Compiled by Dick Bennett https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/05/war-watch-wednesdays-179-may-29-2024.html
WORLD WAR II, the “Good War?”
David Swanson. Leaving WWII Behind.
Daniele Ganser. USA: The Ruthless Empire.
“In Leaving World War II Behind, David Swanson brilliantly destroys the myth that even if war is generally a bad thing World War II was the good war. In a stunning, fact-laden exposition, Swanson demonstrates the systemic failures of the western governments together with their corporate enablers that generated the practices of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and concentration camps, empowering Hitler. Swanson shows incontrovertibly that it was an underlying drive to preserve capitalism and destroy communist encroachment that led to support for Hitler when he was eminently stoppable.” Ann Wright, co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.
Daniele Ganser. USA: The Ruthless Empire.
“World War II…is the greatest man-made catastrophe in the history of mankind. “ It ended with the obliteration of two Japanese civilian cities by atomic bombs, the war “characterized by a high degree of brutality and ruthlessness.” “Some 60 million people lost their lives, the majority of whom were civilians, as well as an undetermined number of seriously injured and traumatized casualties.” The Soviet Union “suffered the greatest losses…with 27 million dead”!
The war strengthened the peace movement and the post-war generation in their firm conviction that conflicts must be resolved without violence whenever possible, and that no one should be excluded from the human family” (110). Out of that conviction arose the United Nations in 1945. But by 1948 fear and loathing of communism and the Soviet Union led to the establishment of NATO and its eastward expansion continuing.