How History Helps Us Understand What Russia and China Are Up To

The Clash of the Two Americas Volume 3: The Birth of a Eurasian Manifest Destiny

By Matthew Ehert

Purchase link: https://canadianpatriot.org/untold-history-of-canada-books/

Book Review

Another great read on a very complex topic.

About half of Volume 3 focuses on hidden history and about half on the Russian-Chinese collaboration to build a global economy based on on peaceful coexistence, nternational cooperation and economic and technological development.

The hidden history chapters cover

• The “Spirit of Westphalia,” as expressed in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that officially ended the Thirty Years War.[1]
• The role of banking centers in the city-states of Venice (697 – 1797 AD) and their role in replacing Rome as the political and economic center of the western world.[2] In 1095, the Venetian Empire instigated (along Pope Urban II) the Crusades against the Middle East Muslim states. It subsequently commandeered the Khazarian [3] trade routes connecting the steppes with the Silk Road and China. Venice would be the first empire to ban Jews from participating in international trade, owing land or weapons, joining trade guilds, farming or serving in the military. The word “ghetto,” which dates back to Venice, was used to describe their urban settlements where the only occupations Jews were allowed were dealing in old rags, pawn brokering and money lending.
• Stalin’s allegations that Churchill had Roosevelt (who died under suspicious circumstances) poisoned and his request (which Eleanor Roosevelt declined) for an autopsy to be performed.
• A summary of positive steps (towards peaceful coexistence and international cooperation Donald Trump launched during his presidency:
  • An initiative to extract CIA operations from the US military.
  • An initiative to end US cooperation with NATO and WHO.
  • An initiative to defund CIA-sponsored regime operations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – see USA: Exportng Democracy Since 1948
  • An initiative to enact protective tariffs to support US domestic industry.
  • His successful negotiation of a US-China treaty to increase Chinese imports of US goods.
• The role of Jesuits in the New World in recruiting Native Americans to launch terrorist attacks on North American colonists, [4] the land grants they received from British round table founder Cecil Rhodes and the study and use of Jesuit psychological mind control techniques at the Tavistock Clinic in London.
• An excellent chapter by Cynthia Chung on the ancient African kingdoms that preceded European colonization of African and enslavement of its residents.

About half the book concerns the role of China and Russia in building the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the International North-South Transit Corridor linking China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East in a massive trade and energy sharing network. According to Ehert, all the Arab countries (including Syria) except Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have joined one or both of these networks.

The only chapters of the book I found problematic were those unconditionally  championing Russia and China’s embrace of nuclear energy. Ehret and Chung’s assertions about nuclear energy being a carbon neutral and totally safe alternative to fossil fuels provide an extremely one sided view of an extremely controversial topic. There’s strong evidence showing nuclear power plants produce far more carbon emissions during their construction (especially for concrete and steel) than either solar panels or wind turbines and emissions continue to be produced as the uranium used to fuel them is processed. See  Fact Check: Is Nuclear Energy Good for the Climate

The authors also assert that the Russians and Chinese have eliminated the toxic nuclear waste problem by 1) reprocessing nuclear waste so it can be reused instead of stored, 2) by replacing uranium-fueled reactors with those fueled by thorium and fusion technology. This directly contradicts the views of the physicists who run the Union of Atomic Scientists.

See The History of Nuclear Power’s Imagined Future: Plutonium’s Journey From Asset to Waste,  Fact Check: Five Claims About Thorium Waste Made by Andrew Yang (which talks about thorium waste being even more dangerous than conventional nuclear waste) and Fusion Reactors: Not What They’re Cracked up to Be.

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[1] The Thirty Years War, essentially a religious war between Catholics and Protestants, began as a civil war between German statelets belonging to the Holy Roman Empire and eventually drew in nearly all of western Europe (reducing the population of Germany by one-third). The Peace of Westphalia outlined (for the first time in western society) the five principles of peaceful coexistence eventually adopted by the Non-Aligned Movement. Founded in 1954, the NAM consisted of 120 countries not formally aligned with any major power block.

[2] The global banking center shifted to Amsterdam in 1609 with the founding of the first private central bank and the Dutch East India Company, which soon merged with the British East India Company. It then shifted to England when the Dutch prince William III (who founded the Bank of England in 1694) assumed the British throne in 1689.

[3] The chapter on the Khazarian Empire describes its founding in the late 6th century, by Turks who subsequently converted to Judaism, owing to their close relationship with Jewish bankers and traders who ran that section of the Silk Road. Ehert disputes David Ickes’s claims about a so-called Khazarian mafia that alleged replaced the Semitic Jews in Israel.

[4] The inventor (and US spy) Samuel Morse first wrote about this in his 1841 book Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States.

 

 

Hidden History: How British Bankers Shaped America’s 20th Century

Clash of the Two Americas Volume 2: Open vs Closed Systems Collide

By Matthew Ehret (2021)a

Purchase link: https://canadianpatriot.org/untold-history-of-canada-books/

Book Review

In Volume 2,  Ehret’s narrative about the political clash between America’s Anglophile pro-colonization elite and pro-international cooperation forces who opposed them continues into the 20th century.

The second volume begins with a brief discussion of Gilpin’s Landbridge, proposed by Lincoln advisor William Gilpin (who Lincoln appointed as Colorado’s first governor in 1861). In 1890 Gilipin published Cosmopolitan Railway: Compacting and Fusing Together All the World’s Continents, calling for a Tunnel to be built between Alaska and Siberia connecting Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad [1] with a North American transcontinental rail network. This proposal arose in part out of a strategy first put forward by Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward, General (and later president) Ulysses Grant and Senator Charles Sumner. The surprise purchase of Alaska from the Russians in 1867 was the first step in this venture. 

According to Ehret, most of British foreign policy in the early 20th century was aimed at disrupting the strong US-Russia-German alliance supported by Lincoln, Seward, Grant, Gilpin and Sumner.

For example

• The 1902 Anglo-Japanese treaty which resulted in the disastrous Japan-Russian war (in which Anglophile US banker Jacob Schiff financed the Japanese), which substantially weakened Russia’s pro-US Romanov rulers.
• According to Ehert, Britain’ primary purpose in instigating World War I was to break up the continuing US-German-Russian-Ottoman alliance committed to international rail development (a major threat to Britain’s monopoly on maritime trade).
• The substantial support the British/Wall Street banking establishment provided Russia’s two revolutions in 1905 and 1917. According to Schiff’s grandson, Schiff funded the Bolsheviki revolution to the tune of $20 million. Prominent member of Lloyd George’s war cabinet Lord Alfred Milner also contributed 21 million rubles to the Bolshevik cause.
•  The collaboration of British banks and Wall Street banks and corporates to finance the rise of Hitler.[2] Prescott Bush (grandfather of George W) bailed out the German Nazi party when it went bankrupt and collapsed in 1932.[3] J P Morgan and Henry Luce, founder and owner of Time Magazine, also helped fund both Hitler and Mussolini, while the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations funded the Nazis eugenics program, including the experiments Dr Mengele conducted on concentration camp victims.

The book includes some fascinating details about Franklin D Roosevelt’s presidency that are rarely covered in high school history classes. Immediately on taking office, anti-colonist FDR immediately declared war on Wall Street, with his Pecora Commission sending dozens of bankers to prison. He only agreed to support Europe during World War II on condition the European powers surrender their colonies at war’s end. However he ran into major resistance from Churchill 1) when he and Eisenhower tried to open a second front in Western France after Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941 and when 2) FDR (seeking to prevent a dangerous nuclear arms race)  tried to bring the Soviets into the secret US-British project to develop an atomic bomb.

Ehert also devotes a chapter to President John F Kennedy, an anti-colonist like Franklin, Lincoln and Roosevelt, and to the role of Anglophile CIA elements (and even British intelligence agents in Montreal) in his assassination.

My favorite part of the book concerns extensive evidence Ehert has compiled revealing the alleged 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre was actually a color revolution funded by George Soros and the CIA-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy.[4] Both Soros and color revolution guru Gene Sharp were in Beijing on June 4, 1989. See George Soros, Gene Sharp and the 1989 Failed Color Revolution in Tiananmen Square and The CIA and Nonviolence

I feel some chapters towards the end of Volume 2 are somewhat one-sided in terms of Ehert’s unconditional embrace of new technological development. At times new technologies can be extremely hazardous to human health, eg our 70-year-old toxic chemical technology which has left us with a global epidemic of chronic diseases.

I’m also skeptical of his high praise of China’s embrace of unrestrained fossil fuel use and nuclear energy. Serious problems with particulate pollution pose (from coal burning a vehicle exhaust) are responsible for serious health problems (in some cases life threatening) for residents of all China’s major cities. Likewise, I don’t believe there is sufficient evidence to conclude China has “solved” the nuclear waste problem by vitrifying it.[5] While transforming nuclear waste to a solid makes it easier to store, the waste still remains radioactive for thousands of years. You also have to wonder whether the massive temperatures (1000° C) required for vitrification lowers the Energy Returned for Energy Invested below the break even point to justify the major investment required.

Finally I’m confused when he writes in one section about global warming being a myth and about the Polar Silk Road made possible by Arctic ice melting.

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[1] Which was built with generous US engineering support.

[2] According to Ehret increasing calls by residents of British Columbia for the province to be annexed to the United States (to facilitate the construction of the transcontinental railroad between Oregon and Alaska) put the UK under pressure to unite Canada’s provinces as a dominion under the British king on July 1st 1867.

[3] First documented by journalist George Seldes in Facts and Fascism in 1943.

[4] It’s also significant that Bush was an insider of the US/British banking conspiracy that created the $5.7 billion Wall Street bubble (via an astronomical level of broker loans) and then deliberately crashed the economy by suddenly calling them due. Bush, like others involved the conspiracy, made his fortune by selling his holdings prior to the crash. In 1942, he was found guilt of under the Trading with the Enemy Act and the federal government all the capital assets of his bank, Union Banking.

[5] In vitrification of nuclear waste, the fission products are made solid by being incorporated into molten glass.

[6] See USA: Exportng Democracy Since 1948

Word War II: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction

A Skeptic’s Guide to American History

Episode 19 Misconceptions and Myths About World War II

Mark Stoler PhD

Film Review

I found this lecture, in which Stoler purports to challenge prevailing myths about World War II, extremely disappointing. It’s been well-established since 1943 (when George Seldes published Facts and Fascism) that numerous Wall Street corporations funded the rearmament of the Third Reich, enabling Hitler to launch World War II. Charles Higham also covers this in depth in his 1983 book Trading with the Enemy.

Instead Stoler makes the blanket statement that war was inevitable because Hitler refused to be “appeased” by Britain’s appeasement strategy. This also turns out to be untrue, based on evidence Peter Padfield explores in his 2013 book  Hess, Hitler and Churchill: the real turning point of the Second World War. The book spells out how Hitler offered Britain a secret peace deal, in which which Germany would withdraw from Western Europe prior to invading the Soviet Union. And how Churchill rejected the offer.

Stoler does address the common myth that the US singlehandedly won World War II for the Allies. Although the US contributed two-thirds of the Allies’ munitions and military equipment, they only contributed 25% of the troops and suffered the lowest number of casualties (killed and wounded). US casualties totaled 418,500 and British 449,800. In contrast, Russian casualties were between 25 and 29 million. Russia also inflicted 93% of the casualties experienced by the German military.

However he disputes the so-called “conspiracy theory” that President Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Robert Stinnett has clearly documented that US intelligence had decrypted various Japanese military and diplomatic cables delineating the the exact time and date of the Pearl attack and transmitted them not only to Roosevelt, but to key members of his cabinet and top military leaders, including US Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall.**

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*See also https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_Hitler.pdf)

**See https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/12/06/pearl-harbor-roosevelt-knew/

The film can be viewed free at Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/world-war-ii-misconceptions-and-myths

 

Did Winston Churchill Have Dementia?

Churchill

Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky (2017)

Film Reiview

What I find particularly interesting about this feature length biopic is its portrayal of Churchill as suffering from obvious dementia in the lead up to Operation Overlord (the D-Day invasion of Normandy – June 6, 1944). It shows Churchill as openly opposing the invasion owing to his catastrophic experience during World War I. As First Lord of the Admiralty he spearhead the attempted invasion of Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula. After over 250,000 allied forces* were killed by Turkish forces, the Allies were forced to retreat.

In the case of D-Day, the Germans, like the Turks, represented a powerful entrenched army with the potential to mow down Allied forces as they landed on the beaches beneath.

As portrayed in the film, Churchill repeatedly tries to obstruct planning for Operation Overlord, and the generals involved (including Eisenhower) repeatedly call on his wife to pull him back in line.

Prior to watching this film, I was unaware that Churchill possibly suffered from dementia during the final stages of World War II. With two openly demented senior citizens competing for the US presidency, it raises some interesting questions about the true source of power in so-called liberal democracy

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*A high disproportiate number of Anzacs (Australian and New Zealand conscripts) were massacred at Gallipoli.. Anazac Day, which celebrates the bloodbath, is one of the major holidays here. This film was shown on Māori TV for the April 2019 Anzac Day celebrations. A substantial number of the Kiwis killed at Gallipoli belonged to the Māori Battalion.

 

The full film can be viewed free at the Māori TV website: https://www.maoritelevision.com/shows/anzac-day-2019/S01E001/churchill

 

 

 

 

Churchill’s War Crimes: The Bengal Famine

The World Today with Tariq Ali – Bengal Shadows

Telasur (2018)

Film Review

This documentary traces the war crime British prime minister Winston Churchill committed in 1943. In it, British historian and activist Tariq Ali introduces and narrates the 2017 documentary Bengal Shadows. His commentary includes priceless quotes from Churchill

. . . on learning of the Bengal famine:

I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine is their own fault for breeding like rabbits.

. . .on learning the famine had killed millions:

Then why isn’t Gandhi dead?

The Bengal famine was clearly man made. By early 1942, the Japanese military occupied all of China to the East Bengal border. Fearing they would invade India, British authorities seized and burned all of Bengal’s surplus rice stocks and all their boats, bicycles and bullock carts. They were following a typical scorched earth policy – aimed at preventing the invasion of India.

This meant there was no way to transport grains from inland Bengal, where harvests were good, when a tsunami destroyed the 1942 coastal harvest.

Churchill adamantly refused to provide starving Bengali with food relief. When Australia dispatched ships loaded with food grains, British authorities in Bengal turned them away. Ironically US ships loaded with Australian grain refueled in Bengal en route to troops in the Middle East.

Three million people died in the man made famine. Many of the farmers who planted the bumper 1943 rice crop weren’t alive to harvest it.

Many in India (and modern day Bangladesh) believe the British owe them reparations for the 1943 famine.

 

Mumia Abu Jamal: Book 2 of Murder Incorporated

Murder Incorporated

Book 2: America’s Favorite Past time

By Mumia Abu-Jamal and Stephen Vittoria

Prison Radio (2019)

Book Review

Book 2 of the Murder Incorporated series begins where Dreaming of Empire (Book 1) leaves off. By this point, I  have absolutely no doubt these are the US history textbooks my daughter and I should have been given in high school. They are a superb resource for the growing home school movement.

Having covered slavery, the brutal and systematic genocide of indigenous Americans and the US invasion and occupation of Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in Book 1, America’s Favorite Pastime starts with Woodrow Wilson, his scores of invasions of Central and South America and Haiti and his entry, in 1917, into the bloodbath known as World War I. Wilson was heavily swayed in this decision by a letter from Wall Street banker J P Morgan. The latter had loaned heavily to the France and England, was at risk of losing a fortune if they suffered defeat.

Unlike most history books, America’s Favorite Pastime focuses heavily on public opposition to the World War I, Wilson’s massive pro-war propaganda machine and his systematic suppression of constitutional rights (via the Palmer Raids, the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act). The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded in 1920 specifically to assist antiwar activists and conscientious objectors who were still in prison for speaking out against the war.

The authors go on to detail the 1918 invasion of the Soviet Union by the US, UK, France and Japan – a historical event censored out of most history courses, even at the university level.

Most of the book focuses on the so-called “Good War,” directly challenging the myth that the West had to go to war in 1939 to prevent the victory of global fascism. In addition to examining the role of various Wall Street corporations in arming Hitler’s war machine (including IBM, which created and managed the data system enabling Nazi’s to efficiently track down occupied Europe’s Jews), the authors discuss the numerous peace overtures Hitler made to Churchill in 1940. Which the latter categorically rejected.

They also discuss Hitler’s unsuccessful attempts to get the West to accept Jewish refugees.

This chapter details the forced internment and asset confiscation of 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1942 (of which 2/3 were US citizens and a majority children), as well as the war crimes committee by the Allies in firebombing Dresden, Tokyo and other cities and in dropping a nuclear bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The book provides the same detailed coverage of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the US-sponsored Indonesia and genocidal occupation of East Timor, and the numerous undeclared wars and drug trafficking operations undertaken by paramilitary operation known as the CIA.

The final chapters are devoted to a blow-by-blow description of Eisenhower’s creation of the Military Industrial and the complex and systematic indoctrination young Americans receive to dupe them into enlisting in America’s “all volunteer” army.

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*There were some here I hadn’t heard of previously: the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Greece (twice,), Brazil, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic – as well as the constant sabotage, terrorism and psyops against East Germany – which were the real reason the Berlin Wall was built.

 

 

 

The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Working Class

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910-2010

By Selina Todd

John Murray Publishers (2015)

Book Review

The People is about the rise of the British working class during World War I and its systematic erosion during the seventies as the Thatcher government systematically dismantled Britain’s manufacturing base.

British workers first began to see themselves as a cohesive force during 1914-18 as hundreds of thousands left domestic service (where most were employed) for the war industry. Working class consciousness reached its zenith during World War II, in part due to discriminatory treatment by the Churchill government. Working class women were often forced to leave well-paying jobs to be conscripted into the munitions industry. In contrast, middle and upper class women were exempted from conscription because they did “voluntary” work. Middle and upper class families also found it easier to be exempted from the mandatory evacuation scheme. The latter required rural families were required to accept child evacuees from urban centers without compensation.

The Churchill government provided virtually no funding for the mandatory evacuation scheme (which was organized mainly by schools and charitable groups), nor for benefits for families who lost housing, jobs and breadwinners due to German bombing, nor for proper air raid shelters. Government provided shelters were so wet and filthy, Londoners spontaneously seized and occupied the subway system, and there was nothing the government could do to stop them.

According to Todd, the austerity cuts that have turned Britain into a low wage economy actually started in 1976 (three years before Thatcher was elected prime minister) with public spending cuts imposed on the UK as a condition of an IMF loan. For the most part, this “free market” attitude continued under Blair and New Labour.

In her Afterward, Todd sees evidence of a growing popular discontent over inequality in the rise of UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party) and the Scottish independence referendum. The latter, she maintains, was actually more about inequality. More recently, this discontent has manifested in the election of left wing Jeremy Corbyn to run the Labour Party and the successful Brexit referendum.

Margaret Thacher: Channeling Churchill’s Messianic Vision

The Living Dead

Part 3 “The Attic”

By Adam Curtis (1995)

Film Review

In Part 3 of The Living Dead, his series exploring the elite’s selective rewriting of history, Adam Curtis explores Margaret Thatcher’s dramatic reprisal of Britain’s “glorious golden age.” According to Curtis, Thatcher rose to power thorough detailed study and imitation of Winston Churchill’s speeches and rhetoric. In this respect, she was very different from most “perception management” artists in that she really believed she was going to restore Britain to its former power and glory.

Curtis suggests that Churchill was also convinced he was going to restore Britain to its eighteenth century imperial magnificence and became really depressed when he failed to do so.

The documentary offers quite a convincing analysis of the “messianic vision” that facilitated the rise to power of both Churchill and Thatcher. In Thatcher’s case, it was based on her romanticized childhood reading of history and incorporated a substantial amount of fantasy. This vision, strongly enforced in Britain’s private schools and military academies, emphasizes morality, discipline, patriotism, tradition, hierarchy, idealization of the monarchy, and respect for authority. Although this intensely hierarchical system only benefits a tiny minority of British society, its romantic pageantry is often extremely effective in winning middle and working class votes.

Untold History of the US – The Cold War

Parts 4 and 5 of Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States explore the exaggerated claims of Soviet expansionism that characterized the Truman/Eisenhower administration.

Part 4 begins by contrasting the economic standing of the US and the USSR when the war ended in 1945. The US economy was booming. America controlled 50% of the world’s economic production and most of its gold. The Soviet economy, in contrast, had been shattered. Truman reneged on Roosevelt’s promise to provide the Soviets post war aid to assist in their recovery. During the US occupation of West Germany, he also discontinued German war reparations to the USSR.

The late forties was a period of excruciating poverty for Eastern Europe, with major famine in the Ukraine. With the Soviet economy in a shambles, the claims made by Truman about their intention to conquer the world were ludicrous.

After Henry Wallace, the last holdover from the Roosevelt administration, made a major speech (echoing statements by Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt) opposing nuclear weapons, Truman fired him.

This episode also explores the first implementation of the Truman Doctrine, justifying US intervention in the domestic affairs of other countries. Truman first used it in 1947 to put down a popular uprising against a fascist coup in Greece. In a clear precursor to US intervention in Vietnam, Truman sent in US advisors to train the Greek military in “counterinsurgency tactics,” ie death squads to crush unions and human rights organizations and concentration camps to extinguish civilian support for pro-independence activists.

Part 4: Cold War: 1945-50

Part 5 explores the election of Eisenhower to power in 1952, coinciding with Khrushchev’s rise to power in 1953 and the re-election of Churchill in 1951 (Churchill was replaced by Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee from 1945-51).

Eisenhower, who had opposed using the A-bomb against Japan at Pottsdam, became a fervent nuclear weapons supporter as president. Under pressure from anti-communist hawk John Foster Dulles, he resisted Khrushchev’s and Churchill’s to organize a peace summit to limit the nuclear arms race.

Eisenhower would go on to engage in war crimes in Korean, causing massive civilian deaths by bombing North Korean dams.

In addition to authorizing the CIA overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, he paid 80% of French military costs as they endeavored to defeat Vietnam’s pro-independence movement.

In this episode, Stone also explores the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1955 in Java. Members consisted of world leaders determined to remain independent of either US or Soviet influence. In attendance at the first meeting were Ho Chi Minh  (Vietnam), Tito (Yugoslavia), Nehru (India), Nasser (Egypt), Zhou Enlai (China) and Sukarno (Indonesia). The CIA eventually removed each of these men from power, in some cases via assassination.

Part 5: the ’50s: Eisenhower, The Bomb and the Third World

Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the US – Parts 1-3

Untold History of the United States – Parts 1-3

Directed by Oliver Stone (2012)

Last week, I sat down and binge watched Oliver Stone’s 10 part Showtime series Untold History of the United States. I was pleasantly surprised. Stone is strongly influenced by late historian Chalmers Johnson (see The Impermanence of Empire) and mentions him at several points in the series.

Untold History concerns the hidden history of the “American Century” that we’re never taught in school. Unlike Howard Zinn’s People’ History of the United States, it devotes little air time to the popular resistance movements that shaped the period 1932-2012. Instead it focuses mainly on the presidents who governed during this period.

Parts 1-3, which focus on World War II, unpack the lie that Truman dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan to spare hundreds of thousands of GIs who would have died invading the Japanese mainland.

Stone begins with a broad outline of the German military build-up that began in the early 1930s. I think this segment would have been clearer if Stone had discussed the Wall Street fascists who deliberately armed Hitler in the hope he would invade and destroy the Soviet Union. He delays this discussion until part 9, when he introduces Prescott Bush, the pro-Nazi granddaddy of George W Bush.

The first three parts of this series provide a fairly comprehensive history of the Spanish Civil War and of so-called British “appeasement” of Hitler in the early 1930s. I was extremely surprised to learn that Neville Chamberlain wasn’t motivated by cowardice, as we were taught in school, when he agreed to Hitler’s 1938 occupation of Czechoslovakia. He was merely carrying out the wishes of the US-Anglo elite – they were happy to cede Eastern Europe to Germany if it facilitated the destruction of the Soviet Union.

I was also totally unaware that the Soviets were responsible for destroying the bulk of Hitler’s vast military arsenal while the Allies piddled around in peripheral conflicts in North Africa and Italy (at the cost of 27 million lives in contrast to the 500,000 each lost by Britain and the US).

The real reason for Churchill and Roosevelt stalling for two years (Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941) before opening a second front (in Normandy) was their continuing belief that Hitler would defeat the Soviets. Once the Red Army pushed Nazi forces out of the USSR and began retaking Eastern Europe, the allies were forced to act to limit Soviet expansion.

It was actually this two year delay that caused nearly all of Eastern Europe to end up under Communist control – not ruthless Soviet expansionism as we are taught in school.

Stone agrees with historians who attribute the US nuclear attack on Japan to anti-communist hawks in the Truman administration who sought to use it to intimidate the Soviet Union. He maintains that Henry Wallace (Roosevelt’s vice-president until 19944) would never have given in to War Department hawks.

Wallace, according to Stone, was a true liberal populist in the Roosevelt mold. He was universally hated by Wall Street elites. He lost the 1944 vice presidential nomination to Truman (despite controlling over 65% of the delegates) after Democratic Party bosses rigged the 1944 Democratic Convention.

Part 1 – World War II

https://vimeo.com/136182100

Part 2 – Roosevelt, Truman & Wallace

https://vimeo.com/136182101

Part 3 – The Bomb