
              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 1  Num. 3
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")


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[CN Editor -- The local all volunteer radio station, WEFT 90.1 
FM, has a 1-hour show at 10 A.M. on Saturday mornings called 
"News From Neptune." The following is a partial transcript of 
their June 4, 1994 broadcast. Co-hosts are Paul "The Truth" Muth, 
and Carl Estabrook.]

MUTH:... what you thought the most egregious misrepresentation of 
America's role. Actually, I was thinking more of a discussion of 
post-war... something we return to in... our namesake for the 
show, "News From Neptune," Noam Chomsky, says it ought to start 
with some of the betrayals of the movements that fought against 
Hitler.

ESTABROOK: Absolutely.

MUTH: Whether the Truman Doctrine in Greece -- Greek partisans -- 
the deals with the mafiosi in the south of France, in Marseilles, 
where the left people who fought against Nazis were betrayed and 
beaten by thugs.

ESTABROOK: Absolutely. No, you're right, Paul. I mean the myth 
making this week around D-Day has just been remarkable. And I 
don't know what I find more appalling: the myth making itself or 
the general ignorance -- the sort of inchoate recognition on the 
part of a lot of people who are listening to this that it *is* 
myth making and therefore they shouldn't pay any attention to it. 
And an awful lot of people are still going to be sadly pressed if 
you ask them what D-Day was or what the situation was 50 years 
ago that is the occasion for all this rhetorical excess that 
we're hearing from both the news media and from our chief 
magistrate [Clinton] who is running around England at the moment, 
apparently, excessing rhetorically.

I don't know. I mean ignorance as a defense against propaganda, 
you know, is a counsel of despair, it seems to me. But that's 
what we're dealing with.

MUTH: I was dismayed by the blessing of the new Italian 
government...

[CN Editor -- In Italy, so-called "Neo Fascists" have recently 
gained control of the government. 50 years ago, we were fighting 
World War II against these same sorts of people. Where is 
Clinton's first stop for the 50-year D-Day carnival? Italy. Who 
does he meet with first? Fascists.]

...What was the line, uh...

ESTABROOK: Yes!

MUTH: "Well a lot of political parties have their origins in less 
than wholesome..." I don't know.

ESTABROOK: Maybe he's talking about the Democratic party and its 
support for slavery [pre-American Civil War] in this country.

MUTH: I suppose. There is that reference, I guess, that's sort of 
a defense of his remark. [CN Editor -- Apparently Clinton made 
some sort of remark, in the context of his meeting with the 
Italian "Neo-Fascists," as some sort of an excuse for the 
absurdity of his situation.] But the Neo-Nazis...

ESTABROOK: I mean, it is... The irony is very great, Paul. I mean 
for him to be embracing the leader of a government that includes 
a fascist... and all this "neo-fascist" talk just means that 
these fascists weren't born when the... when Mussolini was 
running Italy.

It is an important irony, an important contradiction, because it 
shows up the falseness of most of our accounts of World War II. I 
mean, if some accounts are to be believed, what World War II was 
primarily about was it was some sort of a brawl between Hitler 
and the B'nai B'rith. And it seems to me that it's much more 
important to try to see what World War II *was* about and to see 
that the United States never went to war to protect Jews, it 
never went to war to overthrow Hitler -- the U.S. was perfectly 
complacent with the Hitler government throughout the '30s. It 
didn't go to war for any of these "defense of Freedoms" that have 
been talked about. Remember: The war had been on for several 
years; at least 2 years if you talk about Europe and many more if 
you talk about Japanese expansion into China. The war had been on 
for several years before the U.S. got involved in it. And its 
motive for getting into the war had nothing to do with freedom or 
oppressed groups within the Reich. What it had to do with was the 
fact that a military base belonging to the U.S. was attacked in 
the Pacific and that 2 Capitalist powers struggled over which was 
to control the business of the Pacific. We won.

MUTH: Well, but that does bring up the question of what was the 
motive in Europe, though. I thought you were going to say... I 
mean, the precipitating thing, Pearl Harbor [September 7th, just 
ask George Bush -- CN Editor], I think we can set aside. Anything 
could have precipitated. So it's not, that's not a major causal 
thing. The latter is just the fighting over the Capitalist 
spoils. But that's true in Europe as well.

ESTABROOK: Well exactly. You're quite right about that. I'm not 
sure I agree that anything could have precipitated it. I mean, it 
seems to me that it was the [economic] struggle between the U.S. 
and Japan that the U.S. was essentially winning. And that the 
Japanese struck out against militarily that produced the military 
confrontation in the Pacific. The U.S. had trammelled up the 
Japanese economy in the Pacific and was doing its best to do so. 
And it was the Japanese strike, military strike, against that 
that led the U.S. into the war.

The alliance of Japan and Germany turned our attention then to 
the... to Europe. Because the real motive of the U.S. in Europe 
was not particularly, or not immediately, for the defeat of 
Germany. What the U.S. was most interested in, in Europe, was the 
British empire. Who was going to control the colonial empires of 
the declining Capitalist states of Europe when the war ended? The 
U.S. was sure it was going to be that sort of "residuary legatee" 
of 19th century colonialism; that the British empire was going to 
be ours. The Germans were fighting to see that that empire would 
be theirs, that they would have an economic control over that, 
over that empire. We won that one, too. That's the reason we were 
in Iran. That's the reason we were in Vietnam. I mean, the 
question of the Second World War could be summarized as "The War 
of British Succession in Europe"; who was going to succeed to the 
British empire. We won that one, too.

[...]

[Still Estabrook speaking]:
And I think the understanding of what the war was about, and the 
understanding (as you suggested earlier) of what the real outcome 
of the war was, seems to me to be vital and against the 
mythology.

To take just one example: *Time* magazine this week has a picture 
of Dwight David Eisenhower on the front of it with the legend, 
"The Man Who Beat Hitler." Well, that's very interesting. Bertolt 
Brecht wrote a famous poem. "The Remarks of a Worker Who Reads" 
contains the lines:

           Caesar conquered Gaul.
           (Didn't he even have a cook with him?)

So "The Man Who Beat Hitler" is... at once, falls under Brecht's 
quite legitimate stricture.

There's another issue, too. For all this talk about the invasion 
of France on the 6th of June, 1944, by 150,000 troops (a minority 
of whom, by the way, were Americans), um, for all the talk about 
this, the notion grows in American circles that *that* was what 
overthrew Nazi-ism. Well, in fact, what overthrew Nazi-ism was 
the Russian army. Even *after* D-Day, from June 6, 1944 to May 8, 
1945 -- from D-Day to the very end of the war -- the majority of 
German troops were in the east, not in the west. Even after all 
the Allied armies had moved into France and so forth -- all the 
British and American armies (Anglo-Saxon armies, we probably 
should say) had moved into western Europe -- the majority of 
German troops were still in the east because the German's knew 
quite well [that] the real threat came from the east. And it was 
when the eastern front crumbled, when the Russian army -- at 
immense cost, cost of 20 million war dead -- when the Russian 
army finally moved into Berlin, that the war was over.

Now this is not to say that what was going on, the difficulties 
in the western half of Europe, weren't serious difficulties for 
the Reich. They certainly were. But if you ask, "Who won the 
Second World War?" (the question), the short answer is not 
Eisenhower, "The Man Who Beat Hitler," but the Red army. It 
should have a picture of General Zhukoff, or worse yet, Joe 
Stalin, on the front of *Time* magazine if you wanted to be... 
even if you wanted to buy this way of talking.

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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

