Since then, children in Western countries have been taught that a US and UK-led coalition defeated the Nazis (and Imperial Japan) to save the world from fascism and secure a better world for all. But is this the whole story? Was the sudden emergence of a post-war geopolitical balance-of-power that transformed the USSR from ally to enemy - and the US from 'reluctant participant' to global superpower - merely an accident of fate? As we try to understand the current global chaos, we need to ask; what crucial details and context have been excised from the history books?
Today on Behind the Headlines, we look back at this mass outbreak of insanity to explore its causes, historical comparisons, and consequences. We're live this Sunday, April 19th 2015, from 2-4pm EST / 11am-1pm PST / 7-9pm UTC / 8-10pm CET
Running Time: 01:50:00
Download: MP3
Here's the summary of the show:
On this week's show Joe and Niall will be talking about, among other things, the hidden history of the Second World War. The 70th anniversary is coming up on two different days as far as Europe and Russia are concerned. May 8th Germany formally surrendered to the western Allies and they made a point of formally surrendering to Russia day later because they did not want to surrender to Stalin first because they expected and got better terms from the US and the UK.
This week we'll also be updating on more recent topics from the past week or so, stuff that is important and Sign importance, things like that.
The history of the Second World War is important and relevant to today's events because it's the same history playing out. Up to 80 million people were killed including war-related diseases and famine which is about twice the total of the First World War which was the war to end all wars only 18 or 20 years prior.
Starting with the big lies, there are perspectives on all of history. This is what people need to understand about history. When you read about history, you're getting a history that is seen through the lens or the filters of the culture in which you live or were brought up. If it was the culture of the winning countries you get a particular view and a different perspective from a country that was defeated in a major war.
These are biased viewpoints, so what's the truth behind it all? We're looking at some of the lies or misconceptions or misunderstandings about the Second World War, particularly from a European or American perspective. One of the big ones in the news over the past year or so because of events going on today regarding Russia is the extent to which the contribution of Russia towards winning the Second World War has been downplayed and ignored by the west. They were invited but refused to attend the May 8th victory celebrations in Russia WWII, because Russia is "evil". They invaded Ukraine and stole Crimea.
It's also in the context of western pundits and politicians attempting to reinforce this downplaying of Russia's contribution in the Second World War where Russia has been trying to point out that they more or less won the Second World War. It wasn't America and their cheeseburgers and whatever it is that made America great in those days. It's cheeseburgers today or the Abrams tank. It wasn't the Brits with their stiff upper lip.
The official WWII history in an American or a European's book gives the impression that it was won by the Brits, or the French or the Americans; all three. The historical proofs, and some historians are begrudgingly admitting that without Russia the Allies probably would not have won the Second World War. The contribution that Russia made was what won the Second World War for the Allies.
The other thing is the almost complete absence of the role that China played in the Second World War. China lost about 14 million people. It was second after Russia. There was a Chinese/Japanese war that started before the Second World War which carried on through and was part of the Second World War, starting in 1937. China effectively was fighting on the side of the Allies. In the First World War Japan was aligned with the British and French against the Germans but in the interwar period things turned around and they became the enemy of the Allied powers.
To sum up why that happened, there was a Japanese general who said that the western imperial powers - like the British - had taught the Japanese how to play poker and when the Japanese learned how to play poker well and won all of the chips then the British and Americans declared that the game was immoral. In order to thwart or indirectly attack Russia, the British, Americans and French had supported the Japanese in the latter part of the 19th and very early part of the 20th century, giving the ships and weapons to build up the Japanese empire. The Japanese War against Russia in which Russia was defeated in 1905 was funded at least in part by Wall Street and by the British.
Japan was used to defeat Russia and then Japan continued to create itself as a new empire over the next 25 years. They didn't like the idea of a Japanese empire in Asia so they became the enemy.
Niall responds yes and no because Britain was still playing poker at that point because they may have made certain statements like they didn't like it but they didn't do anything to discourage Japan from invading China. Joe responds that in terms of the Second World War it wasn't about the Japanese having had their eye on China. It was more about the rest of Asia and competition for rubber and tin in Malaysia and the British, French and Americans didn't want a Japanese empire as competition because they had their own imperial interests in Greater Asia, not just China.
Japan was taught to be an empire and so they wanted to be an empire, gaining territory, gaining resources and leading up to the Second World War they were increasingly demonized in the media and they became the enemy in the Second World War and were defeated and they dropped two atomic bombs on them. They became the enemy once they had imperial designs. There was a famous document by a Japanese general. Their plan for world takeover was named after him. They were right up there with Nazi ideology. They planned to actually get China and use it as a base from which to take over the entire planet. These guys were nuts.
So once it went into action you can't help but wonder if Japan was similarly appeased in the way that Germany was so that once the war machine was in effect, then a plan went into action. It could have easily been stopped beforehand.
The pattern seen is not a coincidence. The Japanese war machine comes out of nowhere and attacks the eastern flanks of China and also the far east of Russia and Korea. They were always interested in Korea as well. It was territorial expansion learned from the western powers, the British in the early part of the 20th century because it served their interests. But once it no longer served their interest they changed their tune to "We've got to rein these guys in. We've got to clip their claws".
The blitzing of an entire city was carried out by the Brits in the Middle East in the 20s, but on the scale of entire cities like Shanghai leveled, that was Japan in the mid-1930s. You wonder if they'd had the technology 30 years before we'd have seen the same thing arise where entire cities are floored. That was the lasting mark of the Second World War; just taking warfare to a whole new level, carpet bombing of anything and everything.
As far as Stalin and the Russians were concerned, the German war machine was designed to take them out and they had the backing of western powers. It seemed like a continuation, that they weren't done in the First World War where the goal was partly to get rid of the Czar and imperialist Russia and seeded the Bolshevik Revolution and effectively got rid, to some extent reduced the effectiveness of imperial Germany. In the Treaty of Versailles they imposed very punitive economic measures on Germany.
So Russia was taken care of because it was in the grip of the nihilistic, Bolshevik nut jobs who left Russia destroyed for several years until the 20s when the US started rebuilding Russia. And Germany was taken care of as a result of the First World War, but not to the extent that was deemed sufficient by the west. The result of the Second World War was perhaps the aim of the Second World War, ultimately to draw this line down the middle of the northern hemisphere, an iron curtain. It's always been a strange event in history in that Russia could have done so much. They effectively won the Second World War for the Allies and then within a few weeks of the end of the Second World War Russia was the enemy and had to be excluded with an iron curtain and then for the next almost 50 years. That defined the politics of the world for the next 50 years, the division between east and west and capitalism/communism.
Before D-Day the Pentagon was already being built, the Manhattan Project was underway. There are clear statements from US generals and other leaders at the time to the effect that they knew that the real enemy was Russia. This makes sense if you consider the strategic overnight switch immediately after the war ends. Looking at statements made by leaders at the time you can see things were changing. The general who was overseeing the building of the Pentagon and the Manhattan Project knew that the real problem for the US was Russia.
But backtracking, Hitler and the Nazis didn't just emerge in a vacuum. In the space of 10 years Germany went from hyperinflation and severe economic crash in the mid-20s, to temporary recovery, then second recession in 1931. Subsequently Hitler didn't win elections but a significant foothold on power. Up to this point Hitler was considered a clown in Germany. He really was a nobody.
There are statements from senior people in the west such as Henry Montague, the head of the Central Bank of England had agents meeting Hitler and reporting back to him as early as 1923 about how they could work with Hitler. They hadn't identified and selected him, but doors just seemed to open for him at the right time. It was because he was gradually ordained by people who saw themselves as masters of the universe. The German war machine was primarily the work of one super corporation IG Farben which as Anthony Sutton detailed in his book was more than just a chemicals company. It built German armaments, infrastructure from a lot of money that came via Wall Street and other industrials in Europe, from Switzerland. Hitler's finance minister, who was half English, was educated in London and subsequently worked in Wall Street under one of JP Morgan's firms. He became the partner of Montague and went back and forth from Switzerland throughout the 1930s effectively running the German economy.
The Germans got no aid when they needed it because of hyperinflation back in the 1920 but at the right time suddenly western leaders decided the Versailles treaty was a little bit harsh on Germany, but only at the point in time when this madman comes to power. Apparently they used and manipulated the financial levers of the world in order to facilitate someone like this coming to power.
Hitler made open statements throughout the 1930s, including in his book Mein Kamp that he planned to take over Europe but expected to do so with the backing of the British Empire and that his real target for Lebensraum (living space) was Russia. He may not have expressly asked the British government but tried to communicate by sending some agents to England. He wanted English reassurance that she would not embroil the Reich once more in a catastrophic two-front war. With the pattern of the appeasement, annexing Austria, Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia with full backing Britain, France and the United States led him to assume if he went on to invade Russia, he had support.
There are some clues in Mein Kampf that Hitler considered the British Empire to be the stable foundation on which the German empire would be built. He didn't see it as some kind of antagonist competitor, rather the Nazi empire would be some kind of a regional manager and he in no way intended to compete with the British, which just flies completely in the face of the entire sentiment of WWII as it's taught in the west, that it was the Nazis versus the Allies. But the pattern is there to see. The Allies really only took Hitler on late in the game, especially the United States, just as they did in WWI. They only arrived at the end because Russia was winning and racing across Eastern Europe. Either that wasn't supposed to happen or they anticipated and just timed their entry into the war to ensure that Russia didn't go and do too much.
To give a scale of the Second World War, the big invasion by the US, UK and western Allied forces, D-Day, numbered about 1.3 million people. In the Battle of Stalingrad alone, it was one million Nazis against one million Soviet soldiers. When Germany lined up to invade the western front of Russia they had 5 million men. There's nothing close to that in history, prior or since. It is far and above the largest war front ever that we know of.
Everything else is a relative sideshow. The actual battle of two massive forces took place in western Russia with some token support from the US and Britain. They tried to send in arms, planes and food but the only way in was via the Arctic and Hitler had invaded Norway in April 1940 with a view to getting the resources that they needed to make more weapons before the big fight with Russia but also to cut off the Arctic pass. The Nazis and Soviet troops fought up at the Arctic Circle, one of the fronts along the entire perimeter, from the very north of Russia right down to the Baku oil fields in the Caucasus. The only way that the Russians could win this battle was the way they have actually done in the past. As with Napoleon in 1812, the Russians retreated all the way into the interior and let the invading army come at them.
The Russians took whatever industry they could with them, transported them over the Ural Mountains into Siberia, rebuilt the industry and then shipped them by train back to the front to fight the Germans. The scale of it is enormous. There's no comparison.
The Battle of Stalingrad was the major, final, decisive battle and the events that led up to it was the turning point and the first defeat of the Nazis and more or less began the end of the war. It was the Russians who did it, so any kind of honest WWII commemoration ceremony should take place in Russia and Russia should be hosting it. In terms of efforts made and the lives that were lost, Russia stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Zoya in the chat room asked about the Kuril Islands, a string of islands off the northern tip of Japan and are just off the coast of Russia, which Japan and Russia are still fighting over today. Russia lost those to Japan in the 1905 Japanese/Russian war which was sponsored and funded by Wall Street bankers and by the British. Russia gained most of them back after the Second World War but they're very strategic for Russia because they are a natural barrier for the Sea of Okhotsk which is a bay inlet into eastern Russia, just off the Kamchatka Peninsula. There's a lot of natural resources including oil just offshore. There's also a rare earth mineral used in jet engines called rhenium that has been discovered there. It's also very important for Russia's Pacific fleet as a staging ground and watch point for the entry and exit of Russia's Pacific fleet in and out of Russia.
It's important for all of those strategic reasons and the Japanese are antsy about it. They'd prefer to have it as a vanguard against Russia, so there's fairly obvious reasons why it's strategically important for Russia primarily but also for the Japanese.
There is the whole Jewish question about the Second World War in the sense that the Jews were persecuted during the Second World War. There wasn't much concern about it at the time from the Allies as there was against Nazi expansionism. That was the rationale for war. The Jews in Germany had been sending out a warning in the 30s about the atmosphere, the xenophobic, racist atmosphere that was growing, or so they claimed, in Germany at the time. It brings to mind one of the rationales for the 1905 Russian/Japanese War being funded by Wall Street bankers and the British, particularly Jacob Schiff, a Jewish banker on Wall Street. He was very much concerned about protecting Jews in his homeland and in Europe. He was very anti-Czar and was happy to see the assassination of the Czar and his family and the overthrowing of the Czarist regime in Russia because of the historical persecution of Jews in Russia.
Jump forward 20 years from the First World War and you have a similar dynamic, not the full dynamic but part of the it, that Jewish businessmen, banker and politicians were at least in their official words, concerned about the welfare of Jews in Germany and also influential Jewish businessmen and politicians, even though Zionists in Europe at the time were promoting the persecution of the Jews at the same time as well.
It's strange that while you have that, you also have European politicians, notably Winston Churchill saying very strange things, not only about Hitler but about the Jews. A quote from Churchill about Hitler in 1937, so one year before things got started, Churchill said "One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I'd hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and restore us back to our place among the nations."
So to Churchill in 1937, Hitler was a champion. In 1937 an article in the New York Times with Churchill's name on it, talking about the persecution of the Jews said:
"It would be easy to ascribe the persecution of the Jews to the wickedness of the persecutors but that does not fit all the facts. It exists even in lands like Great Britain and the United States where Jew and gentile are equal in the eyes of the law where a large number of Jews have found not only asylum but opportunity. These facts must be faced in any analysis of anti-Semitism. They should be pondered especially by the Jews themselves. For it may be that unwittingly they are inviting persecution but they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer.So this is what Churchill was saying in 1937 about the problem of the persecution of Jews, that he was suggesting it was to some extent because of they tend to keep themselves apart, not really differently than other religions, but he was pointing out that may be why they experienced persecution, not just at that time in Germany.
The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that the Jew is different. He looks different, he thinks differently, he has a different tradition and background and he refuses to be absorbed.
So Churchill is one year away from waging this war against the evils of Nazism and he was honouring the champion that Hitler was and saying that the Jews in Germany who were clamouring at that time for someone in the west and using their political influence to get the Americans and British to come and so something about what the Nazis were doing, blaming the Jews themselves.
This is classic perfidious speak of the western elite in general. They will do this to send signals to their prospective antagonists, in this instance Hitler, to give him false impressions and maneuver him into a strategic position where he makes a mistake. This is why Hitler invaded a succession of countries, until he invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany. What happened? For eight months nothing! Hitler interprets these signals in the years prior were correct, a wink and a nod that he and the west have an understanding, they have his back while he goes and smashes Russia. He and the west both hate communism and "those damn Jews". Niall thinks this is what went on there.
Hitler was probably in the 1930s, the era of western empires was still very much present. It was still in living memory that there were German, Russian and British empires, still very much the order of the day. From the Nazis' perspective their expansion and absorption of different lands was not anything different than what the British, French or any other great power had been doing.
(Lost Audio) Charlie Chaplin monologue:
I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others' happiness, not by each others' misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there's room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned many souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.In 1938 at the Munich Conference, as remembered in the west, British Prime Minster Chamberlain appeased Hitler, desperate at any cost to prevent another European war. He wanted to give Hitler what he wanted, the Sudetenland, the parts of Czechoslovakia with many Germans and a large industrial base which was taken from Germany in the First World War. Initially they were just taking back what was taken from them in the First World War. There were no Czechs represented at the Munich Conference.
We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life would be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of the system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me I say do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators will die and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish. Soldiers, don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men! Machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate. Only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don't fight for slavery. Fight for liberty. In the 17th chapter of St. Luke it is written the kingdom of god is within men. Not one man nor a group of men, but in all men. In you. You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then in the name of democracy let us use the power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age security. By the promise of these things brutes have risen to power. But they lie. They do not fulfill their promise. They never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil their promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
The First World War officially kicked off to defend the honour of Belgium. Britain challenged Germany's march through Belgium to get to France. Then in 1938 the conference decided that Czechoslovakia would no longer exist and gave it to Germany. Stalin realized that all of his efforts in the previous years to create some kind of anti-Nazi alliance were doomed to fail because the west had no interest in actually stopping Hitler. That's when his foreign minister, with his German counterpart created the USSR/Nazi Germany pact over Poland. Then he moved troops into the three Baltic states.
Another revision of history today is that the Russians were as bad as the Nazis because they sliced up Europe between them. Completely left out of this is the fact that those territories the Russians moved into in 1939 had been part of Russia for hundreds of years prior to being taken away from them during the Bolshevik Revolution. The Russians knew that the Nazi war machine had one major purpose, to destroy Russia. They could see it coming.
To understand the mindset of the British and American imperialists. The Americans ideologically and genetically were the descendants of British and other European elite. In 1944 Churchill addressed Stalin in Moscow and said "So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety percent of Romania? For us to have, say, ninety percent of Greece and we go 50/50 on Yugoslavia?" When you're dealing with people who are talking about dividing up entire countries, tens of millions of people, and then you add in the deceptive, psychopathic element where you're barefaced lying to someone about the division of these countries and about the world, these are people that are trying to conquer and control as much of the world as possible and they see the world in those terms; massive chunks of land with tens of millions of people saying "Yeah, we'll take 90% of this and you can have 10. We'll take 10% of that, you can have 90. We'll go down the middle on this big country."
How can you even try to understand that kind of mentality; Ivy League, politically connected families in the US and in Europe weaned on that view of the world?
The internationalist breed form groups like the Milner Group. One subset called the Pilgrims, the people who rose to the top in America over 200 years and are now pilgrims in the sense of reuniting what was left of the British Empire with American designs on world hegemony. The primary result of WWII, even if we can't categorically show that this was the aim from the beginning, was the peaceful transfer of a world empire from dominant British hands into dominant US hands because they all think alike.
The British empirist who thought they were better than the Americans but realized that America with its 200 million plus people with much more resources as opposed to the Britain's 40 million, having one global empire rather than competing empires, then it made sense to do it from one big country like America that could effectively manage the globe as a seat or headquarters of the empire. The British had limited resources. They had an empire on which the sun never set and the blood never dried but it was limited and was not an empire that they could really control fully. So there was a decision somewhere to hand that off to the Americans and their greater resources and population.
When you look at it, it seems like they look at from the point of view of dividing up countries. At that time the major threat in terms of land mass using that analogy, the land mass of Russia was the major other competing power, in terms of being one nation state. The Chinese, although having numbers and land mass, didn't have the imperial history or ideology behind them that would have made them a threat. But Russia did. That's how it was seen at the time and that's where it went. And then at the end of the Second World War the isolation of Russia through the Cold War and manufacturing almost out of nowhere the communist threat and then the perpetuation of it over the next 50 years, was done deliberately to create that threat by the Americans in particular so that they could use it to say they needed to go off on imperial adventures and protect against the commie threat here, here and here and protect their national interests.
It was a smokescreen or ruse or generated boogieman to justify imperial expansion and their ultimate goal. It's difficult to get into peoples' heads and historian never go there, that these people want to control the world. The average historian who tries to judicially analyze what happened and the motives and the means, can't go there. He doesn't understand the mindset of these people who will look at the globe as something to be divided.
Niall read a couple of quotes, remarkable similar. One is from the President Truman, who was thick as a rock but psychopathically in tune. In his stupidity he would say things that hit the nail on the head. As a senator in 1941 when Germany had just invaded the USSR, "Well, I think if we help the Russians just enough but then not too much, if we see that the Germans are then losing, we then help the Germans some more, like sending them weapons or money, and then we get them all to kill as many of each other as possible". That's not verbatim, but the gist of what he said.
There's a similar quote from someone in Britain, Colonel David Sterling who is credited of being the founder of Britain's SAS/assassins, half a century later, so some time in the 90s. In an interview he said "The greatest mistake we British did was to think that we could play the German empire against the Russian empire and have them bleed one another to death", suggesting that that was the idea in the 1930s. That was what they were trying to make happen.
It's so obscure because people can't conceive there are people who would view the world and hundreds of millions of people in countries as this way, to just set them against each other and have them bleed each other to death so that they can move in and take control. No one will ever understand the history of our world or why the world is the way it is today without understanding that kind of deviant and psychopathic mindset which is just someone who does not have any of the normal human foibles associated with empathy or concern for other people or concern for bleeding millions of people to death. Their logic cuts like a knife through butter uninhibited by any normal human considerations. That's what's behind it all.
Historians come along and try to make sense of it and they miss that key ingredient that would allow them to understand it and provide a true analysis of the situation. So you get the projection of all sorts of noble ideals and diplomatic back and forth and deals being brokered when it's not really about that, the way they try to understand it. It's simply a bunch of predators trying to divide up the world between them.
In the case of the Second World War, one big predator was more bloodthirsty and nasty than the others who effectively prevailed and that's America today.
The best way to analyze the Second World War is to consider its results and then consider that that's more or less what was hoped to have happened from the beginning from the most powerful clique among competing cliques.
The Marshal Plan was not a benevolent gift from America to rebuild Europe. Statements coming out from US generals about their military exercises all along the border with Russia as a result of having bases in places like Germany and elsewhere in eastern Europe, come from the outcome of WWII. Among other things, an issue in Europe is that it's got about 30% reliance for its energy needs from Russia.
At the end of the Second World War, over half of Europe's refined oil products that would then be used in machinery, cars and so on, came from American companies. The seven sisters oil companies/cartel consolidated in the 20s and 30s so that by the end of the war they had complete control over Middle Eastern oil. They sold it to Europe at extremely marked-up prices.
The Marshall Plan was to give loans in order to buy that oil, but it wasn't coming from the United States. It was coming from resources in the Middle East. The US ended up being positioned as the middleman of the entire planet.
With the wars of the 20th century, you go into a country, wipe out the indigenous/business opposition, impose your own businesses or open that market for your own business, bring in your own, give money to the local government to buy stuff from your newly founded corporations and business interests in that country. That's what the Marshall Plan was about.
They did the same thing in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks overthrew the established order and brought the Russian economy to a halt and then in a few years, allowed an American business interest to get a foothold in Russia. Lenin's five year plans, with money provided by Wall Street bankers, were a type of Marshall Plan during the 1920s to rebuild Russian industry which had been destroyed under Lenin and Trotsky. It was used to facilitate the establishment of American corporations and industry in Russia and in the course of it Russia was locked into learning how to do business the way America does, recreating the way Russia thought about things.
Being communist was irrelevant. As far as Wall Street bankers are concerned, you have a captive, 100% monopoly on the market which is their only interest.
While the Russians were fighting the Nazis, the toffs and elitists primarily in the east coast of the US were creating the IMF, the World Bank, setting up things so that all currencies after 1945 were pegged to the US dollar. The Bretton Woods meetings were 1944. The major economies of the world were put in a position after both world wars where they decided it was a good idea and the US was in a position to impose the dollar as the reserve currency.
The National Security Act that created the CIA came online in 1947 but that was just a formality. During the war Project Paper Clip transferred thousands of the enemy, injected them straight into the new US national security state and voila, you have ideologically a continuation of the Reich.
There really has never really been any good guys versus bad guys. It's all been stage managed by particular people at particular times in history. There have been good guys but they've never risen to any positions of power. They've never been able to assert themselves on the global stage. Behind the scenes these elite, and bankers play a major part in it, they're simply going about a process of control and domination of as much of the world as possible and they don't have any allegiances that "ordinary people" indulge themselves in. They're staring down and the globe and thinking "it's all ours" and whatever works.
That's where we're at today after 70 years under this system. There have been some significant changes since then but as the chessboard emerged at the end of WWII that's more or less where we're at. It's relevant today because the chessboard is being changed again. It's going through another upheaval and the outcome remains to be seen. During the Cold War they were wary of China and the USSR becoming allies, being the two largest countries on the "world island" forming an alliance you have a problem if your goal is world domination.
Joe changes track to ideologies. The ideology of the average person versus that of the elite are very different. People are given simplistic ideologies, like in America today it's freedom, freedom of speech, civil rights, democracy. That's the "American dream" which underpins American society, freedom, justice and the American way. But that propaganda that people willingly adopt, positive ideologies for their team. If you live in a country that's at war, you're on the good side, and the others are the bad guys while in the other country they think they're the good guys as well with an ideology equally as noble.
With two "noble" ideologies fighting against each other, there's the predatory ideology of the elite wanting global domination of as much of the world and its resources, including human resources as possible going on above it, they can get away with the deception for a long time. If continued for long enough, it starts to destroy the countries on which it's imposed, including the home country like in the US. It's increasingly difficult for Americans and people in Western Europe today to hold to that ideology because they see the evidence that it's not there anymore, all around them; police brutality in the US, increasing gap between rich and poor and favouritism towards the elite, undermining the popular peoples' belief in this ideology for which they live.
The French sociologist, Gustave Le Bon has a very interesting book called The Crowd, a study of the popular mind. He said that society is stable when its cultural core is stable. But when the cultural core that people believe in starts to no longer hold for people and they don't believe in it anymore, then society starts to break down. That's when a society is ripe for social chaos, disintegration, revolution or whatever.
The American government for more than 100 years has promoted and programmed people of the spreading freedom and democracy around the world, American exceptionalism "we are the chosen nation" almost but they have destroyed that ideology for the people by the predatory nature of their rule and society starts to fall apart. It gets into a negative feedback loop where the more brutal the nature of the society, the less people believe in it and the more they react against it which incurs more brutality and it spirals down very quickly with mass unrest. America and to a lesser extent western Europe is on the brink of that as it reaches the tipping point and people are ripe for just losing all faith in the system.
And in the two largest Eurasian countries there's a corresponding increase in social cohesion that is part of what makes them stronger internally. China is criticized for being so oppressive, but they've got a billion people. How do they keep them pacified? What is the cohesion holding them together in spite of internal attacks on its integrity or the military? Clearly something is working there.
The same things are said about Russia, it's corrupt, it's impoverished. But maybe part of it is a culture and people who have gone through hardship. The Russian population in living memory has known hardship and knows how to get by and will put up with living conditions that people in the west would not because they've been conditioned to not put up with those kind of conditions. Things have changed for the better for the Russian population over the past 10 or 15 years; not everywhere but as a general rule.
Russian are asking themselves the question of what ideology they are rallying around, like Putin has been doing for the past 10 or 15 years. It's clearer now post-Ukraine coup. The ideology of defending Russia and Russian values from external attack rings far more true today because there's evidence for any normal person in Russia at least, to see that that is true. Whereas what's being said from the west is completely false. It's accusing someone else of what they themselves are doing. The Americans say they're fighting against Russian aggression. You see it on Facebook "Look how close Russia put its country to our NATO or American military bases". That is coming out a lot and it's really hard for the Americans to justify their rationale because it's patent bullshit. You pull your hair out when you read western media outlets talking about the Russian threat. It's infuriating because it goes against common sense and observable facts and you don't have to research it in any great detail. You can see the truth of the Russian perspective against the lies of the American perspective but all the time the western media's trying to turn that whole thing on its head.
The Russian people have two things on their side. As a general rule they have truth in their overarching government ideology and they also have a history where they've known hard times and are able to put up with more difficult times socially speaking than the people in the west. In America they have this ideology that's so threadbare it's ridiculous and you have to be really brain dead to believe the American ideology. Like the American dream, you have to be asleep to believe it. They've been fed on a diet of wealth and success, etc. and are ill-equipped or prepared for hard time. Also there's a large population in the US that is not living the American dream and the divergence between what they're asked to believe and having to work three jobs.
The part of the population in terms of the American dream that's the cultural norm, they're no longer Americans and they are looked up as being un-American for daring to be poor. There's a series of statements by a US general based in Europe who was on RT Today where he said "It's important for us the US to maintain dominance", primarily of military but also full-spectrum dominance, across the board, whatever sphere it is. "We must over-compensate" (or something) against anything the Russians have." He said explicitly "We have no interest in fighting them on a level playing field". They have no interest in a fair fight. He was saying that America needs to overcompensate as in "we need to be completely dominant in any field. We need to be extra dominant so that there's no chance of anybody challenging us because we're not interested in a fair fight. We like to stack the deck against any of our enemies so that they cannot compete with us and we get to call the shots" (Joe's paraphrasing).
In historical terms, why a US Pentagon general would say that is because the US has never actually had to fight a real or fair war. It came in at the end of WWII, at the end of WWI. Who have they had a real war against ever? If they were in an actual situation with a fairly level playing field, they wouldn't know what to do. A lot of soldiers died in Vietnam but a lot more Vietnamese and Cambodians died than Americans GIs.
Vietnam was contrived. It was part of their containing China. They were in a guerrilla war. You could say it was similar to Iraq in that sense where you had massive superiority of military force and a protracted years-long war against a guerrilla force and of course you're going to lose a lot of soldiers. It's not a fair fight, equally matched. They say they lost in Vietnam but they didn't lose. They didn't lose because the pulled out. When the soldiers leave the corporations walk in afterwards and that is the goal of war.
You can lose a war militarily as long as enough of the area is destroyed to open it up for economic entrance. It was their goal to get a foothold in East Asia and be there to watch the Chinese and watch the development of Asia and make sure it goes the way they want it to go.
With a global way of looking at things that "they" have been using all this time that most of us have been asleep, Korea, Vietnam are two peninsulas bracketing China. It's obviously about containing China from that long-term perspective, but the immediate goal being to secure access to that country's natural resources to feed the beast back home.
The British Empire was only for that effectively. The British Empire never needed to have such a messy, bloody war to do that. There were easier ways if that was the prime or sole goal. The US wanted to actually have a war. It was good for the military industrial complex. It was good for business of modern weapons. As Kissinger said, it was also send some messages.
The British could get away with it when they were fighting natives with bows and arrows but once the industrial revolution had taken hold with the progress, development and spread of weapons, and people could get access to and make their own weapons, suddenly they had to have a war then because the "enemy" that you previously went in and just slaughtered with your cannons, now can actually fight back a little bit. The Brits were gone by 1950 in India and that was the last straw. The Brits had handed off to the US and the US took on the task of fighting those imperial wars which were bloodier and cost more lives on the American side because the enemy could fight back, because this was the latter half of the 20th century. Guns were more easily available.
The horrific and bloody wars in Korean and Vietnam are just two incidents among hundreds of others. Government have been overthrown. There have been smaller invasions.
(Apocalypse Now: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning.")
That sums it up, they love the smell of napalm in the morning and they love building bases all over the world. In a lot of cases the governments didn't put up any kind of resistance. Today there are 700 basis on all the countries of interest on earth.
Talking about the international community, there's something about the non-aligned movement. "...which is a group of states which are not formally aligned with or against any major power block. As of 2012 that movement had 120 members and 17 observer countries." These countries wouldn't form part of the international community which today is America and whoever else will go along with what America says.
The non-aligned movement are the countries who have no official allegiance with anybody in any conflict or war. The only countries that aren't in the non-aligned movement is North America-US and Canada, Western and Eastern Europe, Australia and Russia. The whole swathe of the rest of the world, all of Africa, all of South America, China has observer status, India, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, all of the Middle East are all non-aligned. China has now realized it has to align with Russia.
A law was passed in the United States passed by Congress and accepted by the President which in Europe is called the Netherlands invasion act. It authorizes the President of the US to use force to rescue any American that might be brought to the Hague for trial. This applies to the international community and international law, which is today what America says, a farce. It's interesting that the Americans have a law where the President can order force to be used to stop any American being taken to the Hague. Where is freedom and justice in that?
If some American committed some kind of war crime, there's a law in the US that says that the American can invade a country that's trying to take him to the Hague, to take him back home and he's never going to the Hague because America can never do anything that's a breach of human rights. That's officially on the law books. Effectively "America can do no wrong" and anybody who tries to point that out will get invaded. It's shallow, crass, duplicitous and deceptive.
Part of the reason they're in a rush to incorporate Ukraine to some kind of NATO format is so that they can retrospectively or following some future provocation, say "Oh my god! Look! A clause in our agreement as NATO members is that if one of our members is attacked, we must obliterate the aggressive nation", i.e., Russia in this case. Knowing they have it all in their grasp, they manipulate things to make the appearance that they play by these rules for public perception, to continue the illusion that America is doing all of this to protect the world and make it safe for freedom and democracy. That's the big lie, to have this grandiose ideology and behind it do exactly the opposite. No one would ever believe that you'd do exactly the opposite of what you stand up on podiums and shout to the world over and over again and saturate the airwaves with, this noble ideology, no one would ever believe that you would do that.
The term "the big lie" comes from Goebbels. Tell people a big enough lie enough times and they'll believe it. It's unbelievably ironic that Hitler and the Nazis were just so naïve. They had no idea what they were dealing with. They had an overt totalitarian "wreck everything" approach, but there's something that's far more insidious and far more cunning. The Nazis were just crass compared to it.
Last week we were talking about Iran having tabled an agreement. The Ayatollah Khomeini who's the supreme ruler of Iran has said today that the United States created the myth of nuclear weapons to paint Iran as a source of a threat. It's funny that it was even in the news. They're calling it "tough rhetoric". The tough rhetoric comes days before nuclear talks are set to resume in Vienna. They said "They created the myth of nuclear weapons so they could say the Islamic republic is a source of threat" Khomeini said. "No, the source of the threat is America itself and its unrestrained, destabilizing interventions. They threaten Iran and want us to have no capabilities for defence. The US threatens in the most shameless way to deliver a strike against Iran. That is why we must be prepared for defence in any case."
He's saying this in response to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey who is nuts. He said that deliveries of the Russian S300 air defence missile systems to Iran was not a problem because after this deal Russia said they would go ahead with the deal that they made way back when, to send missile defence to Iran. Russia had suspended that deal with Iran at the request of the US.
Obama today said that he was surprised that they hadn't already sold the missiles to Iran. A pundit was saying what's actually surprising is that Obama would be surprised Russia would actually honour a deal. Russia said it wouldn't sell the missiles because the US asked them not to, and they haven't. And Obama was like "Oh really? I thought they would have done what I would have done, which was go ahead and do it anyway and screw the deal."
Dempsey said in response to Russia now allowing the delivery of these defensive missiles said "It doesn't matter. America's ability to strike Tehran's nuclear facilities remains intact." "If we choose to we can just forget about these talks and Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran (to tune of Beach Boys' Barbara Ann).
A couple of possibilities-Dempsey may be bluffing because he's known to be close with key Zionists. Dempsey may be saying that to reassure Israel because apparently when Obama said he was surprised Israelis said "What the hell?!" because that's basically a signal from Washington to say "We're cool with you sending the S300 defence system". If that's what it seems like, then this is the US preparing to do nothing when the inevitable happens that Israel will provoke regional war and be obliterated by all if its neighbours together. It's just a matter of alliance.
The supreme leader of Iran, Khomeini actually tweeted that. He's been tweeting for a while. He's Khomeini.ir on Twitter and that's what he said. He's even got the way you shorten words down. He said in a tweet a few months ago that love is the answer. He's a dude. They faked a myth about ABT. He's only got 160 characters so he's keeping his words short. He's with the cyber-sphere. He's tweeting away.
That was a broad analysis of the Second World War. There's so much written, so many different battles and events occurred during the Second World War. There have been large volumes written by gentleman historians, ideologically invested, on all the details although most of the established volumes read were commissioned during the war. It had not yet ended so people like A.J.P. Taylor who became the sources for the war were actually commissioned and funded by the victors to make sure a certain version of it came out.
Really there's only one book you need to read about the First World War, The Secret Origins of World War One by Macgregor and Docherty. Niall's never seen it spelled out as in this book where people in London and Wall Street organized the First World War and made Germany seem like the aggressor, who wasn't at all. Or you can read Joe's article on it.
The book about the Second World War has yet to be written. The article doesn't cover the Second World War. It hasn't really been written. There's a lot of conspiracy-type stuff on the Second World War about Hitler and who funded him and the Zionist etc. It took 100 years for the simple, plain truth about the First World War to come out. As the guy said to the journalist Susskind "You all will judiciously study history as you do, but by the time you're studying events, we've moved on. We're in a different paradigm."
It's time for Relic's pop culture roundup. It's a doozy.
Relic: Well hello. It's Relic once again, here to deliver to you, dear listeners, all the latest news from the music and film industry that seem to dominate my grow Boxnet browser feed on a regular basis. In another exciting edition of Relic's pop culture roundup. And as usual, I'm recording the show here in my miniscule moss-covered log cabin tucked away on the upper shores of Northern Lake Canada where up in these parts we have only one word for snow but by golly I can't seem to remember what it is.
Anyways, lots of gossip coming out of the Coachella Music Festival last weekend. You might know it as the Woodstock of the new millennium where throngs of American young people gather together to get again rebel against their parents and society by repeating the time-honoured tradition of spending three days being blasted out of their minds on sex, drugs and rock and roll. Kids these days are so unique. Like no one's ever done that before!
There was a major hoopla at the festival this year when a video emerged of a so-called extended kiss that Drake received from Madonna onstage during a live duet performance. The video showed what appeared to be a negative reaction from the Canadian flip-flop music artist after the Material Girl initiated the prolonged public lip lock.
But after watching the video in question, I can say that for the first time my favourite webtertainment news sites have got this story all wrong. It wasn't a kiss at all. Looking closely, one can clearly see that as he was singing, Mr. Drake began to suffocate and choke, probably on an excess of adoration is my guess. And, when Madonna recognized the symptoms as she's had a lot of experience with this particular form of suffering, she quickly jumped to Drake's rescue and started administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. All I can say is it's a good thing the Material Girl wasn't wearing her famous cone-shaped brassiere during the manoeuvre as Mr. Drake could have been seriously injured. As the old saying goes "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."
You know, that's gotta be the reason why this supposed kiss went on for like seven minutes. She was actually saving his life. The way I see it, it was a selfless, heroic gesture by an aging Italian former pop star and not a creepy onstage make-out session with a desperate, cougar, musical has been like the tabloids are saying. Perish the thought! And whatever the case may be, one thing I can say for certain is that after a Madonna encounter like that, I'm guessing that Mr. Drake will not feel like a virgin ever again. True story.
Also at the festival this year, Canadians-disowned teen pop idol Justin Blieber made headlines again this week when the baby-faced singer and his entourage of no-neck bodyguards tried to worm their way backstage during Drake's final show. Apparently words were exchanged and the young Beauty and the Beast singer was put in a chokehold and escorted off the premises by festival security. Oh Justin Blieber! You no longer adorable impish Canadian scallywag! Always getting into trouble with our American cousins to the south! You mind my words boy! If you don't be careful, you might give all us friendly, overly polite Canucks a bad name. And take it from me young one, it's never wise to be on the wrong side of an insane nuclear superpower.
So here's an idea; whenever that particular security guard grows tired of putting a stranglehold on everyone's favourite girly boyfriend, please send him back home as I'm sure there are more than a few patriotic Canadian citizens that would gladly take over and continue that job. Yeah, that'd fix him. Fix him good!
In other news and continuing on with the Coachella Music Festival, apparently a video has been posted on Instagram that shows the backstage antics of pop diva Rihanna where critics are speculating that she can allegedly be seen snorting some of those infamous Columbian snowflakes up her nose as her friends dance in the foreground. If you ask me, it gives a whole new meaning to the word "Cokachella". As it stands I'm pretty sure it was all just a simple misunderstanding as the Barbados-born pop singer strictly maintains in her response to critics. Rumour has it that the whole event was staged as part of a major advertising campaign and what was seen in the video was merely a slight miscommunication between the artist and her new sponsors. You see, when the chairman of a major corporate soft drink company asked Rihanna to make a promotional video posing with Coke and a straw, I don't think this is exactly what he had in mind.
When a Man Loves a Woman playing - Percy Sledge
Sadly, in our last musical story of note, this week marked the death of soul music legend Mr. Percy Sledge, who passed away quietly in his home in Baton Rouge after a yearlong struggle with cancer. He was 74. Best known for his chart-topping 1966 love song When a Man Loves a Woman, the southern R&B star was remembered fondly by his friends as a gracious human being and one of the nicest people you'd ever meet. You know, in today's modern music industry comprising of shallow, auto-tuned adolescent nonsense, Percy Sledge's heart-achingly tender soul ballad stands as a testament to transcendent, all-consuming love. Real music for real people.
Hats off to you Mr. Sledge for bringing something beautiful into this crazy, fudged-up world. May you sir, rest in peace.
Well that's all for now kids. It's old Relic here sifting through the cold ashes of memory at the bottom of my old wood stove and saying always remember, keep your feet on your ground and your eyes on the stars.
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