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I'm currently reading Howard Zinn's The Twentietn Century: A People's History, and I have to admit that though most of the book is quite shocking in traditional Zinn style, it's not all that surprising. There are, sadly enough, a few important similarities between WWII and the current conflict that I think are very telling.
So far I'm up to Chapter 5, "A People's War?" It's mainly about WWII and whether the war was, indeed, what's commonly referred to as a "just war" or a "good war." Of course, it's no understatement to say that popular support for the war was very high. Even the socialists and communists in the U.S. who had led massive protests against WWI, calling it an "imperialist war," threw their support behind America when it decided to enter the fray in part deux. Thinking of it as a war against fascism, they all felt that it was our place to stop these people, who were obviously doing something that was beyond comprehension with no regard for human life.
However, that's not all there is to the story. According to ZinnPutting aside the wild accusations against Roosevelt (that he knew about Pearl Harbor and didn't tell, or that he deliberately provoked the Pearl Harbor raid - these are without evidence), it does seem clear that he did as James Polk had done before him in the Mexican war and Lyndon Johnson after him in the Vietnam war - he lied to the public for what he thought was a right cause. In September and October 1941, he misstated the facts in two incidents involving German submarines and American destroyers. Sound familiar? Of course, it's no surprise to anyone familiar with the policies inherent in capitalist governments that war is quite necessary for several reasons. Mainly, these reasons boil down to keeping the peace at home by directing internal anger towards foreign enemies and, of course, economic expansion.
Americans were led to believe that we were entering this war because we wanted to liberate the people under Hitler's stranglehold and, of course, because the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Though obviously an immoral act on the part of the Japanese, it was not the least bit unexpected by the American military. America had imposed sanctions on Japan that threatened its very existence, as even one of the judges in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial after WWII admitted. Zinn notes that "the records show that a White house conference two weeks before Pearl Harbor anticipated a war and discussed how it should be justified."
However, even though the war may have been good for the U.S. and not just a humanitarian effort, the main point was to help the millions of Jews and others being oppressed by Hitler, right? Well, in order to answer that, simply ask yourself this question - was the united states, itself, an extremely humanitarian nation at the time? Whites and blacks were still very segregated, both socially and legally. Even the blacks who volunteered to fight in the war were segregated to the point that they were placed in the boiler rooms and bottom levels of military ships on the way to battle.
Japanese citizens were arrested in the U.S. after Pearl Harbor to be placed into interment camps, and Roosevelt in February 1942 signed Executive Order 9066, which gave the army the power to arrest every Japanese-American on the West Coast - 110,000 people. Even the Supreme Court upheld this action. All of this happened without the knowledge of the general American public until several years later. One congressman is noted by Zinn as sayingI'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps...Damn them! Let's get rid of them! Now, obviously this sentiment wasn't quite so strong throughout the government, but it must have been strong enough for Roosevelt to sign the order to toss them away and throw away the key for several years.
The war all but ended, of course, when America dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated total of 150,000 Japanese (mostly civilians) and leaving tens of thousands to die later from the radiation. This of course followed the firebombing of Tokyo which killed 80,000. Indeed, a war against fascism and oppression.
Finally, we can only speculate as to the imperialist reasons behind America's entry into the war. However, one distinct possibility sticks out. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey decided based on interviews carried out right after the Japanese surrendered that they would have done so even if the bombs had not been dropped. American Intelligence, it appears, relayed the message to the President before this mass murder was committed, but it obviously didn't change the outcome. Why, then, would the U.S. have still dropped the bomb? British scientist P.M.S. Blackett suggests that America wanted to drop the bomb before Russia entered the war, which it had secretly agreed to do ninety days after the end of the European war. That would have been August 8, but by then there was no war. We had already wiped the Japanese out with the bomb.
This, of course, made the U.S. the sole occupier of Japan, whereas Russia had hoped for a piece of the pie. This, by the way, was the first act of the so called "Cold War." And so, America had secured economic interests abroad while quelling problems at home by providing tons of new jobs and a new enemy - "The Commies." The world was once again safe for Democracy.
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