Photo #1: New York Times, Dec 8, 1941
Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
September 14, 2020
So far, the year 2020 has been sort of a grand unified compilation of centuries worth of conspiracies and theories. But I’m not here to parse that out (yet). Instead, I have two reminders:
- Some conspiracies exist
- Some theories are rooted in fact
With that in mind, I’m continuing my series of articles designed to demonstrate that “the elites” do indeed conspire to commit acts that benefit them and their ilk.
Entry #1 can be found here.
Entry #2: can be found here.
Entry #3: This story is false: The U.S. minds its own business but, like a sleeping giant, is endlessly awakened or has its patience tested by surprise events and unprovoked hostilities.
Reality: For nearly two centuries, the U.S. government and military manufacture events and reasons to engage in wars of conquest. Below are four examples.
Photo #2: Reddit screenshot
“War Exists”
When James K. Polk was elected U.S. president in 1844, he had every intention of creating a pretext to stir Americans into action against Mexico. One of the issues of the 1844 election was the annexation or Texas — or “re-annexation,” as Polk called it. Apparently, no one bothered to remind Polk that Texas was not part of the original Louisiana Purchase.
When Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, the territory of Texas (along with what are now New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, California, and part of Colorado) was Mexican territory. Fifteen years later, Texas claimed its independence as the Lone Star Republic. In Washington, it was viewed as U.S. property.
“Even before Polk’s inauguration, Congress adopted a joint resolution on his proposal to annex Texas,” explains historian Kenneth C. Davis. “When Mexico heard of this action in March 1845, it severed diplomatic relations with the United States.” Undeterred, Polk sent an ambassador, James Slidell, to negotiate a purchase of Texas and California. Slidell was rebuffed.
Polk took a new tack and ordered General Zachary Taylor to lead his troops all the way to the Rio Grande, thus testing the defined borders. “Mexico claimed that the boundary was the Nueces River, northeast of the Rio Grande, and considered the advance of Taylor’s troops an act of aggression,” says Davis.
Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock, commander of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Regiment, said of this move: “It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.”
“All that was needed in the spring of 1846 was a military incident to begin the war that Polk wanted,” agrees historian Howard Zinn. “Ordering troops to the Rio Grande, into territory inhabited by Mexicans, was clearly a provocation.”
The military incident arrived right on cue when Polk ordered Taylor and his 3500-member “army of observation” to cross the Rio Grande. Taylor’s quartermaster, Colonel Cross went missing, his body found eleven days later with his skull crushed. The day after Cross’ high-profile public funeral, a patrol of Taylor’s soldiers was attacked by Mexicans. Sixteen were killed. Taylor sent a dispatch to Polk: “Hostilities may now be considered as commenced.”
Declaring “the cup of forbearance” to have been exhausted, Polk announced to Congress, “War exists.”
“An agreeable Democratic majority in the House and Senate quickly voted — with little dissent from the Whig opposition — to expand the army by an additional 50,000 men. America’s most naked war of territorial aggression was underway,” Davis explains. It was a war that Ulysses S. Grant later called “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
Photo #3: William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal headline
Remember the Maine!
In 1897, Teddy Roosevelt stated bluntly, “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one,” His wait lasted less than a year.
February 15, 1898, was a muggy Tuesday night in Havana Harbor. Some 350 crew and officers settled in onboard the Maine. “At 9:40 p.m., the ship's forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water,” writes author Tom Miller. “Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption — this one deafening and massive — splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn't battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air.”
By the time the “sleeping giant” was jarred into alertness by the Maine explosion, Cuban and Filipino rebels were already fighting Spain for independence in their respective lands. The Maine was in Havana Harbor in 1898 on a purportedly friendly mission. “Yet,” writes Miller, “the visit was neither spontaneous nor altruistic; the United States had been eyeing Cuba for almost a century.”
“At a certain point in that spring, McKinley and the business community began to see that their object, to get Spain out of Cuba, could not be accomplished without war,” Howard Zinn adds, “and that their accompanying object, the securing of American military and economic influence in Cuba, could not be left to the Cuban rebels, but could be ensured only by U.S. intervention.”
American newspapers, especially those run by William Randolph Hearst (New York Journal) and Joseph Pulitzer (New York World), jumped on the Maine explosion as the ideal justification to drum up public support for a war of imperialism. The Journal commissioned a fictitious half-page sketch which alleged to show where a mine struck the ship. Hearst himself was soon offering a $50,000 reward “for the detection of the perpetrator of the Maine outrage.”
“Tabloid headlines depicting Spanish atrocities against Cubans became commonplace, and the influential papers of both men were outdoing each other in the sensationalized screaming for war,” says Davis.
When Hearst sent artist Frederick Remington to Cuba, Remington reported that he could not find a war. “You furnish the pictures,” Hearst replied, “and I’ll furnish the war.”
Spain was easily defeated, the legend of Teddy Roosevelt was manufactured whole cloth, and the Cubans (and Puerto Ricans) found themselves exchanging one colonial ruler for another. In the Philippines, U.S. soldiers were ordered to “Burn all and kill all.” Over the next decade, 600,000 Filipinos were eventually wiped out…all to the war cry of “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!”
Coda: In 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy mounted an investigation of the Maine disaster. Rickover and his team of experts concluded that the explosion was probably caused by “spontaneous combustion inside the ship’s coal bins,” a problem common to ships of that era.
Photo #4: Remember December 7!, by Allen Saalburg, poster issued in 1942 by the United States Office of War Information
Day of Infamy
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, is the mother of all “sleeping giant” stories. The day after the attack, Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed Congress. The U.S. was “at peace” with Japan, he stated, yet had been “suddenly and deliberately attacked.”
Yet, as historian Thomas A. Bailey wrote: “Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor… He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good.”
The diplomatic record reveals some of what Dr. Roosevelt neglected to include in that now-mythical “Date of Infamy” speech:
•Dec. 14, 1940: Joseph Grew, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, sends a letter to FDR, announcing that, “It seems to me increasingly clear that we are bound to have a showdown [with Japan] someday.”
•Dec. 30, 1940: Pearl Harbor is considered so likely a target of the Japanese attack that Rear Admiral Claude C. Bloch, commander of the Fourteenth Naval District, authors a memorandum entitled, “Situation Concerning the Security of the Fleet and the Present Ability of the Local Defense Forces to Meet Surprise Attacks.”
•Jan. 27, 1941: Grew (in Tokyo) sends a dispatch to the State Department: “My Peruvian Colleague told a member of my staff that the Japanese military forces planned, in the event of trouble with the United States, to attempt a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor using all of their military facilities.”
•Feb. 5, 1941: Bloch’s December 30, 1940 memorandum leads to much discussion and eventually a letter from Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner to Secretary of War Henry Stimson in which Turner warns, “The security of the U.S. Pacific Fleet while in Pearl Harbor, and of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base itself, has been under renewed study by the Navy Department and forces afloat for the past several weeks… If war eventuates with Japan, it is believed easily possible that hostilities would be initiated by a surprise attack upon the Fleet or the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor… In my opinion, the inherent possibilities of a major disaster to the fleet or naval base warrant taking every step, as rapidly as can be done, that will increase the joint readiness of the Army and Navy to withstand a raid of the character mentioned above.”
•Feb. 18, 1941: Commander in Chief, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel says, “I feel that a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor is a possibility.”
•Sept. 11, 1941: Kimmel says, “A strong Pacific Fleet is unquestionably a deterrent to Japan—a weaker one may be an invitation.”
•Nov. 25, 1941: Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson writes in his diary that, “The President…brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese. He brought up the event that we’re likely to be attacked [as soon as] next Monday for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning.”
•Nov. 27, 1941: U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall issues a memorandum cautioning that “Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot…be avoided, the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt action.”
•Nov 29, 1941: Secretary of State Cordell Hull, responding to a speech by Japanese General Hideki Tojo one week before the attack, phones FDR at Warm Springs, GA to warn of “the imminent danger of a Japanese attack,” and urge him to return to Washington sooner than planned.
If it wasn’t a total surprise, why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor?
The events of December 7, 1941, were roughly two decades in the making. In 1922, the U.S. and Britain imposed upon Japan an agreement that the Japanese navy would not be allowed more than 60 percent of the capital ship tonnage of the other two powers. That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for American citizenship, and a year later the Supreme Court upheld a California and Washington ruling denying Japanese the right to own property. The year 1924 saw the passage of the Exclusion Act — which virtually banned all Asian immigration.
On the economic front, when Japan textiles began out-producing Lancashire mills, the British Empire (including India, Australia, Burma, etc.) raised the tariff on Japanese exports by 25 percent. Within a few years, the Dutch followed suit in Indonesia and the West Indies, with the U.S. (in Cuba and the Philippines) not far behind. Such moves, combined with Japan’s expanding colonial designs, brought the US and Japan closer and closer to conflict.
When France fell to Germany, the Japanese moved quickly to take military control of French colonies in Indochina (the primary source for most US tin and rubber). On July 21, 1941, Japan signed a preliminary agreement with the Nazi-sympathizing Vichy government leading to the Japanese occupation of airfields and naval bases in Indochina. Almost immediately, the US, Britain, and the Netherlands instituted a total embargo on oil and scrap metal to Japan…tantamount to a declaration of war.
This was followed soon after by the U.S. and UK freezing all Japanese assets in their respective countries. Radhabinod Pal, one of the judges in the post-war Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, later argued that the U.S. had clearly provoked the war with Japan, calling the embargoes a “clear and potent threat to Japan’s very existence.”
If it wasn’t a total surprise, why were the Americans caught with their pants down on December 7?
Never underestimate the collective power of arrogance and racism. “Many Americans, including Roosevelt, dismissed the Japanese as combat pilots because they were all presumed to be ‘near-sighted’,” writes Kenneth C. Davis. “There was also a sense that any attack on Pearl Harbor would be easily repulsed.”
Photo #5: Public Domain
“Shooting at Whales”
“Through the darkness, from the West and South, the intruders boldly sped. There were at least six of them, Russian-designed Swatow gunboats armed with 37-mm and 28-mm guns, and P-4’s. At 9.52 they opened fire on the destroyers with automatic weapons, and this time from as close as 2,000 yards. The night glowed eerily with the nightmarish glare of air dropped flares and boat’s searchlights. Two of the enemy boats went down.”
No, this isn’t Tom Clancy; it’s Time Magazine in August 1964. “While on routine patrol in international waters, the U.S. destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack,” declared Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
The Vietnam War had found its Maine.
The Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964, read: American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression.
“The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an ‘unprovoked attack’ against a U.S. destroyer on ‘routine patrol’ in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 2 — and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a ‘deliberate attack’ on a pair of U.S. ships two days later,” write journalists, Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon.
President Lyndon Johnson, speaking on national television on the evening of August 4, 1964, announced airstrikes against North Vietnam. In response, the Los Angeles Times exhorted readers to “face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities.”
Asked to explain North Vietnam’s actions, Secretary of State Dean Rusk chalked it up to “a great gulf of understanding between that world and our world, ideological in character.”
“Shortly after the events in the Gulf of Tonkin, Lyndon Johnson met with congressional leaders and lobbied them to grant him broad powers to respond to the supposed provocation,” says historian Donald R. Shaffer. “House and Senate leaders quickly acceded to his request.”
By a nearly unanimous vote, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, 1964, thus authorizing Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Over the next two years, 400,000 U.S. soldiers shipped out to South Vietnam.
Propaganda patterns often border on predictability. Like the Maine, the Maddox was not on a pleasure cruise. “U.S. ships had been supporting South Vietnamese commando raids into North Vietnam,” says Shaffer. The crew of the Maddox was gathering intelligence to support those raids. Despite the aggressive nature of its mission, there is still no reason to believe the Maddox was fired upon.
According to Cohen and Solomon, “Cables from the U.S. task force commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, referred to ‘freak weather effects,’ ‘almost total darkness’ and an ‘overeager sonar man’ who ‘was hearing ship’s own propeller beat.’”
Squadron commander James Stockdale, who would later serve as Ross Perot's running mate in 1992, was a navy pilot flying over the Gulf of Tonkin that night. “I had the best seat in the house to watch that event,” Stockdale recalled, “and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets—there were no PT boats there. There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.”
“There was no battle. There was not a single intruder, never mind six of them,” Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post states bluntly. “Never mind Russian designed Swatow gunboats armed with 37mm and 28mm guns. They never opened fire. They never sank. They never fired torpedoes. They never were.”
At the time, Lyndon Johnson himself reportedly told a State Department official that “those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!” One year after the dubious incident, LBJ openly admitted: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
An internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified in 2005. It concluded that there were no North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident of August 4.
***
Before anyone comments, let me assure you I know that a) the other guys were responsible for their own deception and war crimes and b) “war is hell” and all the other clichés. If you choose to find ways to justify the details above, I’m not here to debate you.
The purpose of this article — in a time when trust in elected and corporate leaders may have (justifiably) reached an all-time low — is to remind you: When attempting to unravel the behaviors of today’s ruling class, it helps to educate yourself about their actions in the past.
Mickey Z. can be found here. He is also the founder of Helping Homeless Women - NYC, offering direct relief to women on the streets of New York City. To help him grow this project, CLICK HERE and make a donation right now. And please spread the word!
