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Posted

On another thread it was pointed out that I was criticising David Aaronovitch’s book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, without actually reading the book.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=15439

This is a valid point as I was basing my comments on the reviews the book had received. Andy Walker and Mike Tribe urged that I read the book and so that I would be in a position to debate it with them. I took up that challenge by ordering it from my public library (I could not bring myself to pay good money for it).

In the introduction of the book Aaronovitch claims that the book was inspired by a BBC film producer, Kevin Jarvis, who claimed that “the Apollo moon landings had been faked by NASA and the American government”. Aaronovitch was shocked why such an intelligent man should believe such a ridiculous story. My response would have been similar. However, Aaronovitch’s next step is to lump this particular conspiracy theory to all other conspiracy theories, by claiming that “we in the West are currently going through a period of fashionable conspiracism”. He adds: “Books alleging secret plots appear on the current affairs and history shelves as though they were as scholarly or reliable as works by major historians or noted academics. Little distinction is made between a painstakingly constructed biography of John F. Kennedy and an expensive new tome arguing – forty-four years after the event – that the president was killed by the Mafia.”

Aaronovitch is implying that historians do not concern themselves with conspiracy theories whereas these books are written by journalists after making a “quick buck”. Of course Aaronovitch is a journalist who admits in the introduction is trying to make money out of the subject matter (he claims that the royalty statements will determine whether he has put the last seven years to good use). I will return to this subject later because Aaronovitch constantly shows his ignorance in the role of historians in dealing with political conspiracies.

Aaronovitch is enough of an academic to realise that you have to first determine your terms of reference (he studied history at Balliol College, Oxford, but was sent down after failing his first-year exams – I am sure we would have got a different book if he had completed his studies). However, this causes him problems. “If a conspiracy is defined as two or more people getting together to plot an illegal, secret or immoral action, then we can all agree that there are plenty of conspiracies.” (page 4)

Aaronovitch considers two alternative definitions by historians Daniel Pipes and Richard Hofstadter. He rejects these because they do not suit his purpose and so he comes up with his own definition: “I think a better definition of a conspiracy theory might be: the attribution of deliberately agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended. And, as a sophistication of this definition, one might add the attribution of secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another.” This is so woolly that Aaronovitch is virtually saying that a “conspiracy theory” is anything I say it is. However, I will try to assess his work based on his definition of conspiracy theory.

The problem for Aaronovitch is that anyone who has read much history is that the past is full of proved “conspiracies”. People in power have always used this power to try and control events. Their power is based on working closely with others in their position. In a democratic society, these people are forced into trying to prevent their actions from becoming public knowledge. The problem for them is that they are competing for power with other groups who share different political philosophies. This means that sometimes, the government itself is a victim of a political conspiracy.

In the introduction Aaronovitch looks at some suggested political conspiracies in the 20th century. His brief survey of US history leads him to argue that “not counting Watergate, which was a rather pitiful botched conspiracy to cover up an attempt at political espionage, the Iran-Contra affair of 1985-6 is the closest the US has come to a full-blown conspiracy.” Even this admittance shows Aaronovitch’s lack of knowledge of these subjects. He understands Watergate as a Nixon conspiracy rather than as a conspiracy against Nixon. The same is true of Iran-Contra. He has only understood the surface conspiracy of Reagan against the will of Congress rather than the conspiracy against the Jimmy Carter administration. These mistakes would have been corrected by the reading of just one of the standard texts written by historians on these subjects. However, his bibliography and his notes (only 15 pages in a 327 page book) show that he has not read any books on these subjects.

In his study of 20th century UK history he only comes up with one political conspiracy, the Zinoviev letter of 1924. He quotes from Gill Bennett, the chief historian of the Foreign Office, who concluded that the letter had been forged by anti-Communist White Russians and passed over to MI6 who believed it to be genuine (of course it was MI6 who believed there was WMD in Iraq). Aaronovitch then goes on to quote the Labour foreign secretary, the late Robin Cook, “there is no evidence that MI6 forged the letter. There is no evidence of an organised conspiracy against by the intelligence agencies.” (4th February, 1999)

I am sure the Foreign Office told Cook that the Labour Party had not been a victim of a conspiracy organized by the intelligence services. However, Aaronovitch seems to be unaware of Christopher Andrew’s book, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (2009). Andrew is no friend of conspiracy theorists but after being given access to previously unclassified files he has had to confirm that MI5 were indeed involved in a number of political conspiracies. This includes the Zinoviev letter. On page 149 he points out that on 9th October 1924 SIS forwarded the Zinoviev letter to the Foreign Office, MI5 and Scotland Yard with the assurance that “the authenticity is undoubted” when they knew it had been forged by anti-Bolshevik White Russians. Desmond Morton, the head of SIS, provided extra information about the letter being confirmed as being genuine by an agent, Jim Finney, who had penetrated Comintern and the Communist Party of Great Britain. Andrew claims this was an “outrageous lie” as the so-called Finney report does not make any reference to the Zinoviev letter. Of course, it did not stop there, the forged document was then sent to the Daily Mail, a newspaper that was running a campaign against the Labour government. Andrew also argues that it was Joseph Ball, head of B Branch who passed the letter onto Conservative Central Office on 22nd October, 1924. Ball later went onto work for the Conservative Party, as Andrew points out: “Ball’s subsequent lack of scruples in using intelligence for party-political advantage while at central office in the later 1920s strongly suggests” that he was guilty of this action.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/CRIballJ.htm

It is clear in this case that Aaronovitch’s comments on the Zinoviev letter is just based on a casual look at newspaper cuttings. While this might be the research method used by a journalist writing an article on the subject, it is not acceptable when you are writing a book about past events. Especially as the main thrust of his argument is that people who write conspiracy books are not historians (and have not studied the evidence rigorously enough).

Anyway, I am posting this on the assassination of JFK thread and will now concentrate on the way Aaronovitch deals with this subject. In fact, it only covers 15 pages and appears in the chapter, “Dead Deities”. He starts of by quoting from his mother’s diary who wrote on the 23rd November 1963: “everybody abuzz with Kennedy assassination. Man called Lee Oswald arrested. Wonder if it is a frame-up, he is billed as having communist associations.” Aaronovitch’s mother, like his father, were members of the British Communist Party, and so it is not surprising that she reacted in this way to the assassination.

Aaronovitch argues that it was not unusual for the left to think that JFK had been killed as a result of a right-wing conspiracy. It was not only those on the left who thought this. A poll carried out in the US showed that one week after JFK’s death, 29% thought that Oswald did not act on his own. However, he claims that it was Mark Lane, with his article in the left-wing National Guardian in December 1963, that instigated the idea that JFK had been the victim of a right-wing conspiracy.

Aaronovitch dismisses Lane as a left-wing activist (he was the only public official arrested as a Freedom Rider). He also points out that most of those who played a public role in the claim that JFK had been a victim of conspiracy in Britain were on the left (J. B. Priestley, Michael Foot, Bertrand Russell, Victor Gollancz, John Calder, Bishop of Southwark, etc.).

He quotes from the article by I. F. Stone, who he describes as “one of the most prominent progressive US journalists”, who “warned the Left that they were falling prey to the same paranoias as the American Right” for arguing that JFK was a victim of a conspiracy (5th October, 1964). Stone believed, as did many on the left at the time that JFK was just a traditional conservative politician, and was an unlikely target of a right-wing plot. This was not an uncommon feeling on the left at the time, it was definitely my view of the assassination, however, we now know from declassified documents, that JFK had moved to the left in office and at the time of his assassination, was involved in secret negotiations to end the Cold War. I would suggest that Stone would not have been so convinced of Oswald’s guilt if he knew what we know now.

He then goes onto to suggest that Lane made a good living out of pushing the conspiracy theory. It is true that Lane’s Rush to Judgment (1966) did sell well. However, he fails to say that the earliest conspiracy books by people like Thomas G. Buchanan and Joachim Joesten had to go to Europe to find a publisher. It was only after the success of Lane’s book that convinced US publishers that there was good money to be made out of the JFK case. That is the way capitalism works.

He dismisses the early books on the case as being written by journalists. He tries to undermine Richard H. Popkin’s The Second Oswald, by claiming that while he was an academic, he was a philosopher rather than a historian. It does not seem that Aaronovitch has read any of these books and they do not even appear in his bibliography.

Aaronovitch then goes onto argue on page 123 that: “If one reads the Warren Report, the circumstantial evidence that Oswald was the lone killer seems overwhelming.” He then goes on to list this “circumstantial evidence”. For example: “he worked at the Texas Schoolbook Depository…” etc. He ends the passage with “the words slam dunk come to mind”. I am afraid that is the kind of analysis that Aaronovitch provides in the book.

Aaronovitch goes onto attack the critics of the Warren Commission by claiming that most of them would not have read the full report. It is unlikely that Aaronovitch has read the report. If you go to the very skimpy notes you will find that he only quotes the report via Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (2003) Larry Sturdivan’s The JFK Myths (2005) and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History (2007), three books that do appear in the Bibliography. In fact, the only pro-JFK conspiracy books that appear in the Bibliography are: Madeleine Brown’s Texas in the Morning (1997), Robin Ramsay’s Who Shot JFK? (2002) and James Di Eugenio and Lisa Pease’s The Assassinations (2003).

This is clearly not a very exhaustive study of the case. What is worse, he seems completely unaware of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that carried out an investigation into the assassination of JFK between 1975 and 1976. The published report claimed that the Warren Commission "failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President." The report was also highly critical of the Secret Service: "The Secret Service was deficient in the performance of its duties. The Secret Service possessed information that was not properly analyzed, investigated or used by the Secret Service in connection with the President's trip to Dallas; in addition, Secret Service agents in the motorcade were inadequately prepared to protect the President from a sniper."

The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that "scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy." It added that "on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”

One can see why Aaronovitch was not keen to examine the findings of the Select Committee on Assassinations report. But to completely ignore its existence is unacceptable. This is especially important as the US official government position is that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK. The issue is not really about if Oswald was the lone gunman but who was behind the conspiracy to kill JFK.

Aaronovitch makes much in his book that conspiracy books are written by lawyers and journalists rather than historians. While this is true of anti-conspiracy books, it is not true of conspiracy books. It is true that many historians, when writing about JFK, tend to leave the assassination of him well alone. However, as far as I am aware, no historian has ever gone on record as saying the Warren Commission got it right. Those historians who have looked at the assassination, people such as David Kaiser, Gerald McKnight and Michael Kurtz, have concluded that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK.

Aaronovitch’s book has nothing to tell us about the JFK assassination. As a journalist who is attempting to write a book as quick as possible, he does not have the inclination or the skills, to investigate the considerable amount of material relating to the case. However, maybe I am not a careful enough reader and maybe Andy Walker and Mike Tribe can point out what I have missed.

Posted
Those historians who have looked at the assassination, people such as David Kaiser, Gerald McKnight and Michael Kurtz, have concluded that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK.

Then there is historian Robert Dallek, who wrote a biography of JFK without even looking at the assassination. In his book An Unfinished Life, Dallek, if we give him the benefit of the doubt (he could just be a deliberate xxxx), displays plain ignorance, an apparent total absence of research on the assassination, by repeating the lie (so necessary for the magic-bullet theory) that JFK was shot "in the back of the neck." (By Lee Harvey Oswald, of course).

Posted
In his study of 20th century UK history he only comes up with one political conspiracy, the Zinoviev letter of 1924. He quotes from Gill Bennett, the chief historian of the Foreign Office, who concluded that the letter had been forged by anti-Communist White Russians and passed over to MI6 who believed it to be genuine (of course it was MI6 who believed there was WMD in Iraq). Aaronovitch then goes on to quote the Labour foreign secretary, the late Robin Cook, “there is no evidence that MI6 forged the letter. There is no evidence of an organised conspiracy against by the intelligence agencies.” (4th February, 1999).... It is clear in this case that Aaronovitch’s comments on the Zinoviev letter is just based on a casual look at newspaper cuttings. While this might be the research method used by a journalist writing an article on the subject, it is not acceptable when you are writing a book about past events. Especially as the main thrust of his argument is that people who write conspiracy books are not historians (and have not studied the evidence rigorously enough).

In fact, the passage in the book comes directly from the Wikipeda entry on the Zinoviev Letter. That helps to explain the lack of references in the book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter

Posted

To correct every mistake, supply every detail deliberately avoided and provide context where it was omitted would take a book four times the size of Aaronovitch's, so great are his failings.

Had Aaronovitch intended penning a book on what gives rise to conspiracy culture, he might have argued that it is the direct result of the disconnect between what the government tells the governed, and a contrary reality that the governed know to be true.

JFK assassination = official lie. Vietnam = official lie. Watergate = official lie. Iran/Contra = official lie. Iraq War I = official lie. 9/11 = official lie. It is not difficult to understand the need felt by the governed to fashion alternate explanations when the official ones are so wholly divorced from reality. How much official malarkey must one swallow before one is entitled to puke it all back up? That might have been a worthwhile book, and might have advanced understanding of the issues it contained.

But that book isn’t what Aaronovitch has written. We all know someone like Aaronovitch; smugly self-satisfied that he has a monopoly on the truth, yet unwilling to bother proving it. Page after page of false equivalence, false assertions, refusal to acknowledge - let alone address - key issues, etc. But an unstinting volley of insults at those who question official versions of reality that are patently false to all but those whose own credulity requires them to remain silently incurious.

This book presents nothing new about any of the topics covered - indeed hides from its readers much that is new and worthwhile knowing - and even less about the man who wrote it. It was a foregone conclusion Aaronvitch couldn’t find a conspiracy even if he were in the midst of one. He’s already demonstrated as much.

Recall that this author was a gung-ho cheerleader for Iraq War II, the premises for which were fraudulently cooked and rushed toward with the hysteria of panicked teenage girls: “If we don’t take Hussein out, he could lob a nuke into Whitehall in 45 minutes.” The more Iraqi ground that was covered by UN weapons inspectors who found nothing, the more shrill and panicky became the advocacy for war by Blair, Bush and their various sycophants, Aaronovitch among them..

Those who favoured this course now say they did so on good faith, having been duped by faulty intelligence. Again, palpably false. The intelligence used to promulgate this crime against humanity was invented and selected for its provocative value, not because of overwhelming credibility. Those who have studied the issue know that members within the US and UK intelligence community warned strongly that the cherry-picked “evidence” was questionable at best, manufactured specifically to trigger war at worst. Joe Wilson was not alone in such wariness, merely made the most famous at the behest of the war criminals who plotted this outrage.

Now that the invading countries court bankruptcy and untold volumes of blood has been unnecessarily shed, it would be fitting for those who were so wrong to admit it. They don’t, of course, because they claim to have been operating with the best information available, and after 9/11 it was more critical to be proactive than to be right. With blood on their hands, they remain wholly unrepentant, assuring all who still bother listening to them that they acted only for queen and country.

This is a necessary ruse, for the alternative is to unmask themselves as vile sociopaths of the first order. Unsurprisingly, they now prefer to claim stupidity and incompetence rather than cop in public to even lower motives.

Aaronovitch has already claimed stupidity and incompetence, on his own behalf and that of the war criminals whose callously indifferent plans he championed. He’s also made it clear that he, personally, didn’t need any fancy pretext to justify the illegal war against Hussein; ousting him from power through unprovoked force was a sufficient means and end.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,945381,00.html

I was never in favour of this war mainly because of the threats of terrorism or WMDs. Getting rid of Saddam (and therefore the myriad afflictions of the Iraqi people) was enough. But the weapons were the pretext on which the invasion was sold to a lot of people in this country, and was attempted to be sold to the people of the world. The British dossiers, released last autumn, claimed that Iraq had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, drawn up military plans for their use, retained illegal missiles capable of carrying WMD warheads, and concealed equipment from the weapons inspectors.

At the United Nations in February, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, presented evidence claiming that there were mobile laboratories and showing clear signs that the Iraqis had moved material to escape inspection from UN teams. Put together, all this was argued as constituting a clear breach of UN resolutions that therefore required urgent action.

That “urgent action” could far more easily have been locating those “mobile laboratories,” for if Colin Powell had been able to identify and locate them before, surely such a feat could be accomplished again, particularly with a UN team on the ground that was briefed on precisely what they were seeking. One is hard pressed to imagine how US intelligence knew about such “mobile laboratories,” yet they were as invisible to UN inspectors then as they have remained to this day. But that option of seeking WMDs was foreclosed because the intent was regime change, not disarmament.

These claims cannot be wished away in the light of a successful war. If nothing is eventually found, I – as a supporter of the war – will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere.

Yet now we have a book in which Aaronovitch advocates the readers should believe the self-same governments whose credibility he, himself, had foresworn seven years ago. Such rank hypocrisy should be drawn to the attention of anyone gullible enough to think Aaronovtich’s book has something new to offer.

This man couldn’t see a criminal conspiracy for which he was a leading media mouthpiece, in real time while it happened, and even with the benefit of hindsight cannot admit the ways in which he was used - unwittingly or otherwise - for that criminal purpose.

But this is the man we should entrust to educate us about historical conspiracies? This is the man we should believe when he rails against cranks, hysterics and mentally defective conspiracy believers?

Physician, heal thyself. There is a cure for ignorance.

post-2206-1268323947_thumb.jpg

Posted

Another good review of the book is by the historian Joseph E. Green:

http://www.ctka.net/2010/voodoo.html

It includes the following:

By and large, this is not an evidential book. He doesn't address the major assassinations in any detail, apart from Kennedy. His entire take on RFK is summed up as: "And if you thought JFK had been killed by 'them,' then why not his brother, gunned down in California in 1968?" [6] Alas, in his chapter on the JFK assassination, although he does not rely on simple rhetoric for his attacks, the evidence he sites is vastly out of date. There is nothing new in his discussion, particularly in light of Bugliosi's recent Reclaiming History. If Bugliosi can't prove the Warren Commission thesis in 2600 pages, then Aaronovitch will not be able to do so in 30 or so. However, he at least gives it a try, which is more than we can say about his assessment of the other political murders.

Aaronovitch's point of view on Oswald is as follows:

If one reads the Warren Report, the circumstantial evidence that Oswald was the lone gunman seems overwhelming. He worked at the Texas School Book Depository, where, on the sixth floor, after the shooting, his rifle was discovered inside an improvised sniper's nest. People had seen a man at the sixth-floor window, had seen the rifle barrel, had heard the shots. Oswald was the only employee unaccounted for after the shooting, and he was picked up shortly afterward in a cinema, having just shot a policeman looking for someone of his description. The words 'slam dunk' come to mind. [7]

Did I say the author was trying? OK, maybe not so much.

Without going into the evidence for all of this (see Jim DiEugenio's series on Bugliosi [8] for a detailed rundown, as arguing with Aaronovitch is both redundant and silly given the scale of the other battle), note that he just restates the Warren Commission's conclusions. When one looks into the detailed evidence, the case falls apart. Aaronovitch isn't going to volunteer that the rifle was ordered under a different name, that the FBI initially failed to get prints off the rifle, that the FBI's own nitrate test cleared Oswald of the murder, that the rifle changed shape three times before settling into the form of a Manlicher-Carcano, and that the State would never have been able to make a case against Oswald for shooting the policeman J.D. Tippit, much less JFK. "The detail is overwhelming," he complains. [9] Yes, it is; such is the price for doing the investigative work. Unfortunately, if you don't do the work, you are going to end up ineffectually repeating the same balderdash that nobody believed in 1963.

And, of course, he does. He calls the idea that Oswald shot at General Edwin Walker "an incontrovertible fact," an embarrassing statement which he may want to delete in future editions. [10] He says of Norman Mailer's book Oswald's Tale that "It is suggestive that one of the eminent Americans who initially advocated the notion of conspiracy changed his mind when he began to study Oswald the man." [11] It is indeed suggestive of the fact that Mailer desperately needed money to help him with the IRS, but apart from that it is unclear just how liberal Mailer was in the first place. Having gone through a substantial amount of personal correspondence located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, I can say that his political views were not consistent with his public statements; among other things, one of his best friends was G. Gordon Liddy.

The rest of his short JFK discussion, encased in a chapter entitled "Dead Deities," will convince no one but the already convinced. And anyone convinced by his evidence doesn't understand the concept.

Posted
Another good review of the book is by the historian Joseph E. Green:

http://www.ctka.net/2010/voodoo.html

It includes the following:

Aaronovitch's point of view on Oswald is as follows:

If one reads the Warren Report, the circumstantial evidence that Oswald was the lone gunman seems overwhelming. He worked at the Texas School Book Depository, where, on the sixth floor, after the shooting, his rifle was discovered inside an improvised sniper's nest. People had seen a man at the sixth-floor window, had seen the rifle barrel, had heard the shots. Oswald was the only employee unaccounted for after the shooting, and he was picked up shortly afterward in a cinema, having just shot a policeman looking for someone of his description. The words 'slam dunk' come to mind. [7]

A clear-cut case of journalistic malpractice. Even if every point in this "slam dunk" case

were true none of it would preclude other shooters.

Aaronovitch presents no case against conspiracy, but pretends otherwise.

Posted (edited)

So Robert since you normally come across as a rational person I would like to hear your explaination at to how a newspaper article indicating a Japanese attack on Singapore or perhaps the Phillipeans or perhap Hawaii might be immenent supports the CT FDR had SECRET information he witheld from the commanders of Pearl Harbor the Japanese were going to attack there. Don't you think the commanders of the US base read the paper?

Edited by Len Colby
Posted (edited)

Just for clarification the article never indicated directly that Pearl Harbor or other US targets were considered likely targets it was about the possibility of an attack on Singapore then a possession of Britain which was already at war with Japan’s ally Germany. They had already seized French Indochina and forced the Dutch to accede to their demands in what is now known as Indonesia.

It did however say “it was announced that Cavite, Philippines, will hold nightly blackouts while U.S. forces in Hawaii Thursday were placed on 'alert.'” Which seems to indicate an attack on the US was considered possibilble the part that followed indicated this was not considered likely:

Meanwhile, a closer German-Japanese tie-up in an effort to drive British and American interests out of the Orient was foreseen by informed sources as a possible result of the critical situation.

This alternative was regarded as more likely than Japanese acceptance of American terms.

It was said that if Japan despairs of reaching an understanding with the United States she might give active instead of lukewarm support to the Axis program by furnishing Germany with supply stations and fueling depots to enable maintenance of a formidable fleet of Nazi raiders in the Pacific to harass British and American shipping while Germany helps Japan cut off American supplies to China.

But even if you were to read too much into the sentence about the American territories it indicates US commanders were advised and ordered to be prepared for a Japanese attack. The ones at Pearl Harbor were court marshaled for failing to do so.

Further despite claims the article was referring to the weekend of December 6 - 7, it’s first sentence makes it clear it was referring to the weekend of November 29 – 30:

"WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 (UP) -- Cancellation of leaves in Singapore tonight coincided with a widespread belief that Japan will strike somewhere over the weekend. Unofficial sources said Tokyo was apparently desperate because she feels the Cordell Hull-Saburo Kurusu talks are near collapse and may strike in an effort to 'break encirclement.'"

EDIT: Formatting error fixed

http://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/articl...ews/local01.prt

Full text if you are willing to pay:

https://secure.townnews.com/shared-content/...er=0&amex=0

Edited by Len Colby
Posted

So at that point, the British had done all the work in creating Adolf Hitler, and Mussolini, beforehand. And we had in the United States at the same time, our financial establishment, under President Wilson, under President Coolidge, and so forth; and our financial establishment was just as Nazi, as the British, who were supporting the Nazis.

But, then Pearl Harbor happened, Japan's attack, which had been something originally planned by the British in the 1920s, because the British were afraid of the United States developing a naval capability they couldn't control. So therefore, they agreed, at the arms negotiations of the 1920s, to have the Japanese take the assignment of taking on and destroying Pearl Harbor. And the Japanese were happy to do that, for two reasons: First of all, Japan had been convinced by the British Prince of Wales to make a war on China, which continued, as you know, from 1894 to 1945, off-and-on warfare. So, the Japanese, who were already conducting this war against China, looked at the U.S. as an enemy who might interfere with their war on China.

So: the Pearl Harbor attack. But, the Pearl Harbor attack mobilized the American people, in a way which is somewhat similar to what happened recently in the United States, by the swindles, by these gigantic swindles which are stirring up the American people toward hatred against the financial community, because of these swindles.

So, at that point, Roosevelt had political control of the situation, because of the hatred against this process, and many of the fascists went underground and changed their names and went into new organizations to come up later; and, it is that element which dominates the United States today, from the top down, especially under three Bush Administrations. And the Bush family was one of these pro-Nazi families. And it's still one of those pro-Nazi families!

So therefore, we have this crisis now, which was created by this kind of mess. We have, with the British financial establishment, the British Empire—it's not the British people, it's the British Empire—and this imperial force which is running most of the terrorism in the world today, and most of the drug-trafficking in the world today, has now made itself extremely unpopular. In the meantime, because of the way they ran the operation. The United States, economically, has been systemically destroyed in its physical-economic capability, since the day that Roosevelt died; Truman began to do that, immediately. Because, you have to understand, that the British Empire is not a friend of the United States; and the United States as a nation, is not a friend of the British Empire. Those of us who are patriots know, the British Empire is our enemy. And the British know, that we, the United States, are their most deadly enemy, if we ever get organized to do something about it, as Franklin Roosevelt was prepared to do.

http://www.larouchepub.com/lar/2009/3612di...h_back2fdr.html

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