to the best Liberty-oriented audio streamed around the clock, on the air and online.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Wrapping up Antiwar Radio, got Eric Margulies on the line.
And now, real quickly here, because we've got to get back to World War II, but there's a quote here.
Eric Margulies writes to Fred Reed, quote, when confronting crowds of heavily armed, angry tribesmen, I've often found that, salam, my brothers, please lower your lovely weapons.
I write for LewRockwell.com.
Always works and gets me lots of kisses and hugs from burly, bearded tribesmen.
Now certainly this is hyperbole, but what's the story behind this, Eric?
I'm just referring to some of my ventures in the third world, particularly places like Afghanistan and Iran and things, and I have a softness, a weakness for burly, heavily armed tribesmen who scowl and look unfriendly initially, but are quickly won over.
Oh, okay, but you don't really tell them, hey, I write for Lew, it's all good.
No, but I will try it next time it happens, Scott.
All right, and you know, they probably read it before, you never know.
It is a worldwide web.
If they're smart, they read LewRockwell.com.
Yeah.
All right, so here's the thing.
First of all, and you got to make this part quick, what was the sellout at Yalta, for those who aren't familiar, and then very importantly, as one of these guys is pointing out in the chat room here, well, what were the Americans to do instead of Yalta?
What was the alternative?
The sellout was that the U.S. and Britain agreed for Stalin to take over half of Eastern Europe, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Stalin promised democratic regimes and elections, which, of course, he never believed in, and the U.S. could have stood up to Stalin.
He had 12 million soldiers in the Red Army moving into Europe, but so did the Allies had a lot of soldiers.
They also had the atomic bomb at the end, which, or a little bit later, which Stalin did not have.
But there was a complete collapse of morale, which I think, and I wrote, is equivalent to the sellout at Munich.
Well, you're not saying they should have nuked Moscow.
No, I'm not.
But I'm saying with the with the backup of nuclear power, they could have dug in their heels and taken a much stronger position with Stalin and challenged him, as General George Patton wanted to do.
You know, the U.S. ordered its troops back and to let the Red Army move in.
We should not have done that.
In fact, what we should have done is what Churchill wanted to do, which was instead of invading Normandy in 1944, was to invade the Balkans to get into Eastern Europe before the Red Army got there and also to make a deal with the Germans instead of holding out for unconditional surrender.
The Germans were perfectly willing to surrender and to let the Americans move into their positions.
And so how many people got stuck behind the iron curtain?
I mean, after all, you're looking at hindsight.
But at the time, Uncle Joe Stalin was a great guy and he said, well, we'll let them have free elections.
It'll be fine.
And of course, all good men trusted him.
Well, the horrible thing about what it would offended me so much when I was in Yalta and, you know, standing in front of a table where they concluded this odious agreement was that Roosevelt actually believed the man he called Uncle Joe was going to keep his word and was a benign Democratic, a little bit authoritarian, but really a benign.
I mean, Roosevelt was a fool, in my opinion.
He may have been senile.
His administration was heavily influenced by communist agents.
There were two in his immediate entourage, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, who was the assistant secretary of the Treasury.
There may have been a third, according to KGB.
Well, Harry Hopkins was a KGB agent, too, wasn't he?
It has not been proven, but there are strong suspicions that he was not a KGB agent, but a Soviet agent of influence.
There may have been more.
There have been accusations made against Evel Harriman.
There have been all sorts of things.
Whatever the case was, the Roosevelt administration was heavily under the influence of the Soviets, an absolutely terrible thing.
And this was the man who was determining the future of the Western world.
Yeah.
And then came in automatic president Harry Truman, who I guess he didn't have even FDR level qualms about complete carpet bombing and and mass slaughter and couldn't wait to get a Cold War going in Europe.
Well, Truman, I think, was a far finer man and president than Roosevelt was.
He was certainly more sensible.
And Truman, I think, backed away from war.
He didn't want to.
He didn't want to see war there.
And after all, he wouldn't let MacArthur use nuclear weapons against China, which I think was the right decision as well.
It could have involved us in a nuclear war down the line somewhere with Russia.
But, you know, in those days, carpet bombing, mass killings of civilians was was an accepted practice in war by the British, by the Americans and by the Japanese and the Russians and the Germans, too.
It was just a bloody awful era.
We forgot that, I think.
Well, you know, maybe this is just propaganda, but I saw a thing recently about the history of the air war over Europe and how the British insisted on carpet bombing.
But the Americans wanted at least and at first at least did a much better job of trying to just target military targets.
But I guess by the time of Dresden and whatever, they just went ahead and gave up.
So when Truman took power, it was already on.
The doctrine had already changed.
That's right.
Curtis LeMay's strategic air command and more slaughter was done in Japan.
But the point there being that the American Air Force, they had serious issues with this.
They wanted to bomb the Nazi military, not all the people of Germany off the face of the earth.
And and, you know, Truman could have reversed the policy back to the way it had been.
Well, I don't I really don't understand why it wasn't done.
I think the military had its own momentum.
It was really leading the war and the war was winding down by that point, too.
So the worst crimes had already been committed except for the bombing of Dresden.
I know because I had a girlfriend who had escaped from Dresden and as a child and her family was killed.
Her aunt was gang raped by Russian soldiers.
It was an absolutely horrible thing.
But I add again, 50 percent of Japan's cities were firebombed into ruins by the U.S.
Air Force.
That itself was a was a crime, no doubt.
Well, you know, another part of the legacy of World War Two is the creation of the United Nations and the doctrine of collective security, where Truman can just start a war with agreement with France and Britain, I guess, if he wants, in South Korea without even having to consult the Congress.
And, you know, this is one of the first things.
Well, there's always a lot of things.
But I remember noticing as a 14 or 15 year old that what do you mean George Bush can go to war with Iraq based on a U.N. resolution?
I thought the Constitution said that Congress has to declare a war.
Oh, well, that point has been moot since 1950 something when was it 1950 when Harry Truman started the Korean War?
Well, that's a very interesting question and a debate Americans should be making because Congress has given up its responsibility to declare war, which it should have, and left responsibility with the president and with the U.N.
And I think it's iniquitous that the that the victors of World War Two should still be calling all the shots.
The U.N.
Security Council, which is held up as some, you know, a gust body, is a group of self-serving large powers that still are calling the shots.
And it shouldn't be.
That's an old order that ought to be overturned.
But I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Yeah, well, and, you know, if you're on the receiving end of the violence, like, say, a North Korean being napalmed to death or something like that, the baby blue flag fig leaf for the American empire picking up where the Japanese one left off is not much consolation.
It seems to work real well on the American people.
I mean, hell, if you look at the polls before Iraq, that was always the question and the way it was portrayed.
Right.
If the U.N. says it's OK, then it's OK.
That's right.
And even if it doesn't say it's OK, which was the other side of the argument, then, well, with the stupid, you know, cheese eating French who it was their fault.
And who the hell who needs the U.N. anyway?
It's a commie organization, et cetera.
But, you know, we we we Americans live in an understate of constant paranoia.
We're being bombarded by the press and have been for as long as I can remember that there are all these threats out there ready to get us when, in fact, we're faced with practically no threats.
And yet the war drums keep beating.
And we've seen it again now with Iran, for example.
They go on and on.
Right.
Well, and that's gets right back to the original point about World War Two as the founding myth and what a dangerous world it is and how justified we are in every everything that we do.
The complex of fear and vaunting that Garrett Garrett talked about.
Right.
We're number one.
Oh, no, they're going to get us.
We're number one.
Oh, no, they're going to get us.
Makes such a great chant.
You know, George Orwell wrote about that brilliantly in his great book, Nineteen Eighty Four, where the country's kept in a constant state of war, fear, paranoia.
Yeah.
The Israelis call it shoot and cry, shoot and cry.
All right.
Thanks, Eric.
Appreciate it.
Pleasure, Scott.
That's anti-war radio.
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Thanks for listening.