As Mike Spahn points out, there were no “Danish” colonies in the South Pacific. This is a mistake for “Dutch”, whether Stinnett’s or mine, I don’t know.

I want to underline that my purpose in writing this “review” of a book published 19 years ago is emphasize the fact that it presents an “open-and-shut” case, that its evidence is ironclad and incontrovertible, that it SETTLES the question of Pearl Harbor, and that attempts to refute or debunk it (such as those in the wikipedia article on the book) are utterly misguided, do not have a leg to stand on, and whether from ignorance of the subject or bad faith, are, in fact, LIES.

This (“Danish”) is a mistake for “Dutch” (i.e. the present “Indonesia”). Thanks for catching it.

Actually American corporations were selling the means of war to both China and Japan up until mid 1941.

The writers you cite and others like them IGNORE Stinnett’s evidence, which you can consult for yourself in his book. Some of them make gestures that pretend to challenge it, but really don’t. In order to discredit his argument it is necessary to discredit his evidence, which is overwhelming and which presents an open-and-shut case. So, do you contend that he forged it? Or that “someone” else forged it to sucker him? Or what? Because unless his evidence can be seriously dismissed, his case stands.

They wanted to cripple the US Pacific fleet. What could be more obvious?

Yes, the literature on Pearl Harbor established an excellent case for facts such as Stinnett reveals decades ago. The one thing Stinnett adds is DOCUMENTARY PROOF. The value of his PROOF is that it takes the discussion beyond the level of argument. The conclusion is now not merely argued; it is DEMONSTRATED.

Stinnett has not been “debunked” at all, although a fair number of fake debunkings have appeared — see wikipedia for a number of them. BUT, in order to actually “debunk” Stinnett it would be necessary to discredit his documentary evidence, which is presented at length, in facsimile, in his book. It would be necessary to show that it is forged, whether by Stinnett or by others. Any open minded reader who examines this evidence will realize that this is not credible. The evidence stands. And it also shows that people who make a pretense of “debunking” Stinnett are not credible, and are either incapable of evaluating Stinnett’s documentary evidence, or ignorant of it, or acting in bad faith. And any way you slice it, they are liars.

I can’t figure which is more painful to contemplate, the realities registered Fred Reed’s article or bulk of these responses. Talk about being part of the problem!

Discussion (argument) focused on the dates when intercepted radio transmissions from the Japanese fleet were de-coded is beside the point as far as the Navy’s ability to track the fleet’s movements, for which interception of undecoded signals sufficed. And discussants pursuing this line of argument above meanwhile ignore the documented order to dispatch the carrier fleet, removing it from Pearl Harbor, the documented order of the 25th ending patrols of the area from which the Japanese attack was launched, the documented order of the 26th clearing its path, and the documented orders of the 27th & 28th informing Kimmel that the government wanted Japan to strike the first blow. Taken together, these orders, coupled with the Navy’s tracking of the fleet (which people disputing the dates of decoding of the intercepts admit), proves Stinnett’s case and the accuracy of his account as summarized above. This obvious and indisputable conclusion also places the good faith of the discussants pursuing this argument in a very poor light and suggests that the discussants do not regard the intelligence of their readers very highly, to expect people to fall for this silly dodge.

Charles Lindburgh is vilified by the usual suspects as an “anti-semite” for stating in a speech in Des Moines on September 11, 1941 that “the three major groups agitating for war” [that is, American involvement in the war in Europe then, were] the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration.”

In a curious and telling coincidence, on the day before (Sept. 10, 1941) Chaim Weizmann, future president of Israel and then head of the Zionist organization headquartered in New York City, wrote Winston Churchill, recalling “how the Jews of the United States had pulled their country into war before [i.e. in World War One]; he promised that they could do it again — provided that Britain toed the line over Palestine.” [David Irving, Churchill’s War: Triumph In Adversity p. 76-77.]

People who object to Lindburgh stating what was an obvious fact known to all observant people in America at that time, do exactly that: object to a statement of fact.

But what are we to make of Chaim Weizmann’s behavior? Was he telling the truth or lying? Plainly he must have had a reasonable expectation that Churchill would take his statement seriously — otherwise he would appear merely ridicuous. Does this mean that Weizmann was an anti-semite? Or a conspirator? Was he trying to fool Churchill? Or stating a fact?

As the article states, Stinnett prints dozens of photographic facsimiles of his documentary evidence. The only way to disprove or debunk his analysis would be to prove that this evidence is forged. Which is nonsensical. Your efforts to skate around this basic fact betray your bad faith. On the strength of this betrayal of your bad faith, there is no reason to pay any attention to anything you say.

None of your three comments addresses the subject of this article in any meaningful way. On the contrary, they amount to throwing dust in the air. This implies bad faith on your part. On this basis there is no reason to pay attention to anything you say.

The orders sent Kimmel telling him that FDR prefered that Japan be allowed to strike the first blow answers your question. Stinnett hypothesizes concerning FDR’s reasons. See the article. And try — try really hard, just to see if you can — to think.

The reason to renew discussion of this 19 year old book today is that it presents conclusive evidence resolving the questions about what happened at Pearl Harbor that have been in play since that day, and yet supposedly “informed” discussion continues as if it had never been published, and as if anyone who had read it had failed to grasp that it does PRESENT EVIDENCE which amounts to conclusive PROOF. My own reading of it leads me to the view that I twice voice in the review, that fair-minded readers will find it conclusive. So your proposed course of reading it and examining its evidence appears the sensible one to me. What I wish to emphasize is that Stinnett’s analysis and discussion rest squarely on the EVIDENCE he PRESENTS. To challenge his analysis would require one to falsify his evidence — to demonstrate that it is forged. This is, as it seems to me any reasonable and fair-minded reader will agree, utterly unlikely. So Stinnett’s argument stands. See for yourself. That’s the essence of science: interrogate the evidence.

About the character of British rule I suggest you consult the people of India.

Stinnett does reproduce many dozens of key documents which do suffice to make his case, as an open-minded reader can see by reading his book. He also cites literal thousands of other documents. Writers who criticize him for not reproducing facsimile’s of “129” more of these documents, while ignoring the conclusive evidence he does reproduce, appear to be acting in bad faith, to distract discussion from what Stinnett’s evidence does appear to prove. And of course there is sufficient other evidence that the Japanese fleet did not maintain radio silence, that began with the reports of merchant marine radio operators of their interception of these signals starting days before Pearl Harbor. It appears to me that an open-minded encounter with Stinnett’s evidence and argument is convincing and conclusive, not only as to the facts Stinnett establishes but also as to the bad faith of his attackers.

With all respect for your always engaging witness, Linh Dinh, and your characteristic careful handling of language, I write to take exception to your oxymoronic phrase “rootless provincials.” A “provincial” is someone who is innately, deeply grounded in the specific details of a particular locale and community (a “province”). There is no one more “rooted,” inherently, by nature, than a true provincial. And an uprooted provincial — an exile, a refugee, a lifelong transient — is not properly speaking a provincial at all, but rather, a “displaced person.” “Provincial” is often used as a pejorative, being regarded as a term for a bumpkin, a hick, a rural ignoramus — as contrasted (in this view) with an urban, cosmopolitan sophisticate. But American poet Kenneth Rexroth reminds us that there is no place so “provincial,” in the pejorative sense of locally narrow-minded, fixated on one spot and one view, that the denizens of a major metropoles, who typically suffer from the “provincialism of the capital,” in his phrase. There is no more narrow-minded sensibility, in the FRAME of its views, than the closely localized tight-focused viewpoint, self-conceived as elevated, of the average New Yorker. Nothing is so blinding as thinking you live at the center of the universe. The Greeks called it hubris. Moreover, since such people dwell in placeless places, among anonymous transient non-communal populations always in flux, there is no one less rooted in the earth or in the cosmos. This accounts for the cosmopolite’s typical ignorant disdain for nature, for ecology, and his typical willingness to see the entire planet destroyed for the purpose of (“creative destruction”) turning it into numbers on somebody’s ledger. As Rexroth’s friend and protege Gary Snyder pointed out several decades ago, and as his friend Wendell Berry has been articulating ever since, what we need most of all to do now, for our planet, for our humanity, for our selves and our loved ones, is to begin to re-settle our specific provinces and cultivate our communities in awareness of and respect for our natural rootedness in place. Capital, it goes without saying — which is why it need saying — hates this idea. Capital wants people as interchangeable disposable labor parts and it wants the entirety of the planet and of nature at its disposal, too. Hence our present deracinated condition — which is neither provincial nor decently animal nor truly human.

Yes, this fits my impression also.

Prominent America First members included President Hoover, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and his son John F. The people who smear them as “nazi-sympathizers” and “anti-semites” defile themselves as slanderers, whether from ignorance, stupidity, programming or partisan malice hardly matters. Two excellent books on this subject are Bill Kauffman, America First (Amherst, New York, Prometheus, 1995) and Justus D. Doenecke, Storm On The Horizon (Lanham, Maryland, Bowman & Littlefield, 2000). Herbert Hoover’s Freedom Betrayed (Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, 2011) is also an important text — so important and so plainspoken that its publication was delayed for FIFTY YEARS by the usual suspects. People who care about America’s America (as distinguished from Wall Street’s Mammon America Inc.) will find it an enlightening read.

Michael Hudson is a national treasure and his Super Imperialism is a MUST READ for people who want to understand the system of international pillage by finance that is killing our planet and pillaging 99% of its inhabitants to serve the insane greed of the very few.

HOWEVER, I do have one bone to pick with this talk. Hudson describes “backing family farms” as “American agricultural policy.” My understanding is that American agricultural policy backs agribusiness industrial farming which, like industry generally, is owned by big finance, and that this policy has almost driven genuine “family farms” from the fields of America. The main beneficiaries of American agricultural exports are not American farmers, but investors in agribusiness and farm mortgages and, especially, the grain brokers, whose American market is dominated by THREE CORPORATIONS.

So I’m curious to know what Michael Hudson thinks he means when he says “backing family farms like the American agricultural policy does.”

Thank you. Do you suppose there’s a reason why these facts are so little known?

My question was facetious but your reply is apropos nonetheless.

Yes to all this, BUT — usury is not debt. Usury is fraud. And, as Aquinas comments, contra naturam — anti-ecological.

The world — meaning Nature — IS a “mutual aid society” — this is a fundamental fact of ecology — and, WE’RE IN IT.

The human species began with egalitarian social structures and economies — the organization of families and extended families, bands, clans, tribes. All over the planet hunter=gatherer societies are still based on mutual aid and non-hierarchical social relations. This structure persists also into small agricultural villages. With larger forms of socio-economic organization, where human and economic relations are no longer all one-on-one, where bullying and fraud and other forms of abuse are all immediate and obvious and dealt with as such by society, forms of covert bullying, especially economic and “political”, begin to emerge and to subvert our human species heritage of egalitarian behaviors.

The science behind these statements is laid out in Christopher Boehm, The Hierarchy In The Forest (1999). It’s a key text to understanding “human nature” and the situation, condition, and problematics facing our species now.

Usury thrives because it is one of the key forms of “rent seeking” by which the 0.1% oligarchy, the 160,000 families that own 28% of America, acquires and keeps its power.

This oligarchy usurped control of American government by increments from First World War onward and secured a stranglehold on it between 1963 and 1971.

Like mortgages, wages, land rent, property in land, and most other fundamental economic practices of Europe and the Americas, usury originated in ancient Mesopotamia. Michael Hudson is the regnant expert on this subject. His scholarship has totally revamped this field, demolishing numerous myths along the way — e.g. the origin of money in barter, the origin of interest in ‘gift-economies,’ the origin or rates of interest in ideas of return on investment … If he had done nothing else, still his contribution to this field alone is brilliant and permanent

The economies of the societies of ancient Mesopotamia were not, as you claim, “balanced.” They repeatedly devolved into debt peonage, sometimes to be rescued by Jubilees (debt forgiveness), sometimes to be subverted instead by wars of conquest and war debts. Michael Hudson’s scholarship in this field witnesses these facts.

The ancient society that was balanced and stable — the only one — and that pursued balance and stability (rather than “growth” etc.) as a matter of policy, was Egypt, which was a theocratic kingdom, comprising a vast peasantry whose harvests were concentrated under the management of the pharoahs, and a small priesthood to manage it. Egyptian peasants lived well. They — and not slaves — built the pyramids, which were (whatever else they were) public works projects that worked in the agricultural off-season, provided nice working conditions and paid well.

Henry Morgenthau as U.S. Ambassador at Istambul was also the probable source of a false report of a German “war council” supposedly convened by the Kaiser (it wasn’t) a week before commencement of hostilities, which was used as part of the propaganda claiming that Germany started the First World War — it didn’t; Russia did, instigated by France, whose financiers were very heavily invested in the czarist regime. See Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the Great War, on these facts.

Goodwin’s book, Remembering The Sixties, is a good read and a valuable witness to the times. I haven’t seen the movie but my impression of him as author is not fairly or adequately represented by his character in the movie as described here. The book, in any case, is worth reading if you are interested in its subject.

Lucid, precise, clear, salient facts, penetrating analysis of essentials — Michael Hudson, he duh man.

America, a country ruled — strictly for their own benefit — by unelected, hereditary oligarch financial parasites headquartered on Wall Street. Pimps. “How much for your seester, Meester?”

What makes money money is that a state declares it to be legal tender payable for all debts public and private. Period.

I have no difficulty distinguishing between my Italian and Italian-American friends and ethnic Italian mafiosi, and nobody accuses me of being an anti-Italite when I do, because nobody runs a racket like that or is so absurd as to argue that to reprehend mafiosi is to reprehend Italians. As a Knesset member commented some years ago, “it’s a trick.” And evidently it works — especially when the dominant elements in the self-described “American” so-called “amusement” and “information” and “education” “industries” are all in the game. And it’s an old old game. The Roman poet Lucilius satirized “Syrophoenician interest-totters” in the second century BC, and in the first, Cicero mocked the influence on the Roman mob of their “smearbund” — a term coined by American historian Charles Beard to describe conditions in NYC in the 30s. Same old game.

To paraphrase Huey Long, if we can’t all sit at a level table and share dinner, let’s kick over the table and eat on the floor.

Just wondering: Daily Mail says:

“Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team named five top former prosecutors involved in his 2008 plea deal in attempt to eventually have his sex trafficking case thrown out
Epstein’s lawyer said those who approved Epstein’s controversial 2008 deal were Sigal Mandeleker, John Roth, Alice Fisher, Mark Filip and Jeffrey Sloman
Mandeleker is the Under Secretary for the Department of the Treasury; Roth is Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security; Fisher was once considered to head the FBI; Filip was the Deputy Attorney General and Sloman was now resigned Alex Acosta’s top deputy.”

All five of these characters apparently signed off on Epstein’s sweet-heart plea deal, along with Acosta, who says he was told it was a matter of “intelligence.” Speaking of their “intelligence,” are any of these five enablers not “seventh-day adventists” or whatever? A quick poke around the internet shows that Mandeleker and Fisher are. Likely also Roth and Sloman, at a guess. And Filip?

Joyce writes:

“While a work like this can come in for heavy criticism from certain sections of the population who may denounce it as ‘revisionist,’ I can only say that ‘revisionism’ should be at the heart of every historical work. If we blindly accept the stories that are passed down to us, we are liable to fall victim to what amounts to little more than a glorified game of Chinese whispers. And, if we taboo the right of the historian to reinterpret history in light of new research and new discoveries, then we have become far removed from anything resembling true scholarship.”

Exactly.

Kamala Harris emerged into politics as the protege of Willie Brown, the political gangster who functioned as the Boss of Corruption in California’s state legislature for decades. Her entire record — utterly unexamined in the bogus media — is unsavory. She is a gangster, like her teacher. The reason she is running is to split the California ballot against Bernie & Warren. Biden wrote the law that multiplied America’s prison population by 600%. As a “representative” from the state of Du Pont, he has always represented Wall Street’s entrenched hereditary wealth and its war on the rest of us. Expect to see him rammed down our throats by the utterly corrupt (as in Willie Brown) “Democratic” Party machine. Expect to see the same criminal rigging of primaries as torpedoed Bernie in 2016, notably in NYC. Expect to see the Donkey Gangsters blame it on the Russians again. Or maybe the Chinese, or Iran, or Hamas. Whatever. Blind fools will be fooled again. It’s an American tradition, brought to us by the occupation government on Wall Street.

The internet is a public carrier and a public utility. Monopoly bully gougers like Facebook and Google need to be taken down and broken up so that the public has the opportunity to evolve forms that serve the public interest, instead of the gangster greed of the same old 0.1% oligarchs who own a controlling interest (28%) of America, focused on key economic formations, and operate them strictly for their own benefit, and to the detriment of 950 in a thousands of the rest of us.

No. The person who wrote “we SHALL have a lot of kids” and “a man of steely resolution” and the rest of it is not a native speaker of idiomatic english, American, English, or Indian … — the mixture of dictions screams it. It is cosmopolitan but off-balance, polysyllabic but dull-witted, smart-ass but one-dimensional. And pushy pushy pushy — as pushy as Hollywood and yet, not Hollywood, exactly. Shall we guess?

This is spot on about the disease but not about the cure. For the cure consult LaFollette’s autobiography, Pinchot on the history of the Progressive Party, Thorstein Veblen’s economics (Michael Hudson for help), Buckminster Fuller, the Townsend Clubs, Upton Sinclair … Eisenhower told us — an alert informed citizenry is America’s ONLY hope. That’s why you never heard of these people.

The people Americans are not allowed to criticize are the 16,000 people, the one in ten thousand, who inherit (80% or more of their wealth is inherited) a controlling ownership of all of America’s core economic institutions and own 14% of everything, and their junior partners, the 160,000 (minus 16,000) people, the one in a thousand, who own another 14% of everything, also concentrated — great grandpa’s financial advisors concentrated it — in investment control of core economic entities. A drastically disproportionate number of them are Jews, but what places them all, Jews & Goyim alike, beyond mention, is their hereditary ownership and control. The Jews among them serve as decoys, or flak.

Paul Craig Roberts writes:

“When agendas advance themselves by using lies to suppress truth, how can rational decisions be made?”

They can’t, but, that’s the point — to divide and conquer, to distract, confuse, divert, delude, mislead — in order to prevent rational adult discussion, to prevent the people from acting and functioning as citizens of a republic — a res publica, that is, the state conceived as “the people’s business” — to keep the state from being the people’s business, in order to keep it the business of business — that is, of the owners of business, that is, of the 160 thousand people among 320 million of us, the one in a thousand, the 0.1%, who own 28% of all America, concentrated in controlling ownership of all core economic institutions.

In 1922 South Dakota’s first Senator, Richard F. Pettigrew, a Progressive (in the sense that Robert La Follette was a “Progressive,” and Amos Pinchot was one, and Jerry Voorhis was one), said, after 20 years in Congress and observing the ways of the world, “The few men who own nearly all the wealth have gained control of the machinery of public life. They have usurped the functions of government and established a plutocracy.” This is what President Eisenhower warned us about, when he spoke of the “military-industrial complex”. A general, he understood strategy, and he told us then, that our only hope is an informed, alert citizenry. That means people acting as citizens, which means, in a republic, taking care of the people’s business, instead of leaving it in the predatory hands of hereditary usurpers.

“merely an extremely parochial and increasingly bigoted Jewish writer rather than an American one” is a fair assessment of Roth.

This confuses money as a medium of exchange with money as a store of value. The only “utility” or dysutility of money as a store of value is for hoarding to establish a putative lien on someone else’s labor in the future.

After man makes
Everything he can
Man makes money
To buy some other man.

As Professor James Brown puts it.

Only the wealthy few have ANY use for money as a store of value, and that use inherently entails abuse of the rest of us — wage slavery.

Hudson is smart enough to see that, in the context of discussing and trying to deal with the problems entailed by usury, discussion of the Jews is completely diversionary and disastrously counterproductive. The subject is USURY, not Jews. People who drag the Jews in do so either in the service of their own mania or deliberately in order to confuse discussion and subvert action addressing the socially disastrous consequenes of USURY and the operations of usurers.

Dylan also speaks, and much more recently & consistently, in the terms of a Christian. It is unlikely that the author of Masters of War and With God On Our Side and License To Kill is a big fan of Zionist theocratic fascism, any more than were Einstein, Arendt, Brandeis, Menuhin …. But it would be decent to let him speak for himself. Also, in this case, to ponder his words: “I just want you to know I can see through your mask.”

Dylan also speaks, and much more recently & consistently, in the terms of a Christian. He deserves to be allowed to speak for himself. It is unlikely that the author of Masters of War and With God On Our Side and License To Kill is a big fan of Zionist theocratic fascism, any more than were Einstein, Arendt, Brandeis, Menuhin …. But it would be decent to let him speak for himself. Also, in this case, to ponder his words: “I just want you to know I can see through your mask.”

FDR’s unstated deep project was to take down the British Empire in Wall Street’s favor, and he succeeded. A veracious history of US-British relations from 1919-1945 and after shows far more covert antagonism than otherwise. The US and Britain were world trade rivals through the inter-war period and from the beginning FDR used US “aid” to Britain and US war strategy to US advantage and British disadvantage. As a result of the war, the British Empire was kaput — goodbye India, Pakistan, and the rest, and the US replaced Britain as the dominant figure in the Middle East of Oil, where the contest continued through the 1954 Iran coup and beyond. The grand “alliance” summed up to the end of Imperial Britain and the confirmation of Imperial Wall Street (don’t call it America because it isn’t America any more than the British ruling 1% was or is England).

David Irving’s Churchill’s War: The Struggle For Power (vol.1) (Veritas, Australia, 1987) and Churchill’s War: Triumph In Adversity (vol. 2) (Focal Point, London, 2001) are BASIC TEXTS for an fact-based informed view of the climactic period of Churchill’s career and of his character. They are brilliant documentary historiography, exemplary in their penetrating, ranging research and careful, meticulous documentation. British “Intelligence” (so I understand) raided Irving’s office and seized his papers, preventing — probably forever — publication of the third and concluding volume of this masterpiece. This is, itself, a stark and resounding testimony to the penetrating candor and terrible truth of this work. It is also a permanent toweringly-evil crime against historiography on the part of the British “Authorities” who have c0llaborated to suppress it. History will long remember and despise them for it.

Dylan continues to release timely work at the top of his late form — Tempest is the latest and best of it.

Nominating Biden re-elects Trump. Or doesn’t. Either way. The same ruling 1% benefits from either. That’s democracy. American style. You have a choice.

Do you want the blue bludgeon or the red bludgeon? The pink handcuffs or the lavender ones? The straightjacket with or without the breast pocket? Feel free, Americans!

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel” — as Pres. Eisenhower put it. That’s why the 1% maintains “America’s” Two Parties and Media and Pundits and Educators. To prevent it.

Thanks for posting the poem, Linh Dinh.

“Crazy Horse, we hear what you say.”

(John Trudell)

Linh Dinh,

You could have been a successful, comfortable, recognized poet in America, but you don’t have what it takes. You’re not a poodle with an expensive haircut, you’re not gelded, you won’t wear a muzzle or a leash, you won’t heel, you don’t heed your master’s voice.

You refuse to follow instructions, you will not govern your speech according to the precepts of Castiglione, whose Courtier tells the Prince what he wants to hear, decorated with sprezzatura (fake spontaneity), or the precepts of Hollywood (“How much for your seester, Meester?” as a crazy Apache used to say.)

Instead of setting up as a cosmetologist or a pimp, you choose to heed the Commandment addressed to poets in particular, about not bearing false witness. Your tongue is not for sale and you won’t kiss ass. It’s unnatural, unprofessional and unpatriotic. Po Biz Inc USA says YOU’RE FIRED.

Yes, I thought of Celine also. Thanks Linh Dinh. U R 4 REAL.

MFA programs and college campuses generally are concentration (“re-education”) camps staffed by people who are content — even proud — to make a living lying to children. People who inhabit them are institutionalized, each stuck in their proper disciplinary pigeonhole, cut off at the knees so that even if it ever occurred to them to stand up and look over the 40 inch high cubical walls, they couldn’t. Infantilisation is mandatory.

That being said, I wish Linh Dinh — whose writing & spirit I admire — would broaden his horizons. Dude, look up!

Poverty as a bi-product of pursuit of a non-lucrative vocation is one thing. It entails resourcefulness, thrift, evasion of exploitation, avoidance of enslavement by induced pseud0-needs and pseudo-desires, thoughtful livelihood, thoughtful living, usw…. Poverty embraced as a grind is masochism.

Post Bretton-Wood easy credit has not only inflated stock market asset prices. It is also primarily responsible for the vast increase in the cost of shelter, whether as rent or as mortgage payment, which is far the biggest expense in most people’s budgets. This purely predatory rise in the cost of shelter, which has no connection whatsoever with the cost of building housing or maintaining it, also figures prominently in the inability of younger people to save and in the student debt peonage into which they are being forced — also to the perennial benefit of the banker class.

In 2000 Iraq changed from selling its oil in petrodollars to euros. The American attack followed as soon as it could. Similarly Libya proposed shifting from petrodollars to gold dinars. With the same result. Iran and Venezuela are both notable for having nationalized their oil resources previously seized by international corporations, mostly British and American. So they too are enemies. Is there a pattern here?

For a definitive scholarly well-documented discussion of German Jewry under Hitler see Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question,’ (Princeton University Press, 1984). In 1930 there were under 600,000 Jews in Germany. By 1939 half had emigrated. In 1945 above 200,000 survived, mostly not imprisoned. The Jews who suffered the lethal brunt of the Nazi regime were mostly in the eastern war zone — what is now Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic States, the Czech and Slovak states, and western Russia — a fate which they shared, in severity and in numbers, with Poles, Russians, and others.

I have read Gary North’s articles (two, actually) on Hoggan and in my judgment — and I imagine in the judgment of any informed fair-minded reader — they are disreputable on the face of it. That Hoggan wound up with mental problems after a decade of persecution and gas-lighting by his putative academic colleagues is almost to his credit. North’s straight-faced citation of Hoggan’s Harvard supervisor Langer’s criticism of Hoggan amounts to bad faith, since Langer was the dean of World War Two official history and himself deeply implicated in American “intelligence” and in its (successful) efforts — described by Barnes — to enforce an official history. I give Unz the benefit of the doubt in imagining that he is not aware of Langer’s position.

The point and use of Hoggan’s lengthy preliminary excursus on Poland is that Poland became the ground of the ostensible causa belli. Hoggan’s discussion shows that Poland between 1920-1939 was a brutal dictatorship that persecuted its large German minority along with all others and was rankly anti-Semitic and militarily aggressive — it seized an area of Russia half the size of California until Stalin took it back in 1939. All this is significant in view of the light in which it places Britain’s guarantee to protect a state rivaling Nazi Germany in obnoxiousness. The most significant point in which Poland differed from Nazi Germany was its willing participation in the dominant arrangements of international usury finance championed by Britain and France (Poland was massively indebted to the latter).

Apropos of poison gas in war it is germane to remark here that Winston Churchill was reponsible for using poison gas against native targets in the middle east when Britain was taking up its mandates there after the First World War and that Zionist leader and first president of Israel Chaim Weizmann was an industrial chemist who made his mark in the formulation of poison gas for warfare.

The Nazi plan after the conquest of Poland was to create a Jewish state in east Poland, comparable to Gaza, and settle Jews there — this is attested by various reliable contemporaneous witnesses (e.g. Oswald Garrison Villard’s Inside Germany, 1940) — and started shipping Jews east for that purpose. However, it turned out to be beyond their ability to follow through with this plan as the war with Russia commenced and intensified and their capacity to take care of the new inhabitants of this Jewish Gaza Strip collapsed. How many deaths resulted from the ruinous conditions of the war zone and how many from deliberate murder is an open question. As John Stuart Mill comments (On Liberty), “the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions.” Since it is illegal to discuss these questions in Europe they will probably remain unsettled for the indefinite future.

Preparata’s book suffers from his desire to tie everything together in one big neat package but it is crammed with useful suppressed facts. He shows the extent of British as well as American financial involvement in Germany both before and during the Nazi regime. He contends that the German Depression of 1919-23 was caused by the German elite’s exporting of capital and by the German government’s continuing to pay interest on and buy back German war bonds, which Versailles left in place, in the hands of the German elite. When German Finance Minister Erzenberger tried to tax capital to pay these charges, he was assassinated; thereafter the government paid by printing money. This payment to the elites, coupled with their exporting of capital, precipitated the Depression of 1919-23. Exported capital was converted to other currencies and then brought back into Germany to buy up assets at fire-sale prices. The major recipient of transferred capital was Holland, but also Britain, US, France, Belgium. He does not discuss what role Jewish finance played in this but certainly many Germans at the time thought it was large.

Thereafter, the German recovery and rearmament (in cooperation with the USSR) was funded by Britain and the US. He shows that British and American investments in Germany in the 20s and 30s were widespread, concerted, pervasive, with the idea being to build up a bulwark against Russian Communism. He shows that the Nazi economic miracle was generated by the government loaning funds to local projects (and national) for infrastructure building (e.g. the autobahn) and rearmament (to a lesser extent — German rearmament before 1940 is grossly exaggerated — the European power that was engaged in a vast arms buildup was USSR and American corporations engineered it in its entirety. When Harry Hopkins, FDR’s emissary, visited USSR in 1942 Stalin told him that 90% of the Soviet industrial plant was built by Americans — Lindbergh said the same after touring their aircraft industry in the late 30s). Nazi state finance compelling the German financial elites to underwrite their infrastructure loans — i.e. they did not generate their own fiat money but worked with — or dragooned — the German elements of international finance. This was the “socialist” element in National Socialism. This, in my view, was the main reason the elites of international usury finance targeted Nazi Germany.

Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Triumph and Turmoil INY, 1968) recounts attending a dinner in Germany with a Jewish banker Arnholt in 1932 at which he was the only goy present and in which several bragged of their backing of Hitler. Included was James Warburg (son of the Federal Reserve founder? or a “German” cousin?). (p. 212) Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception, wites that Mowrer was a British intelligence agent, which puts his veracity in question. But that’s what he says.

What killed Solzhenitsyn’s reputation with Official American Thought was 200 Years Together. Period.

In his important book, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on US Democracy (2016) Mike Lofgren writes that “corporate America” favors expanding immigration “to ensure a large resevoir of foreign workers whose presence will keep wages down and render unionization more difficult.” And what could be more obvious than that? At least to those of us who are awake and can think?

Yes, Gordon’s book is dry as dust but it is full of essential facts — as your citations indicate — and extremely well documented, and in depth. Two other facts you don’t cite — and I don’t remember the exact numbers — show that Jews were dominant owners of Berlin real estate and in retail real estate and businesses. In 1933 when a Jewish “congress” in New York City declared a world wide boycott of German goods the Nazis responded with a one day boycott of Jewish retail businesses in Germany, with Brown Shirts stationed outside Jewish businesses to notify prospective shoppers. Numerous observers, German and foreign, comment on their astonishment at how pervasive Jewish ownership of retail establishments was — ever store on whole blocks of business districts. Etc.

The next book to read on this subject, which I suspect you will find more absorbing, not so dry, and much wider ranging in its reference, is Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (London, Methuen, 10 editions between 1937 and 1939, the later the better). Roberts was an Australian academic –a sociologist or historian, I think — who spent 18 months in Germany and wrote about what he saw and learned. This is an EXTREMELY instructive book by an insightful, balanced, inquistive, unbiased witness. HIGHLY recommended, and not nearly so dry as Gordon.

You misconstrue the argument, which is not that “the Jews put Hitler in power” but that Jewish finance in German helped put the Nazis into power, along with German goy finance. The key element isn’t Jews or goyim, it’s big finance, international usury finance. The reason they did this is that they saw the Nazis as a force to keep Germany from going communist, which would, as they saw it anyways, wreck their whole game. What they didn’t understand was that Nazi “National Socialist” financial policies meant to dragoon business and finance in the interests of the the State and the Folk as much as the rest of Germany. And once they found out, Germany ceased to be their darling. Although, curiously, Hitler was still good for Time’s Man of the Year in 1938 — because of the ‘financial miracle’ he worked. Meanwhile, FDR’s withdrawal of federal funds from works projects after they had won him the 1936 election plunged America into a second Depression — and the 1938 trough was as deep as in 1931-35 and only ended with the war — that was FDR’s solution.

You misconstrue the argument, which is not that “the Jews put Hitler in power” but that Jewish finance in Germany helped put the Nazis into power, along with German goy finance. The key element isn’t Jews or goyim, it’s big finance, international usury finance. The reason they did this is that they saw the Nazis as a force to keep Germany from going communist, which would, as they saw it anyways, wreck their whole game. What they didn’t understand was that Nazi “National Socialist” financial policies meant to dragoon business and finance in the interests of the the State and the Folk as much as the rest of Germany. And once they found out, Germany ceased to be their darling.

A major sticking point in efforts to negotiate Jewish emigration from Germany was German capital controls which prohibited people — Jews and goyim alike — from taking out of Germany the riches they had extracted from it. This is attested in the diaries and letters of both American Ambassadors to Berlin — Dodd and Kennedy — and elsewhere, but it is, like many salient facts, omitted from the Official Version propagated by the Official Sources today.

The “lethal brunt” was being an “enemy population” in a war zone — just like the Poles, White Russians, Ukrainians, Russians, et al. I am assuming that there is some basis in fact in the conclusions put forward in Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (NY, Basic Books, 2010). I may be mistaken to put trust in this text, but that’s what I’m doing in this context.

There is abundant contemporaneous evidence from reliable eyewitnesses and documentary evidence — that the Germans were, by policy, relocating Jews to their planned Jewish Gaza in east Poland and that this became increasingly hazardous to the relocatees as conditions deteriorated on the eastern front. As far as I know there are no reliable body-counts in this context, but I’m not expert in this field by any means, and of course the discussion is vexed from all sides by partisan agendas.

Yes, you should conclude that I agree with St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and Bishop Berkeley and numerous others that usury is a toxic fraud. You should also conclude that I have total contempt for the “argument” that usury rewards deferred consumption. As Tolstoy put it, “how much land does a man need”? The number of falsehoods buried in this line of misreasoning are manifold. You could start with the lie that banks loan depositors money. Or the lie that billionaires defer consumption to earn their interest income. Or whatever. But anyone who buys into stuff like that is beyond reason, beyond facts, beyond truth. In my opinion.

In comment #467 above I cited Mowrer’s account of dining in 1932 with German Jewish financiers who bragged about backing Hilter. I should note that Mowrer does not mention James Warburg by name on page 212 but elsewhere in his text, and then makes it clear enough that Warburg numbered among his dinner companions. This discretion is intriguing but does not impugn his comments otherwise.

I’m addressing your claims about Hitler’s backers. Bruning is not the only pertinent witness and your apparent insistence that he is, is silly. I’m also asserting the obvious and clearly attested fact that Hitler’s wealthy backers were motivated by the usual motives of their element and, in this case, by the idea that the Nazis would save them from the Commies.

An intriguing aspect of the story of the Ukraine “famine” of 1933-35 is the failure to follow the money. On the order of 4-5 million Ukraine farmers died because the Soviet government seized their grain crop whole. So, what happened to the grain? It must have been sold on international commodity markets, and international commodity dealers and their financial “backers” must have made quite a killing handling the deal. And where did the money go? Well, probably in the main it went to pay the American corporations that engineered, built, and stocked with machinery the Soviet industrial plant (which Stalin told Harry Hopkins was mostly American built — I forget the figure, was it 75% or 90%?). That is, the money wound up on Wall Street and environs.

Similarly, Wall Street completely controlled and raked off the cream of the Southern slave economy from 1800 or earlier until the middle of the Civil War, and wrote mortgages with slaves as collateral — a service without which the slave economy could not have functioned. But I have never seen these facts, and their implications for the “responsibility” for American slavery stated anywhere at all, although the facts are unquestionable. Everybody is keen on toppling statues of Confederate generals but as far as I know, no one has proposed doing the same with statues of August Belmont. Why is that, I wonder?

A primary focus of British troop movements from 1939 forward was taking control of the oil fields of the Middle East from Syria to Iran and Saudi Arabia. This objective was pursued with far more promptitude, troops and materiel than were any attacks on the ostensible enemies on the European peninsula. There is no doubt whatsoever about these facts, and they are telling. Which is why they tend to go unmentioned in “official accounts.”

Comment #467 cites Mowrer’s text with a caveat offering reason to distrust his witness, from a source (Mahl) of another order of credibility than wikipedia.

You don’t get to define “the discussion”, its terms or its boundaries, or censure violations of your fiat.

Style favors the “ignorant baffoon” hypothesis — “a typically arrogant, self-centered, bohemian, son-of-a-bitch academic” for instance.

Taylor’s removal enacted an Oxford tradition of some antiquity. In 1868 Regius Professor (the first) political economist Thorold Rogers, a founder of the discipline, published a statistical study demonstrating that the wages of labor in England fell 83% (sixfold) from Tudor (1500) to Victorian times. He was dismissed the following year (Christopher Hollis, The Two Nations).

Thanks as always. London’s essay-story The Scab addresses some of the issues you raise here in ways that may modify some of your views about him and his thinking. It is unusual in what of his work I’ve read in being steeped in a bitter understated irony.

“Property portfolio” is a good guess. One constituent GTU school already tried to sell off its campus for “development.” So far, the neighborhood has it stopped. Stacked with eight story apartments these properties are a bonanza for developers and real estate investors. Rabbi Lehmann will be forming a committee to recommend moving GTU to Fremont with the Deaf & Blind School, and selling off the Berkeley campuses. His brother-in-law is just the expert GTU needs to finesse the deal — all for purposes of Christian Charity, you understand.

What’s at issue here is your definition of “theology.” Dogmatic authoritarian “theology” (logos about theos, reasoning about the divine) seems to be a Christian hybrid fathered by Neoplatonic Greek philosophizing on Hebrew fanaticism. It goes with monotheism and “religions of the book”. “My rules are the only rules. Submit or die!” But Hindu and Buddhist traditions also reason about the divine, minus the single-mindedness and the authoritarian temper.

Mowrer’s book presents interesting observations on many subjects. How much they should be trusted, one by one, is, one by one, a difficult question.

Mahl’s book is much more important — it is key, in fact, on its subject — and much more trustworthy and highly recommended.

“supposedly”. According to whom? On the basis of what evidence? And how did Stalin pay Wall Street for building the Soviet industrial plant, then? There is no question about Wall Street’s intimate and dominant relationship with the South’s slave economy, the facts are in and have been available for a century and more. Probably the facts about where the Ukraine’s grain went in 1933-35 will never be known on the basis of solid evidence. I wonder why.

I found Preparata better in parts than whole. I summarized one topic — the causes of the German depression of the early 20s — where I found him especially useful; there are others — the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Weimar Republic, international gold finance. But his book also does suffer, in my view, from a desire to tie everything together in one big neat package.

These texts discuss Wall Street’s implication in the Southern slave economy and its consequences both before and after the Civil War:

C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston, Little, Brown, 1951) p. 12-13, 35 & 24 & esp. p. 237-240.

B.B. Kendrick, “The Colonial Status of the South,” Journal of Southern History vol. 8 no. 1 (Feb. 1942) 3-22. Kendrick, then president of the Southern Historical Association, shows that the South’s status vis-a-vis New England and New York City was, from before the Revolution up until the present day, colonial, subject, exploited: “At present finance capitalism and imperialism hold the region in so firm a grip that no escape from the colonial status appears possible short of some catastrophic collapse of the whole imperialistic system.” (p. 4). It’s heartening to see that at that time American academics were not yet all gelded, muzzled, brought to heel, bought.

Philip S. Foner, Business & Slavery: The New York Merchants & the Irrepressible Conflict (Univesity of North Carolina Press, 1941).

Not exactly. The facts are well attested — I construe them. I put the pieces together, but the pieces are already on the table.

Circa 33-35 the Soviet government siezed the Ukraine harvests and starved 4-5 million people.

Where did the harvests go?

We have Stalin for witness that American industrial engineers and corporate industry built the Soviet industrial plant. How was this paid for?

The likeliest answer is plain. Did you expect Stalin would announce it to the world? On the contrary, the international community of power (including FDR’s ambassador and the mainstream press) conspired to conceal the genocidal famine. Their united efforts at concealment advertise whose guilty secret is being hidden.

It might be possible to further evidence the hypothesis with reference to statistics of the international grain trade for the period, or another way, but its high probability is inescapable anyways.

It is asserted above that the seized harvests went to feed Soviet cities. Where is this documented? And what caused the sudden need to appropriate these harvests? And if so, how did the cost of industrialization figure into the equation?

It has been claimed that Ukraine peasant farmers were starved in order to collectivise (sic) their farms, or because they resisted collectivisation. Perhaps, but that doesn’t explain where the harvests went. Or how the Soviets did pay for their brand new state of the art industrial plant manufactured by America, Inc.?

Please identify the source of your second passage of quotation (“… put an entirely different …”). I’m not challenging it; Nasaw’s biography of Kennedy says something similar and further confirmation can be found in Amanda Smith’s edition of JP Kennedy’s letters, Hostage To Fortune, as well as in Forrestal. I just want to know your source. Thanks.

You still haven’t said what the source of your quotes in #1001 is. I would appreciate it if you will.

I also entertain the hypothesis that Flat Earth and Moon Hoax (also UFOs) “conspiracy” discourses representing a deliberate propaganda of confusion, diversion, and derision

Sorry. My slip, and yes, I read Hoover’s excellent and important book when it was published, in 2011, over 40 years after he finished it. Now what we need to see published is Joseph P. Kennedy’s “Diplomatic Memoir,” finished in the mid 50s and still suppressed. Amanda Smith’s edition of his letters discusses it and excerpts from it, but it’s way past time we had the chance to read it. There’s a reason John F. Kennedy loved and pursued peace, and is first name was Joseph.

Nasaw’s biography of Hearst is the best of the three I’ve read and his biography of JPK is the best of four. “Under the circumstances” of denial, opprobrium and slander to which advocates of American non-intervention in the 30s are subjected today, Nasaw’s handling of this aspect of Kennedy’s character and career are fairly even-handed, though not as probing or as pointed as I would have preferred.

My sense is that the insertion into the popular mind of “bootlegger” as the first attribute of JPK that “comes to mind” is the result of a campaign of slander prompted by JPK’s important anti-interventionist stance in the late 30s. Given his visible finances through the 20s, it is certain that he did not need to resort to bootlegging to make his fortune. Nasaw regards it as unlikely. Amanda Smith (editor of his letters, Hostage To Fortune) puts what seems to be deliberate over-emphasis on the absence of evidence in his papers and their previous exposure to the opportunity for censoring by interested parties — so she appears to position herself as agnostic on the question without saying so. Seymour Hersh (Dark Side of Camelot) presents JPK as involved with the Mob to the point of being able to ask for favors. I’m not clear how much weight to grant Hersh, or his sources. My sense is both should be treated with gingerly scepticism.

Anyone who takes the time to become seriously acquainted with primary sources on Lindbergh — his diaries, for instance — will realize that people who depict him as pro-Nazi, anti-semite, etc., are slanderers and utterly exposed and disgraced by their own campaign of vilification. Charles Beard called them the “smearbund” and they are more with us now than in the 30s — which is itself a telling fact.

An accurate complete transcript of the French of the video AND a competent translation would be wonderful to see here — wonderful and BASIC, FUNDAMENTAL to serious adult discussion.

It wasn’t exactly “the Federal Reserve” that pushed America into WWI, though the Federal REserve helped with the assembly and transfer of funds, as Vice President Marshall predicted it would when the bill was signed six months before the war started. It’s more accurate to call the financial forces that engineered American involvement in this war, and made a killing, “Wall Street.” JP Morgan Co. was in the forefront. The Nye Committee of the Senate established these facts circa 1934-36. FDR appears to have presided over maneuvering America into WWII but it’s important to understand that it was on behalf of these same financial interests headquartered (for the time being) in New York City. The foremost result of WWII, as far as America is concerned, was supplanting of the British Empire by the World Empire of Wall Street. The people who created the National Security State were all Wall Street lawyers — Forrestal, Patterson, the Dulleses, etc. And FDR was the scion of the oldest banking family in Manhattan — they were already the biggest bullies on the block before 1700, figured in the “financing” of the Revolution and of the Civil War, were prominent in the Wall Street takeover of the Republican Party from its inception. That FDR was, nominally, a “Democrat,” points up Wall Street’s ownership of the whole “two-party” puppet show.

These facts were established by the investigations of the Senate Sub-committee on Munitions chaired by Sen. Gerald Nye of North Dakota in 1934-1937. The evidence produced by their investigations (employing Congressional subpoena power) and their conclusions are published in the Congressional Record and fill several large volumes. Their conclusions are demonstrated and accepted by reputable historians. Matthew Ware Coulter, The Senate Munitions Inquiry of the 1930s: Beyond The Merchants of Death (Westport, CN, Greenwood Press, 1997) offers an accurate overview, if unnecessarily cautious and understated.