Antiwar Propaganda: The Importance of Historical Revisionism
A major protagonist in post-war historical revisionism seeks support. Barnes seemed to equivocate during the major wars of this century, but afterwards his opposition was unequivocal. This article was originally published in the Summer 1967 issue of Rampart Journal of Individualist Studies published by Robert LeFevre's Pine Tree Press for The Rampart College then of Larkspur, Colorado.
Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes defines revisionism as "the effort to revise the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere, and a more objective attitude." Revisionist Barnes has personally contributed significant research and voluminous writing, and has inspired, edited, and promoted many publications of others, shedding important light on the causes and implications of World Wars I and II. He has become an internationally recognized controversial figure in his consistent advocacy of peace, to which he believes that revisionism makes a notable contribution.
Both conservatives and liberals acknowledge his prodigious scholarship. Praise and criticism ebb and flow from each camp, according to the shifting tides of ideology and the imminence of war or the improved perspective with respect to war.
The Public Stake In Revisionism
by 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:
(note 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.
(note 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 Cbamberlin 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 smother out, 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. Viilard, 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. (note 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 non-partisan and
non-racial 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, 1933­p;1941, 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 timetable 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
by-products 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
- National Review, 20 April 1965, pp 335-336.
- See Select Bibliography of Revisionist Books.
- Journal of Modern History, March 1948, pp 55-59.
- Especially in the Rampart Journal, Spring 1966.
- Broadcast then over the Goldman "Open Mind" Program, WNBC-TV,
and rebroadcast on the "World Topic" program on 2 January 1967.
- (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.)
- Especially many entries in Look, the latest being 21 March 1967, and
in the Saturday Evening Post, see 22 October 1965
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