ZGram - 11/9/2004 - "The Danger of Historical Lies"
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Wed Nov 10 11:15:33 EST 2004
Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny: Now more than ever!
November 9, 2004
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
An appropriate Zgram for an historical date - November 9th. Consult
your history books!
[START]
The Danger of Historical Lies
by Mark Weber / Spring of 1997
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-2_Weber.html
On January 20, 1997, Bill Clinton began his second term as President
with a swearing-in ceremony at the White House followed by an
inaugural address. During the first few minutes of this speech,
Clinton briefly surveyed the history of the past ten decades:
"What a century it has been. America became the world's mightiest
industrial power; saved the world from tyranny in two world wars and
a long Cold War; and time and again, reached across the globe to
millions who longed for the blessings of liberty."
Not only do these proud, even boastful words contain historical
lies, they manifest an arrogance that lays the groundwork for future
calamity. In truth, in neither the first nor the second world wars
did the United States "save the world from tyranny."
World War I
In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called for America's entry
into World War I by proclaiming that "the world must be made safe
for democracy." On another occasion, he declared that US
participation in the conflict would make it a "war to end war." To
secure support for this crusade, newspapers and political leaders,
and an official US government propaganda agency, portrayed Germany
as a power-mad tyranny that threatened the liberty of the world.
However, within just a few years after the November 1918 armistice
that ended the fighting, this wartime propaganda image was widely
recognized as absurd. Today no serious historian regards Wilhelmine
Germany as a "tyranny," or believes that it posed any kind of threat
to the United States, much less "the world."
Ironically, America's principal allies in World War I -- Britain and
France -- were at the time the world's greatest imperial powers. (A
sore point for many Americans of Irish background was Britain's
control of Ireland.) Many in the United States regarded Britain, not
Germany, as the foremost threat to world liberty, recalling that
Americans had waged a bitter, drawn-out war for independence from
British rule (1775-1783), and that during a second war with the same
country (1812-1814) British troops had sacked and burned down the US
capital.
World War II
President Clinton's distortion of history is even more glaring with
regard to the Second World War. America's two most important
military allies in that conflict were the foremost imperialist power
(Britain) and the cruelest tyranny (Soviet Russia).
During both world wars, Britain ruled a vast global empire,
subjugating millions against their will in what are now India,
Pakistan, South Africa, Palestine/Israel, Egypt and Malaysia, to
name but a few. America's other great wartime ally, Stalinist
Russia, was, by any objective measure, a vastly more cruel despotism
than Hitler's Germany.
If the US had not intervened in World War II, Germany and its allies
might have succeeded in vanquishing Soviet Communism. A victory of
the Axis powers also would have meant no Communist subjugation of
eastern Europe and China, no protracted East-West "Cold War," and no
"hot wars" in Korea and Vietnam.
In fact, and contrary to Clinton's version of history, during the
Second War the United States helped substantially to preserve the
world's most terrible tyranny. In cooperation with the Soviet Union,
the United States helped to oppress "millions who longed for the
blessings of liberty."
Today's political and intellectual leaders seem eager to whitewash
or forget the Soviet role in the World War II, or America's cordial
wartime alliance with Soviet Russia and its leader. To solidify the
Allied coalition -- formally known as the "United Nations" --
President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin met together in person
on two occasions: in November 1943 at Teheran, Iran, and in February
1945 in Yalta, Crimea.
In a joint declaration issued at the conclusion of the Teheran
meeting, the three leaders expressed "our determination that our
nations shall work together in war and in the peace that will
follow." The "Big Three" continued:
"We recognize fully the supreme responsibility resting upon us and
all the United Nations to make a peace which will command the good
will of the overwhelming mass of the peoples of the world and banish
the scourge and terror of war for many generations.
"We shall seek the cooperation and active participation of all
nations, large and small, whose peoples in heart and mind are
dedicated, as are our own peoples, to the elimination of tyranny and
slavery, oppression and intolerance. We will welcome them, as they
may choose to come, into a world family of democratic nations.
"... Emerging from these cordial conferences we look with confidence
to the day when all the peoples of the word may live free, untouched
by tyranny, according to their varying desires and their own
consciences."
To emphasize the trusting nature of their alliance, Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin concluded their joint statement with the words:
"We came here with hope and determination. We leave here, friends in
fact, in spirit and in purpose."
The wartime leaders of the United States, Britain and Soviet Russia
accomplished precisely what they accused the Axis leaders of Germany,
Italy and Japan of conspiring to achieve: world domination. At the
Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and in crass violation of
their own loftily proclaimed principles, the US, British and Soviet
leaders disposed of millions of people with no regard for their
wishes (most tragically, perhaps, in the case of Poland). To insure
the rule of the victorious Allied powers after the war, the "Big
Three" established the United Nations organization to function as a
permanent global police force.
Lessons
Many Americans recall their country's role in the Vietnam war, and
other overseas military adventures since 1945, with embarrassment
and even shame. But most Americans -- whether they call themselves
conservative or liberal -- like to regard World War II as "the good
war," a morally unambiguous conflict between Good and Evil. So
successfully have politicians and intellectual leaders, together
with the mass media, promoted this childish, self-righteous view of
history, that President Clinton could be confident that it would be
accepted without objection.
The President's distortion of history is all the more remarkable
considering that in this same inaugural speech he proclaimed the
dawning of an "information age" in which "education will be every
citizen's most prized possession."
How a nation views the past is not a trivial or merely academic
exercise. Our perspective on history profoundly shapes our actions
in the present, often with grave consequences for the future.
Drawing conclusions from our understanding of the past, we make or
support policies that greatly impact the lives of millions.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, political
leaders, journalists and scholars often rationalized and justified
America's ill-fated role in the Vietnam war on the basis of a badly
distorted understanding of Third Reich Germany, drawing faulty
historical parallels between Ho Chi Minh and Hitler, with erroneous
references to the September 1938 Munich Conference.
The hubris of Clinton's portrayal of history is not merely an
affront against historical truth, it is dangerous because it
sanctions potentially even more calamitous military adventures in
the future. After all, if the United States was as righteous and as
successful as the President says it was in "saving the world" in two
world wars, why would anyone oppose similar world-saving crusades in
the future?
[END]
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