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Good War Myth: 60 Years is Enough
By Mickey Z.
05/12/05 "ICH"
- - As we pass yet another decade since the official end of WWII, well, you know what that means: anniversary mania. In the midst of our current war vs. evil, America is yet again celebrating the original "good war." More than just a good war, in fact, corporate media shill Tom Brokaw deemed WWII "the greatest war the world has seen."
But the US fought that war against racism with a segregated army.
It fought that war to end atrocities by participating in the shooting of surrendering soldiers, the starvation of POWs, the deliberate bombing of civilians, wiping out hospitals, strafing lifeboats, and in the Pacific boiling flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts.
FDR, the leader of this anti-racist, anti-atrocity force, signed Executive Order 9066, interning over 100,000 Japanese-Americans without due process...thus, in the name of taking on the architects of German prison camps became the architect of American prison camps.
Before, during, and after the Good War, the American business class traded with the enemy. Among the US corporations that invested in the Nazis were Ford, GE, Standard Oil, Texaco, ITT, IBM, and GM (top man William Knudsen called Nazi Germany "the miracle of the 20th century").
And while the US regularly turned away Jewish refugees to face certain death in Europe, another group of refugees was welcomed with open arms after the war: fleeing Nazi war criminals who were used to help create the CIA and advance America's nuclear program.
US General Curtis LeMay, commander of the 1945 Tokyo fire bombing operation, summed up: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."
The enduring Good War fable goes well beyond Memorial Day barbecues and flickering black-and-white movies on late night TV. WWII is America's most popular war. According to accepted history, it was an inevitable war forced upon a peaceful people thanks to a surprise attack by a sneaky enemy. This war, then and now, has been carefully and consciously sold to us as a life-and-death battle against pure evil. For most Americans, WWII was nothing less than good and bad going toe-to-toe in khaki fatigues.
But, Hollywood aside, John Wayne never set foot on Iwo Jima. Despite the former president's dim recollections, Ronald Reagan did not liberate any concentration camps. And, contrary to popular belief, FDR never actually got around to sending our boys "over there" to take on Hitler's Germany until after the Nazis had already declared war on the US first.
American lives weren't sacrificed in a holy war to avenge Pearl Harbor nor to end the Nazi Holocaust. WWII was about territory, power, control, money, and imperialism. What we're taught about the years leading up to the Good War involves the alleged appeasement of the Third Reich. If only the Allies were stronger in their resolve, the fascists could have been stopped. Having made that mistake once, the mantra goes, we can't make it again.
Comparing modern-day tyrants like Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and invoking the A Word (appeasement) activates the following historical façade: After whipping the original axis of evil in a noble and popular war, the US and its allies can now wave the banner of humanitarianism and intervene with impunity across the globe without their motivations being severely questioned...especially when every enemy is likened to Hitler.
But it wasn't appeasement that took place prior to WWII. It was, at best, indifference; at worst it was collaboration...based on economic greed and more than a little shared ideology.
US investment in Germany accelerated by more than 48% between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in Europe. For many US companies, operations in Germany continued during the war (even if it meant the use of concentration-camp slave labor) with overt US government support. For example, American pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by US firms. As a result, German civilians began using the Ford plant in Cologne as an air raid shelter.
The pursuit of profit long ago transcended national borders and loyalty. Doing business with Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy proved no more unsavory to the captains of industry than, say, selling military hardware to Indonesia does today. What's a little repression when there's money to be made?
This is where the most relevant similarities between Hussein and Hitler exist. Despite committing atrocities, both murderers received overt and covert support from the US...in the name of profit and capitalism. Make no mistake: The US, with its stockpile of lethal weapons and no shortage of leaders dying to use them, has never been in the business of appeasement.
When President-Select Bush says, "You are either with us or against us," he's merely selling old wine in a new bottle.
When the US entered WWII, patriotism was the watchword and denial was the order of the day. For example, the publicity arm of the American Motion Picture Industry put out a full-page ad in several magazines in 1942. Entitled "Our Morale is Mightier than the Sword," the ad poetically declared in order to win the war, "Our minds must be as keen as our swords, our hearts as strong as our tanks, our spirits as buoyant as our planes. For morale is a mighty force-as vital as the materials of war themselves...it is the job of the Motion Picture Industry to keep 'em smiling."
Indeed, if the folks back home had any idea was really going on, let's hope less of them would have been smiling. That was the true genius of "Good War" propaganda: lies of omission.
Author John Steinbeck served as a wartime correspondent. "We were all part of the war effort," he later remarked. "We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it. I don't mean that the correspondents were liars. It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies. The foolish reporter who broke the rules would not be printed at home and in addition would be put out of the theater by the command."
If the working class is kept unaware of what is being done in their name, rebellion is unlikely. If the average citizen in inundated with images designed to demonstrate that the US government has always acted in a benevolent manner, rebellion appears unnecessary. As a result, justification is crucial for those in power.
Films like Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," for example, are popular attempts at such justification. Even if war is hell and the good guys sometimes lose their way, these vehicles teach us that there is still no reason to question either the morality of the mission or the stature of that particular generation.
Thanks to the seductive power of myth, millionaire celebrities like Spielberg, Brokaw, and others gain further wealth and prestige by playing the role of corporate/military propagandist to an audience deceived and pacified by jingoistic hysteria and the solace it often provides.
Revolutionary pacifist A.J. Muste said in 1941, "The problem after war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?"
Precisely how and when such a lesson will be taught is not known, but it can be safely assumed that this lesson will never be learned from a standard college textbook, an insipid bestseller, or a manipulative box office smash.
The past 60 years have also shown that without such a lesson, there will be many more wars and many more lies told to obscure the truth about them.
Mickey Z. is the author of several books including "There is No Good War: The Myths of World War II," to be released this summer by Vox Pop. He can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.
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