The Tremendous Importance of Unknown Books
Over the last four weeks I’ve published four long articles, each of which focused upon sets of books that are almost totally unknown today but whose contents radically transform our understanding of important historical events from the relatively recent past.
The overwhelming majority of these volumes were not written by fringe figures. Instead, most of their authors were respected scholars or journalists, often individuals of the greatest mainstream professional credibility and expertise. Sometimes their books were greeted by almost total media silence, but in other cases they were widely and favorably reviewed and endorsed by some of our most prestigious publications, and a few even became national bestsellers.
But whether they were published recently or many decades ago, the facts and analysis of events they provided diverged so drastically from the standard narrative constructed by our media that they soon lapsed into obscurity. So they are unknown today, unknown not merely to the general public but also to our educated elites and in many cases even to professional historians.
Sometimes these books and their contents were even deemed so troubling and dangerous that they were purged from Amazon for ideological reasons and in other cases they have long since fallen out of print. Even those books that are still available on Amazon usually have sales rankings that are so extremely low that it appears few if any copies are currently being sold.
These written works and the important information they contain still exist, but given their near-total boycott by the media, only the tiniest sliver of the American population is aware of them. This brings to mind that traditional philosophical aphorism “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
.....The Origins and Major Turning Points of World War II
The true origins of World War II go back to the total failure of President Franklin Roosevelt to lift America out of its terrible Great Depression. Despite his enormous government spending and the numerous New Deal programs that he created, by late 1937 our economic situation was almost as bad as it had been when he had first entered the White House five years earlier. He seemed to have exhausted all his domestic options and was likely to leave office regarded as a failed president.
Therefore, by early 1938 he and his advisors concluded that their best hopes of reviving the American economy would be through “military Keynesianism” so they decided to foment a major war. They remembered how the unexpected outbreak of the First World War a couple of decades earlier had soon lifted the American economy out of its doldrums and produced a huge boom for our industries. FDR served in the administration of President Woodrow Wilson during that period and had seen the huge economic benefits of heavy wartime military spending......
After the First World War broke out in 1914, many millions of soldiers died over the next five years, and the bitter, very one-sided Treaty of Versailles that ultimately ended the conflict set the stage for World War II twenty years later, a far larger cataclysm that took many tens of millions of additional lives and destroyed much of Europe.
But for more than 100 years, virtually all Western history books have concealed the fact that the bulk of all that terrible bloodshed could have been easily avoided by a 1916 peace agreement.
The Germans had won major victories that year, and from that position of strength they offered to negotiate an end to the war without winners or losers, returning matters to the pre-war situation. But the Allied governments were absolutely committed to destroying Germany and they firmly rejected that peace offer, with some of their top leaders instead declaring that they would be willing to fight for another twenty years to achieve a total military victory.
Germany ultimately lost the war and Allied propaganda blamed the conflict on fanatic “German militarism.” So although those German peace efforts were widely covered in the media at the time, they have been excluded from all our later history books. Probably most Western historians would be shocked and mystified to see the December 1916 banner-headline in the New York Times announcing that German peace offer:
Those German peace efforts were hardly so surprising. Although Allied propaganda portrayed Germany and its leader Kaiser Wilhelm as extremely aggressive and blood-thirsty, this had certainly not been the view at the time. Unlike almost every other country, Germany in 1914 had not fought a major war in well over 40 years, and in 1913 the New York Times ran a long profile on Wilhelm’s twenty-five year reign, praising him as the world’s “chief peacemaker.” But just a couple of years later, Allied propaganda had successfully transformed the German leader into the world’s worst warmonger, and that very distorted perspective has become permanently embedded in most of our history books.
