From Whose Togas I Dangle
A Gallery of Heroes
The Public Stake In Revisionism
Harry Elmer Barnes
Every American
citizen has much more at stake in understanding how and why the U.S. was
drawn into World War II than in perusing the Warren Report, its
supplementary volumes, and the controversial articles and books of the
aftermath, or the annals of any isolated public crime, however dramatic.
However
tragic and regrettable, the assassination of President Kennedy was a
relatively simple crime as compared to perhaps the most lethal and
complicated public crime of modern times, our entry into World War II.
This resulted in the immediate loss of over thirty million lives, an
ultimate cost of more than fifteen trillion dollars, incredible
suffering, and a military-scientific-technological-industrial aftermath
which may wipe out the human race; and the concomitant result: a
conditioned outlook whereby millions favor war—exerted externally upon a
foreign "enemy" and internally upon the taxpayers—as
the means to insure peace.
Do
we need more books to vindicate revisionism?
Although a
formidable array of evidence has been amassed and offered by Revisionist
scholars as to our involvement in World War II, this evidence has not
been fully recognized or generally understood. Writing in 1965, Richard
J. Whalen. author of the brilliant The Founding Father,
stated:[1]
In the twentieth
year after the end of World War II, we still do not have an unsparingly
truthful, solidly authoritative account of how and why the United States
was drawn into World War II. And it is becoming doubtful that we will
ever have it.
The
reasons are many: World War II was the liberals' war and they are
understandably determined to uphold their version of its origins with
all the formidable political and intellectual resources at their
command. There is also our necessary preoccupation with the successor
struggle now centered on Southeast Asia; with so much to comprehend here
and now, a searching look backward at our tragic line of march seems
almost a luxury we can ill afford. But most important of all. we are
losing our hope of the truth about the central experience of our time
simply because time is passing.
Research
is a young man's occupation, particularly the kind of relentless inquiry
required to uncover and piece together information that powerful vested
interests wish to conceal. Unfortunately, those under forty who are
researching and writing history for the next generation with rare
exceptions have accepted the "explanation" of World War II provided by
folklore and orthodox scholarship. The dissenters—the
Revisionist historians—have
not been able to reach the generation that has come of age since the
war; the latter are scarcely aware that another side of the story
exists.
Twenty
years after Versailles, the situation was entirely different. The tidal
wave of disillusionment that swept through the West brought a flood of
scholarly and popular books debunking the official history of the war.
Revisionism became an integral part of the dominant liberalism of the
period. But the younger journalists and historians who revolted against
their elders following the first World War have, in the years since the
last war, succeeded brilliantly in forestalling a like revolt against
themselves. And so we have missed the debunking generation, and the
question is whether we can somehow stimulate a ferocious curiosity in
the next. The odds are heavily against it . . . .
The
Revisionists . . . must exert themselves to produce truly arresting and
provocative studies within a framework geared to a new era and a new
audience, works that will thrust deep into the public consciousness and
at last wrench open a prematurely closed subject of paramount
importance.
While agreeing, in general, with Mr.
Whalen's informed and judicious appraisal of the Revisionist situation,
I would bluntly, if amiably, question his assertion that in two decades
after V-J Day "we still do not have an unsparingly truthful, solidly
authoritative account of how and why the United States was drawn into
World War II," unless he demands absolute perfection, which was not
attained by any Revisionist book written after World War I. Since I am
probably more familiar than any other person, living or dead, with the
Revisionist literature on the causes of both world wars and our entry
into them, I would say that we have actually been especially fortunate
in the number and quality of the Revisionist books which have appeared
on this subject since V-J Day—more
and better books than were published on our entry into the first World
War in the same period of time. Although we should always welcome new
and possibly better books on the subject, we have no more pressing need
of another comprehensive and readable book on the causes of American
entry into the second World War than we have of another good biography
of Joseph P. Kennedy, now that Mr. Whalen has supplied us with an
absorbing and masterly treatment of this subject.
By 1948, we had
Charles Austin Beard's two magisterial volumes on the causes of our
entry into the war, carrying the story right down into Pearl Harbor and
the comprehensive book by George Morgenstern on Pearl Harbor, which is
surely the outstanding tour de force in the Revisionist literature of
either world war and has not been discredited on any essential matters,
despite the extensively subsidized, widely publicized, and lavishly
praised efforts of Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison and Roberta Wohlstetter.
By
1950, we had William H. Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade,
which matched for reliable information and brilliance of style Walter
Millis' widely read Road to War that told the same story relative
to our first crusade. In 1951, Frederic R. Sanborn's very able and
scholarly book, Design for War, was published, but it was
destined to become the most unfortunately ignored Revisionist book on
our entry into the second World War, despite its impressive scholarship,
its lucid style, and the distinction of the author. It did not get even
a book note in the American Historical Review.
By
1953, we had two additional books which qualified even more impressively
for supplying the lacuna regretted by Mr. Whalen, Charles Callan
Tansill's Back Door to War (1952), and the book I edited on
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (1953).
Tansill's
America Goes to War (1938) was the first exhaustively scholarly
work on how we were drawn into the first World War, and this did not
appear until two decades after the Armistice of 1918. It was praised in
the Yale Review of June 1938, in the following lyrical fashion by
no less than Professor Henry Steele Commager, a participant in the
historical blackout on World War II Revisionism: "It is critical,
searching, and judicious...a style that is always vigorous and sometimes
brilliant. It is the most valuable contribution to the history of the
prewar years in our literature, and one of the most notable achievements
of historical scholarship of this generation."
In my opinion,
Back Door to War is equally brilliant and reliable, and is an even
more useful book in that it also provides an account of the causes of
the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 almost as comprehensive as A. J.
P. Taylor's Origins of the Second World War, and based on more
thorough documentation. That the latter book brought so much
consternation to American readers nearly a decade later, only underlines
the manner in which Tansill's invaluable labors had been missed by the
literate American public and brushed aside by the rank and file of
professional historians.
The difference in
the reception of Tansill's two books was almost entirely due to the
change in the climate of historical and public opinion, an impressive
example of historical "relativism." America Goes to War appeared
at the moment of the maximum triumph of Revisionist literature on World
War I; Back Door came out when the blackout against World War II
Revisionism was already getting organized and solidified. The fact that
Back Door had a relatively large sale for a book of its nature
was due in part to an intensive and expensive promotional campaign but
perhaps even more to the fact that historians and publicists had not
fully realized the actual nature, force, and implications of World War
II Revisionism until they had read the Tansill volume. Thereupon, they
rallied to the colors that had been hoisted and waved by Admiral Morison
and lesser lights in the historical profession, the historical blackout
was intensified and congealed, and it has never let up since. Further
academic use of Back Door was discouraged, and a considerable
portion of a later edition was sold at remainder prices.
A book that
probably qualified even more perfectly for filling the gap mentioned by
Mr. Whalen was Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. It is doubtful
if there will ever be a better work written for this purpose. Subsequent
research in this field gives no indication that any fundamental changes
will be needed in the essential phases of the narrative, and the minor
ones required will be more than offset by the reduced familiarity of
future authors with the times, of which the authors of Perpetual War
were highly intelligent, informed, and favored witnesses. Moreover,
it combined and exploited the knowledge and ability of the leading
American Revisionists of that day save for Beard, who had already passed
away. The book was extremely well written throughout and rather more
readable than most books of its nature and intent. Yet, despite vigorous
promotional efforts, the book was a pathetic publishing flop. Not more
than half of the modest first printing was sold, and the remainder were
purchased by one of the richest Americans for fifty cents a copy to
distribute to grass-roots fundamentalists!
Instructive of an
increasingly popular trend in reviewing by anti-Revisionists, namely,
the tendency to evade the facts well established by Revisionist writers,
was the review of the book by Bernard C. Cohen of Princeton University
in the American Political Science Review, December, 1954. Cohen
led off his review with the statement: "This is an unpleasant book to
read." This set the tone of the whole review, which failed to come to
grips with the facts presented in the book.
The
content and challenge of the Tansill book had pulled the blackout
contingent together into speedy action by the time that Perpetual War
reached the market, and by 1954 it was obvious that a book or even more
books were not the main answer to public enlightenment on the causes and
results of our entry into the second World War. A number of other good
books have appeared since that time, but this is not the place to
provide a bibliography of World War II Revisionism. [2]
The
essence of the matter is that the historical profession has rallied and
fully exploited the suggestion of Samuel Flagg Bemis in 1947 that books
like Morgenstern's, which place guilt on President Roosevelt, are
"serious, unfortunate, deplorable." [3] Writing in the top collaborative
American History series, "the New American Nation," edited by Commager
and Richard B. Morris, Professor Foster Rhea Dulles could state that
"there is no evidence whatsoever to support such charges," as those
advanced by Beard, Morgenstern, Tansill, Admiral Theobald, et al,
relative to Roosevelt's responsibility for the Pearl Harbor surprise,
and Professor A. Russell Buchanan could write a two-volume history of
the United States and the second World War in the same series as though
there had been no World War II Revisionism.
There
is no space here to recount the nature and operation of this historical
blackout relative to World War II Revisionism. I dealt with this
comprehensive and effective operation and the fate of most of the
important Revisionist books down to 1953 in the first chapter of
Perpetual War, and have since brought the story down to date in many
articles, brochures, and reviews.[4]
The
public is insulated from even readable revisionist books
The Revisionist
books by Beard and Morgenstern were "loners" with which I had nothing to
do except to welcome and commend them, and I first saw the Sanborn book
in proofs and could do not more than to approve its publication and do
what I could do to assist in its promotion, which was lamentably
unsuccessful, despite the sound scholarship and great merit of the book.
The first book I
arranged for was that of Mr. Chamberlin and it was designed to perform
precisely the function that Mr. Whalen so eloquently pleads for in his
final sentence. The author lived up very satisfactorily to our
expectations. It would be difficult to envisage a book better designed
to reach the literate public and induce them to reconsider the
propaganda that led us into and through the second World War. If any
book could "thrust deep into the public consciousness and wrench open a
prematurely closed subject of paramount importance," America's Second
Crusade should have done so, but even at this early date (1950) the
blackout, stemming from wartime propaganda, was too rigid and well
organized to permit this much-needed service.
Chamberlin's
sound, reliable, and very readable volume sold less than ten thousand
copies despite vigorous promotion, and six months after it appeared the
publisher discovered that there was not a copy in the New York Public Library
or in any of its forty-five branches. It was ignored by most of the
important periodicals, was smeared by most of the newspapers that
reviewed it, and historians, students and faculty alike, were protected
from it by the fact that it did not even rate a book note, to say
nothing of a review, in the American Historical Review. It was
quite apparent that the times were not ready for a book like Millis'
best-selling Road to War on our entry into the first World War,
and the American public is far less attuned to one now than fifteen
years ago. Mr. Regnery has reissued the Chamberlin book in an unusually
attractive and economical paperback, but there is no evidence after
several years that it has pressed Candy, Fanny Hill, or
The Boston Strangler in reader demand.
The
experience with several other brief and highly readable books further
confirmed the difficulty of gaining any marked public response to
Revisionist literature, even with the aid of unusual publicity. A basic
Revisionist book, Popular Diplomacy and War, by Sisley
Huddleston, a world-famous journalist and publicist, one of the best
writers of the era, and long popular with American liberal journals, had
the benefit of two very adulatory lead editorials in issues of the
Saturday Evening Post, 18 December 1964, and 8 January 1965,
potentially calling the book to the attention of more than ten million
readers, counting subscribers, newsstand purchasers, and their families
and friends. The publisher of the Huddleston book told me that he could
not attribute a sale of more than a hundred copies specifically to these
supposedly awesome editorials.
Writing revisionist books for the record
The question
therefore inevitably arose as to sensible procedure in planning further
Revisionist books. It was evident that little general excitement could
be stirred by them, even when clearly and brilliantly written, although
there was greater need for such public concern with Revisionist material
than back in the days of my Genesis of the World War (1926) and
Hartley Grattan's Why We Fought (1930). If we could not interest,
to say nothing of arousing and exciting the
public, we could at least write for the historical record, in the hope
that Clio might ultimately escape from the embraces of what Captain
Russell Grenfell has so colorfully called "the historical Gadarenes." It
may be admitted that this writing for the record is a long shot, and
that there is much to be said for Mr. Whalen's assertion that time may
not be on the side of Revisionism. Yet, it is certain that if time will
not serve World War II Revisionism, nothing is on its side. There is
little prospect of any immediate triumph.
The foremost
product thus far of Revisionist writing produced primarily for the
record is James J. Martin's American Liberalism and World Politics,
1931-1941 (1964). While the book is no literary Paul Revere, likely
to arouse the countryside to the menace of the historical blackout, it
is a monument of careful research and assembles massive and relevant
documentation that could surely provide a vast amount of fuel for future
firebrands, if any should arise to ride or write. Moreover, as Felix
Morley put it, the book "is written with a wit and pleasant phrasing
which all too seldom spice the stodgy puddings of extensive research."
The reaction to
the Martin book amply demonstrated that the literate anti-Revisionist
and non-Revisionist public was not yet ready even for history written
for the record, and at the same time underlined the need for such
material if there is to be any hope for the ultimate triumph of
Revisionism.
Among the
newspapers, the New York Times followed their pattern of many
years, despite my personal appeal to the editor of the book review
section to give the book adequate if critical attention. They gave it to
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and he did his usual artistic job on it,
carefully evading the facts. He questioned only one specific fact,
namely, whether the word "thusly" has lexicographical authenticity, and
even on this matter Martin was right.
As was to be
expected, the only favorable comments in important newspapers that came
to my attention were in those that had favored our non-intervention
before Pearl Harbor and had espoused Revisionism after the war. The New
York Daily News praised it on 23 February 1965 in what was for
them a long editorial, on the ground that it was needed as an effective
rebuke to the liberals who had dominated American public opinion far too
long. The book was very compactly and effectively reviewed by William
Henry Chamberlin in the Chicago Tribune on 4 April. He commended
the key burden of the book, namely, that the liberals had emphasized, if
not exaggerated, the threat of national socialism and fascism to
democratic institutions while neglecting the equal menace of communist
ideology and methods. Walter Trohan praised the book in his Tribune
column for its effective revelation of the ideals and methods of the
liberal commentators. Unfortunately, this conservative and Revisionist
approval did not encourage many of the over three million readers of the
Daily News and Tribune to purchase the book and document
their sentiments.
Among the
journals, it would have been expected that the Nation and New
Republic would give the Martin book extensive attention, if only to
condemn it, since Martin had based much of his record of the liberal
flip-flop from peace to war upon contributions to these two magazines.
He had given his reasons for this procedure at the outset in complete
and convincing manner. So far as I could detect, neither magazine gave
the Martin book any notice, thus validating Chamberlin's conclusion that
Martin "probably knows more about the New Republic and Nation
during the pre-war decade than their present editors."
But Carey
McWilliams, the present editor of the Nation, moved over to the
lively liberal journal of Los Angeles, Frontier, to administer a
lengthy smear under the fantastic title, "Mumbo Jumbo: the Fantasy World
of the Far Right," although he knew, or should have known, that Martin
was as critical of the far right fantasies as McWilliams, himself. He
devoted the core of his criticism to pooh-poohing Martin's emphasis on
the importance of the Nation and New Republic, although
the reasons for Martin's doing so were indicated at length in the
opening portion of the book. This was a distinction which these journals
were only too proud to claim throughout the decade of the 1930's. He
wound up with a concluding smear to the effect that the book had been
produced in part as a result of a grant by a foundation known for its
assistance to the writing of Revisionist books. He could hardly have
expected it to be aided by the Rockefeller Foundation, which financed
the colossal Langer and Gleason whitewash of Roosevelt's foreign policy
during this period, or the Rand Corporation, which backed the
Wohlstetter book.
Richard
Whalen reviewed the book fairly in the National Review, although
he was skeptical of writing mainly for the record and stressed, as was
noted at the outset of this article, the need for a brief and clear
account of how the United States got into the second World War. He fully
recognized the research and scholarship involved in producing the book.
The best review
typically expressing the reaction of interventionist liberals was that
by Professor Paul F. Boller in the Southwest Quarterly, summer,
1965. He sought to read into Martin's book the assumption that the
author held that fascism is to be preferred to communism, although
Martin expressed no such opinion. He merely recounted the attitudes and
opinions of the liberals who performed the flip-flop, which did indicate
their apparent preference for communism, or at least their failure to be
conscious of its threat to peace and the democratic way of life. But
Boller did not write off the importance of Revisionism as a means of
promoting peace, and he did give the book the extended consideration
that its research and scholarship deserved. The review was about the
best that could be expected from a wounded liberal ideologist.
Far
the best review was that by the distinguished publicist and educator,
Felix Morley, in the Modern Age, summer, 1965. Morley described
what Martin actually wrote, indicated its import for understanding the
past and dealing with the future of world affairs, analyzed the amazing
liberal flip-flop and its importance in producing the rise of the war
spirit, and intelligently evaluated the significance of the book.
Recognizing the historical importance of a full treatment for the
record, he also agreed with Whalen as to the need for a condensed
version and urged the preparation of a paperback edition which would
provide this and thus make possible a wide circulation of the book.
Morley properly called attention to the danger that the cold warriors of
today may be providing a flip-flop comparable to that of the liberals in
the 1930's through the conservative shifting from nonintervention into
an increasing obsession with the dangers of communism, a point of view
also stressed by Herbert C. Roseman in his excellent review of the
Martin book in the Rampart Journal, summer, 1965.
From
the standpoint of historical scholarship, the most disheartening episode
connected with the publication of the Martin book was the manner in
which the book was handled by the foremost historical journal in the
country, the American Historical Review, January, 1966. Taking
for granted the unremitting anti-Revisionist policy of the Review
for virtually a quarter of a century, one would have expected an
unfavorable review and could even have respected such consistency. But
here was a book which actually constituted one of the most scholarly,
informing, and impressive contributions to the history of political
policy, journalistic methods, and international affairs made during the
present century. It surely deserved at least a two-page review, however
bitterly attacked, provided that substantial explanations were given for
the criticism, as Professor Boiler did give. Instead, the book was
handed over to Professor Robert H. Ferrell of Indiana University, well
known as an inveterate anti-Revisionist. The book was given summary
treatment, the quality of which is apparent from his appraisal of the
book as "an impossible goulash" and a "scholarly disaster." All this was
in faithful accord with the traditional historical blackout. But the
half-page "review" also indicated the growing acceptance of the
Germanophobia of the historical smotherout by describing the National
Socialist regime as "the most amoral government since the statistically
clouded time of Genghis Khan." At least, the treatment of the Martin
book by Ferrell presented an instructive synthesis of the main items in
the current equipment and techniques of anti-Revisionist historical
opinion today; the historical blackout, the smotherout, and making the
test of acceptable historical prose whether it constitutes pleasant
reading for approved historians and their brainwashed public.
The
review also carried with it an ironical aftermath. Professor Martin
wrote the editor a sprightly but courteous letter of protest about the
Ferrell review, but received a reply which feigned shock, indicated that
the letter was in bad taste, and implied that it could not be remotely
considered for publication. It was not.
The allergy of
most of the professional historians to the Martin book is easy to
understand. By the time that the book appeared, the most generally
accepted test of the worth and acceptability of a historical book of a
controversial nature had become the question of whether or not it made
pleasant reading to the historical guild. Since the latter was made up
primarily of liberals who were war-minded in the late 1930's, or had
been brainwashed later on, there is little doubt that the Martin book
provided about the most unpleasant reading contained in any book
published in this generation.
Some of us who
went through this struggle against the war groups in the 1930's, such as
Charles Austin Beard, Norman Thomas, Stuart Chase, General Charles
Lindbergh, Edwin M. Borchard, John Chamberlain, John Flynn, Edmund
Wilson, Sidney Hertzberg, Frank Hanighen, Jerome Frank, Quincy Howe,
Hartley Grattan, Frank Chodorov, Oswald G. Villard, Marquis W. Childs,
Selden Rodman, Burton Roscoe, Fred Rodell, Maurice Hallgren, Hubert
Herring, George R. Leighton, Ernest L. Mayer, Dorothy D. Bromley, and
the like, have known the facts by personal experience. But not even
participants can know the whole story unless they have read the Martin
book, and every American has much at stake in reading and digesting it.
To revert to the title of John Kenneth Turner's pioneer work on World
War I, Shall It Be Again?, the issue of whether the unparalleled
public crime of the latter half of the 1930's shall be repeated may well
hold within itself the destiny of the human race.
The
historical blackout is replaced by the historical smotherout
For Revisionism
to entice and instruct the newly matured generation, as suggested by Mr.
Whalen, is, indeed, an exciting enterprise and might prove a very
fruitful possibility to explore were it not for a crucial recent shift
in the strategy of anti-Revisionism which seems to be rather generally
unrecognized even by some of the veteran proponents of Revisionism,
although they are virtually buried under evidence of the change by the
material constantly presented by every communications agency in the
country.
For some fifteen
years after V-J Day, the opponents of World War II Revisionism were
content to oppose Revisionist scholarship and publication by giving
books the silent treatment, or smearing authors and books and belittling
Revisionist scholarship. Despite such unfair procedure and the handicaps
it imposed on World War II Revisionism, the Revisionists in time won the
battle of factual demonstration hands down. Moreover, it was recognized
that the traditional procedure of sniping, smearing, misrepresentation,
and distortion in attacking traditional Revisionist works was becoming
tedious, repetitive, frenetic, and often self-defeating in its fervor
and misrepresentation, as was so well demonstrated by the review of the
Martin book in the New York Times of 25 April 1965, by Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr. Hence, it was gradually but effectively decided to
jockey the techniques of the historical blackout around into such a
pattern that all but the most courageous and defiant Revisionists could
be "shut up" entirely and rapidly and their products could be made to
appear essentially irrelevant.
It was the
Eichmann trial of 1960 which furnished an unexpected but remarkably
opportune moment and an effective springboard for stopping World War II
Revisionism dead in its tracks. As the courageous Jewish publicist,
Alfred Lilienthal, has shown in his lucid book, The Other Side of the
Coin (pp 104-111), this trial revealed and demonstrated an almost
adolescent gullibility and excitability on the part of Americans
relative to German wartime crimes, real or alleged, and the equally
apparent passionate determination of every type of American
communication agency to exploit the opportunity for financial profit by
placing every shred of both fact and rubbish connected with them before
American readers, hourly and daily, for months, if not years, on end.
Not even the sophisticated Esquire or New Yorker remained
immune.
This revamped
historical blackout, now become the historical "smotherout," is based
chiefly on the fundamental but unproved assumption that what Hitler and
the National Socialists did in the years after Britain and the United
States entered the war revealed that they were such vile, debased,
brutal, and bloodthirsty gangsters that Great Britain had been under an
overwhelmingly moral obligation to plan a war to exterminate them.
Following up this contention it was asserted that the United States was
compelled to enter this conflict to aid and abet the British crusade as
a moral imperative that could not be evaded but was an unavoidable
exercise in political, social, and cultural sanitation.
The fundamental
error in this ex post facto historiography was pointed out by A. J. P.
Taylor in his interview with Professor Eric Goldman in the autumn of
1965. But it is doubtful if one American in a million has ever heard or
read this exchange. Even though he has never attempted to deny the fact
that he is a persistent Germanophobe, the smotherout proved too much for
Taylor to swallow, although he admitted his Germanophobia in the
interview. As Taylor explained to Goldman:
You must
remember that these gas chambers came very late. People often talk as
though they were implicit in Hitler's policy from the beginning. They
were, in fact, a reprisal against our British policy of indiscriminate
bombing. Hitler said, again and again, "If you are just going to go
out and rub out German women and children, I'll take care that all the—not
only Jews—but
people of many lower races are rubbed out." And when I consider that
the great powers and governments . . . the American government, the
Soviet government, are now both cheerfully contemplating the
obliteration of ten, twenty million people on the first day of war—you
see gas chambers are nothing in comparison.
All alert and
aware Revisionists should and always have expressed their deep regret
and repugnance over whatever brutalities were actually committed by
Hitler and his government, either before or after 1939, but they have
also called attention to the demonstrable fact that the number of
civilians exterminated by the Allies, before, during, and after the
second World War, equaled, if it did not far exceed, those liquidated by
the Germans, and the Allied liquidation program was often carried out by
methods which were far more brutal and painful than whatever
extermination actually took place in German gas ovens.[6]
These
embarrassing facts are almost invariably suppressed in the same agencies
of communication that are now incessantly portraying the allegedly
unique abominations of the Germans. When pressed into a corner, which is
a very rare opportunity indeed, the new smotherout vintage of
anti-revisionists contend, or at least imply, that it is far worse to
exterminate Jews, even at the ratio of two Gentiles to one Jew, than to
liquidate Gentiles. For Revisionists to controvert this assertion in
behalf of nonpartisan and nonracial humanitarianism exposes them to the
charge of anti-Semitism, which, in the present state of sharply
conditioned and persistently inflamed public opinion, is deemed to be
rather worse than parricide or necrophilia.
No substantial or
credible Revisionist believes that two wrongs can make a right or that
revelation of the actual Allied genocide will solve the problem of
averting future wars. But the recognition that the wartime barbarism was
shared would put the responsibility where it belongs, namely, on the war
system which, as F. J. P. Veale demonstrated so forcibly in his
Advance to Barbarism, is becoming ever more barbarous and lethal. In
a nuclear age, war will, as Taylor pointed out, provide in the course of
its normal operations more hideous destruction of human life than has
ever been alleged in the wildest flights of imagination of the
smotherout addicts. One giant hydrogen bomb dropped over a major urban
center would be likely to obliterate at least six million lives, and in
our eastern seaboard towns hundreds of thousands of the victims would be
Jews.
This
is where World War II Revisionism stands today. It was difficult enough
when Revisionists were merely accused of bias, folly, incompetence, or
all three. To be accused of anti-Semitism today is far more precarious
than to be accused, or even proved, to be guilty of pro-communism.
Interestingly
enough, an attempt is now seeming to be made to push this Germanophobia
back into the causes of the first World War, if we may judge from a long
article on "How We Entered World War I" in the New York Times
Magazine of 5 March 1967, by the brilliant stylist and historical
popularizer, Barbara W, Tuchman, granddaughter of Henry Morgenthau,
whose fanciful "story" played so unfortunate a part in encouraging the
war guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty and thus helped to bring on
the second World War. She had followed in her grandfather's steps by
producing another fanciful story in her book, The Zimmermann Telegram
(1958), which she has been unwise and audacious enough to reissue
recently.
It was the New
York Times Current History Magazine that requested me some
forty-three years ago to summarize the historical facts which dissipated
the myths of wartime propaganda about the first World War, of which
Ambassador Morgenthau's Story was a leading item and had been
devastatingly exposed as a fraud by Professor Sidney B. Fay in the
American Historical Review in 1920. My article was published in
Current History in May, 1924, and first put World War I Revisionism
before the literate American public in an effective manner. Whatever may
have been the purpose of the New York Times in publishing this
article by Mrs. Tuchman, it does raise the question of the reality of
"progress" so far as the historical perspective of the Times is
concerned.
This article has
aroused much indignation on the part of even moderate or dormant
Revisionists but it failed to excite me. In my opinion, Mrs. Tuchman is
the type of writer who, given enough rope, will hang herself, and she
has certainly been taking a lot of rope recently in writing about Wilson
and Freud in the Atlantic (February 1967) with no evident
technical knowledge about either, and even posing as an expert on
historiography in the Saturday Review (25 February 1967) although
expert historians like Klaus M. Epstein, A. J. P. Taylor, and David
Marquand, in reviewing her much publicized The Proud Tower, have
questioned her capacity to write history. In my long review of her book
in The Annals, November 1966, I at least conceded her rare
ability as a popularizer of social history.
More ominous is
the announcement of a book by Alton Frye (Nazi Germany in the
American Hemisphere, 19331941, Yale University Press), sponsored by
the Rand Corporation which launched the much-publicized effort of
Roberta Wohlstetter to blur out essential facts about Pearl Harbor. This
book contends that, after all, Hitler did have designs on the United
States and envisaged plans for invading and occupying this country—reminiscent
of Roosevelt's canard about Hitler's time-table for penetration to Iowa
which figured prominently in the interventionist propaganda prior to
American entry into the war.
In my opinion we
are in more danger from the prospect that to Germanophobia may now be
added a revival of Japanophobia. This trend was latent in the
anti-Revisionist writings on Pearl Harbor by Walter Millis, Herbert Feis,
Langer and Gleason, Robert J. C. Butow, Samuel E. Morison, and Robert H.
Ferrell in their defense of Roosevelt. But it has just now taken a more
definite form in Ladislas Farago's The Broken Seal: The Story of
"Operation Magic" and the Pearl Harbor Disaster (1967), in which the
Japanese efforts to preserve peace by negotiation are presented as a
hypocritical sham to cover up their actual determination on war and to
gain time to prepare for it. A more extended enterprise in this same
vein has been foreshadowed by Gordon W. Prange. We may be on our way to
returning to Admiral Halsey's view of the Japanese as sub-human
anthropoids.
It is quite true
that if they could be exposed to the facts about the causes of the
second World War and our entry on their merits, free from the
all-encompassing and incessant barrage of Germanophobia, notably that
against National Socialist Germany, this generation of his own age to
which Mr. Whalen refers is actually highly vulnerable and receptive.
This I have demonstrated to my own satisfaction through the response to
my lectures before student groups in first-rate American universities
and colleges, and in such articles as those I wrote in Liberation
in the summers of 1958 and 1959, in the New Individualist Review
in the spring of 1962, and in the Rampart Journal, Spring, 1966,
thus covering both the left and right of this new generation.
We can, however,
hardly expect those persons who might be willing to learn, if they had a
fair chance, to withstand the incessant bombardment by our communication
agencies designed to demonstrate that we had a vital moral and
self-protective duty to favor and enter a war fought to rid the world of
a gang of barbarians more dissolute and bloodthirsty than anything
since, or even before, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.
This younger and
brainwashed generation gets into contact with only scattered and tiny
bits of even the traditional Revisionist material, and this at
considerable intervals. But not a day goes by without one or more
sensational articles in the daily papers about the exaggerated National
Socialist savagery which required our entry into the war; the leading
weekly and monthly journals, especially Look and the Saturday
Evening Post, 7 never miss their quota of this lurid prose; the
radio has it on the air daily; expensive moving pictures are devoted to
it; not a week goes by without several inciting television programs
revolving around this propaganda, and sensational books pour forth at
frequent intervals. While reading some of the most repulsive examples of
such smotherout Germanophobia, I noted in the newspapers and journals
pictures of President Johnson apparently posing without a shudder as the
host of the Ethiopian tyrant and genocidal virtuoso, Haile Selassie, who
had previously been invited, or at least permitted, to appear in the
funeral cortege of President Kennedy.
Lest
the public get "fed up" and bored by repetition, the material handed out
to them has to be made more unceasing, exaggerated, and inflammatory.
There should be some limit to this but it certainly is not in sight, as
yet, even though it far exceeds in frequency, volume, and ferocity
anything handed out in wartime, when the public imagination was occupied
in large part by following military operations.
There would
appear to be no restraining memory of the backwash that followed when
the mendacity and exaggerations of the Bryce Report on alleged German
atrocities in the first World War were revealed by Arthur Ponsonby, J.
M. Read, and others. The foremost authority on the subject has estimated
that the number of Jews exterminated by the National Socialists, already
reported by "authorities" cited by the smotherout for all the wartime
German concentration camps, would amount to well over twenty-five
millions. This does not include the upwards of a million allegedly
killed by the German Einsatzgruppe when battling guerrilla
warfare behind the lines. We are now being told (New York Times,
3 November 1966, and Saturday Evening Post, 25 February 1967)
that the Austrians executed about as many Jews as the Germans. With not
more than fifteen to eighteen million Jews in the world to start with in
1939, this is, indeed, a remarkable genocidal achievement, especially if
one considers the logistical problems involved in its execution. The
truth about German operations, if presented along with Allied
brutalities, provides a sufficient indictment without any need for
fantastic exaggerations which open the way for a devastating backwash,
if and when the truth is presented in this or some future generation.
If a Revisionist
work on the second World War were written with a combination of the
scholarship of Sidney Fay and the persuasive stylistic genius of Millis
and Chamberlin, the smotherout answer would be that the impressive facts
of diplomatic history since 1930 which have been adduced and presented
by Revisionists with conviction, force, and vigor are now only
antiquated and irrelevant trivia. What is deemed important today is not
whether Hitler started war in 1939, or whether Roosevelt was responsible
for Pearl Harbor, but the number of prisoners who were allegedly done to
death in the concentration camps operated by Germany during the war.
These camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau,
Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dora, but it was demonstrated
that there had been no systematic extermination in those camps.
Attention was then moved on to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno,
Jonowska, Tarnow, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Brezeznia, and Birkenau,
which does not exhaust the list that appears to have been extended as
needed.
An attempt to
make a competent, objective, and truthful investigation of the
extermination question is now regarded as far more objectionable and
deplorable than Professor Bemis viewed charging Roosevelt with war
responsibility. It is surely the most precarious venture that an
historian or demographer could undertake today; indeed, so "hot" and
dangerous that only a lone French scholar, Paul Rassinier, has made any
serious systematic effort to enter the field, although Taylor obviously
recognizes the need for such work and hints as to where it would lead.
But this vital matter would have to be handled resolutely and thoroughly
in any future World War II Revisionist book that could hope to refute
the new approach and strategy of the blackout and smotherout
contingents.
Even former
ardent Revisionist writers now dodge this responsibility, some even
embracing and embellishing the smotherout. The most conspicuous example
is that of Eugene Davidson, who once had the courage to place in
jeopardy his position as head of the Yale University Press by publishing
Charles Austin Beard's two forthright Revisionist volumes. In his
Death and Life of Germany (1959), Davidson defied Burke's warning
against indicting a nation and proceeded to indict Germany since 1932 on
the basis of the Diary of Anne Frank without even remotely
suggesting any question about its complete authenticity. His recent
The Trial of the Germans: Nuremberg (1966) is providing no end of
aid and comfort to the smotherout contingent, as evident immediately by
the ecstatic review of the book in Newsweek, 9 January 1967.
The Davidson book
is devastatingly reviewed by A. J. P. Taylor in the New York Review
for 23 February 1967. As Taylor puts it: "The hypocrisy of Nuremberg
was revolting enough in 1945. It exceeds all bounds when it is
maintained in 1967, over twenty years afterwards. Mr. Eugene Davidson
has compiled at enormous length a biography of the accused at Nuremberg.
Here they are, from gorgeous Göring down to insignificant Fritzsche, the
radio commentator. The biographies are pretty sketchy, slapdash stuff
hatred up in a flashy style and evidently assuming that any kind of
rubbish is good enough for such scoundrels. It is really rather hard
that the thing should be done so badly. After all these years, there are
some things perhaps worth discussing." The remaining comment on
Nuremberg by Taylor is perhaps the best brief appraisal that has ever
been written of its combination of bias, hypocrisy, and legalized
imbecility. Taylor had previously written in the London Observer:
"It is strange that an English Judge should have been found to preside
over the macabre farce of the Nuremberg Tribunal; and strange that
English lawyers, including the present Lord Chancellor, should have
pleaded before it."
The
treatment of Davidson and Nuremberg by Taylor is part of his analysis of
three books which represent the upper level of the smotherout
literature, and what he has written about them probably required more
courage and integrity than was needed to produce his Origins of the
Second World War. It is the first overt attack made by any
historian, currently highly esteemed, on the smotherout attitudes and
methods, and it may be hoped that it has set a healthy precedent. It is
an invaluable and equally indispensable sequel to his Origins. So long
as the smotherout prevails, Taylor's conclusions in that book about
responsibility for the outbreak of World War II will be passed off as
irrelevant antiquarianism, no matter how accurate.
While
the smotherout deluges us with exaggerated examples of National
Socialist savagery, there is no comparable interest in, or even
knowledge of, the actual Allied barbarities, such as the Churchill-Lindemann
program of saturation bombing of civilians, especially the homes of the
working class, which was as brutal, ruthless, and lethal as anything
alleged against the Germans. As Liddell Hart and others have made clear,
Hitler had honestly sought a ban on all bombing of civilians apart from
the accepted rules of siege warfare. The German bombing of Coventry and
London took place long after Hitler failed to get Britain to consent to
a ban on civilian bombing. The incendiary bombing of Hamburg and Tokyo
and the needless destruction of Dresden are never cogently and frankly
placed over against the doings, real or alleged, at Auschwitz. The
atomizing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely needless to secure
Japanese surrender, are all but forgotten, save when occasionally
defended by former-President Truman or made the basis of a romantic
moving picture.
Little or no
mention is now made of the fifteen million Germans who were expelled
from their eastern provinces, the Sudeten area, and other regions, at
least four millions of them perishing in the process from butchery,
starvation, and disease. This was the "final solution" for defeated
Germans who fell into the hands of the victors and, interestingly
enough, as Ragsinlet has made clear, it was identical with the "final
solution" planned by Hitler and the national Socialists for the Jews, in
the event that Germany won World War II. The smotherout legend
represents the German plan as the extermination of all Jews that the
Germans could lay their hands on. No authentic documents have been
produced that support any such contention. The National Socialist "final
solution" was a plan for the deportation of all Jews in their control at
the end of the war, Madagascar being one place considered. Even if they
had been victorious, the Germans could not have laid hands on more than
half as many Jews as the number of Germans who were deported from their
homelands.
The wholesale
massacre of Polish officers and leaders at the Katyn Forest and
elsewhere by the Russians, the exterminations and expulsions in the
Baltic countries, and the rounding up of some millions of Russian
soldiers and other anti-communist refugees in Germany after the war, to
be turned back with Eisenhower's consent to Stalin for execution or the
even worse enslavement in Russian starvation labor camps, are
conveniently overlooked. Nor is anything said about the fact a Yugoslav
scholar, Mihajlo Mihajlov, has recently, on the basis of Russian
documents, disclosed that at least twelve million Russians passed
through Stalin's concentration camps, with not more than half of them
surviving. The intolerable Morgenthau Plan, approved by President
Roosevelt, which envisaged the starvation of between twenty and thirty
million Germans in the process of turning Germany back into an
agricultural and pastoral nation, has now become no more than a subject
for esoteric economic monographs. Only one adequate and accurate book of
even this type, that by Nicholas Balabkins, Germany Under Direct
Controls (1962), has so far appeared in English, and this has been
unduly neglected or ignored.
Also overlooked
today is the fact that virtually the entire Japanese population of the
Pacific Coast were dragged out of their homes without provocation or the
slightest need from the standpoint of our national security. The recent
able and revealing book of Allan R. Bosworth, American Concentration
Camps (1967), may redirect American and world attention to this
scandalous episode, which was mainly the result of the brainstorm of
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.
The above are a
few of the facts and considerations that would have to be presented with
adequate thoroughness in any World War II Revisionist book which could
hope to counter the current smotherout pattern of anti-Revisionism.
Another obstacle
lies in the fact that, as a result of brainwashing and indoctrination
for a quarter of a century, the American public is not only ignorant of
the facts involved in the smotherout approach but has lost much of the
traditional national self-respect and public pride that controlled its
reactions after the first World War. It remains my well-reasoned
conviction, based on unexcelled experience, that the general acceptance
of Revisionism in the late 1920's and the early 1930's was due more to
public resentment at the "Uncle Shylock" slurs from abroad and the
reneging of our former Allies with respect to the payment of their war
debts than to all the Revisionist writings of the era.
This
once-powerful impulse, arising from national pride, apparently no longer
operates in this country: the American public has by now become
thoroughly immune to the "Yanks Go Home" and comparable ungrateful
epithets of our former Allies, and to the hostility and ingratitude of
those who have taken our more than a hundred billion dollars in foreign
aid and other public largesse since 1945, to say nothing of the previous
lavish wartime aid.
When the
Revisionists, after the first World War, revealed how we had been lied
to by gentlemen in British intelligence and propaganda work, such as Sir
Gilbert Parker, there was a considerable backwash and much public
indignation. When H. Montgomery Hyde published his book, Room 3603,
not only revealing but boasting of how we had been kicked around by Sir
William Stephenson (the "Quiet Canadian") and his British intelligence
goons, even to the extent of trying to break up anti-interventionist
meetings in this country in 1940-1941, there was hardly a ripple. The
book attracted little attention, was usually commended when noticed at
all, and received virtually no shocked condemnation.
When the conflict
was over, the American public warmly supported the exposure of the
anti-German propaganda of the first World War, such as the Bryce Report,
by Mock and Larson and others, but there has been no public or
historical demand for an equally honest and searching investigation of
the far more sweeping and debatable propaganda relative to alleged
German barbarism during the second World War. Even to suggest the
desirability of any such project would place the sponsor in
professional, if not personal jeopardy.
Nor do we get any
assistance or encouragement from the masochistic West Germans who, if
anything, in their own blackout distortions and smotherout exceed the
indictment of wartime Germany by their former enemies. This is the
result of the German self-flagellation and self-immolation, in sharp
contrast to the ardently Revisionist proclivities of the Weimar
Republic. Nevertheless, but perhaps fittingly, the West Germans get
little credit even for this craven attitude. There are surely abundant
reasons why all of us who lived through the barbarities of the second
World War and its aftermath should be ashamed of being members of the
human race but certainly there is no sound basis for any unique German
shame or self-flagellation.
History
relative to the second World War has now become a public propaganda
enterprise rather than a historical problem. It has passed from the
investigation of documents and other traditional historical evidence
into a frenzied public debate over extermination archeology, comparative
biology, clinical pathology, and genocidal ethics, in which only one
side has any decent opportunity to present its arguments and evidence.
This diversified and confused conglomeration of fancy, myth, mendacity,
vindictiveness, and fraudulently unilateral vengeance surely provides no
safeguard against the development, increasing imminence, and destructive
potential of a nuclear holocaust.
About the only
rays of light and hope on the horizon for the moment are byproducts of
the Vietnam War. For the first time in all American history, except for
the Mexican War landgrab, the liberals are not the shock troops of the
warmongers, and many are preponderantly "doves," notably the younger
liberals or the "new left." This has encouraged many of them who, as a
group, have been less subject to the World War II brainwashing, to look
back over their shoulder at liberal bellicosity in the past and examine
its validity more rationally. This has already made many of them
skeptical about the impeccable soundness of interventionist propaganda
and the historical blackout relative to the two world wars of this
century. I have had more reasonably friendly and apparently honest
inquiries about Revisionism in the last two years than in the previous
twenty. This skeptical and inquiring attitude may grow; if so, it would
have little patience with the assumptions, methods, and literature of
the smotherout.
Even
more promising and potentially helpful has been the growth of the
"credibility gap" with reference to the Vietnam War, primarily the gap
between what Charles Austin Beard once designated as "the appearances
and the realities" of administration assertions and assurances about our
official policies in entering, continuing, and escalating the war. This
has especially impressed the liberal doves upon whom we must place our
main hope in exposing and rebuffing the smotherout. Nothing would so
quickly dissolve the smotherout as to apply to its attitudes and
contentions the skeptical implications of the credibility gap. The
smotherout would be hopelessly vulnerable to even a moderate application
of the credibility-gap approach; it could fall apart quickly and
hopelessly. Hence, we may appropriately, if with no premature assurance,
welcome the growth of the credibility gap now being nursed and nourished
by the Vietnam War.
May it grow,
prosper, and dispel the smotherout, but its lessons should not all be
derived from the statements and actions of the Johnson administration.
It should lead those amenable to fact and reason to turn back to the
credibility gap in the pre-war protestations of Wilson and Roosevelt,
the latter being the most voluminous and impressive of all, and to the
credibility gap in Truman's assertions about the necessity of bombing
the Japanese cities and entering the Korean War, which even General
Bradley designated as "the wrong war, in the wrong place, and at the
wrong time." The credibility gap in the position and protestations of
the cold warrior "hawks," as pointed out by D. F. Fleming, John Lukacs,
F. L. Schuman, David Horowitz, Murray N. Rothbard, James J. Martin, and
others, is even more grotesque and fictitious than that of the Johnson
administration relative to Vietnam, but fortunately, it does not as yet
possess full official status and authority.
Hence,
let us hail the credibility gap, whether derived from the doves, the
hawks, the cold warriors, or the Johnson administration and its
predecessors. Its application to the smotherout provides the only hope
on the horizon today of making Revisionism effective in gaining access
to public opinion and policy and thus working for permanent peace.
Endnotes
1.
National Review,
20 April 1965, pp 335-336.
2. See
Select Bibliography of Revisionist Books.
3.
Journal of Modern History,
March 1948, pp 55-59.
4. Especially
in the Rampart Journal, Spring 1966.
5. Broadcast
then over the Goldman "Open Mind" Program, WNBC-TV, and rebroadcast on
the "World Topic" program on 2 January 1967.
6. (Of
course, Barnes is confused here by the difference between a "gas
chamber" and a "gas oven." Shortly after writing this article, he came
to reject the entire Holocaust myth, not just part of it.)
7. Especially
many entries in Look, the latest being 21 March 1967, and in the
Saturday Evening Post, see 22 October 1965