Was America’s World War II ‘Crusade’ Worthwhile? – The Occidental Observer

 Was it really worthwhile to fight a destructive war so that Poland might be the victim not of Hitler but of Stalin, so that there might be a Soviet empire, not a German empire, in Eastern Europe, so that we should face not Japan but Stalin’s henchman, Mao Tse-tung, in the Orient? War and postwar emotionalism have inhibited a frank facing of these questions. But the tragic factual record of what happened to Poland, set down in this chapter, surely suggests that there is a case for a negative answer.

—William Henry Chamberlin

If forced to briefly describe America’s Second Crusade, William Henry Chamberlin’s revisionist account of Allied leadership during the Second World War, two words come to mind: sober accounting. In nearly every chapter, the author holds the United States and Britain to the standards they themselves had set for what they hoped to accomplish by defeating the Axis. Did they meet these standards? Were their proclaimed goals achieved? Was the world in a better place after the war than it was before? Surely such questions deserve honest answers.

William Henry Chamberlin

Unfortunately, such questions were considered subversive when this book was first published in 1950, and many today still regard them as heretical. That’s why this dissident book failed to find a mainstream publisher, and why it has never been given the attention it deserves. The sidelining of this important work was part of a broader and largely successful effort to squash all voices that question the prevailing, “official” view of World War II. For any thoughtful and reasonably open-minded reader, this book makes a persuasive case for negative answers to the questions above.

The author begins by assessing how America’s first great “crusade” – in World War I – could have been avoided. It happened because this country’s elites were not honest with the people. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson summoned Americans to war against Germany with idealistic and noble-sounding slogans and promises about making the world “safe for democracy.” That rhetoric disguised the very tangible goal of bailing out the beleaguered British and French, whose defeat would have meant defaulting on the massive debts they had run up to US banks and corporations.

Full text:

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2026/03/31/was-americas-world-war-ii-crusade-worthwhile/ 

In writing America’s Second Crusade, the author benefitted from other important revisionist works that had already appeared shortly after the end of World War II, including George Morgenstern’s Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (1946), and Charles Beard’s two in-depth studies of Roosevelt’s duplicity in the lead-up to America’s involvement — American Foreign Policy in the Making (1946), and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941 (1948). The bibliography of America’s Second Crusade is a useful guide to mid-century independent American historiography.

This book does not merely expose liars and hypocrites in the halls of power. It distinguishes itself by challenging the American public to consider that the death, destruction, and trauma of the Second World War may not have been “worth it” in the end. Chamberlin is no sympathizer of or apologist for Nazism. But he is not afraid to measure the stated goals of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill against the objective historical record by which the question he poses might be answered. The arguments for America’s entry into the war, he concludes, ultimately come up wanting.

Originally post at the Institute for Historical Review.

Pearl Harbor Revisited: What Did Washington Know—and When?, by Jonas E. Alexis - The Unz Review

 Mark Dankof is the former 36th District Chairman of the Republican Party in King County/Seattle. He was an elected delegate to Texas State Republican Conventions in 1994 and 1996 and entered the United States Senate race in Delaware in 2000 as the nominated candidate of the Constitution Party against Democratic candidate Thomas Carper and Republican incumbent William Roth.......

....MD: The event which tells you more about who I am now involved one Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the infamous Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. I was not born until 1955, of course, but in the 1960s and 1970s, two different Air Force tours on Oahu with my father enabled me to develop an extreme interest in the subject.

The event that involved my life with Roosevelt’s legacy, and the tragedy of December 7th, 1941, occurred in late 1971 or early 1972, during my sojourn in high school at Iolani School in downtown Honolulu, near the Ala Wai Canal, Diamond Head, and Waikiki Beach.

There was a fantastic American history teacher at Iolani in those days, the late, salty retired American Navy Captain R. C. Sleight. He had been a destroyer skipper in World War II. His politics were Right of Center, but he had plenty of room in the class for anyone who disagreed with his views with their own academic and political perspective, if it was credible.

His sardonic humor, Sea Captain’s expressions, and wit would be ruled out-of-bounds in American education today. His brute frankness which cut through canards, shoddy thinking, and superficial analysis, would be intolerable to the Minions of Political Correctness (Jewish Political Correctness) that control what passes for education in the United States now.

It was my privilege to have one last conversation with him by telephone, when visiting Honolulu for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary in 1991, 20 years after I left Iolani School as a student. I shall never forget him. I have thought of him many times in all the years since.

When we got to the subject of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and World War II one morning at Iolani School, Sleight became especially serious. He made it clear that he did not agree with the Establishment Consensus on FDR, or the events that led up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

https://www.unz.com/article/pearl-harbor-revisited-what-did-washington-know-and-when/ 

His reasons for this statement were not entirely elaborated upon with the class, but I noticed that the bibliography he distributed on these subjects included a section entitled Revisionist History Books on Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor.

When I returned to my home at Hickam AFB in Honolulu on the Pearl Harbor Channel Entrance on Julian Avenue that evening, I began looking at this particular section of the bibliography. The titles told me something about the contents of the books. (I have recently gone back into this fine but dated bibliography, at the suggestion of Dr. Paul Sheldon Foote of Cal State-Fullerton, to add the Hamilton Fish volume entitled “Tragic Deception: FDR and America’s Involvement in World War II.”

Did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt really know in advance that the American Pacific Fleet was going to be attacked at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7th, 1941? Was that information deliberately withheld from the American Commanders at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short? If so, why? The mere thought of something like this alternated in my mind between the preposterous and the monstrous. Could anyone really seriously entertain this idea who was sane?

I could not sleep in my bedroom at Hickam AFB that night. My night thoughts would not allow my mind a nocturnal peace, despite the Pacific Ocean breeze and the sound of rustling palm trees outside my window. The American Air Force planes that constantly overflew my home on Julian Avenue, headed toward a landing strip at Hickam’s Military Airlift Command (MAC) terminal, also punctuated a sleepless night.

I made a private appointment to see Captain Sleight in his academic office at Iolani School. When I arrived, he pointed to a chair in front of his desk. He had the same demeanor as other military men I had grown up around in the Air Force, when serious conversation was imminent. He told me to sit down.

Sleight asked me why I had come in, what the nature of my concern was. I was just as much to the point. Basically, I indicated I’d like to know what Revisionist History was. And whether or not he thought there was any truth to what I was picking up on in the bibliography he had passed out to the class, regarding President Roosevelt having advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the American Pacific Fleet.

He lit his infamous pipe and looked at me with a seriously piercing examination I had never quite seen before. His question to me, before proceeding, was one I have heard a thousand times: “Are we speaking totally off-the-record here?” I indicated that we were. Sleight then proceeded. I will never forget what he said, and how clearly and powerfully he said it, while continuing to pierce me with the penetrating focus he always had when zeroing in on something that was pivotal. What he said was simply this:

“Roosevelt not only knew about the attack in advance, he deliberately provoked it, from October of 1940 onward. And the United States not only had the capability to intercept Japanese diplomatic communications, as the Tora! Tora! Tora! movie (1971) depicts, but had the network and the active Naval Intelligence operation going on throughout the Pacific, to intercept Japanese military communications.

“We were listening in constantly on [Admiral] Yamamoto’s radio communications with [Admiral] Nagumo, after Nagumo departed from Hitokappu Bay in Japan in late November of 1941 with the six (6) aircraft carriers which comprised the task force which ended up 200 miles north of here, launching the attack on Pearl, Wheeler, Schofield, Hickam, Shafter, and Kaneohe on December 7th. If you want to know why, you have to find out about the [Arthur] McCollum memorandum to Roosevelt in October of 1940. That’s the Rosetta Stone.”

How, I asked, do I find this stuff? Answer:

“Presently, you won’t. I know about it from classified Naval Intelligence materials I’ve seen, and my conversations with a couple of the guys doing the cryptology and the intercepting in the project which was intercepting Japanese military communications. That stuff, and the very existence of the program, is still top secret. Maybe in your lifetime, you’ll be able to see the evidence on paper.”

My last remark was that I had just seen a documentary film on Roosevelt’s speech to the 1940 Democratic National Convention, assuring Americans he would keep their kids out of any European, or foreign war, period. Captain Sleight cut to the chase:

“Roosevelt was a duplicitous, lying son of a bitch. He lied this country into a war that was totally avoidable. If he’s the model of the American Presidency in the world we live in now, God help us. The Mythology that surrounds this guy is enough to make you puke. And don’t ever forget it.”......

......If the Endgame of Pearl Harbor is the world we presently live in, it pales in comparison to the monstrous ramifications in history just ahead, if Netanyahu, the Lobby, and their allies in the governments of America and Europe get their way, with what they desire to do both to Iran, and to American dissidents like me who use our meager resources and lack of power to speak the truth to demonically exercised powers and principalities.

The aggressors against Iran are the same despots who have destroyed the economy, the culture, and the Constitutional Bill of Rights of the United States, especially since the advent of Franklin Roosevelt and World War II.

And in closing, with God’s help, we shall win, for our families, our friends, our communities, our churches and mosques, our respective cultures and histories. The final victory is ours. Be sure of this. You and I are on the winning team.

What You Should Know About Pearl Harbor - LewRockwell

  Roosevelt knowingly sacrificed the lives of American sailors in order to get us into war. He set up the Pacific Fleet as a sitting duck and then provoked the Japanese into attacking by freezing their assets and cutting off their oil supply.

Even if this is true, though, why should we care about this today? The Pearl Harbor attack took place eighty-four years ago. What does it have to do with us now? But in fact, it is vitally relevant. The great Murray Rothbard explains: “Some readers might ask: why?  What’s the point? Isn’t this just a raking up of old coals?  Aren’t we merely pursuing an antiquarian interest when we examine in such detail what happened over a quarter-century ago?  The answer is that this subject, far from being antiquarian, is crucial to the understanding of where we are now and how we got that way.  For America’s entry into World War II was the crucial act in expanding the United States from a republic into an Empire, and in spreading that Empire throughout the world, replacing the sagging British Empire in the process.  Our entry into World War II was the crucial act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex, a permanent system of conscription.  It was the crucial act in creating a Mixed Economy run by Big Government, a system of State-Monopoly-Capitalism run by the central government in collaboration with Big Business and Big Unionism.  It was the crucial act in elevating Presidential power, particularly in foreign affairs, to the role of single most despotic person in the history of the world.  And, finally, World War II is the last war-myth left, the myth that the Old Left clings to in pure desperation: the myth that here, at least, was a good war, here was a war in which America was in the right.  World War II is the war thrown into our faces by the war-making Establishment, as it tries, in each war that we face, to wrap itself in the mantle of good and righteous World War II.” 

I said that Roosevelt set up the Pacific Fleet as a sitting duck. This sounds extreme, but it is solidly based on evidence......

Full text:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/12/lew-rockwell/what-you-should-know-about-pearl-harbor/ 

American Pravda: President Franklin Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the New Deal, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review

 Contents

Options

• FDR as Our Greatest Twentieth Century President
• The Privileged Life and Early Career of FDR
• Franklin Roosevelt in the Wilson Administration
• FDR’s Family Wealth, Illness, and His Return to Politics
• Herbert Hoover, the Great Depression, and FDR’s Election
• President Franklin Roosevelt and the First New Deal
• The First New Deal as American Fascism?
• John T. Flynn and The Roosevelt Myth
• The Many Historical Revelations of John T.

Earlier this year, I published a long article on the career of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his America First campaign, a political movement that had similarly sought to block our involvement in the war. In that work, I’d drawn very heavily upon an excellent 2024 book of that title by historian H.W. Brands, whose coverage focused entirely upon that Roosevelt-Lindbergh political duel of the early 1940s.

• American Pravda: Charles A. Lindbergh and the America First Movement
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 10, 2025 • 15,600 Words

Although Coughlin and Lindbergh were the primary figures in those articles, in each case President Roosevelt had been their main opponent, so he also had a central role both in my political narrative and in the extensive reading that I had undertaken to produce it.

Prior to Roosevelt, no American president had ever dared to exceed the two term limit informally established by George Washington, but FDR shattered that tradition by winning a third and eventually a fourth term, becoming the longest-serving president in our national history. My history textbooks told the story of how FDR’s New Deal rescued our country from the terrible depths of the Great Depression and then how the same president went on to win the Second World War against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the greatest military conflict in human history.

During his many years in office, FDR had hugely expanded the size and scope of the American federal government, establishing Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance, and numerous other basic elements of our society that I had always taken for granted. Along the way, he had become an enormously popular hero to a huge fraction of the American public, notably including a young Ronald Reagan, who began his political career as an ardent New Deal Democrat, and despite his later decades as a conservative Republican still always lionized FDR and many of his policies....

https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-franklin-roosevelt-the-great-depression-and-the-new-deal/ 

...Perhaps the single most famous public speech that President Franklin Roosevelt gave during his twelve years in office came in the wake of the sudden Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor, an attack that killed some 2,400 American servicemen. And his most famous line in that speech declared that December 7, 1941 would be the “date that will live in infamy.”

If more Americans were to read the books by John T. Flynn and some of his other contemporaries, they would certainly still endorse that ringing phrase made famous by our American president, but perhaps give it a new meaning much less favorable to Franklin Roosevelt’s memory.

Related Reading:

• Bibliography
• American Pravda: Father Charles Coughlin
• American Pravda: Charles A. Lindbergh and the America First Movement
• American Pravda: Our Great Purge of the 1940s
• The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn
• American Pravda: Understanding World War II
• The True History of World War II

Why We Need Revisionist History By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The term “revisionism” came into use after World War I, when historians like Harry Elmer Barnes, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, and Charles Austin Beard challenged Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which assigned exclusive guilt to Germany and its Kaiser for the outbreak of the world war, with all its appalling destruction and massacres, It was on the basis of that clause that the Treaty imposed on Germany a Carthaginian peace, memorably condemned by J.M. Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

Barnes and Fay felt a sense of betrayal. They had been roped into Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to “make the world safe for democracy” by the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, and a similar body that coordinated the work of American historians. Now they saw the error of their ways.33 Questions About Ame...Thomas E. WoodsBest Price: $2.91Buy New $9.99(as of 07:05 UTC - Details)

World War I and the ensuing “peace” settlement paved the way for Hitler. The German people’s justified resentment over their harsh treatment led to demands to undo the Versailles verdict. The great libertarian historian Ralph Raico provides a horrifying example of Allied atrocities: “During the pre-armistice negotiations, Wilson insisted that the conditions of any armistice had to be such ‘as to make a renewal of hostilities on the part of Germany impossible.’ Accordingly, the Germans surrendered their battle fleet and submarines, some 1,700 airplanes, 5,000 artillery, 30,000 machine guns, and other materiel, while the Allies occupied the Rhineland and the Rhine bridgeheads. Germany was now defenseless, dependent on Wilson and the Allies keeping their word.

Yet the hunger blockade continued, and was even expanded, as the Allies gained control of the German Baltic coast and banned even fishing boats. The point was reached where the commander of the British army of occupation demanded of London that food be sent to the famished Germans. His troops could no longer stand the sight of hungry German children rummaging in the rubbish bins of the British camps for food Still, food was only allowed to enter Germany in March 1919, and the blockade of raw materials continued until the Germans signed the Treaty.”

Let’s look at another example of revisionist history, World War II. The war led to even more appalling massacres than World War I, but we were told at the time that America needed to enter the war to prevent Hitler from invading America. Our lying textbooks and the mass media repeat this lie to this day.

The facts are altogether different. Franklin Roosevelt wanted to smash Nazi Germany and provoked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor, in order to enter the war in Europe through the Japanese back door. One of the greatest American diplomatic historians, Charles Callan Tansill, wrote an outstanding book about this, Back Door to War. (1952) Tansill also wrote the best book about America’s entry in World War I, America Goes to War (1938). The great Robert Higgs succinctly sums up the story: “When Germany began to rearm and to seek Lebensraum aggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British navy in attacks on German U-boats in the northern Atlantic, but Hitler refused to take the bait, thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged, declared belligerent—a belligerence that the great majority of Americans opposed.

In June 1940, Henry L. Stimson, who had been secretary of war under William Howard Taft and secretary of state under Herbert Hoover, became secretary of war again. Stimson was a lion of the Anglophile, northeastern upper crust and no friend of the Japanese. In support of the so-called Open Door Policy for China, Stimson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan’s advance in Asia. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes vigorously endorsed this policy. Roosevelt hoped that such sanctions would goad the Japanese into making a rash mistake by launching a war against the United States, which would bring in Germany because Japan and Germany were allied.

The Politically Incorr...Thomas E. Woods Jr.Best Price: $1.51Buy New $8.71(as of 06:15 UTC - Details)The Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, accordingly, imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan. In 1939, the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. ‘On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials.’ Under this authority, ‘[o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted.’ Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, ‘on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.’ Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt ‘froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan.’ The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in Southeast Asia.

Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the American leaders knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda had communicated to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: ‘Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas.’”

The value of revisionism isn’t confined to the past. America now supports Ukraine in a costly war against Russia that threatens the world with nuclear annihilation. Russian President Putin is portrayed as an aggressor, embarked on a massive program of expansion. Yet the facts tell a different story. Russia acted in response to a provocative neocon foreign policy that aimed at surrounding Russia with hostile countries. John J. Mearsheimer, the foremost American political scientist specializing in foreign policy, says; “The alternative argument, which I identify with, and which is clearly the minority view in the West, is that the United States and its allies provoked the war. This is not to deny, of course, that Russia invaded Ukraine and started the war. But the principal cause of the conflict is the NATO decision to bring Ukraine into the alliance, which virtually all Russian leaders see as an existential threat that must be eliminated. NATO expansion, however, is part of a broader strategy that is designed to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Bringing Kyiv into the European Union (EU) and promoting a color revolution in Ukraine – turning it into pro-Western liberal democracy – are the other two prongs of the policy. Russia leaders fear all three prongs, but they fear NATO expansion the most. To deal with this threat, Russia launched a preventive war on 24 February 2022.”

Let’s do everything we can to promote revisionist history. That is the path to peace.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/08/lew-rockwell/why-we-need-revisionist-history/