It Would Be
Good If Trump Got His Facts Right
I do recall another man who used the ‘Free French’
resistance parallel from the Second World War. He
was trying to prove that Muslims had the right to
resist the United States. His name was Osama bin
Laden
By Robert Fisk
September
21, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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When, oh when, will our
politicians/statesmen/dictators – mad or moderately
sane – stop using the Second World War as a
yardstick for their hatred and pride?
Trump turned his
hand to it in his
UN speech – in a
passage clearly written by others, but woefully out
of context – when he uttered the following
historical perspective:
“From the
beaches of Europe to the deserts of the Middle East
to the jungles of Asia, it is an eternal credit to
the American character that even after we and our
allies emerged victorious from the bloodiest war in
history, we did not seek territorial expansion or
attempt to oppose and impose our way of life on
others.”
Phew.
Well, let’s kick off with the one country
Trump left alone in
the UN: Russia. It was Russia which bore the brunt
of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, it was Russia’s
destruction of Hitler’s military power that broke
the Nazis, and it was Russia which – with the
approval of both Churchill and Roosevelt (and later
Truman, whom Trump quotes at some length) –
dominated eastern Europe with a series of vicious
“socialist” dictatorships for decades after the war
was over. When Trump referred to “our allies” in the
Second World War, he surely – though I’m not certain
of this – knew that the most powerful of them in
Europe was the Soviet Union.
There’s no
problem with D-Day (“the beaches of Europe”), and
the landings in Italy and southern France, although
they came a bit late for Stalin who’d been pleading
for a Second Front for two years. Besides, the
Western Allies feared that if they didn’t launch
D-Day soon, then the advancing Russian army would be
sunbathing on the beaches of Spain.
But the
reference to the “deserts of the Middle East” went
way beyond reality. US Middle East policy after the
Second World War was based on oil resources – and
the propping up of dictators and kings who would
ensure the flow of oil in the future – and total and
uncritical support for Israel, whose occupation and
theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank would
have produced a froth of economic sanctions from the
Trumps of this world had it been any other country.
The
“jungles of Asia” was also way over the top. The
Communists of French Indo-China fought their
Japanese occupiers, then the French when they
returned to “their” colonies, and then the Americans
when they fought in Vietnam to prop up their own
dictatorship in Saigon. The Japanese themselves got
off so lightly under Douglas MacArthur that many of
their war criminals were never put before a war
crimes court, and the Emperor remained on his
throne. But – the Department of Home Truths (DHT)
beckons here – yes, the Americans did help to give
birth to a flourishing democracy in Japan. And – the
DHT again – the US did help West Germany to develop
as a democracy, albeit with quite a lot of ex-Nazis
still in positions of power, and kept the West
Berliners alive with the Allied airlift. Pity about
eastern Germany.
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And
Czechoslovakia. And Bulgaria. And Hungary. And
Rumania. And Lithuania. And Latvia. And Estonia.
And Poland. Ah yes, poor old Poland. “Patriotism
led the Poles to die to save Poland,” Trump
quoth at the UN. Oh yes, the poor old Poles did
indeed die to “save” Poland. Firstly, they died
in their tens of thousands when the Nazis
invaded them in 1939 (after a secret pact with
Stalin). Britain and France drew the sword on
their behalf but did not even attack Hitler’s
Germany in the West. And when the Poles rose up
against the Nazis in 1944, the Western Allies
dropped a few weapons and watched impotently as
Stalin – our greatest ally – did nothing,
allowed the Nazis to erase the Polish patriots
and then gobbled up Poland himself. The Poles
had died, literally, in their millions, for this
gross betrayal.
And there’s
one more thing we might mention in this load of old
Trumpery: that when Hitler marched into Poland and
Denmark and Norway and Holland and Belgium and
Luxembourg and then France and threatened to invade
Britain, the United States enjoyed a very profitable
period of neutrality – as it had done for most of
the First World War – until the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbour in December 1941, more than two years
after the start of the Second World War. It was, we
might remember, Hitler who then declared war on the
United States, not the other way round. And French
“patriotism” and “free France”, which Trump also
mentioned, took something of a back seat during the
four-year disgrace of the Vichy collaboration.
As for the
Brits, strong we were, though it would have been
good to have US troops fighting for us on the
beaches of Dunkirk in 1940 as well as on the beaches
of Normandy four years later. Pity they couldn’t
make it.
And – hem,
hem – I do recall another man who used the “Free
French” resistance parallel from World War Two. He
was trying to prove that Muslims had the right to
resist the United States. He said it to me. In
Afghanistan. His name was Osama bin Laden. But there
you go. I guess Trump’s World War Two efforts get
about two out of ten. Not bad for a guy who’s
crackers.
This article was first published by
The Independent
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