Top 12 Reasons the Good War Was Bad: Hiroshima in Context
Written by davidswanson Tag: Peace and War
. davidswanson's blog
By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune
Consider this a friendly reminder to President Obama on his way to
Hiroshima.
No matter how many years one writes books, does interviews, publishes
columns, and speaks at events, it remains virtually impossible to make it
out the door of an event in the United States at which you've advocated
abolishing war without somebody hitting you with the what-about-the-good-war
question.
Of course this belief that there was a good war 75 years ago is what moves
the U.S. public to tolerate dumping a trillion dollars a year into preparing
in case there's a good war next year, even in the face of so many dozens of
wars during the past 70 years on which there's general consensus that they
were not good. Without rich, well-established myths about World War II,
current propaganda about Russia or Syria or Iraq would sound as crazy to
most people as it sounds to me.
And of course the funding generated by the Good War legend leads to more bad
wars, rather than preventing them.
I've written on this topic at great length in many articles and books,
especially this one. But perhaps it would be helpful to provide a
column-length list of the top reasons that the good war was not good.
1. World War II could not have happened without World War I, without the
stupid manner of starting World War I and the even stupider manner of ending
World War I which led numerous wise people to predict World War II on the
spot, without Wall Street's funding of Nazi Germany for decades (as
preferable to commies), and without the arms race and numerous bad decisions
that do not need to be repeated in the future.
2. The U.S. government was not hit with a surprise attack. President
Franklin Roosevelt had committed to Churchill to provoking Japan and worked
hard to provoke Japan, and knew the attack was coming, and initially drafted
a declaration of war against both Germany and Japan on the evening of Pearl
Harbor -- before which time, FDR had built up bases in the U.S. and multiple
oceans, traded weapons to the Brits for bases, started the draft, created a
list of every Japanese American person in the country, provided planes,
trainers, and pilots to China, imposed harsh sanctions on Japan, and advised
the U.S. military that a war with Japan was beginning.
3. The war was not humanitarian and was not even marketed as such until
after it was over. There was no poster asking you to help Uncle Sam save the
Jews. A ship of Jewish refugees was chased away from Miami by the Coast
Guard. The U.S. and other nations would not allow Jewish refugees in, and
the majority of the U.S. public supported that position. Peace groups that
questioned Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his foreign secretary about
shipping Jews out of Germany to save them were told that Hitler might very
well agree to that but it would be too much trouble and require too many
ships. The U.S. engaged in no diplomatic or military effort to save the
victims in the camps. Anne Frank was denied a U.S. visa.
4. The war was not defensive. FDR lied that he had a map of Nazi plans to
carve up South America, that he had a Nazi plan to eliminate religion, that
U.S. ships actually assisting British war planes were innocently attacked by
Nazis, that Germany was in fact a threat to the United States. A case can be
made that the U.S. needed to enter the war in Europe to defend other
nations, which had entered to defend yet other nations, but a case could
also be made that the U.S. escalated the targeting of civilians, extended
the war, and created more damage than might have been, had it done nothing,
attempted diplomacy, or invested in nonviolence. To claim that a Nazi empire
could have grown to someday include an occupation of the United States is
wildly far fetched and not borne out by any earlier or later examples of
other wars.
5. We now know much more widely and with much more data that nonviolent
resistance to occupation and injustice is more likely to succeed, and that
success more likely to last, than violent resistance. With this knowledge,
we can look back at the stunning successes of nonviolent actions against the
Nazis that were not well organized or built on beyond their initial
successes.
6. The good war was not for supporting the troops. In fact, lacking intense
modern conditioning to prepare soldiers to engage in the unnatural act of
murder, some 80 percent of U.S. and other troops in World War II did not
fire their weapons at the enemies. That those soldiers were treated better
after the war than soldiers in other wars had been, or have been since, was
the result of the pressure created by the Bonus Army after the previous war.
That veterans were given free college was not due to the merits of the war
or in some way a result of the war. Without the war, everyone could have
been given free college for many years. If we provided free college to
everyone today, it would take way more than World War II stories to get
people into military recruiting stations.
7. Several times the number of people killed in German camps were killed
outside of them in the war. The majority of those people were civilians. The
scale of the killing, wounding, and destroying made this war the single
worst thing humanity has ever done to itself in a short space of time. That
it was somehow "opposed" to the far lesser killing in the camps -- although,
again, it actually wasn't -- can't justify the cure that was worse than the
disease.
8. Escalating the war to include the all-out destruction of civilian cities,
culminating in the completely indefensible nuking of cities took this war
out of the realm of defensible projects for many who had defended its
initiation -- and rightly so. Demanding unconditional surrender and seeking
to maximize death and suffering did immense damage and left a legacy that
has continued.
9. Killing huge numbers of people is supposedly defensible for the "good"
side in a war, but not the "bad." The distinction between the two is never
as stark as fantasized. The United States had an apartheid state for African
Americans, camps for Japanese Americans, a tradition of genocide against
Native Americans that inspired Nazis, programs of eugenics and human
experimentation before, during, and after the war (including giving syphilis
to people in Guatemala during the Nuremberg trials). The U.S. military hired
hundreds of top Nazis at the end of the war. They fit right in. The U.S.
aimed for a wider world empire, before the war, during it, and ever since.
10. The "good" side of the "good war," the party that did most of the
killing and dying for the winning side, was the communist Soviet Union. That
doesn't make the war a triumph for communism, but it does tarnish the tales
of triumph for "democracy."
11. World War II still hasn't ended. Ordinary people in the United States
didn't have their incomes taxed until World War II and that's never stopped.
It was supposed to be temporary. The bases have never closed. The troops
have never left Germany or Japan. There are over 100,000 U.S. and British
bombs still in the ground in Germany, still killing.
12. Going back 75 years to a nuclear-free, colonial, world of completely
different structures, laws, and habits to justify what has been the greatest
expense of the United States in each of the years since is a bizarre feat of
self-deception that isn't attempted in the justification of any lesser
enterprise. Assume I've got numbers 1 through 11 totally wrong, and you've
still got to explain how the world of the early 1940s justifies dumping into
2017 wars funding that could have fed, clothed, cured, and environmentally
protected the earth.
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May
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Top 12 Reasons the Good War Was Bad: Hiroshima in Context
Written by davidswanson Tag: Peace and War
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By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune
Consider this a friendly reminder to President Obama on his way to
Hiroshima.
No matter how many years one writes books, does interviews, publishes
columns, and speaks at events, it remains virtually impossible to make it
out the door of an event in the United States at which you've advocated
abolishing war without somebody hitting you with the what-about-the-good-war
question.
Of course this belief that there was a good war 75 years ago is what moves
the U.S. public to tolerate dumping a trillion dollars a year into preparing
in case there's a good war next year, even in the face of so many dozens of
wars during the past 70 years on which there's general consensus that they
were not good. Without rich, well-established myths about World War II,
current propaganda about Russia or Syria or Iraq would sound as crazy to
most people as it sounds to me.
And of course the funding generated by the Good War legend leads to more bad
wars, rather than preventing them.
I've written on this topic at great length in many articles and books,
especially this one. But perhaps it would be helpful to provide a
column-length list of the top reasons that the good war was not good.
1. World War II could not have happened without World War I, without the
stupid manner of starting World War I and the even stupider manner of ending
World War I which led numerous wise people to predict World War II on the
spot, without Wall Street's funding of Nazi Germany for decades (as
preferable to commies), and without the arms race and numerous bad decisions
that do not need to be repeated in the future.
2. The U.S. government was not hit with a surprise attack. President
Franklin Roosevelt had committed to Churchill to provoking Japan and worked
hard to provoke Japan, and knew the attack was coming, and initially drafted
a declaration of war against both Germany and Japan on the evening of Pearl
Harbor -- before which time, FDR had built up bases in the U.S. and multiple
oceans, traded weapons to the Brits for bases, started the draft, created a
list of every Japanese American person in the country, provided planes,
trainers, and pilots to China, imposed harsh sanctions on Japan, and advised
the U.S. military that a war with Japan was beginning.
3. The war was not humanitarian and was not even marketed as such until
after it was over. There was no poster asking you to help Uncle Sam save the
Jews. A ship of Jewish refugees was chased away from Miami by the Coast
Guard. The U.S. and other nations would not allow Jewish refugees in, and
the majority of the U.S. public supported that position. Peace groups that
questioned Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his foreign secretary about
shipping Jews out of Germany to save them were told that Hitler might very
well agree to that but it would be too much trouble and require too many
ships. The U.S. engaged in no diplomatic or military effort to save the
victims in the camps. Anne Frank was denied a U.S. visa.
4. The war was not defensive. FDR lied that he had a map of Nazi plans to
carve up South America, that he had a Nazi plan to eliminate religion, that
U.S. ships actually assisting British war planes were innocently attacked by
Nazis, that Germany was in fact a threat to the United States. A case can be
made that the U.S. needed to enter the war in Europe to defend other
nations, which had entered to defend yet other nations, but a case could
also be made that the U.S. escalated the targeting of civilians, extended
the war, and created more damage than might have been, had it done nothing,
attempted diplomacy, or invested in nonviolence. To claim that a Nazi empire
could have grown to someday include an occupation of the United States is
wildly far fetched and not borne out by any earlier or later examples of
other wars.
5. We now know much more widely and with much more data that nonviolent
resistance to occupation and injustice is more likely to succeed, and that
success more likely to last, than violent resistance. With this knowledge,
we can look back at the stunning successes of nonviolent actions against the
Nazis that were not well organized or built on beyond their initial
successes.
6. The good war was not for supporting the troops. In fact, lacking intense
modern conditioning to prepare soldiers to engage in the unnatural act of
murder, some 80 percent of U.S. and other troops in World War II did not
fire their weapons at the enemies. That those soldiers were treated better
after the war than soldiers in other wars had been, or have been since, was
the result of the pressure created by the Bonus Army after the previous war.
That veterans were given free college was not due to the merits of the war
or in some way a result of the war. Without the war, everyone could have
been given free college for many years. If we provided free college to
everyone today, it would take way more than World War II stories to get
people into military recruiting stations.
7. Several times the number of people killed in German camps were killed
outside of them in the war. The majority of those people were civilians. The
scale of the killing, wounding, and destroying made this war the single
worst thing humanity has ever done to itself in a short space of time. That
it was somehow "opposed" to the far lesser killing in the camps -- although,
again, it actually wasn't -- can't justify the cure that was worse than the
disease.
8. Escalating the war to include the all-out destruction of civilian cities,
culminating in the completely indefensible nuking of cities took this war
out of the realm of defensible projects for many who had defended its
initiation -- and rightly so. Demanding unconditional surrender and seeking
to maximize death and suffering did immense damage and left a legacy that
has continued.
9. Killing huge numbers of people is supposedly defensible for the "good"
side in a war, but not the "bad." The distinction between the two is never
as stark as fantasized. The United States had an apartheid state for African
Americans, camps for Japanese Americans, a tradition of genocide against
Native Americans that inspired Nazis, programs of eugenics and human
experimentation before, during, and after the war (including giving syphilis
to people in Guatemala during the Nuremberg trials). The U.S. military hired
hundreds of top Nazis at the end of the war. They fit right in. The U.S.
aimed for a wider world empire, before the war, during it, and ever since.
10. The "good" side of the "good war," the party that did most of the
killing and dying for the winning side, was the communist Soviet Union. That
doesn't make the war a triumph for communism, but it does tarnish the tales
of triumph for "democracy."
11. World War II still hasn't ended. Ordinary people in the United States
didn't have their incomes taxed until World War II and that's never stopped.
It was supposed to be temporary. The bases have never closed. The troops
have never left Germany or Japan. There are over 100,000 U.S. and British
bombs still in the ground in Germany, still killing.
12. Going back 75 years to a nuclear-free, colonial, world of completely
different structures, laws, and habits to justify what has been the greatest
expense of the United States in each of the years since is a bizarre feat of
self-deception that isn't attempted in the justification of any lesser
enterprise. Assume I've got numbers 1 through 11 totally wrong, and you've
still got to explain how the world of the early 1940s justifies dumping into
2017 wars funding that could have fed, clothed, cured, and environmentally
protected the earth.
