Corbett, Unz & WWII: The Unnecessary War

dipping a toe into a deep, murky pond

In one of those serendipities to which I’ve learned to pay attention, I happened to be reading a 2019 article from Unz Review called American Pravda: Understanding WWII. It was on a 2008 book by Pat Buchanan called Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. As I was reading it last April, Keith Knight, from Don’t Tread on Anyone, and James Corbett came out with 10 Lessons from Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War taken from that same 15-year-old book by Pat Buchanan.

I was reminded that I had this draft, already too long for email, by the aggressive censorship against CJ Hopkins in Germany for embedding the ghost image of a swastika into the mask that muzzled, not just free speech, but all speech for two years and is threatening on the horizon again for October.

The Road to Totalitarianism (Part 3)

I did an episode on CJ a year ago that I’ll link at the end, in which I disagreed with him and Margaret Anna Alice that we’re repeating the same pattern as Nazi Germany. In fact, I think that’s what Mattias Desmet is also saying in The Psychology of Totalitarianism, but from the opposite side. CJ looks at totalitarian control creating compliance and Desmet looks at mass formation making totalitarianism possible.

I had wondered, at the time, if we knew the truth about WWII and whether the good guys had really won over the bad guys, as we’ve been told. Was Hitler a rogue acter or an actor in the literal sense of playing out a script that was written and produced by others? Who might those others have been? I explored this later in Did Fascists Win WWII?, which I’ll also link.

So I think it’s a good time to learn the history of WWII so that, if we are to be jailed or fined for it, it will be for actually showing what they’re trying to hide. Let’s dive in.

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Let’s start with Keith Knight and James Corbett on 10 Lessons from Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, which I’ll put into bullet points. I recommend the 40-min video as fast-paced and jam-packed. This starts with Keith and an opening quote:

The State is the health of war. This is the result of having unique access to a central bank, the recognized right to collect money involuntarily through taxation, the ability to conscript men into fighting in wars against their will, a monopoly on compulsory education, and a legal double standard which allows mass murder to go unpunished under the guise of foreign policy.

They then alternate lessons learned, starting with James:

1. The success of Churchill’s starvation blockade—what was the Treaty of Versailles and why did Germans sign it? Buchanan writes, “Germany faced invasion and death by starvation if she refused.” The blockade was maintained for a year after WWI, not allowing Germany to buy food or any neutral country to sell to them. He writes, “the birth rate has changed places with the death rate.” See also Corbett on Prolonging the Agony and Sanctions Are War By Other Means.

2. Germany did not declare war in either WWI or WWII. In WWI, Belgium called on an 1839 treaty with England that it would intervene if armed forces entered Belgium. In WWII, it was Neville Chamberlain who sent the ultimatum that unless Germany withdrew its troops from Poland, England would declare war.

3. Britain gave assurances far ahead of either war that, if any action occurred causing Poland to decide it was in their ‘vital interests’ to use its own national army, Britain would join them. They also promised to intervene for Holland, Switzerland, Romania, Greece and Turkey.

4. Churchill wrote his ambassador, “British policy for 400 yrs has been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving together a combination of other countries strong enough to face the ‘bully’.” This competition between empires justified actions against Spain and France, so he had no anti-German bias, he claimed.

5. Buchanan lists Allied atrocities ordered by Churchill, including the incineration of Dresden. He writes, “If Britain initiated terror bombing, America perfected it. Boasted Curtis LeMay of his famous raid on Tokyo, ‘We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people that night of March 9-10th (1945) than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.’ We fought for moral ends but not with moral means.”

6. WWI ended with Britain at 1M square miles and Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini—far more dangerous despots than Franz Joseph or the Kaiser. Poland ended up in the hands of Stalin. Churchill said to Stalin, “We started this war for Poland, can they at least have free elections?” Stalin answered, “Free elections, like in British occupied Egypt?” There was no more talk of it. Buchanan gives the numbers killed in each war for each country.

7. Churchill was an enthusiastic eugenicist going back to 1910 when he talks about “the rapid rise of the feeble-minded and insane classes” and how that constituted a ‘race danger.’

8. CP Snow quotes Lindemann on the Allied bombing campaign, “The bombing must be directed to working class German houses. Middle class houses have too much space around them and are bound to waste bombs. … [With this strategy] It would be possible to destroy 50% of the houses.” This precedes the Blitzkrieg by months and they say it was ‘as heroic a decision as Russia’s policy of scorched earth.’

9. Buchanan shows that America ended the war as the sole superpower because it stayed out until the very end, then scooped up the spoils of war as the decisive element.

10. And making the point that WWII was unnecessary, Buchanan points out multiple times when the US could have gone to war and didn’t, that turned out better for it both geopolitically and economically.

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Ron Unz begins American Pravda: Understanding WWII with why he had published a very hostile review of Churchill, Hitler & the Unnecessary War in Buchanan’s former journal, The American Conservative, after Unz had come to own it. In 2003, Buchanan had published Whose War? blaming Jewish neocons for the US invasion of Iraq. Although he was no longer associated with the journal in 2008, they wanted to distance themselves from attacks as anti-Semitic. But after the book and review came out, Unz read it for himself and found he had made the wrong decision. He writes:

The first part of his volume provided what I had always considered the standard view of the First World War. … But although his narrative was what I expected, he provided a wealth of interesting details previously unknown to me. Among other things, he persuasively argued that the German war-guilt was somewhat less than that of most of the other participants, also noting that despite the endless propaganda of “Prussian militarism,” Germany had not fought a major war in 43 years, an unbroken record of peace considerably better than that of most of its adversaries.

Moreover, a secret military agreement between Britain and France had been a crucial factor in the unintended escalation, and even so, nearly half the British Cabinet had come close to resigning in opposition to the declaration of war against Germany, a possibility that would have probably led to a short and limited conflict confined to the Continent. I’d also seldom seen emphasized that Japan had been a crucial British ally, and that the Germans probably would have won the war if Japan had fought on the other side.

However, the bulk of the book focused on the events leading up to the Second World War … Buchanan described the outrageous provisions of the Treaty of Versailles imposed upon a prostrate Germany, and the determination of all subsequent German leaders to redress it. But whereas his democratic Weimar predecessors had failed, Hitler had managed to succeed, largely through bluff, while also annexing German Austria and the German Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, in both cases with the overwhelming support of their populations.

Buchanan documented this controversial thesis by drawing heavily upon numerous statements by leading contemporary political figures, mostly British, as well as the conclusions of highly-respected mainstream historians. Hitler’s final demand, that 95% German Danzig be returned to Germany just as its inhabitants desired, was an absolutely reasonable one, and only a dreadful diplomatic blunder by the British had led the Poles to refuse the request, thereby provoking the war. The widespread later claim that Hitler sought to conquer the world was totally absurd, and the German leader had actually made every effort to avoid war with Britain or France. Indeed, he was generally quite friendly towards the Poles and had been hoping to enlist Poland as a German ally against the menace of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Ron Unz talks about the major journalists and authors of the 1930’s who were ‘disappeared’ from history for writing about WWII. For instance, Harry Elmer Barnes:

… is credited with having played a central role in “revising” the history of the First World War so as to remove the cartoonish picture of unspeakable German wickedness left behind as a legacy of the dishonest wartime propaganda produced by the opposing British and American governments. And his professional stature was demonstrated by his thirty-five or more books, many of them influential academic volumes …

A few years ago I happened to mention Barnes to an eminent American academic scholar whose general focus in political science and foreign policy was quite similar, and yet the name meant nothing. By the end of the 1930s, Barnes had become a leading critic of America’s proposed involvement in World War II, and was permanently “disappeared” as a consequence. …

Over a dozen years after his disappearance from our national media, Barnes managed to publish Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, a lengthy collection of essays by scholars and other experts discussing the circumstances surrounding America’s entrance into World War II, and have it produced and distributed by a small printer in Idaho. His own contribution was a 30,000 word essay entitled “Revisionism and the Historical Blackout” and discussed the tremendous obstacles faced by the dissident thinkers of that period.

The book itself was dedicated to the memory of his friend, historian Charles A. Beard. Since the early years of the 20th century, Beard had ranked as an intellectual figure of the greatest stature and influence, co-founder of The New School in New York and serving terms as president of both The American Historical Association and The American Political Science Association. As a leading supporter of the New Deal economic policies, he was overwhelmingly lauded for his views.

Yet once he turned against Roosevelt’s bellicose foreign policy, publishers shut their doors to him, and only his personal friendship with the head of the Yale University Press allowed his critical 1948 volume President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 to even appear in print. Beard’s stellar reputation seems to have begun a rapid decline from that point onward … Indeed, Beard’s once-dominant “economic interpretation of history” might these days almost be dismissed as promoting “dangerous conspiracy theories,” and I suspect few non-historians have even heard of him.

This rang a bell and caused me to check my personal library, where I found An Economic Interpretation of the US Constitution by Charles A. Beard. Another episode! Unz talks about the author of a book called Unconditional Hatred, Captain Russell Grenville of the British Royal Navy:

One of the intriguing aspects of his discussion is that much of the anti-German propaganda he seeks to debunk would today be considered so absurd and ridiculous it has been almost entirely forgotten, while much of the extremely hostile picture we currently have of Hitler’s Germany receives almost no mention whatsoever, possibly because it had not yet been established or was then still considered too outlandish for anyone to take seriously. Among other matters, he reports with considerable disapproval that leading British newspapers had carried headlined articles about the horrific tortures that were being inflicted upon German prisoners at war crimes trials in order to coerce all sorts of dubious confessions out of them.

Some of Grenfell’s casual claims do raise doubts about various aspects of our conventional picture of German occupation policies. He notes numerous stories in the British press of former French “slave-laborers” who later organized friendly post-war reunions with their erstwhile German employers. He also states that in 1940 those same British papers had reported the absolutely exemplary behavior of German soldiers toward French civilians, though after terroristic attacks by Communist underground forces provoked reprisals, relations often grew much worse.

Most importantly, he points out that the huge Allied strategic bombing campaign against French cities and industry had killed huge numbers of civilians, probably far more than had ever died at German hands, and thereby provoked a great deal of hatred as an inevitable consequence. At Normandy he and other British officers had been warned to remain very cautious among any French civilians they encountered for fear they might be subject to deadly attacks.

Although Grenfell’s content and tone strike me as exceptionally even-handed and objective, others surely viewed his text in a very different light. The Devin-Adair jacket-flap notes that no British publisher was willing to accept the manuscript, and when the book appeared no major American reviewer recognized its existence. Even more ominously, Grenfell is described as having been hard at work on a sequel when he suddenly died in 1954 of unknown causes, and his lengthy obituary in the London Times gives his age as 62.

An eminent French historian named Sisley Huddelston wrote France: the Tragic Years: 1939-1947, giving a surprising account:

As Huddleston describes things, the French army collapsed in May of 1940, and the government desperately recalled Petain, then in his mid-80s and the country’s greatest war hero, from his posting as the Ambassador to Spain. Soon he was asked by the French President to form a new government and arrange an armistice with the victorious Germans, and this proposal received near-unanimous support from France’s National Assembly and Senate, including the backing of virtually all the leftist parliamentarians. Petain achieved this result, and another near-unanimous vote of the French parliament then authorized him to negotiate a full peace treaty with Germany, which certainly placed his political actions on the strongest possible legal basis. At that point, almost everyone in Europe believed that the war was essentially over, with Britain soon to make peace.

While Petain’s fully-legitimate French government was negotiating with Germany, a small number of diehards, including Col. Charles de Gaulle, deserted from the army and fled abroad, declaring that they intended to continue the war indefinitely, but they initially attracted minimal support or attention. …

Although Petain’s new French government guaranteed that its powerful navy would never be used against the British, Churchill took no chances, and quickly launched an attack on the fleet of his erstwhile ally, whose ships were already disarmed and helplessly moored in port, sinking most of them, and killing up to 2,000 Frenchmen in the process. This incident was not entirely dissimilar to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the following year, and rankled the French for many years to come.

Huddleston then spends much of the book discussing the complex French politics of the next few years, as the war unexpectedly continued, with Russia and America eventually joining the Allied cause, greatly raising the odds against a German victory. … However, the most remarkable claims in Huddleston’s book come towards the end, as he describes what eventually became known as “the Liberation of France” during 1944-45 when the retreating German forces abandoned the country and pulled back to their own borders. Among other things, he suggests that the number of Frenchmen claiming “Resistance” credentials grew as much as a hundred-fold once the Germans had left and there was no longer any risk in adopting that position.

And at that point, enormous bloodshed soon began, by far the worst wave of extra-judicial killings in all of French history. Most historians agree that around 20,000 lives were lost in the notorious “Reign of Terror” during the French Revolution and perhaps 18,000 died during the Paris Commune of 1870-71 and its brutal suppression. But according to Huddleston the American leaders estimated there were at least 80,000 “summary executions” in just the first few months after Liberation, while the Socialist Deputy who served as Interior Minister in March 1945 and would have been in the best position to know, informed De Gaulle’s representatives that 105,000 killings had taken place just from August 1944 to March 1945, a figure that was widely quoted in public circles at the time.

Since a large fraction of the entire French population had spent years behaving in ways that now suddenly might be considered “collaborationist,” enormous numbers of people were vulnerable, even at risk of death, and they sometimes sought to save their own lives by denouncing their acquaintances or neighbors. Underground Communists had long been a major element of the Resistance, and many of them eagerly retaliated against their hated “class enemies,” while numerous individuals took the opportunity to settle private scores.

Unz concludes this section by saying:

John T. Flynn, Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles Beard, William Henry Chamberlin, Russell Grenfell, Sisley Huddleston, and numerous other scholars and journalists of the highest caliber and reputation all told a rather consistent story of the Second World War but one at total variance with that of today’s established narrative, and they did so at the cost of destroying their careers. A decade or two later, renowned historian A.J.P. Taylor reaffirmed this same basic narrative, and was purged from Oxford as a consequence. I find it very difficult to explain the behavior of all these individuals unless they were presenting a truthful account.

A young historian named David L. Hoggen wrote his 1948 dissertation on WWII and expanded it into a 700 pp. book called The Forced War arguing that powerful British interests had provoked Hitler into it. Even though only published in German, it ruined his life and career. Unz writes, “In 1984 an English version of his major work was finally about to be released when the facilities of its small revisionist publisher in the Los Angeles area were fire-bombed and totally destroyed by Jewish militants, thus obliterating the plates and all existing stock. Living in total obscurity, Hoggan himself died of a heart-attack in 1988, aged 65.” Unz has made the PDF available but doesn’t vouch for the veracity of all of its claims.

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No alternate compendium of WWII would be complete without a link to Murray Rothbard’s Revisionism for Our Time. I also include a link to Katherine Watts On the Alleged Neutrality of Switzerland and one on the Internet Archive copy of Tower of Basel.

On the alleged neutrality of Switzerland.

And Emmanuel Pastreich has published the 1918 speech by Eugene Debs against WWI in three parts called: “To Whom do the Wall Street Junkers Marry Their Daughters after they have wrung millions from your sweat, your agony and your life’s blood.” Part I and Part II and Part III.

“To whom do the Wall Street Junkers marry their daughters after they have wrung countless millions from your sweat, your agony, and your life’s blood?”

Each of these deserves its own episode along with work done by Mathew Crawford, Matt Ehret and Cynthia Chung. So consider this dipping a toe into a very deep and murky pool. To be continued, at your own peril of ending the myth of the Good War once and for all.

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To follow up, here’s CJ Hopkins & The New Normal Reich

In Through the Looking Glass, Margaret Anna Alice interviews playwright CJ Hopkins about his Substack, The Consent Factory Essays, and his book, The New Normal Reich. She asks eight questions that I summarize and respond to, on the cultural zeitgeist and reality vs. "reality". I raise questions about the original Third Reich, and whether we've been told the truth. Mattias Desmet is discussed and which came first, totalitarianism or mass psychosis. I quote from A Course in Miracles and why more people are psychoanalyzing humanity as one consciousness than ever before.

And Did Fascists Win WWII?

In this video, I ask viewers to help me find a missing puzzle piece. How did Germany go from the crippling debt of the Weimar inflation to a thriving economy before the invasion of Poland? I propose two scenarios: one involving Madame Blavatsky and theosophist bankers, the other with Hitler kicking out the bankers and creating his own money. And then there's a mix of the two. Help me search the couch cushions for this puzzle piece!