[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Truncating the Antecedents

[Bill Totten]

How Americans Have Been Misled about World War Two

by Robert Higgs {1}

LewRockwell.com (March 18 2008)


Whereas historians obsessively trace every event's causal lineage 
further and further into the past, nonhistorians tend toward the 
opposite extreme: they assume in effect that the world began immediately 
before the event they have in mind. I call this unfortunate tendency 
"truncating the antecedents". Among the general public, it has given 
rise to mistaken interpretations of historical causation in cases too 
numerous to mention, and mistakes of this sort continue to occur 
frequently, in part because politicians and other conniving parties have 
an interest in propagating them.

I was recently struck by this tendency while reading comments at a group 
blog associated with the History News Network. A commentator there had 
mentioned that the blame for World War Two is not as cut and dried as 
Americans typically assume it to be, and hence some revisionism is long 
overdue. In response, another discussant, whose previous contributions 
to the blog show that he is an intelligent man, expressed bafflement: 
"Yes, obviously some revisionism regarding the 'great allied leaders' of 
World War Two is called for. But an attempt to be revisionist about the 
justness of a war where US territory is attacked by one opponent and war 
is declared on the US by the other opponent is sort of like justifying 
the War on Iraq on the basis of mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction."

Like Americans in general, this man takes the Japanese attack at Pearl 
Harbor on December 7 1941, and the German declaration of war on December 
11 1941, as dispositive evidence that Japan and Germany started the war 
that ensued between these nations and the United States, and therefore 
he concludes that they should be held responsible for it. In a later 
post, he persists in this interpretation by saying: "Nation X attacks 
Nation Y. One or the other is right. Either Nation Y is a victim or the 
attack was a 'justified pre-emptive attack'. Yes, the response may be 
disproportionate, et cetera, but those really aren't reasons to declare 
Nation Y 'wrong'. Or the two 'equally wrong'." This view represents a 
classic case of truncating the antecedents.

Many people are misled by formalities. They assume, for example, that 
the United States went to war against Germany and Japan only after its 
declarations of war against these nations in December 1941. In truth, 
the United States had been at war for a long time before making these 
declarations. Its warmaking took a variety of forms. For example, the US 
navy conducted "shoot [Germans] on sight" convoys, which might include 
British ships, in the North Atlantic along the greater part the shipping 
route from the United States to Great Britain, even though German 
U-boats had orders to refrain (and did refrain) from initiating attacks 
on American shipping. The United States and Great Britain entered into 
arrangements to pool intelligence, combine weapons development, test 
military equipment jointly, and undertake other forms of war-related 
cooperation. The US military actively cooperated with the British 
military in combat operations against the Germans, for example, by 
alerting the British navy of aerial or marine sightings of German 
submarines, which the British then attacked. The US government undertook 
in countless ways to provide military and other supplies and assistance 
to the British, the French, and the Soviets, who were fighting the 
Germans. The US government provided military and other supplies and 
assistance, including warplanes and pilots {2}, to the Chinese, who were 
at war with Japan. The US military actively engaged in planning with the 
British, the British Commonwealth countries, and the Dutch East Indies 
for future combined combat operations against Japan. Most important, the 
US government engaged in a series of increasingly stringent economic 
warfare measures {3} that pushed the Japanese into a predicament that US 
authorities well understood would probably provoke them to attack US 
territories and forces in the Pacific region in a quest to secure 
essential raw materials that the Americans, British, and Dutch 
(government in exile) had embargoed.

Consider these summary statements by George Victor, by no means a 
Roosevelt basher, in his recently published, well-documented book The 
Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable  (Potomac Books, 2007):

Roosevelt had already led the United States into war with Germany in the 
spring of 1941 - into a shooting war on a small scale. From then on, he 
gradually increased US military participation. Japan's attack on 
December 7 enabled him to increase it further and to obtain a war 
declaration. Pearl Harbor is more fully accounted for as the end of a 
long chain of events, with the US contribution reflecting a strategy 
formulated after France fell ... In the eyes of Roosevelt and his 
advisers, the measures taken early in 1941 justified a German 
declaration of war on the United State - a declaration that did not 
come, to their disappointment ... Roosevelt told his ambassador to 
France, William Bullitt, that US entry into war against Germany was 
certain but must wait for an "incident", which he was "confident that 
the Germans would give us" ... Establishing a record in which the enemy 
fired the first shot was a theme that ran through Roosevelt's tactics 
... He seems [eventually] to have concluded - correctly as it turned out 
- that Japan would be easier to provoke into a major attack on the 
Unites States than Germany would be. (pages 179–80, 184, 185, emphasis 
added)

The claim that Japan attacked the United States without provocation was 
... typical rhetoric. It worked because the public did not know that the 
administration had expected Japan to respond with war to anti-Japanese 
measures it had taken in July 1941 ... Expecting to lose a war with the 
United States - and lose it disastrously - Japan's leaders had tried 
with growing desperation to negotiate. On this point, most historians 
have long agreed. Meanwhile, evidence has come out that Roosevelt and 
Hull persistently refused to negotiate ... Japan ... offered compromises 
and concessions, which the United States countered with increasing 
demands ... It was after learning of Japan's decision to go to war with 
the United States if the talks "break down" that Roosevelt decided to 
break them off ... According to Attorney General Francis Biddle, 
Roosevelt said he hoped for an "incident" in the Pacific to bring the 
United States into the European war. (pages 15, 202, 240)


These facts and numerous others that point in the same direction are for 
the most part anything but new; many of them have been available to the 
public since the 1940s. As early as 1953, anyone might have read a 
collection of heavily documented essays on various aspects of US foreign 
policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s that showed the various ways in 
which the US government bore responsibility for the country's eventual 
engagement in World War Two - showed, in short, that the Roosevelt 
administration wanted to get the country into the war and worked 
craftily along various avenues to ensure that, sooner or later, it would 
get in, preferably in a way that would unite public opinion behind the 
war by making the United States appear to have been the victim of an 
aggressor's unprovoked attack. (See Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A 
Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt 
and Its Aftermath, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes, Caxton Printers: 1953.) 
As Secretary of War Henry Stimson testified after the war, "we needed 
the Japanese to commit the first overt act" (quoted in Victor, Pearl 
Harbor Myth, page 105).

At present, however, sixty-seven or more years after these events, 
probably not one American in 1,000 - nay, not one in 10,000 - has an 
inkling of any of this history. So effective has been the pro-Roosevelt, 
pro-American, pro-World War Two faction that in this country it has 
utterly dominated teaching and popular writing about US engagement in 
the "Good War". Only a few years ago, when an essay of mine was included 
in a collection being considered for publication by the University of 
Chicago Press, the press's expert outside reader expressed shock that I 
had mentioned in passing Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor maneuvers to bring 
the country into the war, and he declared that crackpot statements of 
this sort would discredit the entire volume. (In deference to the editor 
and to discourage the volume's rejection by the press, I removed the 
single obnoxious sentence, which was not central to my purposes in the 
essay in any event, and eventually the book {4} was published, 
notwithstanding this "expert's" negative appraisal of my own 
contributions to it.)

Observations such the foregoing ones tend to elicit angry accusations of 
"Holocaust denial" and "moral equivalence", among many others. For the 
record, then, let me avow that I do not deny the Holocaust, nor do I 
regard the Roosevelt administration as morally equivalent to Hitler's 
regime. While I am making my innocence plain, let me also avow that I do 
not regard the Roosevelt administration as morally equivalent to 
Stalin's regime. This latter comparison comes up surprisingly seldom, 
however, given that the two regimes were close allies in the war, and, 
most important, that the major outcome of the war was to leave Stalin 
and his puppet regimes astride the greater part of the European 
continent in an area that stretches from the Urals to Bohemia and from 
Estonia to Azerbaijan. In short, if anyone deserves to be recognized as 
the war's "winner", that person is Stalin. Somehow this fact has never 
seemed to me to fit comfortably into a characterization of this horrible 
conflict as the "Good War". Perhaps I'm just unduly squeamish.

The fate of the European Jews also requires mention, inasmuch as after 
the war many people professed to believe that saving the Jews was the 
war's prime justification. Aside from the fact that none of the Allied 
leaders held that view - Roosevelt himself was a genteel anti-Semite of 
the sort typical in his time, place, and class - the undeniable truth is 
that the Jews were not saved: approximately eighty percent of them had 
perished by the end of the war. Little wonder, too, because US and 
British war plans did not give high priority to saving them; as a rule, 
those plans completely disregarded the urgent need to rescue the 
surviving Jews.

Few Americans have ever entertained the idea that their country ought 
not to have entered World War Two. They persist in believing that they - 
the ordinary people of the country, as distinct from its political 
leaders and their foreign legionnaires - were genuinely threatened by 
the Japanese and the Germans and therefore that the war "had to be 
fought". Even George Victor, from whose honest and useful book The Pearl 
Harbor Myth I quoted earlier, has brought himself to believe that 
Roosevelt had excellent motives for his persistent provocation of 
Germany and Japan. Thus, he writes: "As Germany began to prepare for 
conquest, genocide, and destruction of civilization, the leader of only 
one major nation saw what was coming and made plans to stop it. As a 
result of Roosevelt's leadership, a planned sequence of events carried 
out in the Atlantic and more decisively in the Pacific brought the 
United States into one of the world's greatest cataclysms. The American 
contribution helped turn the war's tide and saved the world from a 
destructive tyranny unparalleled in modern history." (page 16)

Unparalleled? What about Stalin's tyranny or Mao's? Regardless of one's 
answer to this question, however, another question remains - whether 
Nazi Germany, as evil as it certainly was, had the ability to defeat the 
United States, much less to "destroy civilization". Americans love to 
speculate about German acquisition of atomic weapons, intercontinental 
ballistic missiles, and other military capabilities the Nazis, in fact, 
never came close to acquiring. As things actually stood, Germany lacked 
the capability to invade and conquer even Great Britain. Conquering the 
United States, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, was realistically 
inconceivable. Whatever else one may take US leaders' motives for war to 
have been in the early 1940's, national self-preservation could not have 
been among them, unless they were shockingly ill-advised as to the 
economic, logistical, and technological constraints on the German war 
machine. In reality, that machine had its hands more than full in 
dealing with the Soviets on the eastern front, not to mention the 
British and others who were pestering it on other fronts.

Thirty-six years ago, Bruce M Russett's little book No Clear and Present 
Danger: A Skeptical View of the US Entry into World War Two (Harper & 
Row, 1972) was published. Russett noted at the outset that 
"[p]articipation in the war against Hitler remains almost wholly 
sacrosanct, nearly in the realm of theology" (page 12). In this regard, 
nothing has changed since 1972. Yet Russett argued forcefully, with 
logic and evidence, that this orthodoxy rests on shaky grounds. He 
concluded that World War Two "may well have been an unnecessary war that 
did little for us and that we need not have fought" (page 20). Nor did 
he concede that although the war may have been imprudent on instrumental 
grounds, it was well justified on moral grounds: "it is precisely moral 
considerations that demand a reexamination of our World War Two myths", 
he insisted (page 21). Although much has been added to the corpus of 
World War Two scholarship since the publication of Russett's book, this 
little volume remains unjustly neglected, and its argument deserves 
serious consideration even now.

Of course, many other great events in American history might be examined 
as I have suggested US participation in World War Two ought to be 
examined - by taking the relevant antecedents fully into account. For 
historians, this advice should be unnecessary; if they know anything, 
they know that history did not begin yesterday. The American people at 
large, however, remain extremely vulnerable to misleading descriptions 
of the government's actions, especially its plunges into foreign wars - 
accounts of which generally disregard many relevant antecedents, 
particularly those that cast blame on the United States for stirring up 
enmities abroad. Yet, any honest account {5} of US foreign policy 
reveals that this country's government has engaged again and again in 
foreign interventions whose official justifications cannot withstand 
critical scrutiny. Many of these interventions amounted to little more 
than armed errand-running {6} for privileged American business interests 
seeking to beat foreigners into line and, not coincidentally, to line 
their own pockets. This aspect of US foreign policy famously led General 
Smedley Butler to declare that war is a racket {7}.

Time, some wit has said, is God's way of keeping everything from 
happening at once. Taking this idea to heart, we may remind ourselves 
and others that whenever the US government launches a new war abroad, we 
would be well advised to look into what happened in that part of the 
world previously, perhaps over the course of several decades. We may 
well discover that the locals have legitimate grievances against our 
government or some of its corporate cronies. Or we may simply discover 
that the situation is more complicated than it has been made out to be. 
We know one thing for certain at the outset, however: we cannot rely on 
the government to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but 
the truth. Unvarnished truth is to our rulers as holy water is to vampires.
_____

Robert Higgs {8} is senior fellow in political economy at the 
Independent Institute {9} and editor of The Independent Review. His most 
recent book is Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the 
Growth of Government {10}. He is also the author of Depression, War, and 
Cold War: Studies in Political Economy {11}, Resurgence of the Warfare 
State: The Crisis Since 9/11 {12} and Against Leviathan: Government 
Power and a Free Society {13}.


Links referenced within this article

{1} http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/mailto:RHiggs2377@aol.com

{2} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers

{3} http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1930

{4} http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/203865.ctl

{5} 
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=IrAzsxzjIooC&dq=denson+%22the+costs+of+war%22&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=i1bW0vahu8&sig=1jNNmiExrQEJQ9gxWhLKHNzgBgM

{6} 
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805078614

{7} http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

{8} http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/mailto:RHiggs2377@aol.com

{9} http://www.independent.org

{10} 
http://www.amazon.com/Neither-Liberty-nor-Safety-Government/dp/1598130129/lewrockwell/

{11} 
http://www.mises.org/store/Depression-War-and-Cold-War-P334C0.aspx?AFID=1

{12} 
http://www.mises.org/store/Resurgence-of-the-Warfare-State-The-Crisis-Since-911-P220C0.aspx?AFID=1

{13} http://www.mises.org/store/Against-Leviathan-P212C0.aspx?AFID=1

Robert Higgs Archives: http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs-arch.html

Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Higgs
Copyright (c) 2007 LewRockwell.com

http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs77.html


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