by Michael E. Kreca

“East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet…” ~ Rudyard Kipling

When Kipling penned those immortal words during the height of Pax Britannia in the 19th century, he believed East and West were so different in their respective civilizations and outlook that there would be no basis for any real understanding between the two hemispheres. True or untrue, at the times they each have met, it has often sadly been in the cauldron of warfare, and at least in the case of the United States, has consequently been expensive and largely fruitless.

Officially, the reason an expansionist, resource-poor Japan attacked the headquarters of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii without warning on Sunday, Dec. 7th, 1941, was to quickly forestall any US potential interference in Tokyo’s drive to seize and retain the resource-rich possessions of the USA, Britain, Holland and France in the south Pacific Ocean. On surface, this is true. But to paraphrase famed British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, what lay “behind the scenes?”

Since the 1920s, the Soviets planned and hoped for a USA-Japan war because they believed such a conflict (one that they knew the USA would likely win) would help create a large Asian power vacuum which could then be quickly filled by Communism. The elimination of significant Japanese military, diplomatic and economic influence in the region, which dated back to the 1880s and was expanded by Japan’s humiliating and conclusive military defeat of Russia in 1905, would give the Reds the opportunity they wanted. And thanks to FDR and Stalin, they got it.

Benjamin Gitlow was a founding and prominent member of the US Communist Party but was permanently expelled from the organization in 1933 for daring to openly criticize the crimes of Josef Stalin. He soon became a staunch anti-Communist and died at age 74 in 1965. Gitlow wrote in his revealing 1940 book entitled I Confess: The Truth About American Communism:

“As far back as 1927 when I was in Moscow, the attitude toward the United States in the event of war was discussed. Privately, it was the opinion of all the Soviet leaders to whom I spoke that the rivalry between the United States and Japan must actually break out into war between these two. The Russians were hopeful that the war would break out soon, because that would greatly secure the safety of Russian-Siberian borders and would so weaken Japan that Russia would no longer have to fear an attack from her in the East. Stalin’s hopes, through the activities of the US Communist Party, to create a public opinion in the United States that would favor a war, presumably in defense of democracy against the encroachment of fascism, but actually one against Japan. Stalin is perfectly willing to let Americans die in defense of the Soviet Union even if they are not members of the Communist Party…”

Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert Hoover had successfully resisted pressure to send US troops and military aid to China (other than maintaining the small contingent of US Navy river gunboats present there off and on since the mid-1850s to guard US economic assets) when the Japanese first occupied Manchuria in 1931. His reason was that the Chinese would eventually wear down Japan, just as they had eventually worn down every other invader throughout their history.

The Japanese premier during most of the crucial 1940–41 period was a member of the royal family, Prince Konoye Fuminaro. Konoye – whose power base lay with big business that was suffering under the burdensome costs of the inconclusive land war in China and US economic sanctions – proposed a meeting with FDR in Honolulu in August 1941 (breaking centuries of Japanese tradition and rigid protocol by meeting with a foreigner outside of Japan) in order to get the US to lift its embargo on longtime petroleum, iron ore and scrap metal exports to Japan. In exchange, Konoye was willing to withdraw Japanese troops from Indochina and sharply reduce its military presence in China.

The US and British ambassadors to Japan, Joseph C. Grew (a Herbert Hoover appointee) and Sir Robert Craigie, respectively both urged FDR to confer with Konoye and to agree to his terms. Grew especially was trying to avoid war with Japan and did everything he could to do so. Grew wrote:

“It seems to me highly unlikely that this chance will come again or that any Japanese statesman other than Prince Konoye could succeed in controlling the military extremists in carrying through a policy which they, in their ignorance of international affairs and economic laws, resent and oppose. The alternative to reaching a settlement now would be the greatly increased probability of war and while we would undoubtedly win in the end, I question whether it is in our own interest to see an impoverished Japan reduced to the position of a third-rate power.”

Craigie agreed with Grew, stating tersely in a dispatch to London, “Time suitable for real peace with Japan. Hope this time American cynicism will not be allowed to interfere with realistic statesmanship.” Churchill (whose own Foreign Office was riddled with Soviet spies, among them the notorious “Kim” Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess) was incensed with Craigie’s conciliatory stance toward Tokyo. He told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden:

“He (Craigie) should surely be told forthwith that the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent.”

Moreover, there were four close Roosevelt advisers who, according to the US Army’s 1940–48 communications surveillance of the Soviet Embassy in Washington (a operation commonly known as “Venona”), were Soviet spies or sympathizers. These four spearheaded the ultimately successful attempt to frustrate Grew’s and Craigie’s negotiating efforts. They were top White House aide and Canadian-born economist Lauchlin Currie, Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White (who essentially was Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s puppetmaster), New Deal tax-and-spend fanatic Harry Hopkins and the notorious State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss had tapped Johns Hopkins University Asia specialist and “adviser” to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang-Kai-shek, Owen Lattimore, as FDR’s “China expert” – one whom Mao Tse-tung’s sidekick Chou En-lai warmly regarded as “quite sympathetic to the Chinese Communists.”

All of these men, White and Currie especially, actively pressured FDR into waging a war with Japan. They eloquently masked their staunch Soviet sympathies behind facile appeals to the territorial integrity of China under Chiang (a weak, greedy and corrupt leader who was uneasily allied with Mao and would later be overwhelmed by him) and in the interests of a “united front against fascism.” FDR thus flatly disregarded the advice of Grew and Craigie and refused any meeting with Konoye.

Meanwhile, German Communist Richard Sorge’s high-level Soviet spy ring in Tokyo, which had substantial influence on ranking Japanese military officers and numerous cabinet officials as well as close contacts with several German diplomats, helped steer Japanese strategy toward its existing Navy-based “Strike South” approach – conquest of the fruitful Pacific possessions of the West and away from the Army-based “Strike North” approach which targeted Siberia and Soviet Central Asia.

The “Strike North” strategy had already largely fallen from favor after Japan’s massive defeat by the Red Army at Nomonhan, Mongolia in August 1939. This defeat led to a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact which ensured the security of the Soviet-Chinese border until the final days of W.W.II and enabled the Kremlin to later immediately transfer some 250,000 seasoned troops from the Far East westward to battle the invading Germans.

Soon, Konoye, the victim of a near-fatal assassination attempt, was forced out as premier in the early fall of 1941 and replaced by the pro-German, openly aggressive General Tojo Hideki. The Japanese militarists were now fully in control of events and cared little about negotiating with the USA or anyone else. The stage was being set in Washington, Moscow and Tokyo for the US-Japan war that Moscow had wanted since the 1920s. All that remained was to drag the USA into World War II, which FDR, Churchill and friends failed to do with Germany after numerous provocations but successfully did with Japan at Pearl Harbor.

On Nov. 18, 1941, Secretary Morgenthau sent to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a long memorandum drafted by Assistant Secretary White describing US terms for peace with Japan. These terms were so severe that White and Currie knew Japan would never accept them. Japanese Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, one of the most moderate members of the Japanese government, recalled after receiving the Morgenthau-White-Hull memo, “I was utterly disheartened, and felt like one groping in darkness. The uncompromising tone was no more than I had looked for; but I was greatly astonished at the extreme nature of the contents.”

An aide to Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Vice Admiral Francis Beatty, revealed in 1954:

“Prior to December 7th, it was evident even to me… that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they thought the Allies could not win without us and our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed. The conditions we imposed upon Japan – to get out of China, for example – were so severe that we knew that that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way – and we knew their overall import – pointed that way.”

Exactly a week after this memo was issued, FDR’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, wrote in his diary some two weeks before Pearl Harbor, recalling a cabinet meeting discussing the problems with Japan. He wrote:

“There the President…brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese. He brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked, perhaps [as soon as] next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning and the question was what should we do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

Sir Oliver Lylleton, Churchill’s war production minister, knew all of Churchill’s and FDR’s plans and decisions to force the USA into the war. In a June 20, 1944 speech to members of the American Chamber of Commerce in London, he stated:

“America provoked Japan to such an extent that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history, even to say that America was forced into the war.”

Moreover, there was a persistent undercurrent of fear in the Kremlin that Great Britain would make a separate peace with Germany. These fears were intensified after Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess’s mysterious May 1941 solo flight to Scotland supposedly to meet secretly with the Duke of Hamilton, (six weeks before the German invasion of the USSR) but Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor seven months after Hess’s inexplicable odyssey, among other things, helped scuttle any chances of a separate Berlin-London peace treaty, another major benefit to Moscow.

Even after Pearl Harbor, Joseph Grew, by then Undersecretary of State for Asian Affairs, still hoped for some kind of negotiated settlement:

“At the same time I believe that it is important that we bear in mind that the defeat of Japanese aggression does not necessarily entail, as many Chinese think, our crushing Japan militarily. The complete elimination of Japan as a force in the Far East would not be conducive either to order or prosperity in this area.”

Well, we certainly crushed Japan militarily, finally finishing the job with two atomic bombs in August 1945. What did we get for it all? Scores of GIs killed from Oahu to Okinawa, billions of postwar taxpayer dollars spent rebuilding a completely wrecked and humiliated Japan, keeping it militarily weak in the face of an appallingly genocidal and increasingly assertive Red China with both nations eventually becoming the USA’s fiercest foreign economic competitors.

Barely eight years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the USA wound up with some 33,000 US dead in a still divided and tense Korea, and some two decades after that, 58,000 troops killed in a still Communist Indochina – the last courtesy of a fruitless eight-year conflict (which some have called the US version of the Boer War) that severely damaged US social, economic and political institutions. We then were treated to Pol Pot’s notoriously barbaric Cambodian “Killing Fields,” scads of desperate Vietnamese “boat people,” thousands of US troops and a string of warships permanently deployed in the Far East, and, finally, Chinese Long March ICBMs aimed at the US West Coast.

All to avenge the loathsome FDR and his pro-Soviet disciples’ self-serving and cleverly premeditated “day of infamy” and to fulfill the bloodthirsty Josef Stalin’s totalitarian fantasies. Well, hey, winning is everything, right, sports fans?

But what did we win?

Originally posted at EnterStageRight.com.

Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5 -Guardian.co.uk

Benito Mussolini was paid £100 a week by MI5 to keep Italy in the first world war. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce’s CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.

Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.

For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. He was also willing to send in the boys to “persuade” peace protesters to stay at home.

Mussolini’s payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5′s man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy at the time.

Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: “Britain’s least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia’s pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today.”

Hoare, later to become Lord Templewood, mentioned the recruitment in memoirs in 1954, but Martland stumbled on details of the payments for the first time while scouring Hoare’s papers.

As well as keeping the presses rolling at Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper he edited, Mussolini also told Hoare he would send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.

“The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the £4m Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash,” said Martland.

“I have no evidence to prove it, but I suspect that Mussolini, who was a noted womaniser, also spent a good deal of the money on his mistresses.”

After the armistice, Mussolini began his rise to power, assisted by electoral fraud and blackshirt violence, establishing a fascist dictorship by the mid-1920s.

His colonial ambitions in Africa brought him into contact with his old paymaster again in 1935. Now the British foreign secretary, Hoare signed the Hoare-Laval pact, which gave Italy control over Abyssinia.

“There is no reason to believe the two men were friends, although Hoare did have an enduring love affair with Italy,” said Martland, whose research is included in Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, which was published last week.

The unpopularity of the Hoare-Laval pact in Britain forced Hoare to resign. Mussolini, meanwhile, built on his new colonial clout to ally with Hitler, entering the second world war in 1940, this time to fight against the allies.

Deposed following the allied invasion of Italy in 1943, Mussolini was killed with his mistress, Clara Petacci, by Italian partisans while fleeing Italy in an attempt to reach Switzerland two years later.

Martland said: “Mussolini ended his life hung upside down in Milan, but history has not been kind to Hoare either, condemned as an appeaser of fascism alongside Neville Chamberlain.”

by Robert Higgs

September 1, 1939—exactly seventy years ago today [time of original publication]—is customarily considered the day when World War II began, owing to the German invasion of Poland. Of course, some belligerents, most notably the Japanese and the Chinese, had already been at war for years, and others did not join the fray until later. The United States actually began to participate in the war almost immediately, but its participation remained for the most part covert until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

I was born in the midst of this terrible event, and all my life, whenever anyone referred to “the war,” I have assumed, as most Americans have, that the reference was to World War II. It was the largest and the most horrible of all wars, although, sad to say, it no more proved to be “the war to end war” than its predecessor (1914-18) had been. In many ways the two world wars are best understood as two phases of a single conflict, although the matter is much more complicated than that formulation might suggest.

No one knows with much confidence how many people died as a result of the war. Estimates range widely, from a low of about 50 million to a high of nearly 80 million. Perhaps two-thirds of the dead were civilians. Countless others were wounded or harmed in various ways, as by malnutrition. Millions were spiritually scarred for life. The war was very productive of nightmares that, for some individuals, recurred for decades. After all that had taken place between 1939 and 1945, it was difficult to believe that the human beings of the mid-twentieth century, many of whom had regarded themselves as civilized, were any better than their savage ancestors of ten thousand years ago.

Yet, oddly enough, World War II has developed a reputation in this country as “the Good War”—an unfortunate turn of phrase, if ever there was one. The war is taken to have been good primarily because (1) the Allied side is believed to have represented the morally virtuous side, in opposition to the manifestly evil Axis side; (2) it got the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression; and (3) it left the world a better place, mainly because of Nazi Germany’s defeat.

For me, these ideas fall under the rubric of myth. I am not saying that no good came of the war, because obviously some did. As much as anyone, I believe that the destruction of the Nazi regime in Germany was a splendid thing for the human race. But every good end must be weighed against the means by which it was achieved, and in this perspective the war’s positive achievements take on a sickly pallor.

In this war, the belligerents plumbed new depths of depravity: operation of mass-destruction death camps, torture of every conceivable kind, terror bombing and other attacks systematically aimed at civilian populations, crowned by the gratuitous atomic bombing of two large, defenseless cities. I am aware that some people still defend some of these heinous actions, but in my mind nothing the war achieved can justify them. Indeed, I seriously doubt that anything can justify them. Yet such wanton, barbaric cruelties were deeply woven into the fabric of the war’s conduct from its earliest days. One is scarcely engaging in moral equivalence if one concludes that neither side represented “the good guys.” There was plenty of evil to go around.

I have been combatting for decades the widely believed notion that the war got the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. For readers who still labor under this misconception, I recommend the first five chapters of a book called Depression, War, and Cold War.

Finally, the idea that the war left the world a better place seems to me unacceptable as a flat, unqualified statement. Yes, the defeat of Hitler’s regime was an excellent outcome—may such utter beastliness never dare to show its face again. But over large parts of the territory where Hitler’s troops had reigned supreme in the early 1940s, Stalin’s troops reigned supreme from 1945 to 1989. It is difficult to count Stalin as anything less than first-rate in the category of monstrous tyrants. Yet, if the war had a clear political winner, it was he. Moreover, he and the evil Soviet regime that carried on after his death wreaked massive human and material destruction over a wide swath. Similarly in the East, the defeat of Imperial Japan counts as a positive accomplishment. But that defeat removed a bulwark against Communism’s expansion and ultimate victory in China, and like the eastern Europeans held under Stalin’s sway, the Chinese were to pay a terrible price—the major political consequence of Japan’s defeat on the mainland of Asia.

World War II is an immense subject. Thousands of books have been written about it from almost every conceivable angle, and thousands more books will probably be written in years to come. The complexities being so great, nearly everything one might say about it cries out for qualification and clarification. Nevertheless, I am willing to assert that in important regards the prevailing American view of the war rests on a foundation of myths. The entire enterprise of understanding the war needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

by Robert Higgs (Aug. 23)

When American students learn about World War II, they are usually taught that it began on September 1, 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland. They do not get much instruction about the Treaty of Non-Aggression between the Third German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, better known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (after the foreign ministers of the two countries), signed early on August 24, 1939, but dated August 23.  By this agreement, each side promised to remain neutral in the event that the other were attacked by a third party.

A key feature of the agreeement, however, was the secret protocols that accompanied it, by which the USSR and Germany divided eastern and central Europe into “spheres of influence” and provided that each side might occupy its sphere should “territorial and political rearrangements” be made in these areas.  In other words, they agreed on a plan for carving up the entire area between the USSR and Germany as their borders existed at that time.

Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland, the Russians invaded from the other side and quickly occupied the Polish territories identified as the Soviet sphere of influence in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Afterward, the two sides cooperated economically and militarily in subduing the Poles and in supplying one another with various raw materials and manufactured goods, including military arms and equipment, as well as plans for weapons.

The pact, which came as a great surprise to almost everyone, created a potentially huge embarrassment for the many Soviet sympathizers in the West, including those in the United States, who had worked tirelessly for years to move public opinion against the fascists in general and Germany in particular. But, like the mindless marionettes they were, they missed not a beat, switching virtually overnight to praise for Stalin’s efforts to promote world peace and opposing war against Hitler.

Further potential for embarrassment arose in June 1941, when, notwithstanding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Disdaining embarrassment, the Roosevelt administration immediately embraced the mass murderers in Moscow and maintained them in a tight embrace for the balance of the war. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

by John Hooper, Guardian.co.uk

Germany’s most notorious postwar neo-Nazi party was led by an intelligence agent working for the British, according to both published and unpublished German sources.

The alleged agent – the late Adolf von Thadden – came closer than anyone to giving the far-right real influence over postwar German politics.

Under his leadership, the National Democratic party (NPD) made a string of impressive showings in regional elections in the late 60s, and there were widespread fears that it would gain representation in the federal parliament.

Yet, according to a report earlier this year in the Cologne daily, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the man dubbed “the New Führer” was working for British intelligence throughout the four years he led the NPD, from 1967 to 1971.

However, a former senior officer in German intelligence told the Guardian this week that he had been informed of a much longer-standing link between Von Thadden and British intelligence. His recollection raises the question of whether the German far-right-winger was under the sway of M16 when he and others founded the NPD in 1964.

Dr Hans Josef Horchem, who was the head of the Hamburg office of the Verfassungsschutz – the West German security service – from 1969 to 1981, said he received regular visits from British intelligence liaison officers.

“We held general discussions on security. At one of these – I think it was towards the end of the 70s- they said, ‘Adolf von Thadden was in contact with us’, and that that was in the 1950s”. Mr Horchem did not know whether the links between the German and British intelligence had continued into the 60s and 70s.

According to the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, whose report passed virtually unnoticed when it was published, the neo-Nazi leader met his British contact at a hotel in Hamburg.

Germany’s government is currently trying to ban the NPD on the basis that its policies violate the constitution.

But the government’s case is in danger of collapse after the disclosure that some senior NPD members were agents of the Verfassungsschutz. This has sparked debate about the extent to which counter-intelligence officers were sustaining the far right in their efforts to monitor it. Similar issues arise in Von Thadden’s case.

The question also arises of whether MI6 was seeking help from the neo-Nazi movement when far-left militancy was sweeping Europe after the uprising of May 1968 in Paris.

Von Thadden left the NPD in 1975, and died at the age of 75 in 1996.

His younger sister, Barbara Fox von Thadden, said she had had no reason to suspect her brother worked for British intelligence. But she added that they had very different political views and steered away from political discussion.

They had an English grandmother, and Ms Fox von Thadden said her brother “did like coming to Britain, and did like Britain very much”.