("Quid coniuratio est?")
[CN Editor -- The local all volunteer radio station, WEFT 90.1 FM, has a 1-hour show at 10 A.M. on Saturday mornings called "News From Neptune." The following is a partial transcript of their June 4, 1994 broadcast. Co-hosts are Paul "The Truth" Muth, and Carl Estabrook.]
MUTH:... what you thought the most egregious misrepresentation of America's role. Actually, I was thinking more of a discussion of post-war... something we return to in... our namesake for the show, "News From Neptune," Noam Chomsky, says it ought to start with some of the betrayals of the movements that fought against Hitler.
ESTABROOK: Absolutely.
MUTH: Whether the Truman Doctrine in Greece -- Greek partisans -- the deals with the mafiosi in the south of France, in Marseilles, where the left people who fought against Nazis were betrayed and beaten by thugs.
ESTABROOK: Absolutely. No, you're right, Paul. I mean the myth making this week around D-Day has just been remarkable. And I don't know what I find more appalling: the myth making itself or the general ignorance -- the sort of inchoate recognition on the part of a lot of people who are listening to this that it is myth making and therefore they shouldn't pay any attention to it. And an awful lot of people are still going to be sadly pressed if you ask them what D-Day was or what the situation was 50 years ago that is the occasion for all this rhetorical excess that we're hearing from both the news media and from our chief magistrate [Clinton] who is running around England at the moment, apparently, excessing rhetorically.
I don't know. I mean ignorance as a defense against propaganda, you know, is a counsel of despair, it seems to me. But that's what we're dealing with.
MUTH: I was dismayed by the blessing of the new Italian government...
[CN Editor -- In Italy, so-called "Neo Fascists" have recently gained control of the government. 50 years ago, we were fighting World War II against these same sorts of people. Where is Clinton's first stop for the 50-year D-Day carnival? Italy. Who does he meet with first? Fascists.]
...What was the line, uh...
ESTABROOK: Yes!
MUTH: "Well a lot of political parties have their origins in less than wholesome..." I don't know.
ESTABROOK: Maybe he's talking about the Democratic party and its support for slavery [pre-American Civil War] in this country.
MUTH: I suppose. There is that reference, I guess, that's sort of a defense of his remark. [CN Editor -- Apparently Clinton made some sort of remark, in the context of his meeting with the Italian "Neo-Fascists," as some sort of an excuse for the absurdity of his situation.] But the Neo-Nazis...
ESTABROOK: I mean, it is... The irony is very great, Paul. I mean for him to be embracing the leader of a government that includes a fascist... and all this "neo-fascist" talk just means that these fascists weren't born when the... when Mussolini was running Italy.
It is an important irony, an important contradiction, because it shows up the falseness of most of our accounts of World War II. I mean, if some accounts are to be believed, what World War II was primarily about was it was some sort of a brawl between Hitler and the B'nai B'rith. And it seems to me that it's much more important to try to see what World War II was about and to see that the United States never went to war to protect Jews, it never went to war to overthrow Hitler -- the U.S. was perfectly complacent with the Hitler government throughout the '30s. It didn't go to war for any of these "defense of Freedoms" that have been talked about. Remember: The war had been on for several years; at least 2 years if you talk about Europe and many more if you talk about Japanese expansion into China. The war had been on for several years before the U.S. got involved in it. And its motive for getting into the war had nothing to do with freedom or oppressed groups within the Reich. What it had to do with was the fact that a military base belonging to the U.S. was attacked in the Pacific and that 2 Capitalist powers struggled over which was to control the business of the Pacific. We won.
MUTH: Well, but that does bring up the question of what was the motive in Europe, though. I thought you were going to say... I mean, the precipitating thing, Pearl Harbor [September 7th, just ask George Bush -- CN Editor], I think we can set aside. Anything could have precipitated. So it's not, that's not a major causal thing. The latter is just the fighting over the Capitalist spoils. But that's true in Europe as well.
ESTABROOK: Well exactly. You're quite right about that. I'm not sure I agree that anything could have precipitated it. I mean, it seems to me that it was the [economic] struggle between the U.S. and Japan that the U.S. was essentially winning. And that the Japanese struck out against militarily that produced the military confrontation in the Pacific. The U.S. had trammelled up the Japanese economy in the Pacific and was doing its best to do so. And it was the Japanese strike, military strike, against that that led the U.S. into the war.
The alliance of Japan and Germany turned our attention then to the... to Europe. Because the real motive of the U.S. in Europe was not particularly, or not immediately, for the defeat of Germany. What the U.S. was most interested in, in Europe, was the British empire. Who was going to control the colonial empires of the declining Capitalist states of Europe when the war ended? The U.S. was sure it was going to be that sort of "residuary legatee" of 19th century colonialism; that the British empire was going to be ours. The Germans were fighting to see that that empire would be theirs, that they would have an economic control over that, over that empire. We won that one, too. That's the reason we were in Iran. That's the reason we were in Vietnam. I mean, the question of the Second World War could be summarized as "The War of British Succession in Europe"; who was going to succeed to the British empire. We won that one, too.
[...]
[Still Estabrook speaking]:
And I think the understanding of what the war was about, and the
understanding (as you suggested earlier) of what the real outcome
of the war was, seems to me to be vital and against the
mythology.
To take just one example: Time magazine this week has a picture of Dwight David Eisenhower on the front of it with the legend, "The Man Who Beat Hitler." Well, that's very interesting. Bertolt Brecht wrote a famous poem. "The Remarks of a Worker Who Reads" contains the lines:
Caesar conquered Gaul.
(Didn't he even have a cook with him?)
So "The Man Who Beat Hitler" is... at once, falls under Brecht's quite legitimate stricture.
There's another issue, too. For all this talk about the invasion of France on the 6th of June, 1944, by 150,000 troops (a minority of whom, by the way, were Americans), um, for all the talk about this, the notion grows in American circles that that was what overthrew Nazi-ism. Well, in fact, what overthrew Nazi-ism was the Russian army. Even after D-Day, from June 6, 1944 to May 8, 1945 -- from D-Day to the very end of the war -- the majority of German troops were in the east, not in the west. Even after all the Allied armies had moved into France and so forth -- all the British and American armies (Anglo-Saxon armies, we probably should say) had moved into western Europe -- the majority of German troops were still in the east because the German's knew quite well [that] the real threat came from the east. And it was when the eastern front crumbled, when the Russian army -- at immense cost, cost of 20 million war dead -- when the Russian army finally moved into Berlin, that the war was over.
Now this is not to say that what was going on, the difficulties in the western half of Europe, weren't serious difficulties for the Reich. They certainly were. But if you ask, "Who won the Second World War?" (the question), the short answer is not Eisenhower, "The Man Who Beat Hitler," but the Red army. It should have a picture of General Zhukoff, or worse yet, Joe Stalin, on the front of Time magazine if you wanted to be... even if you wanted to buy this way of talking.
I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."