INTRODUCTION

To understand today’s world, an introduction is needed first that summarizes what World War II (the Cold War’s predecessor) was actually all about, in geostrategic terms:

The key decision-makers who coordinated together, in order to defeat the three fascist powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy, in WWII, were America’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), Britain’s Winston Churchill, and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin. If any one of those three would abandon the Allied side, or as FDR anticipatorily named it the “United Nations,” then the Axis would win the war, and then a war between the three Axis leaders — Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini — would follow afterward, in which Hitler was generally considered to be the likeliest to achieve his “Thousand Year Reich”: global control. If so, the result would have been a Nazi-controlled planet. But each of the three Allied leaders had different political views and priorities.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an intense anti-imperialist: he believed that the Second World War had been started by the fascist, or “Axis,” powers because each one of them wanted to increase the percentage of the planet’s surface that it controlled.

Winston Churchill was an intense imperialist: he believed, exactly as did the founder of modern British imperialism, Cecil Rhodes, starting in 1877, that the larger the percentage of this planet’s surface that is controlled by the English “race,” the better. The only difference between Rhodesist imperialism and prior British imperialism is that Rhodes’s plan was based upon the geostrategic belief that the only way in which Britain could continue and expand its empire would be by retaking the United States via subversion (as he planned), in which the leaders of America would be deceived to believe that, in the U.S.-and-UK “Special Relationship” which Rhodes had in mind, Britain would be following America’s lead, when actually those American leaders would be following Britain’s lead and not be aware of that subterranean UK supremacy. (Rhodes championed subversive aristocratic rule. Subversion is basic to his plan.)

Joseph Stalin was an intense anti-imperialist like FDR was, especially because Stalin’s chief competitor for leadership of the Soviet Union was Leon Trotsky, the most passionate supporter of a Soviet imperialism, “Trotskyism.” Wikipedia contains an accurate thumbnail description of this:

Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky identified as an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik–Leninist. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin‘s theory of socialism in one country in favor of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Trotskyists also criticize the bureaucracy that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

In order for Stalin to support Soviet imperialism, he would have had to accept Trotskyism, which he refused to do. At Yalta (February 1945), FDR and Stalin agreed together that though every major power has a right to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations in its “neighborhood” insofar as is necessary in order to block such nearby nation’s alliance with any hostile major power (an example is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when Kennedy had a right to block Cuba from receiving Soviet missiles), no such right to intervene in a foreign country’s purely internal or domestic affairs exists: i.e., the right to intervene exists ONLY to protect that given major power’s own national security, but not to intervene into that nearby nation’s internal affairs for any other reason than this. This was FDR’s view and Stalin’s view. They both agreed to disagree together against Churchill’s view that a major power should be allowed to intervene outside of its own neighborhood or to “have an empire.” (In the billionaires’ updated and far more hypocritical version of the pro-imperialistic argument, such as George Soros’s argument, the case for imperialism is “R2P” or “the rulers of a sovereign state have a responsibility to protect [‘R2P’] the state’s citizens. When they fail to do so, the responsibility is transferred to the international community,” which is then allowed to invade. This is the ‘democratic’ argument to invade foreign countries that one wants to conquer and turn into a vassal-nation. The world’s billionaires started pushing for this argument internationally in 1994 because the ‘anti-communist’ excuse for invading had just recently ended, in 1991. Soros stated the argument this way in 2009, after George W. Bush’s having done, to such disastrous effect, such an invasion against Iraq in 2003. But Bush’s lies to ‘justify’ invading had been mainly of the ‘national security’ variety. He was conservative, not liberal; so, his lies were different.)

FDR rejected dictatorship as an internal-policy matter and therefore he disapproved of communism (because it is internally dictatorial), but he had no trouble negotiating with Stalin, because that relationship concerned only international and never domestic-policy matters (since Stalin was not a Trotskyist).

Consequently, amongst the Allies, only Churchill — the British imperialist who, in accord with Cecil Rhodes’s scheme, was seeking America’s help so as to conquer other imperialisms in order to ‘preserve’ The British Empire — endorsed imperialism. His actual aim was ultimately to extend that Empire and to use American might so as to assist this, as being U.S. rule or “hegemony” over the entire planet, which would be controlled behind the scenes by Britain’s aristocracy. When Churchill came to power within the United Kingdom, the change in leadership represented a supreme victory of Rhodes’s branch of the British Conservative Party, pushing aside the pre-Rhodes Tories (such as Neville Chamberlain). Under Labour Party leader Tony Blair starting on 2 May 1997, both of Britain’s major Parties were Rhodesist, and (after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat) they still are in Rhodes’s mold.

There was a severe split within Britain’s aristocracy over whether to ally with Hitler or instead with FDR and Stalin. (FDR himself wasn’t able to avoid having lots of pro-Nazis even in his own Administration: for example, the U.S. intelligence official Allen Dulles secretly said in late 1942, “We’re fighting the wrong enemy,” and General George Patton said exactly the same thing at war’s-end, May 1945. America’s billionaires have profited enormously from invasions and therefore sponsor the careers of many high policy officials, and did so even when FDR was in power.) Churchill’s immediate predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, represented England’s pro-Hitler aristocrats. They were not followers of Rhodes’s plan. They were instead pure anti-socialists. (They were more concerned to protect the aristocracy than to extend their empire.) There were actually two varieties of socialism: one, dictatorial, which was Marxism, the other democratic, which was the main type and the one that prevailed in much of Europe. By contrast, there was only a dictatorial form of fascism, because fascism was (and is) dictatorial capitalism, and any form of democratic capitalism was called simply “democracy.” Thus, there was “social democracy” versus “democracy” versus “fascism” versus “communism.” The Axis powers all were fascist. (Hitler labelled his German fascism Nazism as “National Socialism” in order to be able to win support from workers, but his “Volkisch” ’socialism’ was actually very different: pro-racist, instead of anti-classist or anti-aristocratic like almost all of the actually “socialist” parties in Europe were.)

These facts (including the internal ideological conflicts within the United Kingdom, and also within the Soviet Union) are basic, in order to be able to understand recent world history, and current events.

Now we get to the Cold War:

FDR died on 12 April 1945, and his naive V.P., Harry Truman, became President. Promptly, Truman was surrounded by Rhodesists and he didn’t understand what was going on. Churchill advised him against accepting the Soviet Union. However, the key person who also did was U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, who seems to have clinched the case on 26 July 1945 by confirming Churchill’s view and telling the President that either the U.S. would conquer the Soviet Union or else the Soviet Union would conquer the U.S. (In other words: Ike was telling Truman that Stalin was a Trotskyist, and Truman believed it even if he had no idea of what Stalinism versus Trotskyism were — Truman was tragically naive.) Though Truman had been advised by the scientists not to A-bomb Japan, which was about to fall anyway, Ike’s advice clinched the case in Truman’s mind, to A-bomb it in order to prevent the Soviet Union from conquering Japan, as the Soviets were on the verge of doing. (Under FDR’s plan, not only would the UN have been much stronger, but Stalin would have taken Japan, whereas all of the Western Hemisphere plus central and western Europe would have been within the U.S. sphere, and there would have been negotiations at the UN internationalizing nuclear weapons and the control over other strategic issues between the East and the West, so as to prevent, by clear international laws backed up by the UN’s diplomatic mechanisms and control over all strategic forces, any imperialism or military conflicts, between the U.S. and USSR. Both the U.S. and USSR would have, within a context of effective international law, been allowed some sway over international relations within its own respective sphere of influence. This would have been a bipolar world within a single federal global government, the UN, but a very different UN than Truman participated in. Hegemony, or global empire, would have been outlawed, and the UN would have had the military forces to back up its authority in that regard. The current international gangland would not exist. International law would have been established and enforced instead of having become the hypocritical farce that it is. It would be FDR’s world, if western democracy would have outproduced communism, which — given Marxism’s crippling labor theory of value — seems likely. Marxist economics was a crippler, but abandoning it means abandoning Marxism.)

Here, providing a favorable (pro-Rhodesist-regime, anti-Soviet-regime) slant upon the same ugly reality that has just been documented about Rhodesism, is from the CIA’s own retired Miles Copeland’s 1969 book, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, the opening of Chapter 2:

On a cold and rainy February afternoon in 1947 [21 February 1947], one year before the Games Center was established, First Secretary H. M. Sichel of the British Embassy in Washington telephoned Loy Henderson, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and African Affairs. He had two messages from the Foreign Office which were “rather important.” They were of a sort that normally should be delivered by the British Ambassador direct to the Secretary of State, George Marshall, but since General Marshall had already left the office for the weekend perhaps, Sichel suggested he could drop off the notes, have a “brief” chat about them, and allow Mr. Henderson a weekend of reflection on them before briefing the Secretary prior to meeting the British Ambassador on Monday morning.

Sichel arrived as State Department employees, after a comparatively dull week, were donning their raincoats and galoshes to take off for an indoor weekend. Loy Henderson, who habitually worked until eight or nine o’clock even on Fridays, had sent off all his secretaries and was alone in the office. The scene was the one of utter calm that skillful dramatists often establish to provide the psychological setting for a shattering announcement.

The announcement, which Mr. Sichel delivered in the course of his “brief chat,” was certainly shattering. The two messages were official notification that the Pax Britannica, which had kept order in much of the world for over a century, was at an end. Specifically, His Majesty’s Government could no longer afford the $50,000,000 or so that was required to support the resistance of the Greek and Turkish Governments to Communist aggression either, as in the first case, by guerrilla warfare or, in the second, by direct military action of the Soviet Union. Either the United States Government would fill the gap, or it would go unfilled — or it would be left to the Russians. Mr. Henderson, whose considerable diplomatic experience included assignments in Moscow and other capitals in the Soviet orbit, didn’t need a weekend of reflection to realize that more than Greece and Turkey was at stake. The vacuum of which these two countries were a part extended throughout all of southern Europe that was not already behind the Iron Curtain, and through North Africa and the Middle East. With the British announcement, delivered so calmly by Mr. Sichel, the United States was given the choice of becoming an active world power — an “on-the-ground” world power, as a lecturer at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute was later to put it — or seeing the Soviets become a more menacing feature of world politics than Nazi Germany could ever have been.

THEN P. 38:

there was the necessary discrepancy between the publicly stated attitude of our Government toward world questions and the attitudes held in the inner sanctums of the State Department and the Pentagon. Early in 1946, George Kennan, during the last few weeks in his assignment as deputy chief of mission in Moscow, wrote a letter to the State Department which correctly outlined the shape of the oncoming Cold War and which was immediately accepted as the definitive analysis of Soviet intentions, outlook and behavior. At the same time, Mr. Kennan argued convincingly that if Europe was to be divided the blame should be placed on the Russians and not on ourselves. Winston Churchill, in a speech delivered at Fulton, Missouri, referred to the “Iron Curtain,” and the presence of President Truman at his side implied official U.S. Government endorsement of such an attitude. Apart from this one lapse, however, official policy was still to pretend that the “spirit of Yalta” guided our actions.

1. 42:

Our aboveboard response to the British diplomatic notes of February 21, 1947, was the Truman Doctrine, which was announced, after three weeks of hectic State Department and White House staff work, on March 12. Announcement of the Marshall Plan followed shortly; in July and from then on a flood of editorial, semiofficial and official comment (the latter mainly in the form of college commencement addresses delivered by top government officials) began to deal openly with the Cold War and our policy of “containing” Soviet expansion.

And here is about the Marshall Plan, which was an extremely effective Cold War tactic.

And, then, there was the American double-crossing of Mikhail Gorbachev when he ended communism in 1991 and the U.S. secretly continued the Cold War nonetheless, and of post-1991 U.S. coups such as against neutralist Ukraine on Russia’s border in February 2014.

A typical coup under Truman was the Miles-Copeland-engineered coup against Syria in 1949, which he discussed here. Between the lines he described it as a Deep State operation which carried out what was being kept secret from the President but which was tacitly approved by the State Department. He, of course, never revealed who actually controlled the CIA and the State Department. But he probably knew.

And, as they say: “The rest is history.” And this is the “history” that we’ve actually been living through and are still experiencing — not the myth that the ‘news’-media merely presume.

For further information, click on the links in this article. By means of those links (and what’s linked to in those online sources), this article is at least one full book, and it’s all right here, and without any paper. No paper or broadcast medium (TV or otherwise) can do that. Only this type of medium — online text that includes links — can. That’s a crucial advantage of this medium, which you’re now reading.

The Soviet Union contributed more than did any other nation to the defeats of Germany and Japan in World War II, but America and Britain together defeated Italy. Many prominent Western ‘historians’ white-out the Soviet roles in defeating Hitler and especially Hirohito, and they overstate the importance of America’s victories to the ultimate outcome, and ignore or underplay Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s strong rejection and repudiation of Winston Churchill’s imperialistic agenda, not only for a continuation of empires, but for a continued postwar exploitation of colonies, as being acceptable goals for the future. Those ‘historians’ are actually propagandists — no real historians, at all — because they fundamentally misrepresent; yet they dominate in the ‘historical’ profession, and they have produced in the US and in its allies a widespread and profoundly warped ‘history’ of the war and of its aftermath, and of Twentieth-Century history, and of our own time. This ‘historical’ distortion has continued even after 1991 (it even accelerated) when the Cold War between the US and Russia ended only on the Russian side, but not actually on the US side. These ‘historical’ lies accelerated because ‘historians’ continue, even today, to hide this crucial fact, that the US side of the Cold War secretly continued — and still does continue — to try to conquer Russia. Ever since the time of America’s vile, bloody and illegal actual coup against Ukraine in February 2014 onward, Russia has been responding increasingly. This is especially so because of yet another American-and-allied aggression against a nation that has cooperative arrangements with Russia, Syria, 2012-. The purveyors of fake ‘news’ and fake ‘history’ display the gall to cry foul and to lie and allege that Russia’s necessary defensive actions against America’s aggressions are, instead, themselves, aggressions, to which America and its vassal-nations have the right to respond, and should respond, by what then would actually be yet more aggressions (violations of international law) — instead of to quit its string of aggressions, and to apologize, not only for the aggressions, but also for the lies, that the US regime and its propagandists have been perpetrating, against Russia, and against nations that cooperate with Russia. The reality has been that US foreign policy is, and has been, driven by one overriding and obsessive goal for a hundred years: first, to conquer any nation that’s friendly with Russia, and thereby to isolate Russia internationally; and, then, finally, to grab Russia itself. This entire US geostrategy is based upon lies.

THE ‘HISTORICAL’ LIES, v. THE HISTORICAL TRUTHS

According to the standard accounts, the Cold War ended on both sides in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, and its communism ended, and its Warsaw Pact (the military alliance that the USSR had created in response to America’s having created the NATO military alliance against the Soviet Union) all ended. But, secretly, the Cold War continued on the US side, and with the same (and now blatantly) imperialist goal of ultimately conquering Russia and China, so as to establish the first-ever all-encompassing global empire. Whereas Franklin Delano Roosevelt had set up the U.N. so as to evolve into a global democracy of nations — a democratic federal republic encompassing all nations — his successor, Harry S. Truman quickly became deceived by Winston S. Churchill and Dwight David Eisenhower to believe that the Soviet Union was trying to take over the entire world, and so Truman promptly abandoned FDR’s vision and initiated instead the permanent-warfare US, the military-industrial-complex-ruled US, which relegated the U.N. to a secondary role, as a mere mediator for global diplomacy, not as the international lawmaker that FDR had hoped it would ultimately evolve into. FDR’s dream and intention, of establishing a system of international laws functioning as the all-encompassing global democratic federal democracy in which all nations are represented, became thwarted, almost as soon as he died, when the Deep-State US military-industrial complex that’s run behind the scenes by the controlling owners of America’s top weapons-manufacturing firms took hold.

After WWII, the US Government secretly aspired — and still does aspire — to rule over the entire world, including especially over Russia and China. George Herbert Walker Bush told Robert Sheer in the 24 January 1980 Los Angeles Times and in Scheer’s 1982 book With Enough Shovels, page 29, that in a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the US, the “winner in a nuclear exchange” would be whichever side is stronger than the other at the war’s end; and, so, for Bush, nuclear weapons didn’t exist in order to avoid a nuclear conflict, but instead in order to “win” it. This also is the reason why, on the night of 24 February 1990, Bush secretly told West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to ignore the promises that Bush’s team were making to Gorbachev, that NATO would not be expanded “one inch to the east” (i.e., not extended right up to Russia’s border) if Gorbachev ends the Cold War. Bush, in confidence, told Kohl “To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t.” And he also secretly told French President Francois Mitterrand to pursue no “kind of pan-European alliance” (i.e., alliance that includes Russia) because, actually, total conquest of Russia remains the US-and-allied goal. This view — that the goal is control over Russia — became firmly established in US Government policy by no later than 2006 when Bush’s son was the President and the phrase “Nuclear Primacy” (the ability to “win” a nuclear war against Russia) became used in order to refer to America’s geostrategic goal.

Part of that scam by ’The West’ (the emergent American empire) has been the ongoing ‘historical’ lie that the Allied victory in WWII was mainly an American and British affair, and not mainly a Soviet one. Another part of it is that the Soviet Union had started the Cold War; and yet a third part is that the Cold War was about ideology (communism versus capitalism) instead of about the US regime’s goal of ultimately conquering Russia and Chinaso as to achieve the world’s first and only full global and unchallengeable empire.

The excuse for all of this was always the allegation that global empire is Russia’s goal and that the US therefore needs to win the nuclear war when it ultimately happens. But Russia, and its prior USSR, always did maintain, and still does maintain, as actual Government policy (not just mere verbiage, such as in America after 1980) the belief in “MAD” or Mutually Assured Destruction — the idea that any nuclear war between the two superpowers will destroy the entire planet and therefore produce no winners whatsoever — no winner but only nuclear winter — regardless of which side might temporarily emerge the stronger while nuclear winter and resulting global famine soon destroy all life on Earth after that nuclear exchange. Russia is not (like America is) aiming to take over the planet. The fact that the US regime is trying to take over the planet has shocked even America’s top geostrategic scientists. The ‘historians’ hide all of this, so as to continue the myth that in the US-Russia relationship, Russia is and has been the aggressor, and America the defender — instead of vice-versa, which is, and has been, the historical reality.

A rare, early, excellent, and honest, Western history of the immediate post-WW-II world, was the libertarian William Henry Chamberlin’s 1950 book America’s Second Crusade. Its earnest author — a disenchanted former socialist who once had trusted Stalin’s goodwill but was dismayed now to find Stalin to be America’s enemy as well as an unforgivable tyrant to the nation he led — opened by saying “My book is an attempt to examine without prejudice or favor the question why the peace was lost while the war was being won.” He was struggling to understand how and why and when the Cold War started, but unfortunately, some key documents, in order to become enabled to understand that, had not yet become public. A crucial passage in his book that reflected state-of-the-art historical writing in 1950 but certainly not today, asserted:

Stalin’s diplomatic masterpiece was his promotion, through his pact with Hitler, of a war from which he hoped to remain aloof. [FALSE: Stalin knew that the Soviet Union was Hitler’s main target to attack, and he was terrified of that]

This attractive dream of watching the capitalist world tear itself to pieces and then stepping in to collect the fragments was shattered by Hitler’s attack in June 1941. [FALSE: that war between USSR and Germany was already baked-in in 1939; and it was Stalin’s nightmare — not his “dream.”]

Chamberlin thought that Stalin had made with Hitler the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact because Stalin had wanted to join with Hitler in taking over the entire world — i.e., for aggression, instead of for defense; i.e., instead of so as to protect the USSR from becoming invaded by Hitler (which defensive motivation actually is what obsessed Stalin). Chamberlin thus wrote approvingly of “Churchill’s scheme which would have limited the extent of Soviet conquest.” Chamberlin thought that the ideological conflict (to the extent that there actually was one in the Cold War) was between communism versus capitalism, not  between fascism versus non-fascism (which it was, and still is).

Here are the facts, which have been revealed by the making-public of archives as of 2008 and subsequently:

On 18 October 2008, Britain’s Telegraph bannered “Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact’” and buried the core revelation, that Stalin prior to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact recognized Hitler’s determination to conquer the Soviet Union and he had, on 15 August 1939, urged Chamberlin to accept the USSR as an ally in their mutual war to defeat Hitler; but Chamberlin refused, and so Stalin reached out to Hitler for an agreement with him to a dividing-line between those two countries’ (Germany’s and USSR’s) essential areas of control for each one’s national security. Poland especially was a worry to both of them, because Poland had had territorial conflicts with both Germany and the Soviet Union. Thus was signed on 23 August 1939 the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which split Poland between both countries.

The Versailles Treaty at the end of WW I had handed to Poland what had been German territory that through most of prior history had been Polish territory. Hitler was elected into power in 1933 vowing to abandon that Treaty and to restore, to German rule, that part of Poland.

As regards Poland’s conflicts with Russia: Poland had invaded Moscow during 1605-18, before Russia responded by both military and diplomatic means to virtually conquer Poland into becoming a colony of Russia, which it remained almost uninterruptedly until 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin agreement — the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact — restored part of Poland to the Soviet Union, but handed the other part of Poland to Germany.

Stalin, having been spurned by Chamberlin (who held his own imperialistic intentions — he was as imperialistic as were the fascists: Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini), had actually no other option in 1939 than to reach a peace-agreement with Hitler, so as to avoid having the Soviet Union become swallowed up by the capitalist countries — first by Germany, and then by whatever countries would finally win the coming World War (presumably, likewise Germany).

This is why Chamberlin’s claim that Stalin’s “dream” of imperialist expansion “was shattered by Hitler’s attack in June 1941” is false: Stalin’s necessity for the USSR to be granted enough time, to prepare for Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa invasion against it (which ended up starting on 22 June 1941), caused the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact to become signed on 23 August 1939, which signing sparked both of its signatories to promptly invade Poland and start the active phase of WWII on 1 September 1939, both countries invading Poland. FDR didn’t hold that agreement against Stalin, but instead against Chamberlin, who really hated Russia and virtually forced Stalin into that Pact. Chamberlin’s goal wasn’t to get the Soviet Union onto Britain’s side but instead for a war between the Soviet Union and Germany to weaken both of them enough for a UK-US alliance to take over both of them, and, ultimately, the world. FDR got Churchill to agree to a “United Nations” in which there would be an international democracy of nations and all military weapons and enforcement of General Assembly laws would be possessed and enforced only by “the Big Four” of US, UK, USSR, and China, but Churchill balked at including China because he wanted to retain control of his eastern vassal-nations. FDR agreed instead to each of the Big Four enforcing U.N. laws only  within its own neighborhood, so as to prohibit friction between the Big Four — and China would enforce in East Asia and Western Pacific, which meant Britain’s freeing India, Burma, Malaya, and some other of its vassal-nations. US was to enforce U.N. laws throughout the Western Hemisphere. USSR was to do the same in eastern Europe and central Asia. UK was to do it in Western Europe. Initially, Roosevelt’s plan had been only for a U.N. consisting of this Big Four as “trustees” over other nations that are within their neighborhood, but he soon recognized the need for, as the Dumbarton Oaks founding document for the U.N. put it, on 7 October 1944, “Membership of the Organization should be open to all peace-loving states.” Also: “There should be an international court of justice which should constitute the principal judicial organ of the Organization.” And: “Each member of the Organization should have one vote in the General Assembly.” No international bill of rights was included, because the U.N. wasn’t to get involved in any nation’s internal affairs. But, then, FDR died and along came President Truman, and the U.N.’s Constitution became established on 26 June 1945, as the “Charter of the United Nations”, and it dispensed altogether with that crucial distinction, and, furthermore, the Big Four became the Five permanent Members of the Security Council, France (yet another imperialist regime) being added to the Big Four. Already, FDR’s vision was starting to become replaced by that of agents of owners of America’s ‘defense’ contractors. They needed the distinction to be abandoned so that the U.N. would become distracted away from its peace-keeping function and toward “human rights” issues that could ‘justify’ international invasions. And thus we have today a toothless U.N., far from what FDR had intended. This is very profitable for the military-industrial complex and enables the US regime to aspire to being, as Barack Obama claimed it already to be, “the one indispensable nation”, and every other nation therefore to be ‘dispensable’ (and consequently usable for “target-practice”).

After the 18 October 2008 article in Britain’s Telegraph, another article that is a breakthrough for historians is Randy Dotinga’s superb review (and the best summary), appearing in the 5 March 2015 Christian Science Monitor, of Susan Butler’s 2015 masterpiece, Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership. (Butler’s book is based on her own prior publication, by Yale, of My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin.) Dotinga’s review is titled “‘Roosevelt and Stalin’ details the surprisingly warm relationship of an unlikely duo: How FDR and Stalin forged a bond that helped to shape history.” Basically, what Butler has documented (in those two books) and Dotinga accurately summarizes, is that FDR and Stalin were in agreement and FDR and Churchill were not, and that FDR was consistently a supporter of the position that no nation has a right to interfere in the internal affairs of any other nation, except when those internal affairs present a realistic threat against the national security of one’s own nation. FDR was consistently an opponent of empires, which exist not for national security but for the further enrichment of one’s own nation’s aristocracy, the owners of its international corporations. The negative reviews of Butler’s Roosevelt and Stalin at Amazon object to Stalin’s domestic policies but ignore what FDR was concerned with, regarding Stalin, which was international policies. It would have been foolish for FDR to have gotten into disputes with his most important ally over internal Soviet matters (but American imperialists wish that he had done so). Similarly, FDR did not think that he possessed a right to interfere in Hitler’s domestic policies (including even the extermination programs), but recognized that he had an obligation to protect the United States from Hitler’s intended conquest of the entire world. For example, FDR’s chosen mastermind for, and Truman’s designated prosecutor at, the Nuremberg Tribunals, Robert Jackson, focused mainly against the German regime’s imperialist policies, its international aggressions that really were not motivated by Germany’s national security but instead by international conquest — aggression. The Holocaust was also an important, but secondary, concern, at those tribunals. In international affairs, FDR recognized that the primary focus must be on international policies, not on intranational policies — that it must be on policies betweennations, not policies within nations. He stuck to that; America’s imperialists didn’t like that. (For them, Churchill was the hero.)

As Dotinga’s review also pointedly notes:

But FDR has a huge blind spot. Up until the very end, “Roosevelt and Stalin” virtually never mentions a man who forever annoyed the Russians by declaring in 1941 that “if we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”

This man’s name is Harry Truman. When Roosevelt dies in 1945, just weeks after the Yalta conference, the vice president knows virtually nothing about the wartime talks and has never even spent a second inside the White House’s Map Room brain center.

Truman would learn about the nuclear bomb, which spawned an intense debate in the Roosevelt Administration about whether to mention it to the Soviets, America’s supposed allies. In fact, they’d already figured out something was up.

Despite this fault line over trust with FDR, the Soviets would later mourn a safer world they believed Roosevelt would have created if he’d lived. To them, he was a dear friend who passed away too soon.

FDR knew and respected that Stalin led the main component of the anti-Nazi team. FDR had no illusions about what immense and unnecessary suffering Stalin’s domestic policies produced, but this wasn’t FDR’s business. US national security was. And FDR knew that if Hitler were to win, then America would ultimately be ruled from Berlin, and Hitler’s domestic policies, which were even worse than Stalin’s, would become also America’s domestic policies. That’s what FDR was protecting America against, and his chief international ally was Stalin — not actually Churchill (such as the fake ‘history’ — from pro-imperialists — claims).

The Democratic Party’s biggest donors chose Harry S. Truman to become FDR’s successor because they figured that he’d be able to be controlled by them, and this belief turned out to have been correct. Truman wasn’t corrupt but he was able to be fooled (self-righteously to believe what his billionaire-approved advisors told him), and this is how the Cold War began. Truman thought he had no choice — that Stalin’s regime would take over the world if America did not. He was fooled. And that’s why the OSS and its successor, the US CIA and other agencies, protected and even imported or hired many ‘former’ committed Nazis, as soon as FDR died. America is now basically ruled posthumously by Hitler’s ideological heirs. Whereas some of America’s leaders, such as Barack Obama, probably do it intelligently, understanding where the supremacist and imperialist agenda comes from (the “military-industrial complex” or the nation’s most politically active billionaires), others of them, such as perhaps Donald Trump, might, like Truman was, be true-believers who have been simply fooled by them. Certainly Trump has loads of prejudices, which make him vulnerable to being manipulated without his even being aware of that. He believes what he wants to believe, and such a person is especially vulnerable to being manipulated. Obama, on the other hand, might be more of a realist than a fool. In either case, it’s the billionaires who now control the US Government (and see this, with more on that).

Furthermore, there were two powerful reasons why Stalin would have been getting himself into ideological trouble amongst his own communists if he had aspired to expanding Soviet control beyond the local neighborhood of adjoining (“buffer”) nations all of which were collectively surrounded by the broader capitalist world: (1) Marx himself strongly condemned imperialism; and, (2) Stalin’s main ideological competitor within the Soviet Union was Leon Trotsky, who advocated for a rapid worldwide spread of communism, versus Stalin’s position against that, which was called “communism in one nation,” and which advocated to postpone pushing for such a spread until after communism has first become an economic success within the USSR so that workers throughout the world would rise up to overthrow their oppressors. America’s Deep State knew all about the idiocy of casting Stalin as being an imperialist, but simply lied, in order to increase America’s own empire. They were, and are, brazen.

A masterpiece of historical writing, and of historical documentaries based on it, showing in a broader perspective the history of US international relations during the 20th Century, is Oliver Stone’s and Peter Kuznick’s Untold History of the United States, especially Chapter One here, and Chapter Two here. Massive though it is, it’s only truths, no lies. That’s extraordinarily rare. A masterpiece of behind-the-scenes history regarding US international relations, containing stunning first-person details of the period 1943-1990 (that’s up to but not including the end of the Cold War on Russia’s side), is L. Fletcher Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. Another related historical masterpiece is David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. All of this is history that was being hidden and lied-about at the time when it was being mentioned, at all, in the ‘news’ — and which still remains being lied-about in the ‘news’ and ‘history’ that dominates today, within the US and its empire. The only professional historian amongst those writers was Peter Kuznick. All of the others were journalists, except for Prouty, who was a participant. One can’t reasonably trust the historical profession (nor most of the journalistic profession) in the US and its empire. That’s a fact — a proven-true empirical observation — no mere speculation.

Russia had lost, to Germany’s Nazis, 13,950,000, or exactly 12.7% of its population. Another part of the Soviet Union, Belarus, lost 2.29 million, or exactly 25.3% of its population to Hitler. Another part of the USSR, Ukraine, lost 6.85 million, or 16.3%. The entire Soviet Union lost 26.6 million, exactly 13.7% of its population to Hitler. The US lost only 419,400, or 0.32% of its population. Furthermore, immediately after FDR died and Harry S. Truman became President, the US CIA (then as its predecessor organization the OSS) provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured.

Without the immense sacrifices by the USSR, Hitler would almost certainly have won WWII and Americans be living under Nazi rule, but the owner of that ‘investments’-firm airbrushes Russia totally out of the Allies’ victory.

The Bradford Exchange was founded by billionaire J. Roderick MacArthur, a rabid neoconservative liberal, whose fortune was left to heirs and to the liberal John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which sponsors its ‘genius’ awards; and also left to the Harper’s Magazine Foundation to buy that Magazine and place his son J.R. MacArthur in charge of it. They’re also major funders of NPR and PBS, America’s ‘public’ radio and TV.

As for US Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, they started the Cold War on 26 July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference between Truman, Churchill, and Stalin, each of which relied upon advisors. Eisenhower turned out to have been the key one for Truman.

Steve Neal’s 2002 Harry and Ike says (p. 40), “Truman was elated that Stalin was preparing to join the Allies in the war against Japan. [Stalin had made that intention clear to Truman on July 17th.] [But, on July 26th] Eisenhower advised [Truman against that, because, said Ike] ‘no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.’” So, Truman rejected the overwhelming opposition he had received from the scientists, who favored doing only a public test-demonstration of the A-bomb for Japan’s leaders to view, and he simply nuked both Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in order to keep the Soviets out of Japan, not in order to win the war against Japan. (Then, of course, the very tactful Ike became Truman’s successor, and led, for what at the end of his Presidency he famously named the “military industrial complex,” which he warned against only after he had already served as the President and already given the generals whatever they had asked for.)

The Potsdam Conference ended on 2 August 1945, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred on 6 and 9 August — both within a week of that Conference.

So: those bomb-drops by Truman were part of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, spurred by Eisenhower’s advice, and not really part of the hot WWII to beat Japan, as the myth has it.

And, now, perhaps (according to the Bradford Exchange and other memorializers of a WWII victory that’s cleansed of the Russian ‘stain’ on it), is the time to airbrush Stalin out of the picture altogether, even though he was actually the key person in the defeat of the Nazis, and thus in all of the Allies’ — USSR, UK, and USA. — WWII victory.

Perhaps the reason why France (instead of USSR) was included on that coin, is that that country, which was defeated by the Nazis (instead of having contributed significantly to the Allies’ win), is viewed more sympathetically by propaganda-drenched Americans, than is the country which actually did more than any other — including than the United States itself — in order actually to defeat Hitler.

And the use of the A-bomb against Japan wasn’t really done in order to beat Japan, which already had no chance of winning, but it was instead done specifically because both Eisenhower and Truman, as early as 26 July 1945, wanted the US ultimately to conquer the Soviet Union. Japan was the eastern edge of that, and NATO (yet to be created in 1949) the western one. And the eastern edge of America’s surround-and-stifle strategy against ‘communism’ (but really for the US to take control over the entire world) began precisely on that date, 26 July 1945, when the fates of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were determined. The program to bring Nazi weapons-designers etc. into the US started immediately, at that time. NATO and The Marshall Plan came later, to secure US control over as much of Europe as they could get.

So, in a sense, this Bradford Exchange coin is a reassertion of the Truman-Eisenhower spirit, of total conquest, which had been initiated on 26 July 1945, by those men, America’s first two post-War US Presidents. They were of different Parties, but the same mind, to achieve the world’s first all-encompassing, global, empire, and to make it a ‘moral’ Crusade. There was nothing moral about it.

Let me remind you of what happened right after World War II. A remarkable group of Americans and Europeans and others, not just from government, but from the world of culture and business, engaged in a collective surge of imagination. And what they imagined and what they created was a new international order, the order that’s allowed you and me to live our lives, all of our lives, without great power war and with more prosperity than was ever seen before on the planet. So, a remarkable story. Interestingly, every pillar of this project that produced these results, when first proposed, was rejected by the foreign policy establishment as naive or unrealistic.

My favorite is the Marshall Plan. After World War II, Americans felt exhausted. They had demobilized 10 million troops, they were focused on an urgent domestic agenda. But as people began to appreciate how devastated Europe was and how aggressive Soviet communism was, Americans eventually decided to tax themselves a percent and a half of GDP every year for four years and send that money to Europe to help reconstruct these countries, including Germany and Italy, whose troops had just been killing Americans. Amazing. This also created the United Nations. Amazing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The World Bank. NATO. All of these elements of an order for peace and prosperity. So, in a word, what we need to do is do it again.

The US did donate many billions of dollars to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan, however, excluded the Soviet Union. It excluded Belarus, which had suffered the largest losses of any nation in WWII, 25% of its population. It excluded Russia, which lost 13%. But those weren’t nations, they were states within the USSR, the nation that lost by far the highest percentage of its population of any nation, to the war: nearly 14%.

Russia had lost, to Germany’s Nazis, 13,950,000, or exactly 12.7% of its population. Another part of the Soviet Union, Belarus, lost 2.29 million, or exactly 25.3% of its population to Hitler. Another part of the USSR, Ukraine, lost 6.85 million, or 16.3%. The entire Soviet Union lost 26.6 million, exactly 13.7% of its population to Hitler. The US lost only 419,400, or 0.32% of its population. Furthermore, immediately after FDR died and Harry S. Truman became President, the US CIA (then as its predecessor organization the OSS) provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. So: while the USSR was killing any ‘ex’-Nazis it could find, the USA. was hiring them either in West Germany or else into the US itself. It brought them to America whenever the US regime needed the person’s assistance in designing weapons to use against the USSR Right away, the US was looking for ‘ex’-Nazis who could help the US conquer the Soviet Union. The Cold War secretly started in the US as soon as WW II was over (the OSS-CIA’s “Operation Paperclip”). (There was no equivalent to “Operation Paperclip” in the USSR.)

The Soviet Union suffered vastly the brunt of the Allies’ losses from WWII, but the US, which suffered the least from the war, refused to help them out, and instead the US regime protected most of the ‘ex’-Nazis that were in its own area of control. Without nasty Joseph Stalin’s help, America would today be ruled by the Nazi regime instead of by America’s domestic aristocracy as it now is. And this is the way that our aristocracy thanked the Soviet people, for the immense sacrifices that they had made, really, on behalf of the entire future world. This happened right after WW II was over, and the US regime was already determined, right away, not to help those people, but instead to conquer them — to treat them as being the new enemy, so as to stoke the weapons-trade after the war (and the need for more weapons) ended. How ‘good’ was this behavior by the US rulers — the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC — actually? (The MIC took over as soon as FDR died and Truman replaced him.)

Truman was unfortunately an extremely effective agent of America’s billionaires in advancing them first to continue their MIC (or, actually, the weapons-making firms), so that the billionaires who controlled them had no reason to fear the breakout of peace in the post-war era — America right away started its world-record-shattering number of coups and invasions, virtually as soon as Truman took over. First was the coup in Thailand in 1948 — right at the CIA’s very start — in order to grab hold of Asia’s narcotics traffic so that the needed off-the-books funding for that spy-agency could be instituted (and its existence didn’t become public until the great investigative journalist Gary Webb uncovered its operations in Nicaragua during President Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, which entailed illegal funding — from cocaine-sales — of Reagan’s war against Nicaragua, a Soviet-friendly country) The heroic Gary Webb became blackballed from America’s ’news’-(actually propaganda)-media and plunged into poverty so that he (according to the government) committed suicide and “wasn’t murdered,” but (either way) his death was another of the CIA’s secret victories.

Hey, if this looks bad for the United States, then the truth looks bad. This is not the propaganda. Deceits such as Graham Allison’s slick distortions are the propaganda — and thus he and the others who do such work are enormously successful and highly honored by America’s billionaires and the rest of their retinues. People such as that, train the next generation of and for America’s aristocracy, so that they can become just as smug in their evil and self-deception as their trainers are. Their parents get vindicated by Allison and others of the billionaire-class’s propaganda-merchants (‘historians’ ‘journalists’, etc.). What’s not to like in this? It’s virtually a cult of the world’s most-powerful people and of their retinues. Lots of people would like to join it — and, “To hell with the truth.”

Even the U.N. has caved to the American behemoth. It offers an article “UN/DESA POLICY BRIEF #52: THE MARSHALL PLAN, IMF AND FIRST UN DEVELOPMENT DECADE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM: LESSONS FOR OUR TIME”, eulogizing what maybe its authors didn’t know was actually the very start of the Cold War:

Three events from the Golden Age that left significant lessons relevant for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals include: the contributions of the Marshall Plan, the experience leading to the achievement of current account convertibility under the IMF Articles of Agreement and the declaration of the First UN Development Decade. The Marshall Plan marked the very beginning of successful international cooperation in the post-war period.

No mention is made, there, either, that this was the start of the Cold War. The fact that this was the start of America’s war against Russia is simply ignored. Instead, all of this is celebrated. But even the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia acknowledges, in its (heavily propagandistic pro-US-regime) article “Molotov Plan”:

The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union in 1947 in order to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. It can be seen to be the Soviet Union’s version of the Marshall Plan, which for political reasons the Eastern European countries would not be able to join without leaving the Soviet sphere of influence. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov rejected the Marshall Plan (1947), proposing instead the Molotov Plan — the Soviet-sponsored economic grouping which was eventually expanded to become the Comecon.[1]

Just think about that, for a moment: The Soviet Union is being blamed there because it “rejected” the US regime’s demand upon all nations that accepted aid from The Marshall Plan, that they be “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence.” How stupid does the writer of that particular passage have to be? Wikipedia’s description of the Molotov Plan continues:

The Molotov Plan was symbolic of the Soviet Union’s refusal to accept aid from the Marshall Plan, or allow any of their satellite states to do so because of their belief that the Marshall Plan was an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states through the conditions imposed and by making beneficiary countries economically dependent on the United States (Officially, one of the goals of the Marshall Plan was to prevent the spread of Communism).

The Marshall Plan wasn’t merely “an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states” but was instead an actual lure, to draw into “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence,” the nations “that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union.” This wasn’t really about “Soviet interest in their satellite states” but instead it was about the US regime’s policy, immediately after WW II, to take over not merely the nations that the US had helped in Europe to defeat Hitler, but also the nations that the Soviet Union had helped to defeat Hitler. It was, in short, a US grab, to control territory within the lands that the Soviet Union had saved from Nazism. This is the reality.

Look at these tables, again, of how much the US and the Soviet Union — and all other countries — had suffered losses from actually fighting against Hitler, and then consider that the nation which had lost the least was now so war-mongering as to immediately try to grab “sphere of influence” — the very border-nations which were crucial to the Soviet Union’s national security against that very same grabber — grabbing away from the one that had lost the most.

Here is another piece of US-regime propaganda about the Molotov Plan (which they say was the Soviet response to The Marshall Plan even though it wasn’t and the Soviet Union had been so destroyed by Hitler as to have made any such donations to their own satellites only minuscule by comparison):

The plan was a system of bilateral trade agreements that established COMECON to create an economic alliance of socialist countries. This aid allowed countries in Europe to stop relying on American aid, and therefore allowed Molotov Plan states to reorganize their trade to the USSR instead. The plan was in some ways contradictory, however, because at the same time the Soviets were giving aid to Eastern bloc countries, they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR.

Those weren’t “socialist” countries; they were dictatorial socialist countries, as opposed to democratic socialist countries such as in Scandinavia — the proper term for what the Soviet alliance was is “communist,” not “socialist” — and there was a very big difference between the Scandinavian countries, versus the communist countries (though the US regime wants to slur one by the other so as to sucker fools against democratic socialism — progressivism).

And, by “they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR,” we’re supposed to think that Germany, and Italy, and Japan, shouldn’t have compensated their victims? What? And yet we’re also supposed to believe that Germany should pay it for Jews who lived in Israel? What’s that about? Why? Why ‘should’ Germany be funding Jews to grab land that for thousands of years has been populated almost entirely by Arabs and for perhaps a thousand years almost entirely by Muslims, thus subsidizing the theft of that land, the grabbing of that land, by Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Holocaust? What is all of this really about, and what is propaganda such as Graham Allison delivers, really about? America’s manufacturers of the machinery of mass-death need to “make a living,” don’t they? And isn’t that propaganda the most effective way to do it? So, that’s what it really is about.

There is the presumption by neoconservatives — American imperialists — that the US Government is both democratic and well-intentioned, but at least after the death of FDR, it hasn’t been either one. (Back in his time, it was a limited democracy, very limited for Blacks.) And this is the reason why the US regime double-crossed Russia and shamed The West when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, ended communism and ended the USSR and even ended its Warsaw Pact in 1991, but the US side secretly continued the Cold War, and does so increasingly today.

None of this fits the US regime’s propaganda-narrative, such as Graham Allison, and many other thousands of other regime-shills, present. Theirs is called ‘history’. The reality is called “history.” In the US and its vassal-nations, there is vastly more of a market for ‘history’ than for “history,” because the billionaires not only control the government — they also control the alleged news-media, history-publishers, and other means of ‘informing’ and ‘educating’ the public. So, it’s a self-selecting circle of deceivers that are at the top.

PS: To get to the beginning of the Cold War, Truman’s complete diary needs to be published. The excerpts that have been published do include information that contradicts and overrides his published statements, and that thereby helps researchers penetrate to what was really going on in his head at the time. What they show is a tragically unintelligent but well-intentioned person, who had some guiding prejudices and therefore thought in labels instead of trying actually to understand the other person’s real problems (such as FDR did). For example, at the Potsdam Conference during 17 July to 2 August 1945, Stalin tried to explain why the Soviet Union needed to be surrounded by friendly countries just as much as the US and Britain did, but neither Truman nor Churchill would accept any such concern by Stalin. As the BBC summarized that, “Stalin wanted a buffer zone of friendly Communist countries to protect the USSR from further attack in the future.” Truman got his views on such matters from his top generals and other advisors. His diary on 16 July 1945 said “Talked to Mc Caffery about France. He is scared stiff of Communism, the Russian society which isn’t communism at all but just police government pure and simple. A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.” But Stalin actually had lots of reason to distrust both Truman and Churchill — just as they had lots of reason to distrust him. FDR hadn’t been so totally in thrall of his generals, nor as naive — nor as manipulable. Just a day after that entry on July 16th, came this on July 17th: “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell.”

The problem isn’t that Truman often misunderstood, but that he surrounded himself with people that his Party’s top donors liked. Truman wanted to be a progressive but ended up being only a liberal — which his Party’s wealthiest found to be acceptable. His main achievements were in foreign policy and amounted to leading Churchill’s Cold War, pretty much as Stalin had expected. For example, at Potsdam, as Steve Neal’s 2002 Harry and Ike says (p. 40), “Truman was elated that Stalin was preparing to join the Allies in the war against Japan. [But] Eisenhower advised [Truman against that, because, Ike said,] ‘no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.’” So, Truman rejected the overwhelming opposition from the scientists, who favored doing only a public test-demonstration for Japan’s leaders, and nuked both Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in order to keep the Soviets out of Japan, not in order to win the war against Japan. (Then, of course, the very tactful Ike became Truman’s successor, and led for what at the end of his Presidency he famously named the “military industrial complex.”)

So: those bomb-drops were part of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, not really for the hot WW II to beat Japan. However, Truman could also have deceived himself about what his motives actually were, because his diary on 25 July 1945 said: “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new.” The two bombings occurred on 6 and 9 August — right after Potsdam. Obviously, it wasn’t just “soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” And, never, after he perpetrated that, did he express regret about all those “women and children.” He had no difficulty ignoring embarrassing realities.

Truman’s intentions were progressive — for example, his diary-entry on 16 July 1945 said (in the context of damning the Soviet Government) “It seems that Sweden, Norway, Denmark and perhaps Switzerland have the only real peoples government on the Continent of Europe. But the rest are as bad lot from the standpoint of the people who do not believe in tyrany.” (He routinely misspelled like that.) Unlike Republicans, who love to equate “socialism” with communism and simply to ignore the Scandinavian examples disproving that equation, he wasn’t quite stupid enough to fall for the billionaires’ line on it. He didn’t need to be: he was a Democrat. Even the billionaires in his Party don’t spout that line — it’s strictly Republicans who equate “socialism” with “communism.”

FDR was a leader. Truman didn’t know how to lead, because he didn’t even know himself. Himself was a puppet, and he didn’t even know it, much less know the strings (from Ike etc. — the billionaires’ knowing agents) (which were pulling his own brain).

And that’s how the road to today started.

And 200 years from now is, by now, virtually certain to be vastly worse. If persons of FDR’s calibre had been America’s Presidents after his death, then none of this would likely have happened (at least not nearly as much); but none of them were. Leadership matters. It really does. It really did.

In the summer of 1945, President Harry Truman found himself searching for a decisive blow against the Empire of Japan. Despite the many Allied victories during 1944 and 1945, Truman believed Emperor Hirohito would urge his generals to fight on. America suffered 76,000 casualties at the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the Truman administration anticipated that a prolonged invasion of mainland Japan would bring even more devastating numbers. Even so, plans were drawn up to invade Japan under the name Operation Downfall.

The estimates for the potential carnage were sobering; the Joint Chiefs of Staff pegged the expected casualties at 1.2 million. Staff for Admiral Chester Nimitz and General Douglas MacArthur both expected over 1,000 casualties per day, while the personnel at the Department of the Navy thought the totals would run as high as 4 million, with the Japanese incurring up to 10 million of their own. The Los Angeles Times was a bit more optimistic, projecting 1 million casualties.

With those numbers, it’s no wonder the US opted to (literally) take the nuclear option by dropping Little Boy on Hiroshima on August 6, and then Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 9. Japan formally surrendered 24 days later, sparing potentially millions of U.S. servicemen, and vindicating the horrifying-yet-necessary bombings.

At least this is the common narrative that we’re all taught in grade school. But like so many historical narratives, it’s an oversimplification and historically obtuse.

When Truman signed off on the deployment of the newly-developed atomic bombs, he was convinced that the Japanese were planning to prosecute the war to the bitter end. Many have argued that the casualty estimates compelled him to err on the side of caution for the lives of his boys in the Pacific. But this ignores the fact that other significant figures surrounding Truman came to the opposite conclusion. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, chief among the naysayers, said, “I was against (use of the atomic bomb) on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.” Although he made this statement publicly in 1963, he made the same argument to then Secretary of War Henry Stimson in 1945, as recounted in his memoirs: “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”

Another prominent figure who echoed Eisenhower’s sentiments was Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy. He ranked as the senior-most United States military officer on active duty during World War II and was among Truman’s chief military advisors. In his 1950 book I Was There, Leahy wrote, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.” With mainland Japan under a blockade, Japanese forces in China and Korea were effectively cut off from reinforcements and supplies.

Ward Wilson of Foreign Policy wrote that the most solemn day for Japan was August 9, which was the first day that the Japanese Supreme Council met to seriously discuss surrender. The date is significant because it wasn’t the day after the Hiroshima bombing, but rather the day the Soviet Union entered the Pacific Theatre by invading Japanese-occupied Manchuria on three fronts. Prior to August 8, the Japanese had hoped that Russia would play the role of intermediary in negotiating an end to the war, but when the Russians turned against Japan, they became an even bigger threat than America, as indicated by documents from leading Japanese officials at the time.

Russia’s move, in fact, compelled the Japanese to consider unconditional surrender; until then, they were only open to a conditional surrender that left their Emperor Hirohito some dignity and protections from war-crimes trials. Ward concludes that, as in the European theatre, Truman didn’t beat Japan; Stalin did.

Harry Truman never expressed regret publicly over his decision to use the atomic bombs. However, he did order an independent study on the state of the war effort leading up to August of 1945, and the strategic value of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In 1946, the U.S. Bombing Survey published its findings, which concluded as follows: “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” This is an intensive condemnation of Truman’s decision, seeing as Russia did enter the war, and that plans for an invasion had been developed.

As Timothy P. Carney writes for the Washington Examiner, the fog of war can be a tricky thing. But if we’re forced to side with Truman, or Eisenhower and the other dissenting military leaders, the Eisenhower position isn’t merely valid; it actually aligns better with some fundamental American values. Given all the uncertainty, both at the time and with modern historical revisionism, it’s better to look to principle rather than fortune-telling. One principle that should be near the top of everyone’s list is this: it’s wrong to target civilians with weapons of mass destruction. The deliberate killing of innocent men, women, and children by the hundreds of thousands cannot be justified under any circumstances, much less the ambiguous ones Truman encountered. Whether his decision was motivated by indignation toward Japanese “ pigheadedness” or concern for his troops, Truman’s use of such devastating weapons against non-combatants should not be excused. Americans must strive for complete and honest analysis of the past (and present) conflicts. And if she is to remain true to her own ideals, America must strive for more noble and moral ends—in all conflicts, domestic and foreign—guided by our most cherished first principles, such as the Golden Rule. At the very least, Americans should not try so hard to justify mass murder.

mises.org

North Korea now has a hydrogen bomb.  Maybe.  Even if the bomb North Korea detonated on Sunday was not a hydrogen bomb, it was North Korea’s most powerful bomb yet.

So far, President Donald Trump has not said (or tweeted) anything that comes close to the threat he made on August 8: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

What did President Trump mean?  On August 11, NPR asked Dr. Sheila Smith, senior fellow for Japan Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Smith replied: “The President didn’t say nuclear, but it sounds nuclear.”

The US has threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea before.  I have just finished H. W. Brands’ 2016 book, The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War. Brands, a professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of bestsellers on Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt.

The General vs. the President is an odd book.  When a book has a picture of a mushroom cloud on its cover and the words “nuclear war” in its subtitle, readers will expect…oh, I don’t know…a book about nuclear war?  However, only 35 pages in this 400-page volume mention the atom bomb.  Many of those 35 pages contain only passing references to the bomb.

Rather than an edge of your seat real life thriller about Korea “at the brink of nuclear war,” Brands ladles out a conventional retelling of the history of the 1950-1953 Korean War.  Brands’ focus is the clash between President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur, the US/UN commander in Korea, which culminated in Truman firing MacArthur. This story has already been told many times before.

The Korean War began on June 25, 1950 when forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea crossed the 38th parallel of latitude into South Korea, a US client regime.[1]  On June 30, President Truman illegally ordered American ground troops to Korea without consulting Congress.[2]

Unmentioned by Brands, Truman sent two groups of B-29 bombers to the UK and Guam in July.  The planes carried atom bombs which were complete except for their fissile plutonium cores which remained in the United States.  (At no time during the war were there “live” atom bombs in Korea.)  If Truman decided to resort to the bomb, the UK bomber group would target the USSR and the group in Guam would target North Korea and China.

The war turned against UN forces after the entry of Chinese troops in late October.  At his November 30 press conference, Truman terrified the world.  Truman answered a question about potential use of the atomic bomb by saying that use of the bomb in Korea had always been under “active consideration.”  Brands treats Truman’s answer as a blunder (page 223).  More probably, Truman was consciously signaling to the Chinese Communists and the Soviets.

As Kim Jong-un is signaling today.  Every bomb test, every missile fired over Japan or towards Guam, is a message addressed to the US.  Kim knows what the US does to states, like Iraq and Libya, which do not have nuclear weapons.  Sometimes, I wish I could tell Kim: “All right.  We get it.  You have nuclear weapons and you will defend your country.  You don’t have to keep proving it.”

Except the US doesn’t get it.  Secretary of Defense James Mattis has threatened a “massive military response” should North Korea continue on its present path.  UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has declared that there is “no more road left” for negotiations.  President Trump threatens to cut off trade with all nations which do business with North Korea and accuses South Korea of “appeasement” because it wants to negotiate with the North.

Maybe this is all bluff.  If not Trump, the two generals, Secretary of State Mattis and National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster must know that military action in Korea would not be of benefit to anyone.  Even Trump may realize that he has little freedom to maneuver.  That would explain the kicking and screaming coming out of Washington.  As they say, it’s a chained dog that barks the loudest.

Brands covers the period from the start of the war through Truman’s alarming November 30 press conference in the first seven pages of the book.  Brands does not mention the atom bomb again until page 40.

MacArthur and the Bomb

General Douglas MacArthur had opposed dropping the bomb on Japan.  MacArthur believed that the Japanese were ready to surrender and would have done so if assured that they could keep their Emperor.

Korea was a different story.  A mere two weeks into the war, MacArthur requested atomic bombs from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS),[3] a request which was denied.

If China and the USSR entered the war, MacArthur proposed dropping atom bombs on the tunnels and bridges connecting North Korea to Manchuria and Vladivostock.[4]

On December 9, 1950, “MacArthur requested authorization to use atomic bombs at his discretion.”[5]  MacArthur followed up this request on December 24 with a “‘a list of retardation targets’ for which he required 26 atomic bombs.  He also wanted four to drop on the ‘invasion forces’ and four more for ‘critical concentrations of enemy air power.’”[6]  These requests were denied.

With the passage of time, MacArthur became even more giddily imaginative.  MacArthur latched onto a scheme current at the time of placing a sort of nuclear fence between China and North Korea.  This would be accomplished by laying nuclear waste along the Yalu River, giving a new meaning to the expression “laying waste.”  MacArthur believed that this cordon unsanitaire would render Korea free of Chinese.  It would also, albeit unintentionally, free Korea from Koreans, at least in the north.  It did not seem to occur to MacArthur that Koreans are no more radiation-proof than Chinese are.  MacArthur never submitted the plan to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  For God’s sake, don’t mention this plan to President Trump; he may think it’s a terrific idea for the US-Mexico border.[7]

Exit MacArthur

Truman fired MacArthur on April 11, 1951.  That month, the US came closer than at any other point in the war to using nuclear weapons.[8]  On April 5, the JCS ordered atomic retaliation in the event of an anticipated large influx of additional Chinese troops into North Korea,[9] or an attack by Soviet bombers which intelligence sources showed were massed in Manchuria.[10]

“It is now clear,” University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings writes, “that Truman did not remove MacArthur simply because of his repeated insubordinations [and making his disagreements with the Administration public], but also because [Truman] wanted a reliable commander on the scene should Washington decide to use nuclear weapons…”[11]  MacArthur’s replacement, General Matthew B. Ridgway, fit the bill.  In May, Ridgway renewed MacArthur’s request for thirty-eight atom bombs.[12]

The Joint Chiefs again contemplated use of the bomb in June 1951.[13]  In September and October, Operation Hudson Harbor made simulated bombing runs on the North which dropped dummy atomic bombs.[14]

In 1953, the Pentagon recommended using A-bombs in memos issued in February, May, June, and July. [15]

Even after hostilities ended on July 27, 1953, the Eisenhower Administration was planning to use the bomb should China and North Korea violate the armistice (Strategic Air Command OpPlan 8-53).

Brands discusses MacArthur’s plan for laying nuclear waste on the border of North Korea and China, but says nothing about the many occasions when the US contemplated using the A-bomb during the war.

II

“A nuclear war in 1950 would not be one-sided,” Brands declares on the first page of The General vs. the President.  The US had lost its atomic monopoly the year before when the Soviet Union detonated an atom bomb of its own.

In our world, the Korean War did not go nuclear.  It does in science fiction writer Harry Turtledove’s 2015 alternate history novel Bombs Away.

MacArthur believed that the US needed to strike Manchuria in order to cut off Chinese troops and supplies.  The Truman Administration, however, wanted to keep the war limited.  Consequently, Truman repeatedly denied MacArthur permission to operate in Manchuria.  In Turtledove’s novel, Truman gives in to MacArthur’s entreaties and a mushroom cloud grows over Manchuria.

Russia responds by dropping A-bombs on six small cities in England, France, and Germany.  The US retaliates by A-bombing the base that launched the Russian bombers.  Quicker than you can say “Armageddon,” atom bombs fall on Alaska, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Kiev, Vladivostok, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA (two bombs), Newfoundland, and Maine—and Leningrad and Moscow (Stalin escapes).  Oh, and the Russians invade Western Europe and World War Three is on.

Turtledove’s book is thrilling, terrifying, and preposterous.  In an e-mail exchange, Bruce Cumings told me that there was no “chance that the Soviets would go to the nuclear level over Korea, or even a US invasion of China.”  Even if the Soviets had been willing to risk nuclear war, they possessed a tiny nuclear stockpile of no more than 20 or so bombs.  The US had nearly 300 bombs in 1950.  These facts make nonsense of Brands’ declaration that “A nuclear war in 1950 would not be one-sided,” a claim Brands does nothing to substantiate.

* * *

In the end, the US did not need an atom bomb to destroy North Korea.  In November 1950, while UN forces were retreating from the advancing Chinese, MacArthur, in Bruce Cuming’s words, ordered that “a wasteland be created between the war front and the Yalu River.”[16]  What followed was the Shermanesque destruction of the North.  Stone and Kuznick write:  “Almost every city in North Korea was burned to the ground.”[17] Dams too were destroyed.  The US killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the North with conventional explosives and napalm, wiping out an estimated 20% of North Korea’s population.  It would take North Korea decades to recover.[18]

Truman had many reasons for not using the bomb in Korea.  US allies opposed the bomb’s use. Truman worried about the “optics” of again using the bomb against Asians.[19] North Korea lacked large urban centers to target.  The atom bomb was unsuited to Korea’s mountainous terrain. Later, when China entered the war, Chinese forces did not mass in large targetable formations.  Korea was largely a guerrilla war and nuclear weapons are not suited to guerrilla wars.  The US had only about 300 atomic warheads. We were not going to waste them on China, which the US defense establishment regarded as a mere proxy for the USSR.[20]  (Ah, for the days of monolithic communism.)

Finally, Truman feared escalation, which could lead to World War Three.

A consideration that did not stay Truman’s hand:  concern for human life.  In his post-presidential years, Truman said that he never lost a night’s sleep over his decision to drop the bomb on Japan.  There is a revealing remark, not quoted by Brands, which Truman made on the eve of US entry into the Second World War.  In 1941, then-Senator Truman said:  “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” [21]

Give ‘em hell, Harry.  And he did.

War in the Pacific was won months before Franklin Roosevelt’s April 12, 1945 death.

He declined to accept the Japanese offer of surrender. So did Harry Truman when he became president.

War continued for months unnecessarily, countless more casualties inflicted, mainly Japanese civilians – notably from fire-bombing Toyko in March 1945, an estimated 100,000 perishing in the firestorm, many more injured, over a million left homeless.

Around the same time, five dozen other Japanese cities were fire-bombed. Most structures in the country were wooden and easily consumed.

The attacks amounting to war crimes achieved no strategic advantage. In early 1945, Japan offered to surrender. In February, Douglas McArthur sent Roosevelt a 40-page summary of its terms.

They were nearly unconditional. The Japanese would accept an occupation, would cease hostilities, surrender its arms, remove all troops from occupied territories, submit to criminal war trials, and allow its industries to be regulated. In return, they asked only that their emperor be retained in an honorable capacity.

Roosevelt spurned the offer as did Truman. Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed on August 6 and 9 respectively.

They were gratuitous acts of mass murder, killing hundreds of thousands, scaring future generations to this day with birth defects and other serious health issues.

The bombings weren’t conducted to win a war won months earlier. They displayed America’s new might, what Soviet Russia’s leadership already knew, what might follow against its cities if Washington decided to attack its wartime ally.

Terror-bombing is an international crime – banned by the 1907 Hague IV Convention, Geneva IV protecting civilians in time of war, and the Nuremberg principles, forbidding “crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity,” including “inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war.”

Hiroshima’s 72^nd anniversary is an ominous reminder that what happened then can occur again – far more disastrously than earlier, including on US soil.

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