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D(isinformation)
Day: 60 Years is Enough Copyright © 2004, Mickey Z. All Rights Reserved. June
6, 2004 marks 60 years since the fabled Allied invasion known as "D-Day."
Lost amid the self-congratulatory orgy is the minor detail that by the
time of the D-day invasion, the Soviets were engaging 80 percent of
the German Army on the Eastern Front. Oops... Alexander Cockburn has called D-day a "sideshow," explaining that W.W.II had already been won "by the Russians at Stalingrad and then, a year before D-day, at the Kursk Salient, where 100 German divisions were mangled. Compared with those epic struggles, D-day was a skirmish...Hitler's generals knew the war was lost, and the task was to keep the meeting point between the invading Russians and Western armies as far east as possible." Of
course, this doesn't fit the "good war" myth (more than just
a good war, NBC newsman Tom Brokaw has deemed W.W.II "the greatest
war the world has seen"), so it's down the memory hole. To
borrow from the World Bank protesters, I say 60 years is enough. Faced
with a perpetual war against evil and presidential election pitting
one Yale war criminal against another, the time has never been better
to challenge the "greatest generation" hype. The next time
someone you know speaks of W.W.II in hallowed tones, remind them that: •The
U.S. fought that war against racism with a segregated army. It fought
that war to end atrocities by participating in the shooting of surrendering
soldiers, the starvation of POWs, the deliberate bombing of civilians,
wiping out hospitals, strafing lifeboats, and in the Pacific boiling
flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts. •FDR,
the leader of this anti-racist, anti-atrocity force, signed Executive
Order 9066, interning over 100,000 Japanese-Americans without due process...thus,
in the name of taking on the architects of German prison camps became
the architect of American prison camps. •Before,
during, and after the Good War, the American business class traded with
the enemy. Among the US corporations that invested in the Nazis were
Ford, GE, Standard Oil, Texaco, ITT, IBM, and GM (top man William Knudsen
called Nazi Germany "the miracle of the 20th century"). •While
the US regularly turned away Jewish refugees to face certain death in
Europe, another group of refugees was welcomed with open arms after
the war: fleeing Nazi war criminals who were used to help create the
CIA and advance America's nuclear program. The
enduring Good War fable goes well beyond Memorial Day barbecues and
flickering black-and-white movies on late night TV. W.W.II is America's
most popular war. According to accepted history, it was an inevitable
war forced upon a peaceful people thanks to a surprise attack by a sneaky
enemy. This war, then and now, has been carefully and consciously sold
to us as a life-and-death battle against pure evil. For most Americans,
W.W.II was nothing less than good and bad going toe-to-toe in khaki
fatigues. But,
Hollywood aside, John Wayne never set foot on Iwo Jima. Despite the
former president's dim recollections, Ronald Reagan did not liberate
any concentration camps. And, contrary to popular belief, FDR never
actually got around to sending our boys "over there" to take
on Hitler's Germany until after the Nazis had already declared war on
the US first. American
lives weren't sacrificed in a holy war to avenge Pearl Harbor nor to
end the Nazi Holocaust. W.W.II was about territory, power, control,
money, and imperialism. What we're taught about the years leading up
to the Good War involves the alleged appeasement of the Third Reich.
If only the Allies were stronger in their resolve, the fascists could
have been stopped. Having made that mistake once, the mantra goes, we
can't make it again. Comparing
modern-day tyrants like Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and invoking
the A Word (appeasement) activates the following historical façade:
After whipping the original axis of evil in a noble and popular war,
the US and its allies can now wave the banner of humanitarianism and
intervene with impunity across the globe without their motivations being
severely questioned...especially when every enemy is likened to Hitler.
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