When I was still shaped by my juvenile consciousness during the early Cold War and by the fact that my father was a wounded vet, I believed that he and all his fellows had saved us from the fangs of the venomous Japanese and Nazis. There was nothing in the “history” we were taught straight through high school that digressed from the official mantra.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When I was still shaped by my juvenile consciousness during the early Cold War and by the fact that my father was a wounded vet, I believed that he and all his fellows had saved us from the fangs of the venomous Japanese and Nazis. There was nothing in the “history” we were taught straight through high school that digressed from the official mantra. There was a factor at play, however that almost no one recognized and that was the emotional and psychological effects of organized murder and death on a mass scale on the war’s returnees. Today we call it ‘post-traumatic stress disorder.” The syndrome is well known today, but that hasn’t altered the American public’s willingness to allow their government to perpetuate it. I belong to Veterans For Peace and I have long experience with its heartrending consequences. When we protest at militarized parades, we seek to inform about the realities of war and militarism.

My father and I were not close or tender. He was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, where he went mainly to drink in an effort to find some relief among others who had endured similar experiences. A few years after he returned home and married and began a family, the psychic wounds of his wartime experiences emerged unambiguously. One major result for me was that I became increasingly rebellious at puberty, acting out in defiant ways and that led to a judge’s choice- go to jail for some months or join the military at age seventeen.

Knowing nothing of the real military and still believing that the Marine Corps “builds men,” I joined what most of my fellow grunts would come to brand “the Crotch.” After boot camp, I was proud to have succeeded and survived. Any such self-esteem vanished long ago to be replaced by its opposite. Today, nausea sweeps me when I recall ever allowing myself to be hoodwinked into our nation’s centuries-long militarism in the service of empire.

This year, the emphasis on Veterans’ Day parades seemed much more than usual. Meanwhile, our government funds genocide in Gaza, orchestrates the self-destruction of Ukraine, and is readying for war in Venezuela, among many other campaigns around the globe. Do the celebrants not comprehend that the pageants celebrating veterans are also endorsing the wars in which veterans served, died and suffer lifelong anguish?

After World War II and 75 years of failure in armed invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and countless smaller wars, too many Americans have learned nothing. Far too many still insist that our armed forces exist to protect “us” from those who will do us harm, but the facts confirm the opposite. American wars kill, injure and impair those who are deployed for the “rescue,” while those among the ruling elites who manufacture the nation’s wars are never put in harm’s way. If some of their offspring serve in uniform, it is always as officers and rarely are they in the line of fire. American warfare is a class-based tragedy.

Why so many of my fellow veterans continue to cling to the fabricated and fraudulent mythology encasing all our wars is beyond my comprehension because so many have faced the realities and suffered directly. Those who are trained and deployed for combat are mere pawns in a giant geo-strategic game. When did two tiny countries on the western Pacific outskirts ever threaten American military security? Whose genuine interests were being ministered? In Korea and Vietnam, at least 100,000 American lives were sacrificed. For what? And we all but dismiss the millions of Southeast Asian lives snuffed. Those who concocted these wars had interests. What were they? And why did, and do, citizens so supinely accept the rationales for these moves in the giant chess derby? How could Korea or Vietnam, as alleged Soviet agents, have possibly carried out the same class of destruction upon the American homeland? So, the question always remains, what are the real reasons for the wars?

For that matter, why do so many never doubt the pretexts for World Wars I and II, especially since both have set the stage much too possibly for a third and final war? In neither case did Germany want war with the United States, yet both President Wilson and Roosevelt and their collaborators at the time manipulated the nation into war. Neither enemy had the remotest chance of invading, much less defeating the U.S. Washington even secretly attacked German vessels in the North Atlantic in order to draw fire, seeking to enflame a rationale to declare war. Many want to believe the U.S. embarked upon a crusade to rid the world of militarism and fascism. Yet both abound today.

To this day, the mythology that the attack at Pearl Harbor was a total “surprise” is embedded in all public observances of December 7, 1945, as well as Veterans Day. Yet secret Congressional hearings post-WWII (records now accessible) reveal the fact that American military intelligence had cracked Japan’s diplomatic and naval codes and were covertly listening to Tokyo’s transmissions and operational plans for war. By November 26, the U.S. knew the Japanese Fleet had embarked for Hawaii and while the naval commander at Pearl was ordered to dispatch the aircraft carriers to other Pacific Islands (where, as the vital weapon in the ensuing war, they remained safe). Neither the admiral nor the army commander was informed that the Japanese fleet was approaching Hawaii. Over 2400 American lives were sacrificed to overcome public opposition to going to war. Why?

Until the attack in Hawaii, the Japanese were attempting to take Eastern and Southeastern Asia under their control, thereby severing Washington and Wall Street from their long-standing plans to access the same resources and riches Japan was steadily absorbing. At the height of the Great Depression, America’s rulers needed to expand their capitalism into a much wider world or face an uprising at home that could radically alter the system they had fostered and perhaps even cripple their power. At the same time, the Soviet Union was effectively closed; Germany was closing markets in much of the remaining Europe and even Latin America. On Wall Street and the inner government in D.C., the consensus to confront this threat to American capitalism was war. But first, the widespread public opposition to waging such a war had to be surmounted.

Though few seem to remember the “Open Door Policy,” first announced at the turn of the 20thCentury as Western powers and Japan sought to carve China up for their own profit, that agenda remains the bedrock of American foreign policy and it always shapes the motives for the American way of war. The world must be open to American economic penetration and profit. The access to raw materials and markets and the costs of labor must be protected for the benefit of American investors primarily and by whatever means necessary.

Fundamentally, Japan’s steady domination of Eastern and Southeastern Asia required access to American petroleum and steel so when Washington cut the Nipponese access to those, then enabled American pilots to attack Japanese targets in China, and then demanded Tokyo’s withdrawal from China and IndoChina, Japanese military elites understood that the U.S. was seeking war and that their only hope was to destroy the American fleet anchored in Hawaii and then seek a negotiated peace. American strategists well understood that Japan would not capitulate. Tokyo had no hope of defeating the U.S., as its top Admiral Yamamoto averred? Japan was pushed into war and Washington declared war on Germany because it was Tokyo’s ally. The U.S. was fully prepared to fight its war on three fronts across the globe. One significant factor in the decision was the resolution of the enormous unemployment problem. Sixteen million citizens soon found themselves in uniform.

The United States emerged from World War II as the most potent entity ever to wield power on our sorry planet. But it was not absolute. Defeat of Germany would have been impossible without the USSR as an ally and despite the loss of at least 25 million people, the Soviets now occupied much of Eastern Europe and much of Germany. Whatever one thinks of the communist system, its major jeopardy to the dominance the U.S. wished to achieve was that it was closed to Capitalism. So, as early as 1945, Washington began its so-called Cold War with Russia. Then, as the decade unfolded, communists in China prevailed in the civil war that emerged after Japanese withdrawal. Having fought Japan in an effort to manipulate China’s future development in partnership with itself, the U.S. had lost China to the Chinese- the wrong Chinese who today pose the greatest threat to the global ascendancy long desired in Washington and Wall Street.

After sacrificing over 400,000 American lives, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs. Our myth proclaims this hideous action was necessary to force Japan’s surrender, but we now know (or at least some do!) that Japan was already defeated and facing invasion and occupation by the Soviets. No American invasion could take place for months. The bombs were the means by which Japan surrendered ONLY to the U.S., which enabled Washington to avoid the same difficulties obtaining in Europe whereby the U.S. and Soviets were co-occupying Germany thus interfering with Washington’s after-war agenda. The Soviets interpreted the A-bombs as a clear-cut message to themselves and soon produced their own versions of the Satanic means by which we may yet commit self-extermination. During the Korean War, the US threatened China with nuclear attack, with the predictable result that today China has nukes capable of reaching the U.S.

World War II is not a bygone. Although the United Nations was crafted with the claim of ensuring a global order that would obviate a Third World War, that exalted goal has unambiguously failed. Take note that we have endured grave close calls such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and more. Should not our self-declared “intelligent” species learn the obvious? While the 20th Century witnessed the murderous competition between American-style capitalism, fascism and communism, today Washington, China and Russia, wielding their own forms of capitalism, are arming up. Note the recent rhetoric exchanged between Trump and Putin over the testing of new nuclear weapons. The last treaty attempting to regulate the expansion of nukes expires in February. China makes clear it is increasing its atomic arsenal. The Third World War will be the final.

That we cannot learn the lessons of genuine history definitely disturbs my sleep.

The post Learning Little From History appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed