Knowledge Without Wisdom

Modern society has suffered greatly in the twentieth century as a result of secular revolt, materialism, and atheism. As earth made the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, it was plunged into a suicidal destiny never before experienced in its long and turbulent history. Will we survive? Knowledge Without Wisdom, together with the recording of the evolving circumstances, punctuated points, and defining moments of the twentieth century and beyond, is a commentary on the transformation of modern civilization.

The secularism of the twentieth century will go on record as the most devastating, soul-destroying epoch in history. Our modern secularism was fostered by two worldwide influences: first, the domination of Western civilization by the Christian church and, second, nineteenth century “science.” Modern secularism began as a rising protest against the complete domination of Western civilization by the institutionalized Christian church. The incompatible parents of secularism were, therefore, the narrow-minded and godless attitude of nineteenth century “science” on the one hand and, on the other hand, the totalitarian Christian church.

As our planet exited the twentieth century, we saw that the prevailing intellectual and philosophical climate of all Western and Eastern life was decidedly secular-humanistic. For the preceding three centuries, Western thinking was progressively secularized. As a result, the majority of professed Christians of Western civilization are actually unwitting secularists. Religion has more or less become a nominal influence — nothing more than a ritualistic exercise as demonstrated by the Vatican of Rome.

In the 1,900 years since the cross at Golgotha, mankind had been living in a distinctly agrarian society that provided the scaffolding for life in a civilized world. Savagery and barbarism have always been the response of mortal beings to danger and fear. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrate this in a way we as mortals hardly recognize. Such is our universal denial.

Ancient history records that mankind was not always so primitive and fearful, that hundreds of thousands of years ago men and women lived courageously in a civilization that makes our modern example look savage. That civilization was later known as Dilmun, situated in the southern region of Mesopotamia, now known as the Persian Gulf. So how did the evolving races become so fearful, worshipping just about anything and anybody who presented themselves?

Knowledge Without Wisdom will investigate this conundrum. As readers immerse themselves in the recorded history of the twentieth century, the mystery will unfold and become clear. After reading the evidence presented in this book, readers will see evidence that we who dwell on this planet have done ourselves and future generations a great disservice. Although we have attained a great storehouse of knowledge through the centuries, we have failed utterly to augment this abundance with the requisite wisdom to allow our natural evolution to occur.

Modern society does not recognize that without the thrilling message of Jesus’ life, we would still be languishing in a world of myth and mysticism. Humankind was previously indoctrinated by mythical stories of times during which primitive peoples believed in the gods who go on a rampage in the storm, who shake the earth with their wrath, who strike down men in their anger, and who inflict their judgments of displeasure in times of famine and flood — the gods of primitive religion. They are not the gods who rule the universe.

The ideas of Jesus need to be restated; messages of love and brotherhood, as attested to in the New Testament, must be reiterated to remind us all of Christ’s goodness. It is unfortunate that superstition, myth-making, and mysticism were then and still are today our most cherished reactions to anything out of the ordinary, weird, or paranormal. Man has thrived on this approach, having always been a myth-maker, relying on and prepared to believe the messenger, rather than to deal with reality and truth. In short, we are lazy; we prefer to take our information second-hand, providing that it makes us feel comfortable and removes our fears.

A great power, a mighty influence was brought to bear, to free the thinking and living of the Western peoples from the iron-clad grasp of ecclesiastical totalitarianism and its ungodly domination over man. The rising tide of secularism broke this grasp of church control. Now it has established a new and godless type of mastery over the hearts and minds of modern humankind.

The tyrannical and dictatorial political state is the direct offspring of scientific materialism and philosophical secularism. No sooner is man freed by secularism from the domination of the institutionalized church than it delivers man into slavish bondage to the totalitarian and socialist state. Secularism delivers man from ecclesiastic slavery only to lure him into the tyranny and oppression of political and economic slavery. Slavery is slavery.

Materialists deny God; secularists ignore God. As our planet transited through the latter part of the last century, secularism took on a more militant stance as evinced by so-called political correctness and other manifestations of the secular humanists. Twenty-first-century secularism insists that man does not need God. Yet, in fact, nothing can take the place of God in our society. While we should never surrender the beneficent gains of the secular revolt against totalitarian religion, secularism will never bring peace to our planet. The great mistake of secularists is that they went beyond freedom from the bondage of religious totalitarianism to institute a revolt against God himself — sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly.

There is no denying we owe to the secular revolt the amazing technological advancements of American industrialism and the unprecedented material progress of Western civilization. We all enjoy many liberties and satisfactions resulting from the secular revolt. Because it went too far and resulted in losing sight of God and true religion, however, there also appeared the unsolicited harvest of two world wars and countless regional conflicts resulting in international discord. We must realize that this godless philosophy of human society only leads to more animosity, unhappiness, unrest, social dysfunction, wars, and worldwide disaster.

That the secularists antagonized true religion in order to get their way was not essential. It is not necessary to abandon our faith in God to enjoy the benefits and blessings of the modern secular revolt. The promotion of science and education would have been just as easily achieved by the secularists had they not confronted true religion. Without wisdom, however, they had difficulty recognizing true religion and its fruits — tolerance, social service, true democratic government, and civil liberties.

Without God and without religion, scientific secularism is unable to coordinate its forces, harmonize its divergent and competitive interests, races, and nationalism. Twentieth-century secular humanist society has utterly failed, exposing its inhabitants as a bankrupt society without virtue, lacking principles, ethics, morals, and values — all of the goodness extolled by Jesus of Nazareth. Secular humanism is disintegrating. The only cohesive force resisting the final disintegration is nationalism. And nationalism is the primary barrier to world peace.

The inherent weakness of secular humanism is that it discards virtues and religion, replacing them with politics and power. Secular socialism and political optimism are simply cruel illusions. How can a society be established after the life and teachings of Jesus when it inaugurates the brotherhood of man but denies the fatherhood of God? For modern society to believe it can march ignorantly toward a continuation of the insanity we now accept as commonplace is not only inconsistent with recorded history, it dispels and repudiates the vast storehouse of knowledge acquired during our long and laborious climb from primitive savagery to the modern age. Without God, no amount of science and material wealth will lead to worldwide peace.

The complete secularization of science, education, industry, and society in the West and East will lead to ultimate disaster. During this twentieth century we murdered more human beings than during the whole nineteen centuries of the Christian dispensation leading up to this age. This is only a glimpse of the terrible harvest yet to come if materialism and secularism continue unabated through the twenty-first century.

Christianity has done a great service to our world. But what we need most now are the teachings of Jesus. It’s futile to speak of a revival of primitive Christianity, with the spiritual menace of a galaxy of “saints and martyrs” who were assumed to have special privileges and influences at the divine courts, and therefore able to intercede on behalf of man before the Gods.

The world needs to see Jesus living again on earth in the experience of spirit-born mortals who effectively reveal the Master to all men — and never once ask for or receive material compensation for doing so. In Jesus, the universe produced a mortal man in whom the spirit of love triumphed over the material handicaps of time and overcame the fact of physical origin. The beauty and sublimity, the humanity and divinity, the simplicity and uniqueness of Jesus’ life on earth — all these present such a striking and appealing picture of man-saving and God-revealing that the theologians and philosophers should be effectively restrained from forming creeds or creating theological systems of spiritual bondage out of them — because Jesus was nothing less than the transcendental bestowal of God in the form of man.

Next to the declaration that his Father is a living and loving spirit, “The kingdom of God is within you” was the greatest pronouncement Jesus ever made. Bear in mind that God needs man and man needs God. This is a mutually necessary relationship for the full and final attainment of eternal personality experience and the divine destiny that awaits each of us after death.

The acquisition of wisdom is the as yet undiscovered goal of all who live in this and future ages. For without obtaining wisdom and augmenting it with knowledge, we will hardly survive this new century.

Chapter 1

Transition

Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.

— Edward Gibbon

At midnight on December 31, 1899, London’s Big Ben quietly recorded the earth’s transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. There were no excited crowds on hand to witness this event. There were no parades or fireworks. It may be difficult for us, who witnessed the dawn of the twenty-first century, to comprehend the lack of media coverage and fanfare on this event.

This passive transition is not so unusual given the lack of technology and communication during that time period. Apart from the telegraph system, crude newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and mail by sea, mortals had to content themselves with one-on-one communication.

Life at the turn of the century was uncomplicated and blissful compared to the chaos of modern society. The city streets were astir with pedestrians and the horse and buggy. Commerce was conducted in a most primitive way. There were no computers, fax machines, or cellular phones; there was no Internet, instant power, running water, or jet travel. There were just people working, thinking, and living. And as the century clicked over rather noiselessly, who would have imagined the enormous changes and shifts in society we see in the modern technology-charged landscape of the twenty-first century?

There are two questions we must now ask ourselves: Have we benefited from the increase in technology? And if so, why? Let us survey the landscape of philosophy and politics to discover why the harvests of the twentieth century have been so fruitful, yet so unfulfilling.

A serious survey of the last century must first look at the characters who influenced thought in the nineteenth century. This is where we run headlong into Karl Marx (1818-1883), probably the most potent intellectual driving force to impact the twentieth century. Marx is the progenitor of the majority of all that is wrong with our present civilization. We will examine the profound influence this single human being has had over our lives all through the twentieth century and beyond. We will also seek to discover what powerful influence drove Marx to formulate his convoluted philosophy and godless doctrine of humanism. And we will try to understand his mindset and, more importantly, how it influenced society at the time and continues to do so every day in so many ways.

Of course, most so-called academic Marxists will scoff at any attempts to summarize Marx. They will insist comrade Karl is completely beyond the range of simple minds. However, we will use the wisdom derived from the last century’s experience of living under the twisted and perverted philosophies that evolved from his tract, The Communist Manifesto.

Before we begin, it is necessary to understand the following two terms:

· secular revolt — secular (adjective): worldly, as opposed to sacred, not connected with religion or the church; revolt (noun): uprising against authority; (verb): rise in rebellion, cause to feel disgust.

· secularists (noun): a person or persons who profess to be worldly and not sacred, nonreligious, non-church-going.

What these definitions, taken from several well-known English dictionaries, mean to our discussion is that secular revolt is a revolution against God, as well as against religion and the church. Secularists, then, are the exponents of the secular revolt. Is that not what modern communism and its sinister sidekick, socialism, espouse?

Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels

Marx was born in 1818, a Jewish German who was educated at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena. In 1842, shortly after contributing his first article to a Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, Marx became editor of that paper. He continued to write, criticizing contemporary political and social conditions, which enmeshed him in controversy with authorities. In 1843, he resigned from his position and moved to Paris. It was there that he adopted communist beliefs. He struggled to develop a philosophy of social and political expediency, which was designed to act as a bulwark and rallying point for the masses against the oncoming Industrial Revolution.

In 1844, Freidrich Engels (1829-1895) came to visit Marx in Paris where they discovered both had separately arrived at analogous views on the nature of revolutionary problems. The two began a partnership to explicate the beliefs of communism and to organize an international working-class movement dedicated to those beliefs. Their many-sided collaboration had two principal aspects: systematic exposition of the principles of communism and the organization of the Communist movement. Although the two men began with the field of philosophy, they moved in other directions. Marx dealt primarily with political thought, political economy, and economic history; Engels’s focus was on physical sciences, mathematics, anthropology, military science, and languages.

Marx’s influence during his life was not great, but increased after his death as the labor movement grew. His ideas and theories came to be known as Marxism, or scientific socialism, which constitutes one of the principal currents of contemporary political thought. His analysis of capitalist economy and his theories of historical materialism, the class struggle, and surplus value have become the basis of modern socialist doctrine. Of decisive importance with respect to revolutionary action are his theories on the nature of the capitalist state, the road to power, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx and Engels tried to analyze contemporary society, which they described as capitalistic. They pointed out the discrepancies between ideals and reality in modern society: rights granted to all had not done away with injustices; constitutional self-government had not abolished mismanagement and corruption; science had provided mastery over nature but not over the fluctuations of the business cycle; and the efficiency of modern production methods had produced slums in the midst of abundance.

They described all human history as the attempt of people to develop and apply their creative potential for the purpose of controlling the forces of nature so as to improve the human condition. In this ongoing effort to develop its productive forces, humanity has been remarkably successful. History has been the march of progress. Yet in developing productivity, various social institutions have been created that have introduced exploitation, domination, and other evils; the price humanity pays for progress is an unjust society.

It was Marx’s argument that all social systems of the past had been a way for the few rich and powerful to live by the work and misery of the many powerless. Consequently, each system was fraught with conflict. Moreover, each method of exploitation had flaws that sooner or later destroyed it, either by slow disintegration or by revolution. Engels and Marx believed that the capitalist system was flawed, too, and therefore bound to destroy itself. They tried to show that the more productive the system became, the more difficult it would be to make it function. The more goods it accumulated, the less use it would have for these goods. The more people it trained, the less it could utilize their talents. In short, capitalism would eventually choke on its own wealth.

The collapse of the capitalist economy, it was thought, would culminate in a political revolution in which the poor masses would rebel against their oppressors. This proletarian revolution would do away with private ownership of the means of production. Run by and for the people (after a brief period of proletarian dictatorship), the economy would produce not what was profitable, but what the people needed. Abundance would reign. Inequalities and coercive government would disappear. All this, Marx and Engels expected, would happen in the most highly industrialized nations of Western Europe, the only part of the world where conditions were ripe for these developments.

Communists in all parts of the world proclaim that all their actions were derived from the teachings of Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924), who in turn built on the doctrines of Marx and Engels. Most socialists revised these doctrines after Marx’s death. In the twentieth century, Lenin revived, developed, and applied these doctrines. They became the core of the theory and practice of Bolshevism and the Third International. Marx’s ideas, as interpreted by Lenin, continued to have influence throughout most of the twentieth century. In much of the world, including Africa and South America, emerging nations were formed by leaders who claimed to represent the proletariat.

Communists insist that communism was born in the mind of Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century. They further believe it received its first explicit exposition in 1848 when Marx, with the help of Engels, published what has come to be the most infamous pamphlet in the history of the world, The Communist Manifesto. Communism, a concept or system of society in which major resources and means of production are owned by the community rather than the individuals in the community, theorizes that such societies provide for equal sharing of all work according to ability and all benefits according to need. Some conceptions of communist societies assume that coercive government ultimately would be unnecessary and such a society would be without rulers. Until the ultimate stages are reached, however, communism entails the abolition of private property by a revolutionary movement. Consequently, responsibility for meeting public needs is vested in the state.

Many theologians who studied Marx’s writings believe him to be the anti-Christ. Marx’s philosophy as presented in The Communist Manifesto has done its job of causing the blood-thirsty destruction of hundreds of millions of innocent men, women, and children in ensuing revolutions. It has also inaugurated a social mindset described either as socialism or social democracy. Regardless of how we look at these social sophistries, we see the evidence of their origins having been derived by corrupt minds of proponents of The Communist Manifesto. Is Marx the anti-Christ? The answer to this question is irrelevant, as Marx’s mission has been completed.

History of The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto has become known as the first systematic statement of modern socialist doctrine. Written by Marx and in part based on a draft prepared by Engels, this work was derived from the melancholy ramblings of Das Kapital, which was a detailed analysis of the laws governing the economics of capitalism as well as an immense historical and philosophical treatise. Das Kapital, considered to be Marx’s greatest work, was a systematic and historical analysis of capitalist economics. In it, he developed the theory that the capitalist class exploits the working class by appropriating the "surplus value" produced by the working class. In Das Kapital, the theory of historical materialism was fundamentally developed, so it could impinge on the twentieth century.

The Communist Manifesto was the introduction to Marx’s and Engels’s program for social change. It has influenced and reshaped the course of history, not only erupting in such cataclysmic events as the Russian Revolution, but also lurking beneath the subversive antagonism toward democracy and the hostility of many developing nations. It slinks by, unobserved by many, in the sophistry of evolved socialism. It eloquently camouflages itself in so-called social democracy — our latest and rapidly failing populist social experiment.

The Communist Manifesto was written as an inflammatory outcry against capitalist exploitation of the working classes, in preparation for the emerging and oncoming Industrial Revolution and the industrialization of the twentieth century. The Manifesto calls upon workers of the world to unite and revolt against their oppressors: the capitalist system. It calls for the complete abolition of private property and free enterprise through a creeping and tyrannical taxation regime that, when imposed, renders all citizens helpless and in economic slavery and bondage to the ever-powerful totalitarian state.

It further calls for all workers to form into worker communities, or unions, by which a slow and methodical destruction of capitalism and free enterprise would take place, resulting in a utopian civilization where everyone would have an equal share.

In 1848, The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a working man’s association. A congress of the Communist League was held in London in November 1847. Marx and Engels were commissioned by this congress to prepare for publication a complete theoretical and practical party program. It was drawn up in German. Then, the manuscript was sent to the printer in London, just a few weeks before the French Revolution of February 1848. A French translation was delivered to the French revolutionaries in Paris shortly before the insurrection of June 1848. Danish and Polish editions had also been published by 1850. The Communist Manifesto had a profound effect in spawning the French Revolution, which was really the first great battle between the proletariat (working class) and bourgeoisie (wealthy elite).

When The Communist Manifesto pamphlet was distributed, all the powers of eighteenth-century Europe entered into "holy alliance" to hunt down and exorcise this haunting specter. The Pope and the Tsar, Metterniesh and Guizot, French radicals,

and German police spies — all of these individuals and groups rallied together to rid the world of the principles behind The Manifesto.

They were unsuccessful. The seed of The Communist Manifesto was planted into the academia of world society. This seed has now found the fertile soil so necessary for the slow cancerous growth of the weed, which was destined to engulf and choke the modern civilization of the twentieth century.

The Meaning of The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto is divided into four sections, preceded by an introduction that begins with the provocative words, "A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism."

In the first section, Marx outlines his theory of history and prophesies an end to exploitation. Identifying class struggle as the primary dynamic in history, he characterizes the modern world as the stage for a dramatic confrontation between the ruling bourgeoisie (the capitalists) and the downtrodden proletariat (the working class). Driven by capitalism to seek ever greater profit, the bourgeoisie constantly revolutionizes the means of economic production, the fulcrum of history. In so doing, it unwittingly sets in motion socio-historical forces it can no longer control, thus ironically calling into existence the class destined to end its rule — the proletariat. As the proletariat increases in number and political awareness, heightened class antagonism will, according to The Manifesto, generate a revolution and the inevitable defeat of the bourgeoisie.

In the second section, Marx identifies the Communists as the allies and theoretical vanguard of the proletariat. He emphasizes the necessity of abolishing private property, a fundamental change in material existence that will unmask bourgeois culture, the ideological expression of capitalism. After the revolution, economic production will be in the hands of the state, that is, the proletariat, organized as the ruling class. Because ownership will be in common, class distinctions will begin to disappear.

The third section, criticizing various alternative socialist visions of the time, is now largely of historical interest but displays the author’s formidable polemical skills. The final section, which compares Communist tactics to those of other opposition parties in Europe, ends with a clarion call for unity: "Workers of All Countries, Unite!"

The Manifesto is the most concise and intelligible statement of Marx’s materialist view of history. Hence, although it produced little immediate effect, it has since become the most widely read of his works and the single most influential document in the socialist canon.

With the benefit of history and the wisdom of experiencing this choking weed, we may now discover not only the progenitor of our twentieth-century woes, but also the powerful evil mind that nurtured this philosophy for more than a century and a half. It is obvious that Karl Marx and his associates — together with the innocent, gullible, unwise, weak and indolent minds of the twentieth century — became unknowingly and unwittingly the agents of rebellious and fallen sons of God. We will call their tract The Luciferian Manifesto.

As the close of the nineteenth century drew near, we can use history as our guide to see that the scaffolding of civilization, having survived the dark ages of Christian domination, was ripe for a new philosophy. The individual, science, and secularism were propelled into a wild melee of social revolution by the thirst for equality by four-fifths of the population — the working class. Driven by envy, greed, and hatred of the wealthy elite, the fertile soil of the early twentieth century was perfect for the emergence of communism, socialism, and social democracy. All that was needed were the radical minds of future mortals in the twentieth century to propel this empire of destruction from generation to generation.

As The Communist Manifesto began to infiltrate European and American society, there appeared many branches of like-minded thinking that espoused this twisted way of looking at humanity and the world. In England, the Fabian Society took root and attracted to it many of the latter nineteenth-century intelligentsia. Counted among these bright, yet weak and indolent minds were many of the members of the arts as well as the physical sciences and the social sciences. Why was this so? They were looking for a euphoric, utopian life — an easy way out.

Put simply, the Marxist manifesto provided and still does provide a declaration of liberty that absolves personal responsibility by transferring all authority to the state. The individual mortal, through an abdication of personal responsibility and self-will decision- making, is simply let off the hook from the rigors of daily living. The cruel deception of a utopian world is not only mythical but also fraught with danger. The progenitor of The Manifesto and the twentieth-century devastation through social and political retrogression —Karl Marx — was the unwitting recipient and mortal agent of this evil and short-sighted work.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the ground was well prepared. It had been worked and fertilized by almost half a century of indoctrination by the words of The Communist Manifesto. All that was needed were men and women of sufficiently weak minds to carry this manifesto into the wider world and spread its evil intent among all humankind, particularly the oppressed and weak of society.

As history records, there have been a plethora of such individuals to carry out the bidding of this plan for the final destruction of our civilization. We shall see during this odyssey of discovery, using recorded history as our guide, the many mutations of the original Communist Manifesto. Future generations succumbed to the sophistry of a declaration of liberty, fueled by envy, enmity, hatred, and greed — all negative and prevalent in the mindset of the workers and the underprivileged. We see how this promises ease of living and, thus, a powerful tool to destroy the "enemy" — capitalism and the free enterprise system.

Now that we have a firm grip on the social and political cauldron of Marxist thinking that globally permeated the latter part of the nineteenth century (particularly in academia), we may proceed with our investigation. We will see how hundreds of millions of unsuspecting and ignorant workers could so easily be seduced into the unions’ and workers’ communities, as the call to revolution was heeded and executed. We will also see that hundreds of millions of innocent lives would be sacrificed — as the slaughter that logically follows this twisted and evil manifesto was ordered by cosmically insane mortal minds. Throughout the twentieth century new fascists arose, spawned from the same hatred, envy, and greed provoked by The Communist Manifesto mindset. These negative human emotions are inherent in our evolutionary genes from primeval beginnings, and simply require provocation.

But in the closing of the nineteenth century, the global population was totally unprepared and ignorant of the evil seeds that had been cast onto fertile soil — awaiting the moment for their new life and the prolific and cancerous spread over humanity and the world.

Chapter 2

The War To End All Wars

Let peace be sought through war. — Oliver Cromwell

The world has been at war in one way or another since history was first recorded thousands of years ago. Savagery and barbarism have been inherent in the human species as it clawed its way up through the evolutionary ladder to the present.

Karl Marx and his followers had simply forgotten — or ignored — these facts. In their rush to discover a utopian world, they failed to recognize the evolutionary struggle of the human being from a primeval beast to the more acceptable, partly civilized creature of the early twentieth century.

By the word “evolutionary,” let it be understood that the facts supporting man’s animal origins cannot be disputed; but neither can the reality of man’s eventual uplift by beings of divine origin. Whereas the mindset of the wise and knowledgeable human being does not contradict the facts and the science of evolution, it is at odds with evolutionism. This twisted philosophy abandoned not only religious belief but also God himself. It fed the secular revolt that took root in the early part of this century, spawning not only materialism but also atheistic science. Combine this with an immature civilization, and panic and chaos result.

Howard Bloom in his revolutionary vision of the relationship between psychology and history, The Lucifer Principle, illustrates this point:

"The appeal of prophets often lies in the ability to paint a picture of an irresistible utopia and to convince us that this better world is almost within our grasp. Marion Keech, the woman who communicated with extraterrestrial Guardians, promised her followers that they would shed all earthly ills and bathe in blessings they could scarcely imagine — after they had been whisked away from our decaying galaxy. William Miller, the founder of Seventh Day Adventism, predicated that God would come to rearrange the world we know and that those who followed Miller would find themselves possessors of a sparkling new paradise. And Karl Marx explained that the elimination of capitalism would trigger the creation of a whole new human nature, one that would flood the greedy dens in which we live with brotherly good will."

(Howard Bloom. The Lucifer Principle. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995)

These foolish predictions by Keech, Miller, and Marx all failed to materialize, yet millions of followers blindly believe them to be true. The point all three missed is simply that the relationship between man as the creature and God as the Creator is a personal one, founded on the concept of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. If all three had been around at the time when Jesus of Nazareth spent his thirty-five years of life teaching simple parables in Galilee, they would have heard these truths. The great problem under which Christianity labors is that so few of God’s teachings appear in the much-edited and consequently compromised versions of the gospels of the New Testament.

Not only is the human experience shaped by an evolutionary process that came forth from savage beginnings, but people also are prone to accepting myth and superstition readily. In short, humans allow others to do their thinking for them. Yet, the simple cosmic truth taught by Jesus was, “The kingdom of God is within you.” What this means is that every mortal has the same potential to enter into God’s kingdom of brotherly association, the same connection to God’s love and truth, a concept that will be expanded upon in later chapters.

With competing economic forces lined up against one another in the early days of the twentieth century, there arose the first of the insane and bloodthirsty events we now dismiss as World War I. At the time, it was dubbed “the war to end all wars.” How ignorant that statement would prove to be.

World War I

Leading up to the declaration of war in 1914, there was much talk during the first decade about the potential for war. Politicians, writers, novelists, and philosophers discussed at length how the great powers of Europe were rubbing shoulders and borders in a frantic effort for economic and trade superiority. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia all dominated during this period. The French were still smarting and held much enmity dating back to May 11, 1871, a day in which German Chancellor Otto von Bismark (1815-1898) ended the Franco-German war, when he signed the agreement transferring all of Alsace and much of Lorraine to Germany. The Franco-German war of 1870 had been the last war between European powers in the nineteenth century, and this victory by Germany over France was etched in the minds of Frenchmen for many generations.

Through inept ambassadors and flawed political thinking, the terror of war was fast approaching. In a public meeting in the Munich Odeonplatz on August 1, 1914, an exuberant crowd greeted the news of the coming war. Among those photographed at that moment of public enthusiasm was the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, then earning a meager living selling his own watercolor paintings.

The clouds of war gathered in 1914 largely because both the Kaiser of Germany and the czar of Russia, who had been corresponding for twenty years and maintaining a cordial relationship, were not able to find common ground through diplomacy or negotiation regarding territory and trade. At 11:00 the night of the August 1, 1914, the Kaiser, unconvinced by these back-and-forth diplomatic messages, told Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891), the chief of staff of the German armies, that the hoped-for guarantees of neutrality of the British and French were illusory, and there would be a war in the West. The troops at Trier were ordered to march. Germany had declared war on Russia.

Five years of bloodthirsty slaughter of men, women, and children ensued. Carnage, despair, and desperation abounded. When the noise abated and the bullets, bayonets, shells, and gas ceased, the terror of war between man and machines was a spectacle that must have been the penultimate example of the savage and barbaric nature of the partly civilized human being.

The underlying causes of World War I are related to the spirit of unwavering nationalism that permeated Europe throughout the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the political and economic competition among the European nations, and the establishment and maintenance in Europe after 1871 of large armaments and of two hostile military alliances. All of these set the scene for the power brokers of the early twentieth century to manipulate the population of Europe, Britain and its territories, and the United States into fighting a war people believed was simply about economics. Like all wars, however, it was about political power and economic advantage.

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic era had spread throughout most of Europe the idea of political democracy, resulting in the idea that people of the same ethnic origin, language, and political ideals had the right to independent states. The principle of national self-determination, however, was largely ignored by the dynastic and reactionary forces that dominated in the settlement of European affairs at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Several peoples who desired national autonomy were made subject to local dynasts or to other nations. Notable examples were the German people, whom the Congress of Vienna left divided into numerous duchies, principalities, and kingdoms; Italy, also left divided into many parts, some of which were under foreign control; and the Flemish- and French-speaking Belgians of the Austrian Netherlands, whom the congress placed under Dutch rule. Revolutions and strong nationalistic movements during the nineteenth century succeeded in nullifying much of the reactionary and anti-nationalist work of the congress. Belgium won its independence from the Netherlands in 1830, the unification of Italy was accomplished in 1861, and that of Germany in 1871. At the close of the century, however, the problem of nationalism was still unresolved in other areas of Europe, resulting in tensions both within the regions involved and between various European nations.

Imperialism

The spirit of nationalism was also apparent in economic discord. The Industrial Revolution, which took place in Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, followed in France in the early nineteenth century, and then in Germany after 1870, caused an immense increase in the manufactures of each country and a consequent need for foreign markets. The principal field for the European policies of economic expansion was Africa, and on that continent colonial interests frequently clashed. Several times between 1898 and 1914, the economic rivalry in Africa between France and Great Britain, and between Germany on one side and France and Great Britain on the other, almost precipitated a European war.

Military Expansion

As a result of such tensions, between 1871 and 1914 the nations of Europe adopted domestic measures and foreign policies that in turn steadily increased the danger of war. Convinced their interests were threatened, they maintained large standing armies, which they constantly replenished and augmented by peacetime conscription. At the same time, they increased the size of their navies. The naval expansion was intensely competitive. Great Britain, influenced by the expansion of the German navy begun in 1900 and by the events of the Russo-Japanese War, developed its fleet under the direction of Admiral Sir John Fisher. The war between Russia and Japan had proved the efficacy of long-range naval guns, and the British accordingly developed the widely copied dreadnought battleship, notable for its heavy armament. Developments in other areas of military technology and organization led to the dominance of general staffs with precisely formulated plans for mobilization and attack, often in situations that could not be reversed once begun.

Statesmen everywhere realized the tremendous and ever-growing expenditures for armament would in time lead either to national bankruptcy or to war, and they made several efforts for worldwide disarmament, notably at the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. International rivalry was, however, too far advanced to permit any progress toward disarmament at these conferences.

The European nations not only armed themselves for purposes of “self-defense,” but also sought alliances with other powers so that they would not find themselves standing alone if war did break out. The result was a phenomenon that, in itself, greatly increased the chances for generalized war: the grouping of the great European powers into two hostile military alliances — the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy; and the Triple Entente of Great Britain, France, and Russia. Shifts within these alliances added to the building sense of crisis.

The United States Enters the War

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) of the United States, which was at that time a neutral nation, attempted to bring about negotiations between the belligerent groups of powers that would in his own words bring “peace without victory.” As a result of his efforts, and particularly of the conferences held in Europe during the year by Wilson’s confidential adviser, Colonel Edward M. House (1858-1938), with leading European statesmen, some progress was at first apparently made toward bringing an end to the war. In December, the German government informed the United States that the Central Powers were prepared to undertake peace negotiations. When the United States informed the Allies, Great Britain rejected the German advances for two reasons: Germany had not laid down any specific terms for peace; and the military situation at the time (Romania had just been conquered by the Central Powers) was so favorable to the Central Powers that no acceptable terms could reasonably be expected from them. Wilson continued his mediatory efforts, calling on the belligerents to specify the terms on which they would make peace. He finally succeeded in eliciting concrete terms from each group, but they proved irreconcilable.

Wilson still attempted to find some basis of agreement between the two hostile groups until a change in German war policy in January 1917 completely altered his point of view toward the war. In that month, Germany announced that beginning on February 1, it would resort to unrestricted submarine warfare against the shipping of Great Britain and all shipping to Great Britain. German military and civil experts had calculated that such warfare would bring about the defeat of Great Britain in six months. Because the United States had already expressed its strong opposition to unrestricted submarine warfare, which, it claimed, violated its rights as a neutral, and had even threatened to break relations with Germany over the issue, Wilson dropped his peacemaking efforts. On February 3, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany and at Wilson’s request a number of Latin American nations, including Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, also did so. On April 6, the United States declared war on Germany.

Russian Losses

On the eastern front in 1916, the Russians staged an offensive. Their attack, designed to force the Germans to move troops from Verdun to the Lake Narocz region, was a complete failure. Not only did it fail to divert the Germans in any degree from their attack on Verdun, but also the Russians lost more than a hundred thousand men. In June, the Russians carried out a more successful offensive. In response to an Italian request for action to relieve the pressure of an Austrian offensive, the Russians moved against the Austrians on a front extending from Pinsk south to Czernowitz. By September, when strong German reinforcements from the western front stopped the Russian advance, the Russians had driven some forty miles into the Austro-German position along the entire front and had taken about five hundred thousand prisoners. They did not succeed, however, in capturing either of their objectives — the cities of Kovel and Lemberg. Losses of a million men left the army demoralized and discouraged. The Russian drive had nonetheless given sufficient evidence of strength to play a large part in inducing Romania to enter the war on the side of the Allies on August 27, 1916. By the middle of January 1917, however, Romania had been completely conquered.

On the eastern front, the dominating influence on the fighting during 1917 was the outbreak in March of the Russian popular uprising against the imperial government, which resulted in the establishment of a provisional government and the abdication, in March, of Czar Nicholas II (1868-1918). The provisional government continued the prosecution of the war, and in July the Russians staged a moderately successful two-week drive on the Galician front, but then lost much of the territory they had gained. In September, the Germans took Riga and in October occupied the greater part of Latvia and a number of Russian-held islands in the Baltic Sea. The Bolshevik party seized power by force on November 7. A cardinal point of Bolshevik policy was the withdrawal of Russia from the war, and on November 20 the government that had just come into power offered the German government an armistice. On December 15, an armistice was signed between the Russian and Austro-German negotiators and fighting ceased on the eastern front.

By the end of World War I, the seeds of socialism and fascism were taking root. In addition to this, the Christian church had entered into an unholy alliance with the state, which would provide the spiritual void into which hundreds of millions of twentieth-century souls were sucked. This destructive spiritual vacuum is at the very root of the secular revolt and the resulting materialism and evil of atheistic science. The latter generations of twentieth-century humankind were destined to experience the full effect of these sophistries, thanks in no small way to that nineteenth-century genius of perverted philosophy, Karl Marx.

Laying blame, however, is not the motive here. The blame game solves nothing; it merely creates a confrontational atmosphere whereby the populists and the reductionists hold sway over rational debate. Rather, the intention is to focus the reader on historical facts. Our history is the map upon which we may reliably navigate. If we truly know where past generations have been, we can learn from their mistakes. Only then are we as human beings able to navigate a righteous path for our future and that of succeeding generations.

The Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, between defeated Germany and the principal Allied and associated powers. The representatives of twenty-seven victorious powers appended their signatories to the two-hundred-page document. On September 1, 1919, the last American combat division left France, sailing from Brest. In the previous months, three hundred thousand American soldiers had crossed from east to west each month, heading back to the United States. Each returning soldier received his discharge papers, a uniform, a pair of shoes, a coat, and a sixty-dollar bonus. More than three and a half million soldiers went through this process. A small group of men remained in France to work in the military cemeteries, supervising the gathering of bodies, their identification, burials, and memorials. An American occupation force of sixteen thousand men was also sent to Germany as part of the allied presence on the Rhine; they were based at Coblenz.

In Britain, those conscientious objectors who had been in prison were also being released but only slowly. In March 1919, there were still twelve hundred in prison and thirty-four hundred performing labor service in special camps. As a collective punishment for their un-warlike views, they were deprived of the vote for five years after the war, both in parliamentary and local government elections. In short, their wisdom in not wishing to participate in the terror of war was punished. This is a prime example of worldwide knowledge without wisdom. This was only a glimpse of the idiocy and legal and political ineptitude we’ve learned to take for granted in the latter part of the twentieth century.

On November 19, 1919, the U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles. This single act sent a shudder through the Principal Allied and Associated Powers that would virtually ring a death knell not only to this treaty but also to the concept and legitimacy of the League of Nations. The Treaty of Versailles came into force on January 10, 1920, a mere seven weeks after the U.S. Senate had rejected it out of hand. As one of the treaty’s British participants would later write, “The whole Treaty had been deliberated and ingeniously framed by Mr. Wilson himself to render American cooperation essential.”

Ten years later, Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) wrote rhetorically to the Americans, his indignation still at fever pitch:

Your intervention in the war, which you came out of lightly since it cost you but 56,000 human lives, instead of our 1,364,000 killed, had appeared to you, nevertheless, as an excessive display of solidarity. And either by organizing a League of Nations which was to furnish the solution to all the problems of International security by magic, or by simply withdrawing from the European schemes, you found yourselves freed from all difficulties by means of a “separate peace.” It was not enthusiasm that flung you into our firing lines: it was the alarming persistence of German aggressions.

This admonition by the Frenchman was all too true. America had entered the war based on its fear of German aggression and the possible loss of financial power through commerce and trade. The war having been won, the U.S. Senate had no further use for such devices — perhaps the U.S. senators had a modicum of wisdom in this decision.

This planet will not enjoy lasting peace until the so-called sovereign nations intelligently and fully surrender their sovereign powers into the hands of the brotherhood of men — mankind government. Internationalism — Leagues of Nations or United Nations — can never bring permanent peace to mankind. Worldwide confederations of nations will effectively prevent minor wars and acceptably control the smaller nations, but they will not prevent world wars nor control the three, four, or five most powerful governments. In the face of real conflicts, one of these world powers will withdraw from the League and declare war. You cannot prevent nations going to war as long as they remain infected with the delusional virus of national sovereignty. Internationalism is a step in the right direction. An international police force will prevent many minor wars, but it will not be effective in preventing major wars, conflicts between the great military governments of earth.

During the course of this war, four empires had been lost, the most significant being that of Russia. In 1917, through the auspices of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924), the Marxist theorist, party organizer and first leader of Soviet state, Russia fell to the Bolshevics. Lenin was the principal figure in the development of Marxism during the twentieth century. He contributed to it a distinctive revolutionary politics that is of continuing and terrorizing importance. He is celebrated in particular for his account of the proper organization of a revolutionary party, its relationship to the class system, its role in political mobilization, and for his characterization of a new and final epoch of capitalist development that had created all the sufficient conditions for global socialist transformation.

Lenin and his successors in all Communist regimes reigned over their citizens using terror and tyranny to uphold the totalitarian state. In the West, the seeds of Marxism were rapidly bearing fruit as one after another over the ensuing decades, so-called democracies fell prey to the insidious mindset of Marxism. As leader of the Communist International, Lenin was instrumental in enforcing acceptance of Bolshevik organizational precepts and the Russian revolutionary progression upon member parties, precipitating a breach with gradualist and constitutional social democracy. During his lifetime, he engaged in and provoked an almost constant stream of polemic and disputation, and almost every aspect of his thought and activity continues to be the subject of scholarly controversy.

With the outbreak of the World War I, Lenin began to formulate a new theory of contemporary capitalism, which he completed in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). In it, he denounced World War I as a fight among the imperialist powers for control of the markets, raw materials, and cheap labor of the underdeveloped world. Since neither the Allies nor the Central Powers offered any benefits to the working class, he urged all socialists to withhold their support from the war effort. Following his lead, Russian Bolsheviks initially refused to support their government in its war efforts.

He also contended that the innovative and progressive role of capitalism in refining the productive forces was a product of its competitive market structure that consequently ceased when capitalism became monopolistic at around the turn of the century. It then became retrogressive and parasitic upon colonial exploitation, thereby universalizing its own contradictions and preparing the ground for the fusion of the European Socialist Revolution with the colonial struggle for national liberation. Capitalism, Lenin concluded, had outlived its historical mission.

Simultaneously, however, monopoly capitalism itself had, by concentrating capital in the hands of the banks and by rationalizing the processes of production and distribution in the trusts and cartels, created the mechanisms whereby a rational allocation of scarce resources and equitable distribution of the product could be achieved under popular control. Capitalism, in its imperialist stage, had created the objective conditions for international socialist transformation.

So the stage is set through Lenin, the student of the Marxist Communist Manifesto, for the oncoming secular revolt and resulting materialism that, together with atheistic science, would plunge our planet into a suicidal and frightening place.

A “Just” War?

As recorded in its long and turbulent history, all wars have been “just” wars. World War I and every other war and regional antagonism since have been similarly justified. Through the centuries, wars have been absolved by politicians, supported by theologians, and participated in by we the people, who innocently believe the “just war doctrine” and spill our blood on the battlefields.

In the broadest sense, Western culture defines a “just” war as the justified use of force for political purposes. The entire tradition of thought and practice in this civilization is aimed at setting limits and determining when the use of force is justified. The components and expressions of just war include religious and philosophical moral thought, legal theory, domestic and international customary and positive law, and military theory. Theological ethicists use the term primarily to refer to that component of the broader tradition derived from Christian theological sources, and Roman Catholic authors typically narrow the meaning still more when they speak of the “just war doctrine” of Catholic moral theology. Christianity has embraced for centuries the concept of a just war, providing the war furthers Christianity. This is evident from the Vatican back through to the crusades. Many idealists during this and preceding centuries have asked the same question: Why is war necessary? The only answer that makes any sense, even to the partly civilized mind of the twentieth century, is that legal theory and political expediency make it so. In other words, we simply abdicate all responsibility to the state represented by the government of the day, then blindly follow the doctrine that is most expedient to the political leadership in the prosecution of their assumption of our wishes. Have you or anyone you know ever prayed or petitioned for war? Have you or any one you know ever been asked to cast a popular vote in favor of war?

The answer to these questions speaks volumes.

More than nine million soldiers, sailors, and airmen lost their lives in the World War I. An additional five million civilians also perished between 1914 and 1919. Seven hundred fifty thousand German civilians died during the Allied naval blockade. Men such as Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Winston Churchill (1874-1965), Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), Erwin Rommel (1891-1944), Georgy Zhukov (18961974), Bernard Law Montgomery (1887-1976), and Maurice Gustave Gamelin (1872-1958) all served as soldiers in the trenches during this war. It is interesting that these future protagonists would serve their apprenticeships in this war and go on to play such a major part in the next. Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) volunteered and served with the French as a Vietnamese orderly in World War I. Harold MacMillan (1894-1986), who later became prime minister of Britain, also served and was wounded on the western front.

The Federal Reserve System

There is one more piece to the puzzle that needs to be recognized to see clearly the emerging kaleidoscope of the twentieth century. A piece of American legislation was shepherded through the U.S. Congress by Woodrow Wilson and Carter Glass (1858-1946) of Virginia late one night just before Christmas 1913. It would become the infamous Federal Reserve System. True democracy slipped from the grasp of American citizens on that fateful night. Commonly known as “the Fed,” this system was foisted on the American people without their consent or blessing. It would prove to be the nemesis of the American way of life from that day forward.

In a later chapter, we will take a more detailed look at how this vague and shadowy yet controlling system will impact not only the United States but the rest of the world as well. It not only becomes grossly misunderstood but also has a great effect on the emerging global economy. Several aborted attempts to introduce a central banking system had been experienced in this great nation’s history. With several assassinations and coups having been perpetrated up to 1913, the United States had warded off all attempts from a hijacking of the fiscal policy mechanism. Materialism fueled by greed and power did finally triumph over the high ideals that the founding fathers of almost two centuries earlier — inspired by divine and insightful guidance and imbued with wisdom and a vision of the future of this great nation — brought into temporal existence through the Constitution and the accompanying Bill of Rights.

As we shall see, the unfolding pattern of each chapter of the twentieth century is a repeat, albeit in different terms, of previous mistakes and unwise paths. Only time will tell if the present and future generations have learned anything from the blood-soaked pages of history. Only when a certain level of wisdom has been attained can the pattern be broken and plans made for a future that not only encompasses all people, but also provides a rich and fulfilling life based on virtues, families, and a spiritual connection to the First Source and Center — God.

Chapter 3

Post World War I

Evils which are patiently endured and which make them seem inevitable become intolerable once the idea of escape from them is suggested. — Alexis de Tocqueville

After the horrors of World War I, the 1920s seemed to augur a long era of international stability, liberal constitutionalism, and economic prosperity — but serious diplomatic, political, and economic problems remained unsolved. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought these problems to the fore and helped create an environment in which militaristic authoritarianism flourished.

The 1920s

Between 1920 and 1929, an uneasy peace developed as strong nations rubbed shoulders and borders vied for economic superiority through commerce and trade. National sovereignty was in full cry as each nation flexed its economic muscle to demonstrate strength and prosperity. In the United States, it was the “Gatsby” era during which people danced the Charleston and consumed the hard liquor of prohibition.

The parties for the elite of society attained levels of luxury and degeneracy, fueling the fires of envy and enmity among the struggling working classes. During this period, small fortunes were won and lost trading shares and other instruments of financial manipulation on stock markets worldwide. It was during this era of absolute opulence that materialism really took hold and spread its tentacles throughout Western society. This party atmosphere, enjoyed by revelers of the rich and famous, continued unabated until 1929.

With a greatly overheated New York stock market, Wall Street and other powerful bankers decided all at once the party should end. What ensued would become known as the Great Depression. At this defining moment, the world would see the new players of the next era emerge. They would be Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), and Joseph Stalin (1879-1915) on one hand, and Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), and Hirohito (1901-1989) on the other.

The future allies made up a strange combination of bedfellows represented by Churchill and Roosevelt, from so-called Western democracies, and Stalin, from Soviet Russia, which by now was soaked in the blood-purging of dissidents from the revolution. Trade was the game then, as it had always been, and the great powers of Europe, Japan, and America were all keen to gain the superior position which would feed the materialistic bent of their consumer-hungry populations. Soviet Russia had a different agenda: The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx had been modified and fashioned to the modern Soviet mindset, which demanded that all nations and their people bow to the "superior" philosophy of communism.

History eloquently records that whenever a void appears in the social or religious structure of evolving civilization, there always appears a dictator or dictators fueled by power and greed who will readily fill these voids. And so we view the circumstances prevalent between World War I and World War II as being ideal for the clouds of destruction and carnage to once again gather.

International agreements reached during the 1920s appeared to portend future peace. The Washington Conference in 1921 and 1922 fixed the ratio of capital ships among the powers and declared open and equal access to China. The Locarno Pact (1925) and the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) presented the prospect of arbitration as an alternative to force in Europe. Meanwhile, the League of Nations, which had been established in 1919, provided procedures designed to isolate any would-be aggressor and promote disarmament. The United States did not join the League.

Despite the portents for peace, Italy, Germany, and Japan remained dissatisfied nations in which dangerous tendencies toward bellicose nationalism threatened constitutional government and world order.

In Italy, which had obtained little for its efforts on the victorious side in World War I, internal disorder combined with diplomatic frustration to overturn in 1922 the fragile, shallow-rooted parliamentary system in favor of the Fascist movement of Benito Mussolini. Harboring territorial ambitions, Mussolini established a corporate state founded on chauvinistic nationalism.

The harsh terms imposed on Germany at the end of World War I by the Versailles Treaty were deeply resented in that nation. The democratic Weimar Republic, as a product of German defeat, bore the onus of association with the treaty. Antidemocratic and violently nationalistic right-wing organizations and even private armies, such as the virulently anti-Semitic storm troopers of Adolf Hitler, flourished immediately after the war.

Like Italy, Japan had been on the winning side in World War I. Many Japanese were also dissatisfied with their country’s international status, believing that Japan should be the dominant power in East Asia. This view was particularly common among military officers participating in a revival of nationalism incorporating Shinto, emperor worship, and glorification of warrior virtues. Although Japan had a liberal, pro-Western government during the 1920s, the military remained influential. From about 1927, nationalistic military officers began appearing in cabinet posts and pressing for a more aggressive China policy.

Depression and Frustration

Optimism thrived during the prosperity of the 1920s, but it was a prosperity flawed by, among other things, over-extension of credit and inadequate worker purchasing power. When economic well-being gave way to depression in 1929, the shock discredited constitutional government in those nations lacking a strong liberal tradition and already bedeviled by frustrated nationalists. Leaders complained in Germany, Italy, and Japan that their nations did not have fair access to raw materials, markets, and capital investment areas, all of which were necessary for their economic health. They argued that their nations were the victims of economic warfare with its protective tariffs, managed currencies, and cutthroat competition, and that they had been left behind in the race for economic self-sufficiency and a favorable balance of trade. They made it plain that they would fight, if necessary, for a better economic status.

Because they felt that democracy had failed, the people of those countries looked with increasing favor on antidemocratic elements that glorified war as the means of national salvation. In Italy, Mussolini’s cries that Italians needed both colonies and glory struck a responsive chord. In Germany, Hitler’s National Socialists gained power in 1933. Meanwhile, Japanese militarists won a preponderant influence in the inner circle of their government.

The Great Depression

The depression of the 1930s shook capitalism to its foundations and shaped the public attitudes of people for generations. The shock was so great because it contradicted long-held beliefs in the unlimited possibilities of expansion. The depression made the Western world ripe for revolution as every political faction in society looked frantically for a cure. Finding a cure without determining the causes, however, was difficult. In fact, no economist has ever thoroughly explained why the disaster of 1929 to 1932 came about.

One of the most notable attempts to explain this disaster was made by John Kenneth Galbraith in his book The Great Crash, 1929, published in 1955. He pointed to five significant factors:

1. An extremely unequal distribution of incomes limited the consumer goods market. Most people were not making enough money to buy the goods they manufactured.

2. There was an enormous amount of fraud and corruption in big business and in the marketing of stocks and bonds. The prosperity of Wall Street consisted largely of paper that was not backed up by real wealth.

3. The banking structure, made up of too many banks, had acted foolishly in making loans. When bad times came, the loans could not be called in, and many people lost their savings as a result.

4. Foreign nations that had borrowed money from the United States could not repay their loans. This, coupled with high American trade barriers, damaged their economies because they could not send their exports to the United States at a profit.

5. The amount of information on the operation of the whole economy was much less adequate than it is today. People, even experts, were not as able to spot trends in industrial output, investment, consumer buying, and other factors that are now studied closely.

What Happened

On October 24, 1929, the complete collapse of the stock market began; about 13 million shares of stock were sold. Tuesday, October 29, known ever since as Black Tuesday, extended the damage; more than 16 million shares were sold. The value of most shares fell sharply, precipitating financial ruin and a state of panic.

There had been financial panics before, and there have been some since, but never did a collapse in the market have such a devastating and long-term effect. Like a snowball rolling downhill, it gathered momentum and swept away the whole economy before it. Businesses closed, putting millions out of work. Banks failed by the hundreds. Wages for those still fortunate enough to have work fell precipitously. The value of money decreased as the demand for goods declined.

Most of the agricultural segment of the economy had been in serious trouble for years. With the arrival of the depression, it was nearly eliminated altogether, and the drought that created the 1930s Great Plains Dust Bowl compounded the damage.

Government itself was sorely pressed for income at all levels as tax revenues fell, and government at that time was much more limited in its ability to respond to economic crises than it is today. The international structure of world trade collapsed, and each nation sought to protect its own industrial base by imposing high tariffs on imported goods. This only made matters worse.

By the fall of 1931, the international gold standard had collapsed, further damaging any hope for the recovery of trade. This started a series of currency devaluations in several countries, because these nations realized that a devalued currency posed at least a temporary advantage in the struggle to find markets for their goods.

The economic depression that beset the United States and other countries in the 1930s was unique in its magnitude and its consequences. At the depth of the depression, in 1933, one American worker in every four was out of a job. In other countries, unemployment ranged between 15 percent and 25 percent of the labor force. The great industrial slump continued throughout the 1930s, shaking the foundations of Western capitalism.

Economic Aspects

President Calvin Coolidge had said during the long prosperity of the 1920s that “the business of America is business.” Despite the seeming business prosperity of the 1920s, however, there were serious economic weak spots, a chief one being depression in the agricultural sector. Also depressed were such industries as coal mining, railroads, and textiles. Throughout the 1920s, U.S. banks had failed, an average of six hundred a year, as had thousands of other business firms. By 1928, the construction boom was over. The spectacular rise in prices on the stock market from 1924 to 1929 bore little relation to actual economic conditions. In fact, the boom in the stock market and in real estate, along with the expansion in credit (created, in part, by low-paid workers buying on credit) and high profits for a few industries, concealed basic problems. Thus, the U.S. stock-market crash that occurred in October 1929, with huge losses, was not the fundamental cause of the Great Depression — although the crash sparked and certainly marked the beginning of the most traumatic economic period of modern times.

By 1930, the slump was apparent, but few people expected it to persist; previous financial panics and depressions had reversed in a year or two. The usual forces of economic expansion had vanished, however. Technology had eliminated more industrial jobs than it had created; the supply of goods continued to exceed demand; the world market system was basically unsound. The high tariffs of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act (1930) intensified the downturn. As business failures increased, unemployment soared, and people with dwindling incomes nonetheless had to pay their creditors, it was apparent that the United States was in the grip of economic breakdown. Most European countries were hit even harder, because they had not yet fully recovered from the ravages of World War I.

The deepening depression essentially coincided with the term in office of President Herbert Hoover. The stark statistics scarcely convey the distress of the millions who lost jobs, savings, and homes. From 1930 to 1933, industrial stocks lost 80 percent of their value. In the four years from 1929 to 1932, approximately 11,000 U.S. banks failed (44 percent of the 1929 total), and about $2 billion in deposits evaporated. The gross national product (GNP), which for years had grown at an average annual rate of 3.5 percent, declined at a rate of over 10 percent annually, on average, from 1929 to 1932. Agricultural distress was intense: farm prices fell by 53 percent from 1929 to 1932.

President Hoover opposed government intervention to ease the mounting economic distress. His one major action, creation in 1932 of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend money to ailing corporations, was seen as inadequate. Thus, Hoover lost the 1932 election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Conquest of Ethiopia

Italy had unsuccessfully attempted to conquer Ethiopia in 1896. Mussolini, seeking easy foreign victories to galvanize his country, attempted to avenge that still-rankling defeat by sending forces into Ethiopia from Italian Eritrea on October 3, 1935. Another thrust came from Italian Somaliland. Throwing mechanized troops against untrained and poorly armed Ethiopians, the Italians completed the conquest in 1936. With Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, Ethiopia was organized as Italian East Africa. Although the League of Nations imposed an embargo against Italy, it failed to include a vital item, oil, thereby discrediting itself again.

Spanish Civil War

July 1936 began the Spanish Civil War, a conflict between Spain’s liberal-leftist republican coalition government and rightists led by General Francisco Franco. The war soon brought international repercussions. Hitler and Mussolini sent planes, troops, and supplies to Franco, while Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin gave military equipment to the republicans. The United States adhered to a policy of strict neutrality, and Britain and France, anxious to prevent a general war, forbade the shipment of war material to the republic. Thousands of anti-fascist volunteers from Britain and the United States went to Spain, however, to serve with the republicans and were organized with Soviet Comintern aid.

Cooperation between Germany and Italy in Spain helped cement the vague Rome-Berlin Axis, an understanding that they had concluded in 1936. Franco’s victory in 1939 strengthened Hitler’s and Mussolini’s position in the Mediterranean. In 1936, the Japanese concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany, and a year later Italy joined; this grouping prefigured the later alliance structure of the general war.

Renewal of Japanese Aggression

A Chinese-Japanese military clash on July 7, 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing (Peking) provided the pretext for an all-out Japanese campaign of conquest in China. By 1939, Japan controlled populous eastern China.

Reacting to events in China, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke in October 1937 of the need to “quarantine the aggressors.” A strong negative response to this call indicated the wide extent of isolationist sentiment in the United States. Not until 1940 did Japanese expansionism begin to draw the attention of the American public.

Anschluss with Austria

Proclaiming the unity of the German people, Hitler from 1934 sought Anschluss (union) between Germany and his native Austria. In February 1938, he forced Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, under threat of invasion, to admit Nazis into his cabinet. On March 12, 1938, Hitler invaded Austria and incorporated it into his Third Reich.

Czechoslovakia and Appeasement

Almost immediately afterward, the Nazi regime began agitating on behalf of the Sudeten Germans who lived in pockets of western Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, claiming that they were a persecuted minority. The Czech government made numerous concessions to the Sudeten Germans, but in September 1938, Hitler demanded the immediate cession of the Sudetenland to Germany. On September 29 and 30, Britain and France (Czechoslovakia’s ally) agreed at the Munich Conference to yield to Hitler, who promised to make no further territorial demands in Europe. Czechoslovakia was excluded from participation at Munich. Unlike Austria, Czechoslovakia was democratic, and its president, Eduard Benes, was prepared to resist Hitler, but the two western European democracies insisted on submission.

British prime minister Neville Chamberlain hailed the Munich agreement as bringing “peace in our time.” In March 1939, however, Hitler destroyed what remained of Czechoslovakia by occupying Bohemia-Moravia and making Slovakia a German protectorate. He also took Memel from Lithuania and began threatening the Polish Corridor, a narrow strip of land that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. In the meantime, Italy occupied and annexed Albania in April 1939.

End of Appeasement

The Western powers could no longer avoid acknowledging that Hitler’s promises were worthless and that his territorial ambitions were not restricted to German-speaking areas but might, indeed, be limitless. Desperately, Britain and France began to prepare military resistance to Nazi expansionism. In the spring of 1939, they both guaranteed Poland against German aggression. They also sought to begin negotiations with the USSR, whose earlier efforts to form an anti-Axis coalition they had rebuffed.

Stalin, however, had become convinced that Britain and France were conspiring to help throw the full weight of German strength against the USSR. Therefore, despite their bitterly antagonistic ideologies, he sought an accommodation with Hitler. On August 23, 1939, Germany and the USSR signed the ten-year Nazi-Soviet Pact of nonaggression. A secret protocol provided for the division of Poland and the Baltic states between the signatories.

For a delighted Hitler, the treaty meant that he would not have to fight a war on two fronts because Stalin was giving him the way to move against Poland. Britain and France would be without major allies as they belatedly prepared to defend that beleaguered country.

World War II commenced as a localized conflict in eastern Europe and expanded until it merged with a confrontation in the Far East to form a global war of immense proportions. The war began in Europe on September 1, 1939, when Germany attacked Poland, and ended on September 2, 1945, with the formal surrender of Japan aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Involving most of the world’s major powers as belligerents, it also included many smaller states on both sides and had a great impact on neutral nations. The victorious Allies included Great Britain and the Commonwealth, France, the United States, the USSR, and China. The losing side comprised Germany, Italy, and Japan, as well as smaller nations. The opponents clashed in two major areas: Europe, including the coast of North Africa and the North Atlantic; and Asia, including the Central and Southwest Pacific, China, Burma, and Japan. The belligerents fought over the central issue of Axis expansion, which was halted at the cost of many millions of military and civilian casualties.

The Democracies on the Eve of Aggression

The major democratic powers — the United States, Great Britain, and France — were not prepared to cope with the challenges to peace posed by the dissatisfied nations. They accepted the international order established by the Versailles Treaty but were unwilling to defend it. Many in the democracies were disillusioned by World War I. The idealistic goals of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson had not been achieved, and it seemed to some that the war had been promoted by war profiteers and deceptive propaganda. The Versailles Treaty was widely regarded as unfair to Germany. Furthermore, the enormous casualties of World War I had aroused pacifist sentiment. Finally, while the depression spurred dissatisfied nations toward expansionism, it turned the democracies inward as they became preoccupied with reviving their economies. Hoping to avert another war, the United States adopted neutrality laws, the British sought to appease the dictatorial regimes, and the French tried to secure themselves behind a network of alliances and the defensive fortress of the Maginot Line.

The Road to War

Territorial aggrandizement by Japan in China, by Fascist Italy in Ethiopia, and by Nazi Germany in central and eastern Europe brought the world to war. The League of Nations failed to take decisive action to curb armaments or stem aggression. The Western powers long pursued policies of neutrality and appeasement until it became clear that the

expansionist nations would not rest content with their gains.

Hitler Rearms Germany

German chancellor Adolf Hitler abandoned the efforts of his predecessors to ease the provisions of the Versailles Treaty through a policy of reconciliation with the World War I victors. Instead, he unilaterally tore up the treaty. Hitler took Germany out of the League in 1933 and began a massive program to build up the German army, navy, and air

force. In March 1935, he restored universal military service. The democracies did not react, and Britain even concluded a naval agreement with Germany in 1935 that permitted greater German naval strength than that allowed by the Versailles Treaty. In 1936, Hitler sent troops into the demilitarized Rhineland.

Hitler’s virulent racism gave rise to a cruel system of anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which deprived Jews of most civil rights, were supplemented by other measures designed to rid Germany of Jews. These measures were to culminate in a policy of deliberate extermination during World War II, taking the lives of approximately millions of European Jews. More immediately, however, a concerted state program of ending unemployment with public works projects and a restoration of business confidence produced remarkable economic recovery in Germany. Joseph Goebbels’ efficient propaganda ministry controlled the media to ensure that Hitler would be viewed as a genius and Nazi Germany as the best of all possible worlds. Given this combination of coercion, achievement, and thought control, it is perhaps not surprising there was little resistance, aside from limited opposition from some elements in the churches and the army.

The New Deal

In the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt was swept to power under the socially inspired plan aptly named the “New Deal.” His plan was for the U.S. government to spend its way out of the Great Depression and post the debt to the future.

The depression brought a deflation not only of incomes but of hope. In his first inaugural address in March 1933, President Roosevelt declared “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But although his New Deal grappled with economic problems throughout his first two terms, it had no consistent policy.

Roosevelt was a leader imbued with knowledge but totally lacking wisdom. He understood class occupies a central place in the analysis of capitalism by socialists. Capitalism is a society that forms itself into exploiting classes, and members of the working class are, in this view, both the particular victims of capitalism and the basis for opposition to it and for its final overthrow. There has been in socialism an assumption both that desired changes will come about as a result of the rise to power and influence of the working class and that the empowering of the working class is itself a desirable component of socialism.

At first, Roosevelt tried to stimulate the economy through the National Recovery Administration (NRA), charged with establishing minimum wages and codes of fair competition. It was based on the idea of spreading work and reducing unfair competitive practices by means of cooperation in industry, so as to stabilize production and prevent the price slashing that had begun after 1929. This approach was abandoned after the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional in Schecter Poultry Corporation v. United States (1935).

Roosevelt’s second administration gave more emphasis to public works and other government expenditures as a means of stimulating the economy, but it did not pursue this approach vigorously enough to achieve full economic recovery. At the end of the 1930s, unemployment was estimated at 17.2 percent. Other innovations of the Roosevelt administrations had long-lasting effects, both economically and politically. To aid people who could find no work, the New Deal extended federal relief on a vast scale. The Civilian Conservation Corps took young men off the streets and sent them out to plant forests and drain swamps. The government refinanced about one-fifth of farm mortgages through the Farm Credit Administration and about one-sixth of home mortgages through the Home Owners Loan Corporation. The Works Progress Administration employed an average of over two million people in occupations ranging from laborers to musicians and writers. The Public Works Administration spent about four billion on the construction of highways and public buildings in the years 1933 to 1939.

The depression years saw an explosion of union organizing. One cannot fully understand the rise in union membership between 1935 and 1937 without the perspective of the Depression of the 1930s and the New Deal policies put into place during President Roosevelt’s first administration. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, which had limited the power of the federal courts to issue injunctions to stop peaceful strikes, was followed in 1933 by the National Industrial Recovery Act, whose famous section 7(a) established workers’ “right to organize and bargain collectively through representation of their own choosing.”

Although the legislation was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935, the same language was embodied in the National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, of 1935. Besides the legal status it conferred on unions, the act granted workers the right to strike. It also established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to conduct elections among employees wishing to organize a union. Part of the New Deal legislation, it clearly established workers’ rights to form unions without interference from employers.

New industrial unions came into existence through the efforts of organizers led by John L. Lewis (1880-1969), Walter Reuther (1907-1970), Philip Murray (1886-1952), and others; in 1937 they won contracts in the steel and auto industries. Total union membership rose from about three million in 1932 to over ten million by 1941.

Political and Cultural Effects

The expanded role of the federal government came to be accepted by most Americans by the end of the 1930s. Even Republicans who had bitterly opposed the New Deal shifted their stance. Wendell Willkie (1892-1944), the Republican presidential nominee in 1940, declared he could not oppose reforms such as the regulation of the securities markets and the utility holding companies, the legal recognition of unions, or Social Security and unemployment allowances. What bothered him and other critics, however, was the extension of the federal bureaucracy.

The depression caused much questioning of inherited economic and political ideas. Senator Huey P. Long (1893-1935) of Louisiana found a national following for his Share the Wealth program. The socialist writer Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was nearly elected governor of California in 1934 with a similar program for redistributing the state’s wealth. Many writers and other intellectuals swung even further left, concluding that capitalism was on its way out; they were drawn to the Communist party by what they supposed were the accomplishments of the USSR.

In other countries, the depression had even more profound effects. As world trade fell off, countries turned to nationalist economic policies that only exacerbated their difficulties. In politics, the depression strengthened the extremes of right and left, helping Adolf Hitler to power in Germany and swelling left-wing movements in other European countries. The depression was thus a time of massive insecurity among peoples and governments, contributing to the tensions that produced World War II. Ironically, however, the massive military expenditures for that war provided the economic stimulus that finally ended the depression.

This socialization of America would have dire consequences for immediate generations; moreover, it would set in place a social framework that would hold sway over the politics and policies of future generations. These social policies would eventually bankrupt the American economy.

The ambivalence between workers’ power directly exercised — which could be seen as an expression of liberty — and power exercised through the state —which could threaten to be a form of paternalism — was evident in the proposals of nineteenth-century French socialist Louis Blanc (1811-1882). He advocated replacement of individual capitalist production by social work shops, which the state would initially fund and administer, but should develop into self-managing communal enterprises. In France also, Georges Sorel (1847-1922) argued for workers’ power through unions, a form of syndicalism aiming at a general strike which would overthrow capitalism and inaugurate a workers’ regime. In the United Kingdom, a non-insurrectionary version of workers’ power exercised from the point of production was elaborated in guild socialism. This sought to combine a rediscovered satisfaction in work with both decentralized producers’ power and an overall coordinating and regulating task for a reconstituted state. Various forms of workers’ control continued to attract socialists throughout the twentieth century.

Fascism

Fascism was an authoritarian political movement that developed in Italy and other European countries after 1919 as a reaction against the political and social changes brought about by World War I and the spread of socialism and communism. Its name was derived from the fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of authority consisting of a bundle of rods and an ax.

Italian fascism was founded in Milan on March 23, 1919, by Benito Mussolini, a former revolutionary socialist leader. His followers, mostly war veterans, were organized along paramilitary lines and wore black shirts as uniforms. The early Fascist program was a mixture of left- and right-wing ideas that emphasized intense nationalism, productivism, antisocialism, elitism, and the need for a strong leader.

Formed in response to a society reeling from economic hardship and searching for a leader to provide a more comfortable existence, fascism was a synthesis of organic Nationalism and anti-Marxist Socialism, a revolutionary movement based on a rejection of liberalism, democracy, and Marxism — these ideologies were regarded simply as different aspects of the same materialist evil. It was this revolt against materialism which, from the beginning of the century, allowed a convergence of anti-liberal and anti-elitist nationalism and a variety of socialism, which while rejecting Marxism, remained revolutionary. Its opposition to historical materialism made it the natural ally of radical nationalism.

Mussolini’s oratorical skills, the postwar economic crisis, a widespread lack of confidence in the traditional political system, and a growing fear of socialism all helped the Fascist party to grow to three hundred thousand registered members by 1921. In that year, it elected thirty-five members to parliament. Mussolini became prime minister in October 1922 following the “march on Rome” and three years of bloody violence. In 1926, he seized total power as dictator and ruled Italy until July 1943, when he was deposed. A puppet fascist regime with Mussolini at its head nominally controlled northern Italy under the Germans until Mussolini's execution by partisans in 1945. A neo-fascist party, the Italian Social Movement, was founded after World War II, but its influence was small.

The Philosophy of Fascism

Fascist ideology, largely the work of the neo-idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), emphasized the subordination of the individual to a “totalitarian” state that was to control all aspects of national life. Violence as a creative force was an important aspect of the fascist philosophy. A special feature of Italian fascism was the attempt to eliminate the class struggle from history through nationalism and the corporate state. Mussolini organized the economy and all “producers” — from peasants and factory workers to intellectuals and industrialists — into twenty-two corporations as a means of improving productivity and avoiding industrial disputes. Contrary to the regime’s propaganda claims, however, the totalitarian state functioned poorly. Mussolini had to compromise with big business, the monarchy, and the Roman Catholic church. The Italian economy experienced no appreciable growth. The corporate state was never fully implemented, and the expansionist, militaristic nature of fascism contributed to imperialist adventures in Ethiopia and the Balkans and ultimately to World War II.

The intellectual roots of fascism can be traced back to voluntaristic philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941) and to Social Darwinism, with its emphasis on the survival of the fittest. Its immediate roots, however, were in certain irrational, socialist, and nationalist tendencies of the turn of the century that combined in a protest against the liberal bourgeois ideas then holding sway in Western Europe. Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938), Georges Sorel, and Maurice Barres (1862-1923) were particularly influential.

European Fascism

Closely related to Italian fascism was German National Socialism, or Nazism, under Adolf Hitler. It won wide support among the unemployed, the impoverished middle class, and industrialists who feared socialism and communism. In Spain, the Falange Española (Spanish Phalanx), inspired by Mussolini’s doctrines, was founded in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903-1936). During the Spanish Civil War, the Falange was reorganized as the Falange Española Tradiciónalista by General Francisco Franco (1892-1975), who made it the official party of his regime. Of less importance were the Fascist movements in France and the British Union of Fascists under Sir Oswald Mosley.

Fascist movements sprang up in many other European countries during the 1930s, including Romania, Belgium, Austria, and the Netherlands. Fascist groups rose to power in many of the countries under German occupation during World War II. In France, the Vichy Government of Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856-1951) was strongly influenced by the Action Française, a movement that shared many ideas with fascism. The collaborationist Quisling government in occupied Norway also espoused a fascist-like ideology. The defeat of Italy and Germany in the war, however, spelled the end of fascism as an effective, internationally appealing mass movement.

Although national socialism was the most spectacular, and in some respects the most successful, of all forms of fascism, it was intellectually less sophisticated and less interesting than French or Italian fascism. Its political success lay in its ability to synthesize often contradictory elements into a doctrine with universal appeal — “socialism” for the working class, anti-bolshevism for the employers, nationalism for traditional conservatists, and anti-Semitism for all who looked for a scapegoat on whom to pin the blame for the loss of World War I and the economic disasters of the 1920s.

Nazism

In Germany, there appeared Adolf Hitler, an Austrian-born fascist who, having studied The Communist Manifesto, determined he would embark on a quest for a totalitarian state in Germany first, then conquer the rest of the world. His plan was simple. Using the distress and despair of the Great Depression, which had impacted heavily on the working classes of Germany, he would herald in the Nazi Party as the Third Reich.

The ideology of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), better known as the Nazi Party, was formed in 1919, and under Hitler it ruled Germany between 1933 and 1945. National socialism essentially combined two doctrines: the fascist belief that national unity could best be secured by an all-encompassing state directed by a party with one supreme leader embodying the national will; and the racist belief in the superiority of the Aryan peoples, implying other races might justifiably be subjugated or eliminated entirely.

Nazism had intellectual pretensions, but they came a poor second to an enthusiasm for brute force and the cult of the leader. It and socialism meant little more than states’ rights transcending those of private owners. Its appeal to the masses was hardly more than an excuse to destroy the secondary organizations of liberal society, trade unions in particular, and to arouse the population for war. Its embodiment in the febrile genius of Hitler is not by accident, for it was his political opportunism and his galvanizing energy that allowed the Nazis to gain support and fill the void created by despair and desperation of the German people. These economic and social voids always suck into themselves, like a huge vacuum cleaner, the populist dictators.

After a checkered beginning, the party gathered strength rapidly in the 1930s until it was able to prevent its opponents from forming a majority in the Reichstag, or lower house of the parliament. Hitler became chancellor and dictator in 1933. Although some tenets of Nazism, such as nationalism and anti-Semitism, had existed earlier in German history, the Nazi ideology as a whole was a product of the beliefs of Hitler, articulated in his book Mein Kampf.

Nazism somewhat resembled fascism, which preceded it in Italy. It spawned several small Nazi parties in the occupied countries, Britain, and the United States. Nazism had several elements:

• A belief (with a theoretical and pseudoscientific basis in the works of the Comte de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Alfred Rosenberg) in an Aryan German race superior to all others and destined to rule, together with a violent hatred of Jews that led to the establishment of concentration camps and to the Holocaust.

• An extreme nationalism that called for the complete unification of all German-speaking peoples. This led to the occupation of Austria, a German-speaking country, and of Czechoslovakia, which had a large German minority.

• A belief in some form of state socialism, although the left-leaning members of the party were purged in 1934.

• A private army, called the SS (Schutzstaffel).

• A youth cult that emphasized sports and paramilitary outdoor activities.

• The massive use of propaganda, masterminded by Joseph Goebbels.

• The submission of all decisions to the supreme leader Adolf Hitler and the glorification of strength and discipline.

It is one of the great tragedies of modern history that Germany’s first encounter with democratic government was associated with defeat and misery. The Social Democrats, accepting the support of the army in order to maintain order, suppressed several Communist revolts, including those in Berlin and Bavaria. Early in 1919, a freely elected constituent assembly met in Weimar to write a constitution giving direct governing power to the Reichstag. SPD leader Friedrich Ebert (1871-1925) was named president of the new Weimar Republic, and Philipp Scheidemann (1865-1939) formed a coalition government of the SPD, the Center party, and a liberal group. This government soon resigned rather than sign the Treaty of Versailles, the vindictive settlement imposed by the Paris Peace Conference. Germany, however, really had no choice. In June 1919, the Weimar Assembly voted to comply with the treaty, which deprived Germany of large amounts of land, people, and natural resources and forced it to pay enormous reparations.

The attempt to root parliamentary democracy in Germany was beset from the beginning by grave problems. There were so many political parties (at least six major and many more minor ones) it was hard to form stable coalitions for effective government. Militant minorities — the Communists on the far left and monarchists and racists on the opposite extreme — sometimes resorted to force in efforts to overturn the republic. Notable among these efforts was the Munich Putsch of 1923, in which the tiny National Socialist party led by Adolf Hitler made a somewhat farcical attempt to seize power in Bavaria. The continuing unrest made the national government even more dependent on the basically conservative army.

The year 1923 was one of major crisis. The payment of reparations, in both cash and kind, had placed an enormous strain on a country already bankrupted by more than four years of war. As inflation mounted, Germany had suspended payment in 1922, provoking the French to occupy the Ruhr area in January 1923. Workers in Ruhr mines and factories resisted by striking, but such resistance contributed to inflation, which brought on economic collapse. The situation was saved in November 1923 when the ablest of Germany’s republican politicians, Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929), introduced a new currency and improved Germany’s relations with the Western nations, paving the way for foreign loans and a more reasonable schedule of reparations payments.

During the later 1920s, therefore, the German economy revived, and politics settled down. Also, during those years, a remarkable avant-garde culture blossomed in Germany, extending from the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), to the Bauhaus school of functional art and architecture, to the relativity physics of Albert Einstein (1879-1955), and to the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

However, this new Germany was cut down in its infancy by the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Nazi seizure of power. Depression conditions once more radicalized politics and so divided the parties in the Reichstag that parliamentary government became all but impossible. >From 1930 on, government functioned by emergency decree. The Communists profited briefly from this radicalization, but the main beneficiary was Hitler's National Socialist, or Nazi, party, which had the twin attractions of appearing to offer radical solutions to economic problems while upholding patriotic values. By 1932, it was the largest party in the Reichstag. The following year, President Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1976) appointed Hitler chancellor after allowing himself to be convinced by generals and right-wing politicians that only the Nazi leader could restore order in Germany and that he could be controlled.

Nazi Dictatorship

Most Germans who supported Hitler during his rise to power did so out of desperation, scarcely knowing what he planned to do. They received much more than they had bargained for. After half-persuading, half-coercing the Reichstag to grant him absolute power, Hitler lost no time in founding a totalitarian state, known unofficially as the Third Reich, supposedly in the tradition of the Holy Roman Empire and the unified German Empire set up by Bismarck.

When confronted by demands from Storm Trooper (SA) leader Ernst Roehm (1887-1934) and others for a second revolution that would make good on Nazi claims to socialist ideals, Hitler purged Roehm and his associates on the weekend of June 30, 1934. Four years later, he forced out two of the top generals on trumped-up charges in order to assure himself of full control of the expanding German armed forces. Thanks to a ruthless secret police (the Gestapo) and a concentration camp system under the direction of SS leader Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), known enemies of Nazism were put away and potential ones terrorized.

The March of Marxism

So here we see the Marxist-inspired Communist Manifesto filtering through the mindset of 1930s Western societies, as shown by the strengthening power of union blackmailing techniques and the intellectual weakness of the authors of legislation, the lawyers, and the elected who are the actual legislators, the politicians. Meanwhile, the masses lived in relative ignorance and apathy to the wider and more influencing picture. At this point, the United States, through Roosevelt, was experimenting with the dangerous doctrine of socialism as derived from The Communist Manifesto. This experimentation, rooted during this period, would continue on ad infinitum through the balance of the twentieth century.

During this fermenting period of world history, we consistently detect the subtle influence of Marxist thinking and the debilitating philosophy of “individualism,” which Marx’s method seeks to create as a weapon against the enemy — capitalism.

The Communist Manifesto, which was intended as a platform statement for a small international workers’ party, the Communist League, was published during the revolutions of 1848. The brief work sketches Marx’s evolving philosophy of “scientific socialism,” a philosophy he fully expounded in Das Kapital. From its opening line, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” to its famous closing, “Workers of the world unite!” the Manifesto retains its compelling force for Marxists even today.

In addition to the Manifesto and dozens of newspaper and magazine articles, Karl Marx authored the following gems:

• 1841: On the difference between the natural philosophy of right economic and philosophic manuscripts

• 1844: On the Jewish question, The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

• 1845: The Holy Family

• 1846: The German Ideology

• 1847: The Poverty of Philosophy

• 1848: The Communist Manifesto

• 1850: Class Struggles in France

• 1852: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

• 1853: Revelations of the Communist trial at Cologne

• 1859: A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

• 1865: Wages, Price, Profit

• 1871: The Civil War in France

• 1867: Capital Volume I

• 1883: Capital Volume II

• 1893: Capital Volume III

So we see that, apart from The Communist Manifesto, Marx was a prolific writer of socialist-inspired works. These works permeated the societies of this post-war era and have done so effectively ever since. The vast majority of students and teachers who have studied these works have a burning desire for social justice burning so brightly that they are simply seduced into believing that these philosophies of secular humanism were the answer to their longings. No sooner had these unwise citizens read and digested these socialist philosophies, than they began to aspire to the “utopia” they promised, only to be deluded and disappointed along the way. Not, however, before the damage had been wrought on the society of their passion. Academics, scientists, religionists, politicians, and a vast majority of the masses were not only seduced by these unwise experiments in social justice, but fervently believed they were right. Such was and still is their delusion.

As history has so eloquently demonstrated, no amount of socialism will bring about these social justice changes. They must be earned by successive generations of men and women through a sincere desire to compete and do better through hard work and the soul-building virtues of discipline, determination, and dedication. There were never meant to be any shortcuts and none have emerged. Civilization and equality are evolving phenomena not achievable by brute force or blackmail. The eventual emergence of the middle class in Western society was an important piece of the scaffolding, as it provides a stepping stone effect for successive generations to acquire and pass on property, the essential ingredient to social equity. During this post-war period, great strides were made in achieving the early stages of a civilized society. Lurking in the shadows of the West , however, was the taxation regime of the Marxist theory. At the same time, in Russia, outright communism was being practiced in all of its bloody excesses.

This era was the consolidation of both mindsets. On the one hand was the ideal of normal evolution through the establishment and progress of the middle classes shepherded by capitalism. On the other hand was the ideal of socialism spawned by the writings of Karl Marx and being experimented with by a cross-section of the intelligentsia and working classes of this era. The opposing forces were lining up for a long battle that will continue to rage into the closing chapters of this manuscript and the twentieth century.

The following is a surprising list of Marxist followers who emerged during this and subsequent eras.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Albert Camus (1913-1960)

Lózaro Cárdenas (1895-1970)

Fidel Castro (1926-)

Marc Chagall (1887-1985)

Charles Chaplin (1889-1977)

Marie Curie (1867-1934)

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

Diego Rivera (1886-1957)

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Sigmond Freud (1856-1939)

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948)

Maksim Gorki (1868-1936)

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969)

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

John XXIII (1881-1963)

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

Karel Capek (1890-1938)

Charles Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)

Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961)

André Malraux (1901-1976)

Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976)

Henri Matisse (1869-1954)

Gamal Nasser (1918-1970)

Oscar Niemeyer (1907-)

George Orwell (1903-1950)

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883-1955)

Pasolini Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)

Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

Romain Roland (1866-1944)

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

Dimitry Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Josef Stalin (1879-1953)

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980)

Lev Nikolayevic Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)

Emiliano Zapata (1877-1919)

There would be many more as this century of experimentation and flirtation with new philosophies evolved. Many contemporary so-called democratic socialists of the latter part of the century have learned their particular brand of socialism from students who learned theirs from Marx. And so the weed spreads unobserved and unrecognized by innocent and unsuspecting minds. Of course, these minds would argue, so what? Social justice is our goal. Who cares who the author was?

A most interesting study of how Marx continues to influence history is to be found in trade unionism. This grouping together of workers, the “proletariat,” was, of course, a vital and necessary platform of The Communist Manifesto. Marx’s economic theories made no immediate impact on the workers’ movement or on other thinkers, except after his death in 1883. This is true of his theories on value and surplus value, accumulation, exploitation, pauperization, crisis and appropriation, class struggle, and revolution. But by the end of the 19th century, several such theories were being hotly discussed within the workers’ movement, while others were gradually accepted as absolutely valid.

We must remember that the Manifesto was a direct appeal to all workers to unite into Unions of Workers and to fight a long, ongoing battle with the enemy, the Capitalists. Of course, Marx’s Manifesto arose out of the squalid practice of worker exploitation. Yet, Marx himself was the son of a wealthy family, his father a well-to-do lawyer. Marx would later study law at Bonn University. He never had a paying job in his life, preferring instead to live off of a meager family endowment. From Bonne he went to Berlin, where he finished his studies. Returning to Bonne, he tried teaching, but his reputation did not serve his purpose. In Berlin, he turned to atheism and became a subversive.

The number of his books and review articles that were actually printed are very few; comrade Marx’s style was not terribly clear, and so, very few were able to grasp his daring and complex ideas. From excellent data accumulated, so very few of the union leaders have ever read the Manifesto and practically none of the members over the century, preferring to follow the doctrine though blind faith. It has only been the elitists of academia who have attempted to decipher the complexities of Marx’s mindset. These academics, through the use of freewill, either rejected out of hand the philosophy or became drunk with the individualistic and secular potential, becoming disciples of the “faith.” The virus spread rapidly in this way, as university after university fell prey to the converted. Later on, this effect would be witnessed in primary and secondary schools worldwide, as through the growing power of unionism, the virus was carried and passed on from teacher to teacher and teacher to student.

So as we survey this period of the twentieth century, we clearly see the coalescing effects of Marxism as it would impinge on future generations worldwide. It was not until 1917, with Lenin’s victory in Russia, that the works of Marx were heard of throughout the free world, and studied and discussed and put into practice by hundreds and thousands of millions of people.

Britain, Germany, Italy, most of the rest of Europe, the United States of America. the Pacific, South America were all beginning to fall under its domination as the Manifesto and its message filtered through the civilized world, carried wholeheartedly by the oppressed and bitter rank and file of the workers and their unions. All the while, capitalism and capitalists did what they always did — they simply continued to accumulate wealth by exploiting the workers and the weak. The theme of the strong oppressing the weak in society is, of course, unbroken in our long history. We will explore the solutions in a later chapter.

Chapter 4

World War II

The journey has been well worth making — once. — Winston Churchill

Bear in mind that my brain works in about the same way as a calculating machine.— Adolf Hitler

On September 1, 1939, the German army under Adolf Hitler invaded Poland and began World War II. The German military machine struck decisively at Poland in what was known as a blitzkrieg (lightning war). High-speed panzer (tank) units pushed across the borders, blasting holes in the Polish lines. From the skies, Luftwaffe (air force) bombers destroyed the Polish air force, damaged communications lines, and prevented the Poles from moving reinforcements, supplies, and ammunition to the front lines. Then, German foot soldiers moved forward to hold the conquered ground. Meanwhile, Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3.

On September 17 that same year, Soviet troops marched into Poland. The Polish government and high command escaped into exile on the next day. The Soviets halted at a line running from East Prussia down to the Bug River. Hitler and Stalin then partitioned the conquered country: the USSR occupied the eastern half, populated by Ukrainians and White Russians as well as Poles; the Germans took the western half, which included Gdansk (Danzig) and the Polish Corridor.

Three million Polish Jews were subjected to a Blitzpogrom of murder and rape. Reinhard Heydrich, an aide to Heinrich Himmler, issued a ghetto decree that month, and Jews were progressively fenced off from the rest of the population. Seven hundred thousand Polish Jews would die of disease and starvation over the next two years as the Nazis toyed with the idea of deporting all Jews to Nisko, a proposed reservation in the Lublin area, or to Madagascar.

When Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, four special Einsatzgruppen (strike squads) were deployed against Soviet Jewish civilians. The worst atrocity committed by these squads occurred at the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were machine-gunned September 29 and 30, 1941. At Hitler’s insistence, in January 1942 Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference on the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

In late September and early October, Stalin forced the Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuaniato — to accept garrisons of Soviet troops within their borders. The following year, elections held under Soviet auspices resulted in the incorporation of the three nations into the USSR as constituent republics.

After crushing the Poles, Hitler subdued Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and The Netherlands. Then, he set his sights on France.

Collapse of France

During the winter of 1939 and 1940, the French army and the German Wehrmacht faced one another in what was regarded satirically as the Sitzkrieg, or sit-down war. The world waited in anticipation of a major conflict between two powerful forces. On May 13, a bridgehead was established at Sedan, considered the gateway to France, and then suddenly, on May 16, 1940, a day after the Dutch capitulation, the German blitzkrieg was released on northern France. German mechanized forces outflanked the Maginot Line, surprised the Allies by attacking through the wooded Ardennes rather than the Belgian plain, and drove the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from the continent at Dunkirk. On June 5, the Germans launched another offensive southward from the Somme. They entered Paris unopposed on June 14 and forced France to sign an armistice at Compiegne on June 22, 1940.

The fall of France was an extraordinary victory for Hitler. The supposedly unbeatable French army had melted away before the onslaught of his mobile units with their convincing display of mechanized power. Nazi Germany then occupied most of France and permitted the establishment of a friendly government at Vichy, in central France on the Allier River.

The Vichy Government was headed by Marshal Henri Petain, hero of World War I, and Pierre Laval, a collaborationist. Disgruntled French patriots rallied around General Charles de Gaulle, who pronounced himself leader of the Free French.

During the early months of the war, Benito Mussolini maintained Italy’s neutrality. When France was about to fall, he decided to join the Nazis. Declaring war on the Allies on June 10, 1940, he invaded southern France in what U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt described as a “stab-in-the-back.”

Dunkirk Retreat

During the Belgian campaign, the Germans drove rapidly across southeastern Belgium and turned toward Abbeville on the French coast, thereby isolating Allied troops. The British Expeditionary Force and its French comrades appeared to be doomed. While some of the troops of the French First Army sold their lives in a fierce rearguard action, from

British ports sailed one of the strangest armadas in history, composed of destroyers, motor launches, private yachts, old ferries, steamers, even fishing smacks, about 850 vessels in all. While planes of the Royal Air Force (RAF) provided an umbrella over the scene to drive off German bombers, the fleet of British vessels moved to Dunkirk and proceeded to evacuate about 338,000 British, French, and Belgian troops from May 26 to June 4, 1940. Not only was a military disaster turned into a propaganda victory, but several hundred thousand experienced troops were saved for future action against the Axis.

Battle of Britain

Hitler, anticipating further eastern conquests, hoped Britain would accept German control of the Continent and seek peace. But Britain shunned the chancellor’s overtures of July 1940, and, in August, Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe began an all-out attack on British ports, airfields, and industrial centers and, finally, on London. The goal was to crush British morale and wipe out the RAF in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, an invasion of England.

The Battle of Britain was the first great air battle in history. For fifty-seven nights, London was attacked by an average force of 160 bombers. The outnumbered RAF, employing the effective Spitfire fighter and aided by radar, destroyed 1,733 aircraft while losing 915 fighters. German air power could not continue sustaining such heavy losses, and in October, Operation Sea Lion was postponed indefinitely. France fell that same year, but Hitler’s plan to invade Britain was foiled when the German air force lost the air Battle of Britain. When Italy’s invasion of Greece and Africa failed, Hitler seized the Balkans and North Africa.

During this time, the Nazis began to import “inferior races” from conquered countries to relieve the manpower shortage. Those who resisted were herded into concentration camps. About twelve million people, including about six million Jews, were exterminated.

USSR Invasion

Since well before the war, Hitler had looked toward the conquest of the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe and the USSR to provide the additional Lebensraum, or “living space,” he believed the German people needed. He hoped to establish German colonies in those regions to be served by the despised Slavs. After the defeat of France, the German chancellor began planning an invasion of the USSR. To avoid fighting a two-front war, Hitler first tried to make peace with Britain. After that attempt to clear the western front failed, he launched the Battle of Britain but again failed to put the British out of action.

Nevertheless, full-scale preparations for the invasion of the USSR began in December 1940. He believed Britain, having been expelled from the Continent, no longer posed an offensive military threat. He was convinced that the greater menace came from the Soviets, who in June 1940 had moved uncomfortably close to Romanian oil fields.

Originally scheduled for mid-May of 1941, the invasion of the USSR, called Operation Barbarossa, was delayed until June 22 by Hitler’s campaign in the Balkans. Launching a blitzkrieg with 121 divisions on a 3,200-kilometer (2,000-mile) front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Germans employed a three-pronged assault. In the north, they moved on Leningrad via the Baltic states. Moscow, the target of the German center, was approached by forces moving east to Smolensk. In the south, the invaders marched toward the Ukraine and Kiev, where they planned to turn south to the Crimea and cross the Don to the Caucasus and to Stalingrad on the Volga. A smaller force of Romanians and Germans attacked in the extreme south.

As justification for the move, Hitler accused the Kremlin of treachery, of threatening German frontiers, and of disseminating anti-German and pro-communist propaganda. He alleged that the invasion was a crusade against Bolshevism; in addition, however, he was attracted by wheat, oil, and mineral supplies that would enable him to defy the British blockade. So certain was he of victory that he did not even bother to equip his troops for winter.

The onslaught took the Soviets entirely by surprise, and the Germans made startling progress. In the first eighteen days, the attackers advanced 640 kilometers (400 miles), capturing three hundred thousand prisoners, a thousand tanks, and six hundred guns. During the first forty-eight hours alone, the Soviets lost more than two thousand aircraft. The northern forces had entered Leningrad province by July 10, and on August 31 were within 16 kilometers (10 miles) of the city. In the center, German troops took Minsk on June 30 and Smolensk, only 320 kilometers (200 miles) from Moscow, in mid-July. Progress in the south was slowed by unexpectedly heavy resistance and rainy weather, but the invaders captured Kiev in late September. More than a million Soviet prisoners had been taken by the end of that month. The Soviets retreated, adopting a defense-in-depth strategy, but German victory seemed imminent.

The German invasion of the USSR signaled a change in the alliance structure. Despite his aversion to communism, Churchill promised Stalin economic and technical assistance against the Axis. On July 13, 1941, Moscow signed a mutual-aid pact with London. Offers of help also came from Washington. Italy and the Axis satellites — Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary — allied themselves with Germany. Vichy France broke off its diplomatic ties with Moscow. On August 1, Britain severed relations with Finland, which the Germans had used as one base for their invasion. Sweden had granted permission for German troops to cross its territory, but announced its determination to remain neutral. Despite pressure from the USSR and from Britain, with whom it had an alliance, Turkey, too, proclaimed its neutrality. Japan, which had concluded a mutual nonaggression pact with the Soviets in April and was, in addition, a member of the Axis Pact, adopted a policy of watchful waiting.

Growing U.S. Involvement

From the beginning of the war in Europe, the sympathy of the American public was with the Allied cause; most Americans felt a Nazi triumph would pose a grave threat to the United States. As German victory followed German victory, isolationist sentiment, originally strong, began to evaporate.

From 1935, U.S. neutrality legislation had forbidden the selling of war supplies to belligerent countries. In November 1939, a revised neutrality law authorized the sale of war supplies on a cash-and-carry basis while forbidding U.S. vessels and nationals from traveling in combat zones. This act was intended to prevent direct U.S. involvement in the war through the sinking of U.S. vessels, a problem that had spurred the nation’s involvement in World War I. From the beginning of the war, however, the British dominated the seas; the cash-and-carry law thus had the effect of favoring the British cause.

The next year, President Roosevelt and Congress began preparing for possible U.S. entry into the war. In September 1940, the first peacetime draft law in U.S. history provided for the registration of 17 million men. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 was aimed at curbing subversive activities. In March 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, empowering the president to allow the shipment of vital war material to nations, primarily Great Britain, whose defense he considered to be necessary for U.S. security. Later that year, the law was extended to include China and the USSR. The Americans also took measures to defend the Western Hemisphere by patrolling the Atlantic Ocean. American forces occupied Greenland and Iceland. In August and September 1941, the sinking of U.S.-owned ships led to a measure authorizing the arming of U.S. merchant vessels and permitting them to carry cargoes to belligerent ports.

On August 14, 1941, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill held a conference on a war vessel off the coast of Newfoundland. The two agreed to present plans for a new world based on an end to tyranny and territorial aggrandizement, the disarmament of aggressors, and the fullest cooperation of all nations for the social and economic welfare of all. The Atlantic Charter was designed as a counterthrust to a possible new Hitler peace offensive as well as a statement of postwar aims. The next month, the USSR and fourteen other anti-Axis countries endorsed the Atlantic Charter.

Japanese Expansion and U.S. Response

Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria and its 1937 full-scale assault against China had brought expressions of disapproval from the U.S. government. With public opinion strongly isolationist, however, the United States did not act to halt Japanese expansionism. Not until the outbreak of World War II in Europe and the escalation of Japanese aggression did the U.S. response become strong.

In 1940, Nazi Germany’s march into western Europe opened up opportunities for Japan to consolidate its position in China and penetrate Southeast Asia, thereby advancing the Japanese goal of dominating a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” After the fall of France, the Vichy government accepted in August 1940 Japanese demands that aid through French Indochina to the Chinese resistance be cut off and that Japan be allowed to use air bases in Indochina. In September, Japanese troops moved into northern Indochina, and Japan joined the Axis. Meanwhile, with Britain fighting for its life and the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, Japan called on the British to close the Burma Road to supplies bound for China and pressed the Dutch East Indies for economic and political concessions. In July 1941, Japan occupied southern Indochina, an obvious prelude to further expansion in Southeast Asia, a rich source of rubber, tin, oil, quinine, lumber, foodstuffs, and other vital raw materials.

Japanese prime minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro (1891-1945) hoped the United States would accept Japan’s actions, but in September 1940, President Roosevelt imposed an embargo on U.S. exports of scrap iron and steel to Japan. In July 1941, he froze all Japanese assets in the United States. This action virtually ended U.S. -Japanese trade, depriving Japan of vital oil imports.

On September 6, 1941, an imperial conference met in Tokyo to consider worsening relations with the United States. Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Konoe favored a continuation of negotiations in Washington, D.C. The war minister, General Tojo Hideki (1884-1948), however, believed the United States was determined to throttle Japan, that war was inevitable, and that it would be preferable to begin the conflict sooner rather than later. Tojo’s views had wide support within the Japanese military.

At the insistence of the war party, Konoe was given six weeks to reach a settlement with the United States and was to insist on a set of minimum demands: immediate cessation of economic sanctions, a free hand for Japan in China, and rights for Japan in Indochina. With no progress occurring in the negotiations, Konoe resigned on October 16 and was replaced by Tojo, whose cabinet decided to wait only until the end of November for a diplomatic breakthrough.

Talks between U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull (1871-1955) and Japanese emissaries remained stalled. U.S. cryptographers had broken Japan’s major diplomatic code, and U.S. authorities knew that rejection of the minimum demands would mean war. Even so, on November 26, Hull formally reiterated the U.S. position. Japan, he said, must withdraw from China and Indochina, recognize the Chiang Kai-shek regime in China, renounce territorial expansion, and accept the Open Door policy of equal commercial access to Asia. An imperial conference on December 1 set the Japanese war machine in motion.

Pearl Harbor

The United States expected the first blow to be in the Philippines or Southeast Asia. But Japan had made plans for a devastating aerial strike against the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, in the Hawaiian Islands. In late November, a powerful Japanese task force left the Kuril Islands; on December 2 it received a coded message issuing the attack order. The undetected Japanese force arrived off the Hawaiian Islands on the morning of December 7. In two successive waves, more than 350 Japanese bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters struck. Altogether, eighteen U.S. ships were sunk or disabled. At one stroke, U.S. naval power in the Pacific was crippled. Fortunately for the Americans, their aircraft carriers were on missions elsewhere. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps lost 2,117 men, the Army lost 218, and 68 civilians were killed. More than twelve hundred were wounded. About two hundred aircraft were destroyed, most on the ground. The Japanese lost twenty-nine planes.

The next day President Roosevelt told a joint session of Congress that December 7 was “a date which will live in infamy.” Congress voted to declare war on Japan. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The European war now merged with the Pacific war into one global conflict.

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Hitler declared war on the United States. Hitler’s defeat at Stalingrad (now Volgograd), in the Soviet Union, marked the turning point of the war. The Allies drove the Nazis out of Africa, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Germany became a battleground as the Allies closed in from east and west.

U.S. War Effort

Following Pearl Harbor, the U.S. economy was placed immediately on a war footing, and its industrial productivity plant played a crucial role in the global conflict. All key industries were running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Within a year after Pearl Harbor, U.S. war production equaled that of all Axis nations together and by the beginning of 1943 greatly exceeded that of the Axis powers. During the war, the United States manufactured 296,000 planes, 87,000 tanks, and 2.4 million trucks, as well as millions of rifles and millions of tons of artillery shells. From January 1, 1942, the nation produced 28 million U.S. tons of shipping, enabling the Allies to replace vessels lost to the enemy.

Turning of the Tide

In 1942 and 1943, the German offensive in the USSR ended at Stalingrad, and the Allies won the North African campaign, secured the Atlantic for their shipping, and were winning the battle of the skies. The days of German supremacy in the European theater were over.

As Germany suffered military defeats, it also faced increasing difficulties inside occupied Europe. At first, resistance to German occupation occurred on a modest scale, in part because many believed the Nazis to be invincible. But after the Battle of Britain and later Axis setbacks, anti-Nazi activity in occupied countries increased. Organized groups, aided by British and, later, American intelligence, killed officials and soldiers, wrecked trains, blew up ammunition dumps, sabotaged factories, provided useful information to the Allies, and helped escaped prisoners of war as well as downed Allied pilots. Many who were not active in the resistance helped shelter and protect those who were. Having spread his forces over a large area and treated many of the conquered peoples with unprecedented cruelty, Hitler could not crush the resistance despite the extremely harsh retaliatory measures taken by his administrators.

Battle of the Atlantic

Early in 1942, German U-boats were sinking more Allied shipping than ever. From January to June, they destroyed three million U.S. tons, much of this along the U.S. coast. Soon, however, the productivity of the U.S. war economy began to neutralize the German effort. In August 1942, the construction rate of new Allied ships at last reached the level of Allied losses, and in December permanently surpassed it. As more and longer-range planes were built, air support was extended to all but the mid-Atlantic region. There, escort carriers began providing air cover for convoys in March of 1943. New types of radar also facilitated the detection of enemy ships. From the spring of 1943 the U-boats were, finally, held in check.

Germany’s surface ships were hamstrung by the British blockade, although in February 1942 the battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen broke through it. The British retaliated in March by sending commandos to destroy the locks at Saint Nazaire, a French port at the mouth of the Loire and the only Atlantic port suitable for the repair of Germany’s bigger ships.

Allied Strategic Bombing

Aided by rapid production of aircraft in the United States, the Allied forces began making major air raids on Germany in 1942. The Royal Air Force attacked the cities of the Ruhr Valley, a major center of German heavy industry, in crippling raids. In May 1942, the first RAF thousand-bomber raid was directed against the Rhineland city of Cologne, destroying much of the city. In the summer of 1942, the U.S. Army Air Force joined in the operations against Germany. U.S. B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators concentrated on daylight precision bombing of industrial targets, whereas the British struck at night. Most raids were still small and of limited destructiveness, however. Although the German Luftwaffe had played a major role in the early campaigns of the war, its effectiveness declined precipitously after the Battle of Britain.

Not until after the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, when Churchill and Roosevelt decided to place greater stress on strategic bombing, did the Allies begin winning air superiority in Europe. The Combined Bomber Offensive was launched, and the bombing became better organized and more intensive. In the summer of 1943, for example, three-quarters of Hamburg was destroyed in combined raids. Round-the-clock bombing mounted steadily until all Germany was subjected to massive air raids. As the effectiveness of the U.S. fighter escorts increased, the Luftwaffe became less and less able to counter the air attacks.

In 1942 and 1943, the Allies thwarted Japanese efforts to expand farther southward and eastward and began their island-hopping campaign toward Japan. In the summer of 1943, a disagreement arose among Allied strategists on the method for opening the route to the Japanese home islands. General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1969), the Southwest Pacific commander, favored an approach along the New Guinea-Philippines axis. But Admiral Chester Nimitz (1885-1966), Central Pacific commander, believed it best to capture key Central Pacific islands to win strategic air and naval bases that would be used to cut Japan off from its empire.

The Combined Chiefs of Staff gave priority to Nimitz’s design, but elements of both plans were to be employed. Nimitz’s forces would island-hop through the Gilberts, Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas. MacArthur would capture northern New Guinea and islands lying between New Guinea and Mindanao, the southernmost island of the Philippines.

The Allies on the Offensive

By 1944, after the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, the Soviet advance in the east, and the establishment of a second front with the Normandy landing, Germany was in full retreat.

Invasion of Sicily

Meeting in Washington in mid-May 1943 at the conference code-named Trident, Roosevelt and Churchill confirmed the invasion of Sicily, decided on a cross-Channel invasion of France for early May 1944, and agreed to step up the airlift of supplies to China and to go ahead with plans to retake Burma. To implement the first of these goals, Operation Husky was put into action under the command of Eisenhower’s deputy, British general Harold Alexander. First, the little island of Pantelleria, Italy’s fortified base midway between Tunisia and Sicily, was bombed into submission from sea and air. A month later, on July 9 and 10, 1943, British and American forces landed in Sicily in a combined action.

Although German and Italian troops in Sicily had expected the invasion, the date and precise landing points were complete tactical surprises. Italians surrendered in great numbers. The Germans, however, began a spirited defense, and for a time the success of the invasion was in doubt. After initial difficulties at Gela, the U.S. Seventh Army swung across the center and west of the island and took Palermo on July 22. The British Eighth Army, reinforced by Canadians, plodded up the east coast against strong German resistance and took Catania on August 5. Both armies moved on Messina, which was taken August 17, 1943.

On July 25, 1943, Mussolini was overthrown in a surprise development, and Marshal Pietro Badoglio assumed the post of head of the government. Italians throughout the country demanded peace. Suspecting (with good reason) that the Italians might defect, the Germans seized all strategic centers on the Italian mainland and awaited an Allied invasion of the peninsula.

Italian Campaign

Not until after the Sicilian invasion was the Allied decision made to strike at the Italian mainland. On September 3, 1943, British and U.S. forces moved across the Strait of Messina to the toe of the Italian peninsula. A week later, the U.S. Fifth Army, under General Mark W. Clark (1896-1984), landed on the beaches of Salerno; within a month, southern Italy was under the control of the Allies. Naples fell on October 1, 1943. Now, however, German resistance stiffened, and the Allied campaign bogged down. By the end of the year the Allied forces were still closer to Naples than to Rome. About 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Rome, the Germans had set up a strong defensive line, the Gustav, or Winter, Line.

At Algiers on the day of the invasion (September 3), the Badoglio regime secretly signed an armistice with the Anglo-American forces. The Italian capitulation was announced on September 8, and on October 13 the Badoglio government declared war on Germany. In the meantime, however, the Germans had rescued Mussolini from imprisonment, and he was installed as the head of a puppet regime in northern Italy.

Eastern Front

Meanwhile, on the eastern front, the Germans, after their loss of the Battle of Stalingrad, were unable to mount a crushing offensive. It was February 1943 and the Germans and their allies had lost 850,000 to death or capture since the beginning of the Soviet invasion in the summer of 1941.

After several months of retrenchment, General Erich von Manstein (1887-1973) launched a desperate summer counterattack against the Soviets in the south. The situation had changed slightly in the Germans’ favor since Stalingrad. They had shortened their lines, while the Soviet troops were stretched over a massive front with a bulge westward around Kursk. On July 5, 1943, the Germans, using their new Tiger and Panther tanks, struck at this Soviet salient. Hitler committed more than a thousand planes against the Red Army’s enormous concentration of troops, artillery pieces, and tanks. The encounter developed into one of the largest and most vicious armor battles ever fought. More than three thousand tanks were engaged on the grasslands. On July 12, 1943, the Soviets, favored by a seemingly endless supply of troops and tanks, moved in fresh tank divisions, and the advantage finally swung to the Russians. Manstein, having lost seventy thousand men, half his tanks, and more than a thousand planes, was forced to withdraw.

The Germans pulled back to strong defensive lines. As they retreated, the Soviets launched a new offensive northward toward Orel, which they captured on August 4, 1943. They also captured Kharkov (August 23), Poltava (September 22), and Smolensk (September 25). Kiev was liberated in early November. Manstein’s forces were being severely reduced by the steady Russian advance, but Hitler still refused to allow a massive withdrawal, leaving his now-outnumbered troops to the grinding Soviet military machine.

The Soviet advance halted temporarily as winter set in, but once the roads and waterways were firmly frozen, an enormous Soviet counteroffensive began along the entire eastern front. In mid-January 1944, the 890-day siege of Leningrad was relieved after Soviet troops reestablished land communications with the city. Since September 1941, the people of Leningrad had withstood German artillery and air bombardment. More than two hundred thousand of them had been killed in the siege; a half million more died from cold, starvation, and exhaustion, although for a time the city had been tenuously supplied across frozen Lake Ladoga.

As the Red Army pressed westward, it took Riga and Vilna in the north and was crossing into East Prussia by mid-July. In the center, the Germans had withdrawn from Minsk by July. In the south, the entire Crimea was in Soviet hands by May. By mid-July 1944, the Soviets were deep into Poland and by the end of August had crossed into the Balkans. As the Red Army approached the suburbs of Warsaw, the resistance in the Polish capital led a revolt in August through October against the German occupiers in an unsuccessful attempt to gain control of the city before the Soviets arrived.

Collapse of Italy

In early 1944, the Allied armies in Italy were slowed down because of difficult terrain and stubborn German resistance. On January 22, 1944, in an attempt to catch the Germans in a pincer movement, fifty thousand U.S. troops were landed at Anzio between the German Gustav Line to the south and Rome 53 kilometers (33 miles) to the north. Unable to move forward immediately, the troops settled on the beachhead. Under General Albert Kesselring (18851960), eight German divisions moved to form a powerful perimeter around Anzio. After repeated attacks, which included the destruction of the old monastery at Monte Cassino, the Allies managed to break the German lines. On June 4, 1944, Rome fell to the Allies. In the ensuing months, the Germans retreated from one defensive line to another as Allied troops pushed cautiously but irresistibly north toward Tuscany. Not until early 1945 did the Allied forces reach the heights overlooking the Po Valley. Mussolini was captured by anti-fascist partisans near Lake Como on April 28, 1945. He and his mistress were shot and their bodies were taken to Milan — the city where fascism had first taken root — and displayed in the public square.

Tehran Conference

During 1943, while the campaign in Italy was underway, Allied leaders met in two significant conferences to plan a grand assault on France and to map out other aspects of their strategy against the Axis. At the first Quebec Conference, held in mid-August, Roosevelt and Churchill confirmed the decision to establish a second front in France and approved specific plans for a landing at Normandy, to take place on May 1, 1944.

At the Tehran Conference, from November 28 to December 1, 1943, Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt for the first time, and the date for the invasion, code-named Operation Overlord, was confirmed. Stalin agreed to launch a simultaneous attack on Germany’s eastern front. At Tehran, Stalin was also assured that a second invasion of France (from the Mediterranean), known as Operation Anvil, would take place. He reaffirmed that the Soviets would join in the fight against Japan after Germany was defeated but asserted that the USSR wanted Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and a year-round Pacific port on the mainland of Asia. The postwar restoration of Iran was also discussed.

As they prepared for a cross-Channel assault on France, the Western Allies built up on British soil one of the largest and most powerful invasion forces in history. For two months before the landing, while troops, equipment, and supplies poured into Britain, the Allied air forces bombed railroads, bridges, airfields, and fortifications in France and Belgium and continued their attacks on German industrial centers.

Postponed by delays in gathering the necessary landing equipment and by weather and tidal conditions, Operation Overlord, with Eisenhower in command, began on June 6, 1944, afterward known as D-Day. Throughout the preceding night, paratroopers were dropped behind German coastal defenses to sever communications and seize key defense posts. Hundreds of warships and innumerable small craft supported the invasion.

Between 6:30 and 7:30 a.m., waves of Allied troops moved ashore between Cherbourg and Le Havre in history’s largest amphibious operation, involving approximately five thousand ships of all kinds. About eleven thousand Allied aircraft operated over the invasion area. More than 150,000 troops disembarked at Normandy on D-Day. Because all major French ports in the north were mined and fortified, the Allies improvised two artificial harbors, with pontoons, breakwaters, and sunken ships. One of the harbors was destroyed by a severe Atlantic gale, but the other worked perfectly. Twenty pipelines below the Channel were used to bring in critical supplies of gasoline for the tanks.

The Germans had anticipated an Allied invasion of western Europe at about this time, but were surprised by its location. General Gerd von Rundstedt (1875-1953), commander of German forces in the West, had expected the Allies to take the shortest water route and land at Pas de Calais. A British intelligence operation called Ultra, having broken key German ciphers, learned of his misapprehension. To capitalize on the situation, the Allies stationed a phantom army in Kent that reinforced Rundstedt’s mistaken opinion. It may also have influenced Hitler to decide against sending reserve panzer divisions to Normandy, a decision that greatly facilitated the landing and the establishment of beachheads.

Yet, the Germans struck back vigorously. For more than a month, they resisted while Allied forces were being built up on the crowded beaches. The defenders were under a severe handicap, however, because Hitler had been forced to send many of his troops from France to the eastern front, where the Soviets were on the offensive.

Campaigns in France

To trap the Germans in a pincer movement, the Allies had decided on a second landing in the south of France. On August 15, 1944, a fleet of Allied warships appeared off the French Mediterranean coast between Toulon and Cannes. Following a heavy bombardment, they unloaded an army of U.S. and French troops. Speedily taking Marseille and Nice, the Allies headed northward along the Rhone River. German troops in western France were now threatened with isolation.

The huge Allied force that had set ashore on the Normandy coastline — more than a million men within three weeks of D-Day — gradually extended its width but not its depth. Cherbourg was captured on June 27, 1944, giving the Allies a major port for the flow of men and supplies. On July 25, Allied troops broke through the German lines between Caen and Saint Lo and then fanned out into open country. The Germans counterattacked at Avranches but were contained by U.S. troops. The heavily armored U.S. Third Army, led by Lieutenant General George Patton (1885-1945), turned the German left flank at Avranches, broke into Brittany, and then moved northeast to the Seine, to outflank Paris on the south.

To avoid expected loss of life, Eisenhower intended to bypass Paris. The French resistance fighters inside the city and French troops in the liberation army, however, called for a quick and clean capture of their capital. On August 19, Eisenhower changed his mind on receiving word of an uprising in Paris. He sent the Free French Second Armored Division, supported by U.S. troops, into the city. Paris fell to the Allies on August 25 without great damage because the German commandant disobeyed Hitler’s orders to “fight to the last man” and to raze the city.

Western Offensive Toward Germany

As the Allied commanders planned final strategy for the assault on Germany, a disagreement arose among them. Montgomery urged a “big thrust” of all concentrated Allied armor through Belgium to the Ruhr, but Eisenhower, although he agreed to give initial priority to such a drive, decided that the earlier plan of simultaneous advance by all the separated armies should thereafter be resumed. In early September, the British liberated Brussels, and U.S. troops crossed the German frontier at Eupen. On October 21, the U.S. First Army took Aachen — the first city within Germany’s prewar borders to fall to the Allies. Meanwhile, the invasion forces from Normandy and southern France joined near Dijon. The Allies now had a continuous front from Belgium down to neutral Switzerland.

German resistance stiffened, however, in the last months of 1944. In late September, a British airborne division was dropped behind German lines across the Rhine near Arnhem in the Netherlands. The operation incurred heavy casualties: of the ten thousand troops landed, more than a thousand were killed and at least sixty-four hundred were taken prisoner. The Allied offensive ground to a temporary halt.

On December 16, 1944, General von Rundstedt launched a counteroffensive, known as the Battle of the Bulge, which took the Allies by surprise. With a quarter of a million men and a massive panzer force, he hit the center of the Allied lines at the thinly held Ardennes area. In eight days the Germans cut deeply into Allied-held territory. Eisenhower ordered Patton and his Third Army to turn north toward the fighting. In clearing weather, Allied air power, which had been grounded at the start of the counterattack, now hit hard at the Germans. In early January 1945, the German thrust was contained. The last great German offensive in the West had failed to terminate the Allied drive to the heartland of Germany.

Air War

After the successful landings in Normandy, the Allied Combined Bomber Command turned its full attention once again to targets inside Germany. By the end of 1944, it had seriously curbed German oil production. The Luftwaffe, with diminishing resources and pilots, tried to strike back. In late December, eight hundred German aircraft attacked Allied-held airfields in northern Europe, taking a toll of a hundred aircraft. The Allies, however, were able to replace their losses immediately; the Germans were down to their last reserves.

Many Germans continued to hope that Hitler would unveil at the proper time some secret weapon of shattering power that would turn the tide of battle in Germany’s favor. In 1944, two deadly Vergeltungswaffen (vengeance weapons) were ready for use against the Allies. On June 13, 1944, just seven days after D-Day, Hitler ordered the release of the first V-1s, or “buzz bombs,” from bases along the French coast in the Pas de Calais sector. They were aimed at London in an effort to terrorize the civilian population. The robot bombs whined across the English Channel on a predetermined course. RAF pilots became adept at shooting them down. Altogether, about half of the V-1s sent off to London from northern France and Belgium reached the city; the bombs killed nearly six thousand Londoners, injured forty thousand others, and destroyed more than seventy-five thousand homes.

The heavier and more deadly supersonic V-2 rocket was put into action on September 8, 1944. From bases in the Low Countries, the V-2 hurtled toward London. With its 1-ton warhead, the V-2 buried itself into the ground and exploded violently. Of the more than one thousand V-2s rained on England, about five hundred hit London; they caused nearly ten thousand casualties. Although the “vengeance weapons” were deadly and caused much loss of life and property damage, they came too late to influence the course of the war.

Germany Collapses

During the first four months of 1945, a two-front trap closed in on Germany, forcing its surrender in early May. Meanwhile, the Allied leaders met to deal with the Far Eastern theater, to cope with problems concerning the liberated states of eastern Europe, and to establish terms under which postwar Germany would be occupied.

Soviet Advance to the Oder

With the Germans in the midst of their western counteroffensive, the Soviets, on January 12, 1945, initiated a tremendous assault on the German lines in the east. Within five days they took what remained of Warsaw and two days later captured Krakow. In the north, Soviet troops swept across East Prussia and took Gdansk (Danzig). By February, the Soviets cut off the crucial coal-producing region of Upper Silesia and crossed the Oder River near Breslau (Wroclaw).

As the Soviets moved through Poland, they came upon the notorious Auschwitz extermination camp, where as many as two million Jews, gypsies, Poles, Russians, and members of other groups that the Nazi leaders deemed as “undesirables” had died in the crematoria.

Yalta Conference

From February 4 to February 11, 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at the Yalta Conference held in the Crimea. In eastern Europe, then being occupied by the Soviets, Stalin promised to establish provisional governments that would include all democratic elements and to hold free elections as soon as possible. The USSR, it was agreed, would receive eastern Poland, with Poland to be compensated at Germany’s expense. Germany was to be divided into four zones of occupation, to be administered by the three major Allies and France.

In exchange for its declaration of war against Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender, the USSR was to receive the southern half of Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, and special rights in the Manchurian ports of Dairen (Ta-lien) and Port Arthur (Lu-shun). Later criticized as excessively generous to the Soviets, these concessions were made at a time when the Far Eastern conflict was expected to continue many months after Germany’s defeat.

Battle for Germany

In February 1945, Patton’s fast-moving tanks cleared the entire west bank of the Rhine. The Americans captured intact a key bridge at Remagen near Cologne on March 7. Allied troops began to pour over it in strength and were soon crossing the Rhine at other points. With Montgomery poised in the north and Patton in the south, the Allies were now in a position to drive into Germany and head straight for Berlin.

Eisenhower, however, intent on pursuing the enemy and not aware of the political significance of Berlin, decided to head for Leipzig and then to concentrate his power on the supposed “national redoubt” in the south, where he expected Hitler to make a last stand. Thus, although U.S. forces reached the Elbe on April 12, 1945, and were only about 96 kilometers (60 miles) from Berlin, Eisenhower informed Stalin that he was leaving the city to the Soviets. Systematic bombing by Soviet artillery and Allied air power operating from England reduced the German capital to ruins. The Luftwaffe, with its corps of pilots depleted, airfields destroyed, and fuel supply nonexistent, could not protect the city.

On April 16, 1945, the final attack was launched on Berlin. By the end of the month, the Soviets had penetrated to the center of the city. German soldiers and civilians, fearful of revenge expected from the Soviets, hastened to surrender to the Americans and the British in the belief that they would receive better treatment from the Western Allies. On April 25, 1945, Soviet troops, who now encircled Berlin, met the Americans at Torgau on the Elbe.

German Surrender

While the Soviets were making their final drive on Berlin, Allied troops liberated one concentration camp after another. In April they reached Buchenwald as well as Belsen — where they found forty thousand inmates barely alive and ten thousand unburied corpses —and Dachau, one of the worst extermination centers. A shock of amazement ran through the entire world at the extent of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” unprecedented in the entire history of civilization.

Allied armies occupied all of Germany. They found it a wasteland. Allied bombers had almost pulverized the large cities. Thousands of civilians had died in air raids. Some 3,250,000 German soldiers had been killed. The war left Germany shrunken in size. In early 1939, it had been a country of 183,000 square miles (474,000 square kilometers) with a population of about 60,000,000. In 1945 it was reduced to 144,000 square miles (373,000 square kilometers) and was also reduced by several million inhabitants. The Soviets annexed northern East Prussia. Poland administered southern East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia, and Germany’s eastern border was pushed back to the Oder and Neisse rivers.

Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30. On May 7, 1945, representatives of Germany’s armed forces capitulated to the Allies at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims. The formal unconditional surrender came the next day in Berlin. Hitler’s Third Reich had come to an end.

Potsdam Conference

The last wartime Allied conference was held at Potsdam, Germany, from July 17 to August 2, 1945. Attending were Churchill, replaced by Clement Attlee during the conference; Harry S. Truman, successor to Roosevelt, who had died in April; and Stalin. They confirmed the Yalta plan for the division of Germany into four zones of occupation, and reached agreement on plans for the de-Nazification, demilitarization, and democratization of Germany. Those Nazis and Nazi supporters guilty of war crimes or atrocities were to be tried. The conferees also called for the unconditional surrender of Japan. Truman informed Stalin that the United States had tested an atomic bomb that could be used against Japan.

Differences among the Allies also appeared at Potsdam. Britain and the United States refused to accept the pro-Soviet provisional government in Poland because they did not consider it to be democratically based. They called for free elections in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, whereas Stalin demanded that the Western Allies recognize the puppet regimes established by the Soviets in those nations. Disagreements also arose over German reparations and other matters.

Defeat of Japan

In 1944 and 1945, the Allies completed the Central Pacific campaign, took the Philippines, bombed Japan, and penetrated the Japanese home islands. By the summer of 1945, Allied victory was only a matter of time; it was hastened when the United States perfected the atomic bomb and dropped two of the devices on Japan.

By early 1945, Japan was on the verge of collapse. About 1.5 million Japanese troops remained in the home islands, with another 3 million in the Pacific or in China and Manchuria; the Japanese air fleet, however, had been severely mauled. The navy had lost 11 battleships, 19 aircraft carriers, 34 cruisers, nearly 150 submarines, and many other combat craft. The merchant fleet had been drastically reduced.

With one naval and air defeat after another, supply lines extended for impossible distances, and raw materials cut off, Japan could not hold out much longer. In a new development, American fliers operating from the Marianas began in November 1944 the strategic bombing of Japanese airfields, industrial targets, and naval installations. The bombing intensified in 1945 as the Allies captured air bases in the home islands.

Iwo Jima and Okinawa

A tiny island of volcanic ash, Iwo Jima, was one of the most strategic locations in the Western Pacific. Only 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) from Tokyo, it would be for the Americans an invaluable refueling base or emergency landing field for heavy bombers going to or returning from Japan. They reached the peak of Mount Suribachi on February 23 and secured the island by mid-March. The Japanese lost twenty-one thousand to death; only two hundred were taken prisoner.

The next objective was Okinawa, the main island of the southern Ryuku Archipelago. Allied strategists were attracted by its airfields within about 560 kilometers (350 miles) of Japanese cities. In the Pacific theater’s largest amphibious operation, the first of the 172,000 troops of the U.S. Tenth Army began moving ashore on April 1. Within three weeks, they held four-fifths of the island, but organized Japanese resistance continued until June 17.

The door to Japan was now open, with U.S. casualties totaling twelve thousand dead or missing. The Japanese lost one hundred thousand; many committing suicide to avoid capture. In the Japanese code of warfare, defeat was unthinkable and shameful. Nonetheless, Japan faced imminent subjugation. Desperately seeking to turn the tide of battle, Japan began to employ suicide as an official weapon. Young pilots were asked to join the Kamikaze Corps, whose members were to crash their bomb-laden planes into Allied ships. Volunteers were plentiful.

The kamikaze pilots began operating at Leyte Gulf in October 1944. At Okinawa, they made fifteen hundred individual attacks. Altogether, they sank 34 naval craft, none larger than a destroyer, and damaged 358 others. Despite the fury of their assaults, they did not affect the outcome of the war.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By the end of July 1945, almost half of Tokyo had been destroyed, and scores of Japanese cities had been leveled by strategic bombing. Preparations were being made for an Allied invasion. On July 16, however, the work of the U.S. Manhattan Project came to fruition when an atomic bomb was successfully tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico. President Truman decided in favor of using the weapon to end the war quickly unless Japan surrendered. From Potsdam on July 26, Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek issued an ultimatum demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan. It did not mention the bomb. Japan decided to continue the war.

On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb with an explosive force greater than 20,000 U.S. tons of TNT was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, with a population of about three hundred thousand. At least seventy-eight thousand people were killed outright, ten thousand were never found, and more than seventy thousand were injured. Almost two-thirds of the city was destroyed. On August 9, the day after the USSR declared war on Japan, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, with a population of 250,000. About forty thousand people were killed, and about the same number were injured.

Surrender

On August 10, Japan sued for peace on the condition that the emperor’s position as sovereign ruler be maintained. The next day, the Allies stated that the future status of the emperor must be determined by them. At the behest of the emperor, an imperial conference on August 14 accepted the Allied terms. The next day, U.S. forces were ordered to cease fire. On September 2, 1945, Japanese representatives signed the formal document of surrender on the deck of the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.

Crimes of War: The Holocaust

The first concentration camps were established in 1933 for confinement of opponents of the Nazi Party. The supposed opposition soon included all Jews, Gypsies, and certain other groups. By 1939, there were six camps: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, and Ravensbruck. The outbreak of war caused a great demand for labor, and other camps were added. The most notorious was Auschwitz in conquered Poland. Inmates were required to work for their wages in food. So little food was given, however, that many starved. Others died of exposure or overwork. The dead bodies were burned in huge crematoriums in or near the camps.

The most horrible extension of the concentration camp system was the establishment of extermination centers after 1940. They were set up primarily to kill Jews. It is believed that from eighteen to twenty-six million people were killed in them, including six million Jews and four hundred thousand Gypsies. Prisoners in these camps were also used for barbaric medical experiments. This slaughter is known as the Holocaust.

Holocaust, an Old Testament sacrificial term, is used by historians to describe the massacre of six million Jews by the German Nazi regime during World War II. Hitler gave top priority to removing the Jews from Germany. Between 1933 and 1938, the Nazis boycotted Jewish businesses, established quotas in Germany’s professions and schools, forbade intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles, and instituted the first concentration camps at Oranienburg, Buchenwald, and Dachau. During the next three years, Jews represented more than half of those exterminated as undesirables in concentration camps. Methods of killing at Auschwitz and other camps included cyanide gas or carbon monoxide gas, electrocution, phenol injections, flamethrowers, and hand grenades — all of this while the rest of the world looked on.

The Nazis used the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German legation secretary in Paris, as an excuse for Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass). One night in November 1938, storm troopers burned 267 synagogues and arrested 20,000 people. Germany’s Jews were also required to pay a fine of four hundred million dollars for damage to their own property.

Lacking weapons, weakened by disease and starvation, and isolated from the Allies (who were apparently apathetic about their fate), Jews nevertheless fiercely resisted the Nazis throughout the war. Perhaps as many as sixty thousand joined the partisan units that operated from North Africa to Belorussia. Ghetto uprisings occurred in Krakow, Bialystok, Vilna, Kaunas, Minsk, and Slutsk, as well as in Warsaw from April to May 1943. Jewish inmates destroyed Sobibor and Treblinka and led rebellions in fifteen other concentration camps. Despite these efforts, when World War II ended, two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered, more than had been slain in pogroms during the previous eighteen hundred years. The foundations of Western theology have been shaken by these horrors; a vast literature has developed that attempts to reconcile God, civilization, and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Anti-Semitic extremists have sought to propagate the notion that the Holocaust is a myth, and many people show a surprising ignorance about it.

The Costs of the War

No one will ever know what the war cost in the number of people killed, crippled, and wounded. Many nations could not accurately count their losses. The military forces of the Allies and the Axis reported a total of about 14.5 million killed. The civilian population suffered even more than the military through air bombings, starvation, epidemics, and deliberate massacre. Estimated civilian deaths amounted to almost thirteen million, which did not include those in China and other parts of eastern Asia. Total military costs were more than a trillion dollars; property damage was estimated at almost that much. The war at sea cost 4,770 merchant vessels, with a gross tonnage of more than twenty-one million. This amounted to twenty-seven percent of all the ships in existence at the start of the war.

In addition, war spending did not stop when the fighting ended. Care of the crippled, pensions, and other expenses continued. In the United States, money spent for United Nations relief, occupation of foreign countries, and veterans benefits raised the total cost by another thirty billion dollars.

Churchill and Hitler

There are two dominant personalities involved in this world catastrophe: Sir Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. Both were politicians and both had knowledge; however, neither of these protagonists possessed wisdom, but rather a level of egoism and lust for destruction in the extreme. One would destroy tens of millions and the British Empire; the other millions more and the German Empire.

Churchill and Hitler each masked a dark sinister side beneath his public persona. As this modern tragedy played out, these dark and sinister personalities began to manifest. Of course, it must be remembered that, like the first world war, World War II was proclaimed a “just” war. However, like all wars preceding it, World War II was nothing more than an act of lunacy perpetrated and foisted on humanity by dysfunctional individuals who sought fame and immortality through their misguided actions. As usual, the victims were the innocent participants, whether directly as military personnel or as civilians.

As we review this war, it becomes obvious that the published reasons for its existence were skewed, masking and camouflaging the underlying motives. These stemmed from almost a half century of the triune sophistries of the secular revolt, materialism, and atheistic science. These human inventions, involving philosophy, politics, social, and physical sciences, would mutate into a worldwide mindset that would readily accept the thinking of the major leaders in this war — men such as Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hirohito. These men reacted in their own way to the triune sophistries shaping the national patriotism to suit their particular agendas. Each harbored egocentric and self-aggrandized plans, not only for his place in history, but also for his nation’s dominance over the world’s landscape. This mindset, having found a populist place globally, would continue to manifest all the way through to the end of the twentieth century.

Let us take a look at two of these men of war to assess who they were and why they were as they appeared at this defining moment on the temporal stage of action.

Sir Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill will always be remembered as the “First Citizen of western Civilization, Defender of the Faith.” Or so said Henry R. Luce in 1946, publisher of the magazines Time, Life, and Fortune.

After a decade of meticulous research, noted historian David Irving presents a shockingly different picture of the great man. In all of the historical works on Churchill, it was found that David Irving’s Churchill’s War provided the most accurate and revealing story of a flawed, complex world leader who was more saboteur than savior. We shall draw heavily on his research to expose this politician as the master exploiter of "idiots" — the masses.

In the introduction to Churchill’s War, David Irving paints the real picture of the postwar Churchill, flush with victory:

It was March 14, 1946: the uneasy interlude after the end of World War II had ended, and everybody could sense it. Luce’s fellow editors and executives scrutinized the famous Englishman, as if taken aback to find him so small, in the way that movie fans are startled to find that their idols are less than the twenty-foot giants of the silver screen. In the words of a lucid and penetrating memorandum that Charles Murphy wrote for Luce’s private files, there was just a dress-shirted cave where the chest should have been, and a swelling paunch that bore testimony to years of rich fare.

Behind them was a brooding sculpture of a bald eagle, carved in clear ice some hours earlier by the Union Club chiefs. The wings of this symbol of American might were outstretched: its eyes glittered, and every crevice was heaped with black caviar. The club’s heating had been turned up, and rivers of iced water dribbled down its chest. Churchill leered. “The eagle,” he announced, “seems to have caught a cold.”

He was hypnotized less by the sculptor’s art than by the caviar. He waved aside the genteel slices of toast an editor handed him, explained, “This stuff needs no reinforcement,” and put words into action by shoveling a whopping helping onto a plate, and from there, with scarcely a perceptible interruption, straight and undiluted to his mouth — seemingly unabashed at the appreciative belches that shortly emerged from that orifice. “I hope, Gentlemen,” he apologized with little evidence of true contrition, “I hope you don’t find me too explosive an animal.”

Luce misinterpreted the remark. “On the contrary, sir,” he said, “you were only putting into words what was gravely in the minds of many Americans.”

The remainder of the evening, or so Charles Murphy’s memorandum goes, saw the obese animal that had become Churchill quaffing down copious amounts of liquor and rich food, until finally:

At one point that evening, Churchill just settled back and let his thoughts ramble — over Eisenhower, whom he always called "Ike,"over that vanishing breed, horses; over Drew Pearson and American journalism. Then he eagerly described a new American gadget, the Dictaphone: “Think of being able to talk for twenty minutes into a little green disk that only costs a dime,” he said. “But that is not the end of the marvelous accomplishments of this machine. If you wish to ponder what you have said, it is only necessary to flick a switch and it will play your words right back.”

The journalists present that evening would probably never forget their encounter with Winston Churchill. With fire in his eyes, he talked wistfully of the panoply of battle, and he said challengingly: “War is the greatest of all stimulants.” Henry Luce proposed a toast in words which everybody felt exactly right: “We are accustomed,” announced Luce, “to drink toasts to people. I propose a toast to Civilization. But Civilization is embodied in people. So, to Winston Churchill, the First Citizen of Western Civilization, Defender of the Faith.”

They were sorry to see him leave. Churchill pulled himself to his feet, politely repeated the name of each person as he shook hands with him, and peered intently into that man’s face as though fixing it hard upon his memory. He was no longer Prime Minister but in opposition. A spent force? “The fire has unmistakably burned low,” wrote one observer.

If there was one passage that fixed itself on their minds, it was when Churchill warmed to the theme of Fulton and the furor that his “Iron Curtain” speech has caused. He dismissed the Soviet reaction as ill tempered, crude, and a typically Communist trick. In fact — and his cheeks positively glowed as he said it — Stalin had used almost the same terms to attack him as had Hitler in his time. “War Monger, inciter of wars, imperialist, reactionary has-been-why, it is beginning to sound like old times,” scoffed Churchill.

We see a glimpse here of the real Churchill, bloated and scoffing at the aphrodisiac of war and the remembrance of past battles irrespective of lives lost whether innocent or not; Churchill, the consummate politician having made decisions to send men and women to do battle and yet not once showing any remorse or personal feeling about doing so. The real Winston Churchill was a power-hungry politician who deliberately prolonged the war to advance his own career. He was a coward who goaded Hitler into bombing London then fled to safety during the Blitz. He was a serious alcoholic who hired an actor to deliver his greatest speech because he was too drunk to broadcast it himself.

The real Churchill lived for the moment of power and the lustful life. As Hitler was to become the terror of civilization, so Churchill would respond in equally terrifying ways. Here are a few more examples from Irving’s Churchill’s War:

Ifear that if we entered upon this pass we should soon find that it led to Mussolini being a mediator between us and Germany, and to an Armistice and conference under the conditions of our being at Hitler’s mercy. Such a conference would only end in weakening fatally our power to resist the terrible terms which will almost certainly be imposed, if not upon France, at any rate upon Britain.

We do not feel unable to continue the struggle and our people would never allow us to quit until we have fought our fight. They are an unbeaten people and will never allow us to surrender. They know well that for us once under the Nazi domination there can be no mercy.

Thus we do not see any way but to fight on, and we have good hopes of holding out until some deep change occurs in Germany or Europe… (Irving, page 295)

Political oblivion moving ever closer, Churchill whistled up the familiar demons to prove Britain had no choice: “If,” he argued, “Herr Hitler was prepared to make peace on the [basis of] restoration of the German colonies and the over lordship of Central Europe, that was one thing. But it was quite unlikely that he would make any such offer” (Irving, page 299).

Churchill spoke scathingly of the French —“hypnotized by the Maginot Line,” he called them. He blamed the B.E.F.’s retreat on the French failure to push northwards from the Somme.

“How many would get away we could not tell…. Calais had been defended by a British force which had refused to surrender, and it was said that there were no survivors.”

Dunkirk, he continued, motioning with his cigar, was under a pall of black smoke. “On two occasions great flights of German bombers turned away and declined battle when they saw our fighter patrols.” It would be said, “and with some truth,” that this was the greatest British defeat for centuries.

“Attempts to invade us would no doubt be made, but they would be beset with immense difficulty. We should mine all round the coast; our Navy was immensely strong…our supplies of food, oil, etc., were ample; we had good troops in this island, others were on the way by sea, both British Army units coming from remote garrisons and excellent Dominion troops.”

His main purpose was to discourage thoughts of peace:

“It was idle to think that if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms from Germany than if we went on and fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet — that would be called ‘disarmament’ — our naval bases, and much else. We should become a puppet state, though a British Government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up —‘under Mosley or some such person’…Therefore…we shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere. And if at last the long story is to end…let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the field.” (Irving, page301)

When, in mid-August 1940, Chamberlain was growing weaker because of cancer, Winston’s attitude toward him was contemptuous:

... that rather distant and sympathetic manner that the United States was manifesting towards Britain. Behind the sympathy was a lingering contempt. “History will deal severely with Chamberlain,” he would rasp, toward the end of the current war, and add, after a well timed pause, “I know — because I shall write it,” (Irving, page 401)

Readers may be alarmed at some elements in these pages. Few of the visiting statesmen failed to comment in their private papers on Churchill’s consumption of alcohol, occasionally coupling their remarks with the puzzled observation that even the hardest liquor appeared to leave him unimpaired. In official American publications, documents have been doctored to omit such passages. Irving’s book also shows evidence that, on occasions, Churchill’s temporary incapacitation resulted in political or military decisions that damaged British prestige, and even caused casualties among the soldiers and sailors concerned. He was his happiest at war, and said so. He was rarely a creator, always a destroyer — of cities, of monuments and works of art, of populations, of frontiers, of monarchies, and finally his own country’s empire.

During the years leading up to the war and the political struggle between Churchill and Chamberlain, we see the real Churchill emerge. Churchill was a consummate politician who connived and stretched the truth to obtain his way. According to Irving:

At the Admiralty, the Officers were aghast at the distinct possibility that Churchill would profit from Chamberlain’s humiliation. The danger to my mind [wrote the acting Director of Operations that night] is that out of it will come a Government headed by that arch-idiot Winston. I’m quite certain he’s played the whole of his last 8 months to become P.M., often at the expense of helping to win the war as witness the way he never backed us against the Air.

There are too many examples in Churchill’s war to mention, which propose that this man of destiny had an agenda based on self-interest and a breakneck speed to get his way. This, of course, is the hallmark of the egocentric, of which Churchill was perhaps this century’s champion.

As Hitler was a psychopath, so Churchill was the consummate manipulator, hell-bent on creating history no matter the cost, whether they be lives or empires. To prolong the war and immortalize himself in history, he deliberately fastened the British Empire into debt with the United States, dressing it up as the Lend Lease.

In addition to Hitler and Churchill, we have a the third player in this disaster: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the consummate gambler, playing his cards very close to his chest, never letting the right hand know what the left hand was doing. “I would rather,” said Roosevelt in 1942, “lose New Zealand, Australia, or anything else rather than have the Russians collapse.” He also said England was “an old tired power and must take second place to the younger United States, Russia, and China.” Later, this sly statesman conceded, “When there are four people sitting in a poker game and three of them are against the fourth, it is a little hard on the fourth.”

France’s humiliating defeat and Britain’s threatening bankruptcy gave Roosevelt an opportunity to clean up these old empires. At Teheran in 1943, he confided to Stalin, “I want to do away with the Third Reich.” He added, “In any language.” Stalin liked that. Roosevelt’s policy was to pay out just enough to give the empire support — the kind of support a rope gives a hanging man. When his treasury secretary confirmed, after visiting London in 1944, that Britain was penniless, the cynical man in the Oval Office snickered: “I had no idea,” he said. “I will go over there and make a couple of talks and take over the British Empire.”

This inspired American statesman would pursue his subversion of the Empire throughout the war. He might lead the crusade for democracy, but he expected the front-line nations to foot the bill. During the Munich crisis, he had predicted to his cabinet that the United States would be enriched by any resulting war. Sure enough, gold from the beleaguered nations had begun to flow in payment for American war materials. The 1939 revision of neutrality legislation, which legalized this sale of war goods to belligerents, and the Johnson Debt-Default Act required that such purchases be for cash. So the great bloodletting began. Britain donated £2,078 million in aid to its own minor allies during the war years, but the United States extorted from Britain every movable asset in return for acting as an arsenal of democracy. During the war, Britain would sell off £1,118 million of foreign investments; in addition, its foreign debt would increase £2,595 million from 1938 to 1945. Formerly the world’s major creditor, Britain became an international pauper and even forty years later had not permanently recovered.

The turning point came when the United States Congress enacted Lend Lease. On that day, Britain was saved from an ignominious defeat at the hands of the arch-enemy Hitler and the Third Reich — but at what price? Churchill, in vanity and ineptitude, had destroyed the empire and its assets. So as we see this savage and brutal conflict play out between the old empires of Germany, France, and Britain (Russia having succumbed to the Bolsheviks), the new empire of the United States — with a history of self-interests and socialization under Roosevelt — was to become the champion. Materialism was in full swing at this point of the twentieth century. Leadership was at an all-time low on all fronts, with greed and power lust fueling the veins of the protagonists as they sacrificed everything in their quest for dominance. This was no “just” war; it was no different from any other war prior or since. It was merely about greed and power.

Eventually, with the well-designed and well-executed official entry of the United States into the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the war in Europe meandered toward its final conclusion. One of its protagonists, Adolf Hitler, commited suicide. Although Churchill secured his place in history and Roosevelt attained his greedy ambitions, the war in the Pacific was relatively short, although savage and blood-thirsty, as the animal-minded Nippon forces cut a swathe through the Pacific. Their end came with the godless yet fully “justified” acts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By war’s end, knowledge was in full cry and wisdom long forgotten.

Adolf Hitler

As we explore the warped and obviously insane mind of Adolf Hitler, we will use references from Robert G. L. Waite’s The Psychopathic God, Adolf Hitler. According to H. Stuart Hughes, of all the works authored on Adolf Hitler since 1945, Waite’s is “a triumph — a wonderful mixture of psychological perception and good sense. Even though a thousand books are written on Hitler, this will long remain the best.” In reviewing this definitive psychological portrait of Adolf Hitler, which documents accounts of his behavior, beliefs, tastes, fears, and compulsions, many new revelations emerge explaining not only how his insanity manifested but why. Waite sheds new light on this complex figure. It is recommended to any serious student of history.

The young Adolf suffered from many mental disorders that emanated from an abnormal relationship with his parents. He idolized his mother and lived in fear and hate of his father:

Like many fathers of his place and time, Alois Hitler believed in corporal punishment. Bridget Hitler, the wife of Alois Jr., testified that her husband had often told her about his childhood and described his father as a person with “a very violent temper.” He “often beat the dog until it…wet on the floor. He often beat the children, and on occasion…would beat his wife Klara.” Other people who knew Alois Hitler have said that his children never dared to speak in their father’s presence without being told to. They were not permitted to use the familiar “du,” but were told to address him as “Herr Vater.” He was accustomed to calling his son Adolf not by name but by putting two fingers in his mouth and whistling for him as he did for his dog. (Waite, page 134)

The adolescent Adolf developed a decidedly abnormal and dysfunctional personality. His twisted and paranoid mind of terror was prone to all manner of fetishes and symbolical responses to everyday life.

During his adolescence, he suffered an identity crisis. A painful process of “finding” himself followed:

During the identity crisis a person may adopt a “negative identity” as a means of attacking a hated father… when a son takes on an identity radically different from one his father intended for him — and this is certainly what Adolf did — he is showing a “paranoid form, a powerful death wish (latent in all sever identity crises) against [his] parents.” (Waite, page 185)

In Hitler’s case, this was accompanied by an extreme need for some type ideology:

... a total commitment that will answer all the vague but “urgentquestions which arise in consequence of identity or conflict.” Hitler found his faith in anti-Semitism and racial nationalism... It became the ground of his being and the core of his political philosophy. It allowed him ... to destroy and to create. It required that he destroy the “Jewish peril” and create a radically pure Motherland.

Anti-Semitism was deeply satisfying to Hitler for psychological as well as historical or philosophical reasons. He embraced anti-Semitism at a highly vulnerable point in his life. Even before his mother died [of breast cancer while under the treatment of a Jewish physician], Adolf had experienced one of the most shattering events of his life: he was rejected by the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, apparently smashing his cherished ambition to become an artist. (Waite, pages 186-187)

Questions about his own genealogy made him extremely uneasy. When he was once threatened with blackmail by a relative who claimed to have special information that Adolf had a Jewish grandfather, he ordered his lawyer to investigate. His lawyer discovered Adolf’s father was the illegitimate son of a domestic who worked in a Jewish home. Adolf became obsessed with worry about the possibility that he was Jewish.

The two physical characteristics he associated with Jews — body odors and large noses — were two things that bothered him about himself. Hitler’s obsessive concern with personal cleanliness and his abhorrence of perfume and after shave lotion was so great, one suspects, because he was afraid that either the smell of body odor or the use of perfume to cover it up might make people think he was a Jew. When one of his colleagues asked why Jews “always remain strangers in the nation,” Hitler had his ready answer: “The Jews [have] a different smell.” (Waite, page 131)

He was the doe-eyed, sympathetic figure who could instantly change into a terrorizing despot. His response to the arts was that they demanded fanaticism. According to Christa Schroeder, one of his secretaries, “His library contained no classics or any single book of humane or intellectual value.” Hitler himself said, “I read to confirm my ideas.”

Since Hitler saw himself as a Messiah with a divine mission to save Germany from the incarnate evil of “International Jewry,” it is not surprising that he likened himself to Jesus. On one occasion during the 1920’s, as he lashed about him with the whip he habitually carried, he said that, “In driving out the Jews, I remind myself of Jesus in the Temple.” At another time, “Just like Christ, I have a duty to my own people…” (Waite)

At a Christmas celebration in 1926, Hitler thought it appropriate to compare his own historical importance favorably with that of Jesus. Christ had changed the dating of history and so would Hitler. It was his intention to “complete” what was begun by Christ. He would mark the beginning of a new age in the history of the world with his final “victory” over the Jews. In a speech on February 10, 1933, he parodied the Lord’s Prayer in promising that under him a new kingdom would come on earth and that his would be “the power and the glory, Amen.” He added that if he did not fulfill his mission, he should be crucified.

In reminiscing about the institutions and ideas that had influenced him, Hitler said he had learned a great deal from Marxist terrorism, from the protocols of the Elders of Zion, and from the Freemasons. But, he concluded, “Above all, I have learnt from the Jesuit Order.” Certainly, the oath of direct obedience to the Fuehrer was strikingly reminiscent of the special oath that the Jesuits swear to the Pope. Moreover, Hitler spoke of his elite SS, who wore the sacred symbol and dressed in black, as his “society of Jesus.”

In this self-deluded messianic state of mind, Hitler projected a vision of human history that was one of religious mythology and mysticism. He believed a pure German people had lived in an early Garden of Eden. He concluded that this pure race had been attacked by the devil and made incarnate in the form of the Jew. He said many times that “the Jew is the personification of the devil and all evil.” By fighting the devil (Jews), he rationalized the he was doing the work of the Almighty God. His theology, based on original sin as depicted in the biblical Garden of Eden story, concluded that the original sins of this world manifested in blood and race. World War II was regarded in eschatological terms by Hitler, who saw himself as the commander of the forces of good standing at Armageddon, battling the forces of Satan: “Often it seems to me as if we are being tested by the Devil and Satan and we must pass through Hell together until we finally obtain ultimate victory.”

He viewed the Nazi Party and the Reich not merely as secular organizations. “I consider those who establish or destroy a religion much greater than those who establish a State, to say nothing of founding a Party,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. Years later he told his followers, “We are not a movement, rather we are a religion.”

The institutional pattern he used for creating his new order was the Roman Catholic Church, which had so greatly impressed him. As a boy, he had dreamed of being an abbot. When he became Fuhrer, however, he raised his sights and saw himself as a political Pope with an apostolic succession. He announced to a closed meeting of the faithful in the Brown House during 1930, “I hereby set forth for myself and my successors in the leadership of the Party the claim of political infallibility. I hope the world will grow as accustomed to that claim as it has to the claim of the Holy Father.”

Hitler’s obsession with the Jews came primarily from his reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he believed his personal mission on Earth was the eradication of all Jews.

The member of the Thule Society who most influenced Hitler and who helped reinforce his political ideas was the racist poet Dietrich Eckart, best known in Germany for his translation of Peer Gynt. Hitler’s eyes invariably moistened whenever he spoke of Eckart. He dedicated the second volume of Mein Kampf to him — a highly atypical public acknowledgment of indebtedness. And years later, in a midnight reverie, he looked back upon Eckart as an admonishing father figure in whose presence he felt like a small boy: “He shone in our eyes like a polar star. When he admonished someone, it was with so much wit. At that time [1922] I was intellectually a child still on the bottle.”

Eckart had written scathing attacks on Jews and other non-Germans in his racist periodical, Auf gut Deutsch (In Plain German), a journal that shows clearly Eckart had read Lanz-Liebenfels, List, Fritsch, Wagner, and H. S. Chamberlain, and that he too was fascinated with runic mysteries and such secret signs as the SS and the swastika. His poetry, which Hitler considered “as beautiful as Goethe’s,” proclaimed his belief in Germany’s messianic mission:

Father in Heaven, resolved to the death

Kneel we before Thee, Oh answer us, then!

Does aught other people Thine awful command

More loyally follow than we Germans do?

Is there one such? Then Eternal One, send

Father, Thou smilest? Oh, joy without end!

Up! and onward, onward to the holy crusade.

A little-known pamphlet that seems to have been written jointly by Hitler and Eckart and published in 1924 is an important source for Hitler’s political ideas during these years. Despite its ambitious title, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: Dialogue Between Adolf Hitler and Me, there is virtually nothing in the pamphlet about Bolshevism. Hitler’s concern here, as it had been in Vienna, is with race and the alleged Jewish conspiracy. He and Eckart discuss various other matters, including freemasonry, Christianity, pacifism — but not Communism. Hitler’s invectives against the “Bolshevik peril” were to come later, as his propagandists later claimed, “instinctively anti-Communist.” Indeed, he had grudging admiration for their radical activist theory and openly admired the way Communist leaders used their theory to control and manipulate the masses. Stalin, he often said glowingly, was “just one helluva fellow!”

Fulfillment

As technology and our ability to use it in acquiring knowledge continued, we see the fulfillment of the prophecies of past ages. This chapter of the twentieth century was a defining moment in our planet’s long and turbulent history, whereby the consolidation of these three sophistries was effected. >From that consolidation would emerge the beginning of the dire harvest of materialism and secularism; still more terrible destruction was yet to come.

While the evolution of mankind provides our modern civilization with incredible technological advances together with an exciting and self-gratifying experience, patience will be required if our planet is to evolve to a point where all people benefit equally. Unbridled self-gratification and impatience have the propensity to plunge mankind into devolution. History records eloquently that this undisciplined impatience quickly unravels the well-woven fabric of society.

In our confusion over man’s origin, we must not lose sight of our eternal destiny. Let’s not forget that Jesus loved little children, and that He forever made clear the great worth of human personality. As we view the world, remember that the black patches of evil we see are shown against a white background of ultimate good. We do not view merely white patches of good that show up miserably against a black background of evil.

When there is so much good truth to publish and proclaim, it’s a pity to dwell on and accept the evil in the world simply because it appears to be an unalterable fact. The beauty and spiritual values of truth are more pleasurable and uplifting than is the phenomenon of evil. In religion, Jesus advocated and followed the method of experience, even as modern science pursues the technique of experiment. We find God through spiritual insight, but we approach this insight of the soul through the love of the beautiful, pursuit of truth, loyalty to duty, and worship of divine goodness. Of all these values, love is the true guide to real insight, which is wisdom.

As we learn from our past mistakes, we must strive to break the pattern that has afforded such destruction. But how is this to be achieved when our children are denied the complete picture of our recent history? Our institutions of learning have been modified and manipulated by those who would prefer ignorance and indolence in our curriculums so that their agendas may be progressed.

As adults, we face similar obstructions to truth. Our modern minds are so preoccupied with survival and the present that we scarcely have time for reflection on our history. The information overload is so great that our news is provided in five-second sound bytes that cater to a mass audience with a diminishing ability to concentrate, weigh and question.

Little wonder, then, that so many accept World War II as being a “just” war when, in fact, it was an amazing chronicle of mass human carnage and genocide. This panoramic review of the twentieth century up to the end of World War II provides a sense not only of what went wrong but why. Wars are the product of egocentric megalomaniacal political leaders. Their personal psychotic impulses are so strong and unfettered that they recklessly plunge their nations and eventually the world into blood-soaked battles where there are no winners — and the losers are the innocent mortals so cruelly destroyed by their leaders. How can any war — no matter who starts it, who participates, and whatever comprises its principles — ever be justified and described as “just”? Yet, it’s a popular description, utilized by those in our societies who fall into the populist mindset of the day.

This mindset is described by Howard Bloom in his book The Lucifer Principle. Bloom examines the research of Dr. Paul D. MacLean, who first posited the concept of the “triune brain.” According to MacLean, near the base of a human skull is the stem of the brain poking up from the spinal column like an unadorned walking stick. Sitting atop that rudimentary stump is a mass of cerebral tissue bequeathed us by our earliest totally land-dwelling ancestors, the reptiles. When these beasts turned their back on the sea, roughly three hundred million years ago and hobbled inland, their primary focus was simple survival. The new landlubbers needed to hunt, find a mate, to carve out territory, and to fight in that territory’s defense. The neural machinery they evolved took care of these elementary functions. MacLean calls it the “reptile brain.” The reptile brain still sits inside our skull, like the pit at the center of a peach. It is a vigorous participant in our mental affairs, pumping its primitive, instinctual orders to us at all hours of the day or night.

Violence as it has developed in the twentieth century is the product of the “neocortex,” according to Bloom’s elucidation of MacLean’s theory. Having only just reached a point of pre-civilization, the neocortex is breached by the primal savagery of the “reptile brain.” What Bloom failed to recognize is that in this transition from reptile to mammal to primate brain, hundreds of millions of years culminated in the emergence of “free will.” This free will as exercised by the modern hominid already possessed psychotic tendencies and resulted in reptilian thinking. In modern language, this is referred to “fight or flight.” Remembering that it takes two or more sides to eventuate a war, the opposing political leaders, being ignorant of their “reptilian brains,” reacted with similarly reptilian responses — savagery. Once the reptile brain is loosened from the nurturing mammalian and hominid neocortex, savagery and barbarism are unleashed in blood-letting, as the history of world wars proves.

Eons after the first reptiles ambled away from the beach, their great-great grandchildren, many times removed, evolved a few dramatic product improvements. These upgrades included fur, warm blood, the ability to nurture eggs inside their own bodies, and the portable supply of baby food we know as milk. The remodeled creatures were no longer reptiles; they had become mammals. Mammals’ evolved features gave them the ability to leave the lush tropics and make their way into the chilly north. Their warm blood allowed them, in fact, to survive the rigors of an occasional ice age while exacting certain costs. Warm blood meant that mammalian parents could not simply lay an egg and wander off. It forced mammalian mothers to brood over their children for weeks, months, or even years. And it required a tighter social organization to take care of these suckling clusters of mammal mothers and children.

All this demanded that a few additions be built into the old reptilian brain. Nature complied by constructing an envelope of new neural tissue that surrounded the reptile brain, like a peach’s juicy fruit enveloping the pit. MacLean called the add-on the “mammalian brain.” The mammalian brain guided play, maternal behavior, and a host of other emotions. It kept our furry ancestors together in nurturing gangs.

Far down the winding path of time, a few of our hirsute progenitors tried something new. They stood on their hind legs, looked around them, and applied their minds and hands to the exploitation of the world. These were the early hominids. But proto-human aspirations were impractical without the construction of another brain accessory. Nature once again complied, wrapping a thin layer of fresh neural substance around the two old cortical standbys — the reptilian and mammalian brains. The new structure, stretched around the old ones like a peach’s skin, was the neo cortex — the primate brain. This primate brain, which includes the human brain, had awesome powers. It could envisage the future. It could weigh a possible action and imagine the consequences. It could support the development of language, reason and culture. But the neocortex had a drawback; it was merely a thin veneer over the two ancient brains. And those were as active as ever, measuring every bit of input from the eyes and ears and issuing fresh orders. The thinking human, no matter how exalted his sentiments, was still listening to the voices of a demanding reptile and a chattering ancient mammal. Both were speaking to him from the depths of his own skull.

Richard Leakey, the eminent paleoanthropologist, says war didn’t exist until men invented agriculture and began to acquire possessions. In the back of Leakey’s mind, one might find a wistful prayer that agriculture would go away so we could rediscover peace. But Leakey is wrong. Violence is not a product of the digging stick and hoe.

Hitler, as described in Waite’s The Psychopathic God, released the reptilian side of his nature. Churchill responded in an equally reptilian manner, spurred on by political aspiration, greed and power lust. The whole episode escalated into a blood-letting period that is unsurpassed in our history. Roosevelt responded in an equally reptilian manner by maneuvering Churchill and the British into a suicidal plunge to poverty and the end of the British Empire. Stalin, Mussolini, and Hirohito were no different. They each acted out their reptilian natures in ways that would see their countrymen slaughtered either on the battle field or innocently in cities. World War II was created by unwise and reptilian-minded political leaders, undertaken by the reptilian minds of the various military commanders, filtering down to expose the worst propensities of man. Atrocities and all manner of savage behavior resulted that rivals only the “Jurassic” era.

The glorification of war is nothing more than the primitive mind of mankind seeking to justify the voices of a demanding reptile and a chattering ancient mammal. The truly civilized mind of hominid not only controls the reptile brain, but seeks to shame future generations into accepting that it is unnecessary. It preempts and corrupts our individual free will. Ultimately, it is against God.

Insights from this piece of modern history together with the valuable information that Bloom gleans from MacLean’s theory will form much of the content of solutions presented in later chapters. We must first know our history, then evaluate why things happen. More important, we must know ourselves if we are ever to develop a system of government that provides peace on earth. There are solutions to our problems. They are available if we as societies of so-called civilized beings will only stop and take proper notice of past prophets and teachers. We must seek the “truth” with open minds and a willingness to learn anew. Then and only then will our world be free from the savagery of our reptile natures and share the sublimity of peace on earth. Anything less, and we shall all surely suffer the suicidal fate that hangs like a dark cloud over our heads in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 5

Post World War II

There is no nation, it seems, which is not being promised the whole earth.- Elias Canfetti

The world’s view of war was changed forever on July 16, 1945. On that day in Alamogordo, New Mexico, America exploded the world's first atomic bomb, sending a huge mushroom-shaped cloud high into the sky.

The Manhattan Project, the code name for the U.S. effort during World War II to produce the atomic bomb, was led primarily by German and German-Jewish scientists who had escaped from Adolf Hitler’s Germany. It was named for the Manhattan Engineer District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, because much of the early research was done in New York City. Sparked by refugee physicists in the United States, the program was slowly organized after nuclear fission was discovered by German scientists in 1938, and many U.S. scientists expressed the fear that Hitler would attempt to build a fission bomb.

In 1939, an American university professor named Albert Einstein (1879-1955) wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlining the possibility of using a nuclear chain reaction for a bomb. After reading the letter, Roosevelt began the Manhattan Project in 1943. Only a few people knew of the project. Einstein later regretted his letter to Roosevelt, but he feared the Nazis would develop an atomic weapon and use it on America. Many scientific and military people involved in developing the bomb did not want it to be used, feeling it was immoral.

The program was first under the leadership of Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), head of the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development; and later under General Leslie Groves (1896-1970) of the Army Corps of Engineers. Groves immediately purchased a site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee for facilities to separate the necessary uranium 235 from the much more common uranium 238, and he consolidated the research done in many East Coast universities under the direction of Arthur Compton (1892-1962) at the University of Chicago. He also appointed German theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) as director of the weapons laboratory built on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico. After much difficulty, a porous barrier suitable for separating isotopes of uranium was developed and installed in the Oak Ridge gaseous diffusion plant. Finally, in 1945, uranium 235 of bomb purity was shipped to Los Alamos, where it was fashioned into a gun-type weapon. In a barrel, one piece of uranium was fired at another, together forming a supercritical, explosive mass.

On August 6 and August 9, 1945, American planes dropped one atomic bomb each on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first bomb destroyed 80 percent of Hiroshima’s buildings and killed about 80,000 people. The second bomb killed about 35,000 people. Japan surrendered to America after Nagasaki, but the people of Japan suffered failing health and horrible deaths for years afterward because of the effects of atomic radiation.

Controversy still rages on the "necessity" of destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs that killed more than a hundred thousand people and wounded nearly as many. The atomic bomb did not win the war in the Pacific; at best, it hastened Japanese acceptance of a defeat that was viewed as inevitable. Advocates of the bombing claimed, however, that invasion of the Japanese home islands would otherwise have been required, producing untold carnage. Those opposed, among whom were many of the scientists involved in developing the bombs, argued in retrospect that the United States' use of the atomic bomb may have been the first act of the Cold War.

In any event, the incidents at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had dire consequences for our planet. The Manhattan Project was an example of absolute idiocy. This unleashed universal energy not only endangered our two human rights — life itself and a planet on which to live on — but also endangered nearby neighbors in our universe.

So it was that in 1947, two years after the explosions and scene of the mushroom clouds over the cities of Japan, neighbors in our universe, concerned with the evolving reptilian minded-ness of our planet’s human population, began to monitor our behavior. (We will discuss this still much-discussed incident at Roswell, New Mexico later in this chapter.) With atomic weaponry, we had reached a point in our evolution where fighting and warring had quantum-leaped to potential annihilation of our life plasm and the planet itself.

This desperate act by the U.S. government, justified by the need to end the war in the Pacific and thus save millions of lives, did not take into account the dire consequences that could — and did — follow. Not only were the atheistic scientists involved in the Manhattan Project fearful of a worldwide catastrophe prior to the detonation of the first device in New Mexico, but they were also patently aware that it would be impossible to contain the immediate radiation fallout from such explosions, much less safely store residual nuclear waste. Still, they forged ahead toward a godless and reckless plunge into the unknown. This single act will go down in our planet’s future history as the culminating point of absolute insanity, developed out of man's savage need to conquer his fellow man.

Now let us take a look at the post-war United States. Flush with the success of defeating the Axis powers in Europe and the Pacific, the United States had emerged by the late 1940s both financially and militarily as a super power. The industrial and military machinery of this nation was in an embryo stage. It would require wise leadership to prevent the industrial military complex, representing capitalism on the one hand and the emerging social democracy on the other hand, to reverse this hallowed position.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) alluded to the problem when he referred to the emerging “industrial military complex” in the 1950s.

This ideological conflict waged from opposite sides of the political spectrum would become known as the “right” and “left” of politics. Both of these ideologies are grossly flawed, and each cling tenaciously to the delusion of national sovereignty. On the “right” are the proponents of capitalism fueled by greed and power-lust. On the “left” are the proponents of socialism, fueled by jealousy and hate. Both are firmly rooted in secularism, materialism, and atheistic science. Both maintain their political positions drawing heavily on knowledge but utterly lacking the wisdom of history and experience. As we view the chapters of the latter part of the twentieth century, the reader will easily recognize this fallacy.

The “right” and “left” of western political life during the balance of the century would experience the ebb and flow of populist thinking as the citizens, confused by fear of a potential nuclear threat, gave their power away to unwise politicians. This apathy would prove to be almost suicidal. We must always remember that representative government and their agencies are fallible — they are just people — and they can never replace God. That is why a global government, at this point in time, is a recipe for disaster. Before a global government can ever become a just and wise course, there must first be a power beyond our imagination capable of creating the circumstances whereby religious and political sovereignty have been surrendered to God as the supreme sovereign. This unimagined power has been prophesied in all religions and is expected at the "end of the age." Many believe that this new age will coincide with the first part of the third millennium. Christianity has expectantly awaited this event for each of the 2,000 years since Jesus walked among men.

Whether this comes to pass sooner or later, we as mortals must strive to find common ground between not only the dominant global powers but all nations, so that a framework for a future just and righteous global government will be in place. Unless we accomplish this goal, we will continue to experience wars and rumors of wars, as the strong and powerful sovereign nations rub shoulders with only oceans separating them. Nations with power agendas cannot rub shoulders without generating conflicts and eventuating wars. Nations that view other nations as a means toward an end — whether that end is richer oil fields or a source of cheap labor — will always pose a threat to peace.

A Cosmic Watergate

A mysterious crash, dead extraterrestrials littering the landscape, a government cover-up. The incident that occurred near Roswell, New Mexico, on June 14, 1947, is an elaborate tale, growing ever more so with time and mythic imagination. Although the Roswell Incident seems the most spectacular flying-saucer story, the phenomenon goes far beyond the small desert town.

On the day W. W. (“Mac”) Brazel chanced upon the strange debris (June 14, 1947), he was making his rounds at the J. B. Foster sheep ranch, 85 miles northwest of Roswell. The wreckage was strewn over a 200-yard area and consisted largely of rubber strips, tin foil, wood sticks, Scotch tape, other tape decorated with a floral design and what the rancher described as a rather tough paper.

Ten days after Brazel's chance discovery, Boise business man and trained pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Washington state’s Cascade Mountains when he spotted what he described as nine disk-like objects flying in formation at about 1,200 mph. It was Arnold’s report that led to widespread use of the term “flying saucer.” His story immediately gave rise to other sightings. By July 4, newspapers were reporting literally hundreds of stories of “flying saucers” in skies across the nation. Arnold’s report has held up to 50 years of scrutiny as a puzzling but excellent sighting.

Rancher Brazel, who had no radio in his shack, was not aware of the sightings until July 5. He heard about the saucers when he drove to a nearby town. By then, Brazel later told the Roswell Daily Record, he had already returned to the littered field with his wife and two children, gathered the debris, and taken it home. On July 7, while in Roswell, he reported to the sheriff that he might have found a flying disk. Sheriff George Wilcox immediately phoned nearby Roswell Army Air Field, home of the 509th Bomb Group, and notified Major Jesse Marcel, the group intelligence officer. Marcel, hardly able to control his excitement, went to Brazel to collect the debris.

A July 8 press release issued by the Roswell Army Air Field caused quite a sensation: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region,” proclaimed the Roswell Daily Record. Word of the discovery quickly spread and press inquiries came in from all over the world.

The excitement did not last, however. At 8th Air Force headquarters on the same night, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, consulted with his weather forecaster, Warrant Officer Irving Newton, then called in the local press. He announced that the debris was nothing more than the remnants of a high-altitude weather balloon. The sticks and tin foil, he explained, were from a reflector used to track the balloon by radar. The next day, under the headline "General Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer," the Daily Record reported his retraction and explanation. Tranquillity returned to Roswell, and more than three decades would pass before any more excitement was stirred.

It was in 1978 that Stanton Friedman, a former itinerant nuclear physicist who describes himself as “a clear-cut, unambiguous UFOlogist,” met up with Jesse Marcel, long retired from the Air Force and living nearby. After quizzing Marcel, who still believed the debris he retrieved was extraterrestrial, Friedman reviewed the old stories about Roswell, painstakingly sought out and interviewed other witnesses, and came to a dramatic conclusion: there had been a cover-up of “cosmic Watergate” proportions. His research and conclusions became the basis of the 1980 book The Roswell Incident, co-written by Charles Berlitz (author of The Bermuda Triangle) and UFO investigator William Moore. Its publication put Roswell back on the map.

Mentioned briefly in the book was a yarn told secondhand to Friedman by a couple who attended one of his lectures in 1972. They claimed that a friend, now dead, had told them about coming upon a crashed saucer in 1947 on the Plains of San Augustin, New Mexico, about 150 miles west of the Foster ranch. Before being shooed away by military police, he claimed, he had spotted several small bodies strewn nearby. Since the story had no apparent connection to Roswell and was given scant credence by Friedman and the authors, it was generally ignored. Yet it was the UFO era’s first mention of alien casualties.

In 1988, responding to the continuing speculation about Roswell, the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Chicago sponsored a team to seek out the crash site, recover any remaining debris and interview surviving “witnesses.” Three years later, the key members of that team, science-fiction author Kevin Randle and CUFOS investigator Don Schmitt, published their conclusions in the book UFO Crash at Roswell. In addition to recovering a UFO at Roswell, they charged, the government had found and spirited away the remnants of its crew: several small alien bodies.

Randle and Schmitt reinforced their findings with accounts by Roswell witnesses, some of whom had earlier been interviewed by Friedman. The most notable of their sources was Glenn Dennis, who had been a mortician in 1947. According to Dennis, he had received inquiries from the air base that July about the availability of child-size coffins and procedures for embalming bodies that had been exposed to the elements.

Even more intriguing, he claimed that he had seen strange activity at the base hospital early in July and had been ordered to leave after encountering a hysterical Army nurse, who later told him she had aided doctors performing autopsies on strange-looking, small bodies. The nurse, he added, had sworn him to secrecy and had been transferred to

England, flown out of the base shortly after they spoke. Later, he said, he heard that she had been killed in a plane crash.

Friedman's interest in UFOs landed him a deal as adviser for a 1989 episode of a television series dealing with the Roswell crash. One viewer of the episode, Gerald Anderson, called the show and said the re-enactment of the event was inaccurate. For one thing, he said, the shape of the crashed spacecraft was wrong. He explained he had been a witness, thus knew this firsthand.

Friedman saw this as confirmation of the incident at Roswell. He arranged to have John Carpenter, a Springfield therapist, interview Anderson. Carpenter, who also directed investigations for the local chapter of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, conducted several sessions with Anderson, often using hypnosis, presumably to help him recover buried memories of the event. Anderson later reported to the local newspaper: “We all went up…to it [a large silver disk]. There were three creatures, three bodies, lying on the ground underneath this thing in the shade. Two weren't moving, and the third one obviously was having trouble breathing, like when you have broken ribs. There was a fourth one [that]...apparently had been giving first aid to the others.” Soon after, Anderson claimed, the military arrived, moving the civilians away from the site and ordering everyone to forget what they had seen.

Armed with his new evidence, Friedman and UFO researcher Don Berliner co-authored their own book, Crash at Corona, in 1992. In this book, they concluded the government recovered not one but two saucers in July 1947, along with seven dead extraterrestrials and one that was still alive. The first craft, they claimed, crashed near Corona after some kind of midair accident that showered debris on the Foster ranch. And the second, they wrote, was surely the one Anderson saw.

In a 1994 sequel, The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, Randle and Schmitt introduced more witnesses. One was Roswell resident who maintained he was part of a military contingent that had searched for a crashed saucer and, 40 miles south of the Foster sheep ranch, had discovered a craft shaped like a plane fuselage, its nose buried in a sandy hill. Through a cracked section, he saw several small bodies.

Another story was told by a resident of Carlsbad, New Mexico. He alleged that he and a woman friend had been camping in an area north of Roswell during the July 4 weekend in 1947 and they saw an object flash overhead and crash not far away. Seeking out the wreck, he said, they discovered a crashed saucer and, using a flashlight, spotted several little corpses. They returned in the morning to get a better look but beat a hasty retreat when they saw a military convoy approaching.

Minutes of an Air Force Scientific Advisory Board meeting on March 17, 1948, quote Colonel Howard McCoy, then chief of intelligence at what is now the Wright Patterson Air Force Base (where the bodies and debris were supposedly shipped) as saying, “We are running down every [UFO] report. I can't even tell you how much we would give to have one of these crash in an area so that we could recover whatever they are.”

More recently, UFO investigators have focused on a series of sightings reported in Arizona. Dozens of observers, scattered across 100 miles, reported seeing a cluster of lights moving rapidly across the night sky. The Arizona incident stands as “perhaps the most dramatic UFO sighting that has been reported to the National UFO Reporting Center” over the past few years, says the Seattle-based center’s director, Peter Davenport. Davenport also gathered reports of a similar cluster of lights passing over a wide area of Texas.

The Roswell controversy continues today and Washington has been under increasing pressure to resolve it. At the urging of New Mexico Representative Steven Schiff, who complained about a government “cover-up” of Roswell and the “runaround” he was getting from the Pentagon, the General Accounting Office announced in January 1994 that it would launch a hunt for any documents related to the incident.

Finally, an Air Force report stated that “there was no indication in official records from the [1947] period that there was heightened military operational or security activity which should have been generated if this was, in fact, the first recovery of materials and/or persons from another world.” The GAO probe, released in 1995, reported much the same conclusion. The Air Force tried to pass off the small bodies as being from experiments conducted in the 1950s that involved dropping dummies from high-altitude balloons to study the results of the impact. Witnesses’ descriptions of the “aliens” closely match the characteristics of the dummies.

Even the cynically minded of the national press corps scoffed at yet another botched attempt to avoid the inevitable owning up that the US authorities lied in 1947 — and have continued to do so ever since. As in the Watergate conspiracy, once lies are told, it is impossible to keep the lid on without a continuing campaign of deceit and the eventual consequences.

After several botched attempts were made by the Air Force to conceal this UFO crash event, the official position was total denial. Yet, subsequent investigations and evidence point clearly to the fact that something from another planet crashed on our planet's surface. With their “reptile brains” fully engaged, the U.S. authorities made the decision for all mankind that the official response to extraterrestrial interaction would be hostile; it would take two generations of our global populations to discover the truth.

UFOs and extraterrestrials in the later part of the twentieth century are the two most talked about, filmed, and reported subjects. Those early days preceding the 1947 Roswell crash must have convinced our visitors that we are a strange and hostile race of people. An educated guess would posit that their need to visit our planet was provoked by the 1945 atomic explosions and their concern based on the universe law of cause and effect. It must have appeared to these creatures that the immature children of planet earth, not content with waging war among themselves using machinery and conventional weapons, would resort to unleashing a universe energy known as nuclear fission upon their own kind. This barbarous and savage act must have brought our planet to their attention.

Because there exists a nonintervention law based on the “free will” of a planet’s intelligent species, the visitors' presence here could only be to monitor our insanity. The political and military response, based on reptilian thinking, was one of aggression toward the visitors and denial toward the masses. Notwithstanding the "problems" they assumed would arise once the masses were cognizant of extraterrestrial life, this aggressive and denial response would set our evolution back by many decades.

(This nonintervention law is similar to Gene Roddenberry’s “prime directive” which he portrayed in his Star Trek television series. It is believed by many that much of the Roddenberry’s conceptual detail came from secret and inspired contact with the celestial world (angels). Of course, it is impossible to prove this; however, every scientist on this planet when viewing the night sky, atheist or not, will admit to the fact that the celestial array is based on a complicated mathematical arrangement. And therefore, there must be in existence a “Master Mathematician" — God. Even the most rigorous researcher, in accepting the existence of a "nonintervention law," eventually must conclude that the universe is governed by a code of sublime laws that could never have arisen by chance.)

The reptilian fear-based response that would be the official reaction to the Roswell incident for decades was not only typical and expected, it would prove in the long run to be futile. The following generations of committed investigators from all walks of life would eventually unearth this massive conspiracy, this “cosmic Watergate.” The U.S. government would run this conspiracy for most of the twentieth century in a desperate effort to avoid telling its citizens the truth — that it could not defend itself against other planets and that the perceived power of government and authority was but a vague shadow hanging over us all, enabling the reptile-minded to lord it over the masses. This futile attempt at conspiracy and subterfuge would eventually be exposed. The notion that an all-powerful government could usurp the basic freedom and liberty afforded all men by our Creator was a cruel deception and against the will of God.

This deceit and denial has unfortunate long-term ramifications for the authorities — the more it is prolonged, the harder it will eventually be to tell the truth. Apart from the enormous damage that has been done to the public’s perception of the credibility of authority, this breach of trust runs counter to the notion that a government should serve the people, not the other way around. The longer this “Cosmic Watergate” continues, the worse off we are as a species. And time is running out. As our governments move us closer toward a suicidal end, the cover-ups and grabs for control and power increase as the truth is obliterated by daily sound bites.

Any civilized species that posits the question, “Could life exist elsewhere in the universe?” can quickly summon an answer by simply looking up. As previously discussed, even the most ardent atheists have great difficulty viewing the night sky and explaining away the endless arithmetical equations by which it is arranged. They quickly realize a higher intelligence would be required to develop the quantum physics necessary for the billions upon billions of stars (which are actual suns) twinkling in the dome above our heads. Based on our solar system alone — our sun at the center surrounded by orbiting planets, with one of these planets inhabited by intelligent beings — many astronomical physicists have conjectured that the universe is literally teeming with life. Denial of extraterrestrial life and a Creator is the response of an arrogant inward-looking species that regards the universe as a mechanism and thinks of humans as mere machines mass-produced by chance. Most so-called atheistic scientists while agreeing the universe is, after all, based on mathematical equations, continue to deny the existence of a “Master Mathematician.” It's a contradiction that most mortals of the realm easily grasp as they view the glory and perfection of the “Master Mathematician’s” work.

The Marshall Plan

As the world recovered from World War II, the unlooked-for harvest of further wars and atrocities began to surface, as mankind quickly chose to forget history and settle down to the soft and comfortable life of the modern West. It was what would become known as the “baby boomer” era. An urgent rush to procreation was the natural response by partly civilized mortals, repulsed and numbed by the horror of the past decade — or perhaps because the gene pool had been so heavily eradicated by two wars. Still, the modern-thinking human was still listening to the voices of a demanding reptile and a chattering ancient mammal. Both were speaking to us from the depths of our own skulls.

With the onset of the baby boomer era, Western societies quickly returned to the comfortable lifestyle of mass consumerism, fueled by the invigorating financial benefits of the U.S.-inspired Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan, formally known as the European Recovery Program, was a program of U.S. economic and technical assistance to sixteen European countries after World War II. Its objectives were to restore the war-ravaged west European economy and to stimulate economic growth and trade among the major non-communist countries.

In early 1947, as the cold war between the United States and the USSR dawned, U.S. policy-makers concluded that western Europe would require substantial economic aid to attain political stability. This program, announced by Secretary of State George C. Marshall (1880-1959) in an address at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, proposed that the European countries draw up a unified plan for economic reconstruction to be funded by the United States. The USSR and other countries of Eastern Europe were invited to join, but they declined. The Economic Cooperation Administration was established by the United States to administer the plan. The sixteen west European countries then formed the Organization for European Economic Cooperation to coordinate the program.

From 1948 to 1952, the sixteen participating countries received 13.15 billion dollars in U.S. aid. The program succeeded in reviving the West European economy and setting it on the path of long-term growth. Germany, Japan and all of the non-Iron-Curtain nations began to prosper. Science and technology took on a new meaning with the emergence of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous speech, when the world heard for the first time the term, “Industrial Military Complex.” This emerging power base of industrialists and the capitalist elite would frame the history of the latter part of the twentieth century. New levels of materialism, fueled by greed and power lust would be achieved. The world as it had been known would change dramatically as science and technology would catapult both the Iron Curtain countries and the west into the “Cold War.”

With the shadow of planetary annihilation hanging over global societies, all governments took on a paternal role to fill the void created by the secular revolt, which by now was in full cry. In the Eastern Bloc communist countries, which by now had coalesced in Europe and was embryonic in Asia, the totalitarian state had replaced God. In the West, with the daily fear of atomic annihilation hanging over their heads, a different sort of totalitarian state was manifesting.

This world order was the governmental response to the void created by secular revolt and atheistic science, and would continue to manifest in its totalitarian state, as the weak-minded of this era espousing Marxist philosophy found their way into politics, religion and social service. Readers will recall that the seeds of this new breed of socialism were sown in the early part of the century. By now, with a greater portion of the sacrificed stronger-minded individuals buried in unmarked graves throughout Europe and the Pacific, the weak-minded of the more liberal thinkers held sway.

The totalitarian state emerged swiftly as the lawyers, imbued with knowledge and devoid of wisdom, framed legislation in response to politicians’ urgent requirement to solve all problems for society. This urgent rush to replace family and community with a centralized totalitarian government would prove to be not only socially suicidal, but also financially bankrupting. All of the financial gain Roosevelt had cunningly gouged from Churchill would be squandered by Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress. The liberals of the world would continue this social plunge into indebtedness and dependency until all vestiges of freedom and liberty, as set out in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, had disappeared from the political horizon.

China

During this transition period in the middle part of our century, there emerged in the 1950s a new war, the Korean War, fought between two ideologies — communism and capitalism — the basis for the “Cold War.” The sleeping giant through the latter half to the close of this century was China.

Mao Zedong, or Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976), was born into a well-to-do peasant family in Shaoshan, Hunan province. As a child, he worked in the fields and attended a local primary school, where he studied the traditional Confucian classics. He was frequently in conflict with his strict father whom Mao learned successfully to confront, with the support of his gentle and devoutly Buddhist mother. Beginning in 1911, the year the republican forces of Sun Yat-sen launched the overthrow of the Qing (Ch'ing, or Manchu) dynasty, Mao spent most of ten years in the provincial capital. He was exposed to the tides of rapid political change and the new culture movement then sweeping the country. He served briefly in the republican army and then spent half a year studying alone in the provincial library, an experience that reinforced his habit of independent study.

By 1918, Mao had graduated from the Hunan First Normal School and had gone to Beijing (Peking), the national capital, where he worked briefly as a library assistant at Beijing University. Mao lacked the funds to support a regular student status and, unlike many of his classmates, mastered no foreign language and did not study abroad. It may be partly due to his relative poverty during his student years that he never identified completely with the cosmopolitan bourgeois intellectuals who dominated Chinese university life. He did establish contact with intellectual radicals who later figured prominently in the Chinese Communist party. In 1919, Mao returned to Hunan, where he engaged in radical political activity while supporting himself as a primary-school principal. At this stage, his writings revealed the influence of Marx.

When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was organized in Shanghai in 1921, Mao was a founding member and leader of the Hunan branch. He was one of the twelve original members of the Chinese Communist Party then engaged in the organizing of mine workers. His ideology and philosophy was deeply rooted in Marx’s Communist Manifesto. At this stage, the new party formed a united front with the Kuomintang (Guomindang), the party of the republican followers of Sun Yat-sen. Mao worked within the united front in Shanghai, Hunan, and Guangzhou (Canton), concentrating variously on labor organization, party organization, propaganda, and the Peasant Movement Training Institute. His 1927 “Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan” expressed his view of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry.

In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, who had gained control of the Kuomintang after the death of Sun Yat-sen, reversed that party's policy of cooperation with the communists. By the next year, when he had control of the Nationalist armies as well as the Nationalist government, Chiang purged all communists from the movement. Mao was forced to flee to the mountains of south China, where he established with Zhu De (Chu Teh) a rural base defended by a guerrilla army. It was this almost accidental fusion of communist leadership with a guerrilla force operating in rural areas with peasant support that was to make Mao the leader of the CCP.

Because of their growing military power, Mao and Zhu were able by 1930 to defy orders of the Russian-controlled CCP leadership that directed them to capture cities. In the following year, despite the fact that his position in the party was weak and his policies were criticized, a Chinese soviet was founded in Jiangsu (Kiangsi) province, with Mao as chairman. A series of extermination campaigns by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government forced the CCP to abandon this base in October 1934 and to commence the Long March. At Zunyi (Tsun-i) in Guizhou (Kweichow), Mao for the first time gained effective control over the CCP, ending the era of Russian direction of party leadership. Remnants of the communist forces reached Shaanxi (Shensi) in October 1935, after a march of 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles). They then established a new party headquarters at Yenan.

When the Japanese invasion of 1937 forced the CCP and the Kuomintang once again to form a united front, the communists gained legitimacy as defenders of the Chinese homeland, and Mao rose in stature as a national leader. During this period he established himself as a military theorist and, through the publication in 1937 of such essays as “On

Contradiction” and “On Practice,” laid claim to recognition as an important Marxist thinker. Mao's essay “On New Democracy” in 1940 outlined a unique national form of Marxism appropriate to China; his “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art” in 1942 provided a basis for party control over cultural affairs.

The soundness of Mao’s self-reliance and rural guerrilla strategies was proved by the CCP’s rapid growth during the Yenan period from 40,000 members in 1937 to 1,200,000 members in 1945. The shaky truce between the communists and nationalists was broken at the end of the war. Efforts were made by the United States, in particular to forge a coalition government. Civil war erupted, however, and the years 1946 through 1949 saw the rapid defeat of the Kuomintang. Chiang's government was forced to flee to Taiwan, leaving the Peoples Republic of China, formed by the Communists in late 1949, in control of the entire Chinese mainland. Mao became head of state of the new Peoples Republic in 1949.

When Mao’s efforts to open relations with the United States in the late 1940s were rebuffed, he concluded that China would have to “lean to one side,” and a period of close alliance with the USSR followed. Mao’s fear that a U.S. victory in Korea would threaten China contributed to China's entry into the Korean War. During the early 1950s, Mao served as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, chief of state, and chairman of the military commission. His international status as a Marxist leader rose after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953.

Mao’s uniqueness as a leader is evident from his commitment to continued class struggle under socialism, a view confirmed in his theoretical treatise “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” written in 1957. Dissatisfaction with the slowness of development, the loss of revolutionary momentum in the countryside, and the tendency for CCP members to behave like a privileged class led Mao to take a number of unusual initiatives in the late 1950s. In the Hundred Flowers movement of 1956 and 1957, he encouraged intellectuals to make constructive criticism of the party’s stewardship. When the criticism came, it revealed deep hostility to CCP leadership. At about the same time, Mao accelerated the transformation of rural ownership by calling for the elimination of the last vestiges of rural private property and the formation of people’s communes, and for the initiation of rapid industrial growth through a program known as the Great Leap Forward. The suddenness of these moves led to administrative confusion and popular resistance. Furthermore, adverse weather conditions resulted in disastrous crop shortfalls and severe food shortages. All these reverses cost Mao his position as chief of state, and his influence over the party was severely curtailed. It was also during the late 1950s that Mao’s government began to reveal its deep-seated differences with the USSR.

During the 1960s, Mao made a comeback. Several failed communist experiments in the 1950s, including the Commune Movement (1958) and the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1959), culminated in his launching the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The ensuing chaos and blood-letting of this despicable act irradiated an estimated 70 million Chinese citizens. The population of Communist China would continue to revere this reptilian-minded beast. He attacked the party leadership and the new chief of state, Liu Shaoqi (Liu Shao-ch’i), through a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which peaked from 1966 to 1969. The Cultural Revolution was largely orchestrated by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. It was perhaps Mao's greatest innovation and was essentially an ideological struggle for public opinion carried out in the form of a frantic national debate.

Mao proved to be a master tactician. When he could not get his ideas across in the Beijing press, he used the Shanghai press to attack the Beijing leadership. Students, mobilized as “Red Guards,” became his most avid supporters. As tensions mounted and events threatened to get out of hand, Mao was obliged to rely increasingly on the military, under the leadership of Lin Biao (Lin Piao). In return for this military support, the party named Lin as Mao’s successor in its 1969 constitution. By 1971, however, Lin was reported to have died in a plane crash after having plotted to assassinate Mao, and Mao was once more firmly in control.

On the popular level, the thrust of the Cultural Revolution was to teach the Chinese masses that it was “right to revolt”, that it was their privilege to criticize those in positions of authority and to take an active part in decision-making. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s sayings, printed in a little red book, and buttons bearing his image were distributed to the masses; his word was treated as an ultimate authority and his person the subject of ecstatic adulation. Despite this temporary assumption of an authority higher than the CCP, Mao continued to state his belief in the Leninist notion of collective party leadership. He showed his opposition to the “personality cult” by explicitly asking that the number of statues sculpted in his likeness be reduced.

Cold War Outcomes

The Korean War, justified in ideological terms, would be just one of many of the new era savage wars using killing machines produced by the Industrial Military Complex, which had mobilized on both sides of the ideologically inspired Cold War. The industrial military complex describes the link between the Defense Department and a permanent peacetime arms industry that enables those groups to wield extraordinary political and economic power. The term was coined by Eisenhower in his farewell address of 1961, when he warned of the threat it posed to democracy. This Cold War era lasted until 1989, whereupon it abruptly dissipated. The end of the Cold War largely ended the peacetime arms buildup in the U.S., and caused the contraction of the nation’s arms industry, temporarily diminishing the power of the military-industrial complex.

During the forty years of the Cold War, both sides of the ideological struggle ignored the rights of citizens. Under two different guises of totalitarian-styled government, they constructed covert intelligence agencies and assets that would become laws unto themselves. The United States quickly adapted to this new form of secret government. New acronyms, such as CIA, NSA, and FBI, were coined, creating an aura of authenticity and legitimacy for agencies that actually formed the totalitarian state's center for western power. Each nation, large or small, would follow suit with its own brand of secret intelligence police forces. This era of secret government totally abdicated any notion of government by the people, for the people and of the people, replacing it with government of the people for the government. The virtues of the Constitution of the United States of America and other so-called western democracies were usurped and abandoned during the Cold War. Naturally, all lawyers and politicians who framed and enacted a monolith of legislation during this period would justify it based either on skewed ideology or the hollow excuse of national sovereignty and security.

What began at the turn of the century as a benign ideological shift in consciousness blossomed into the mutative forms of socialism and social democracy, which would go so far as to almost destroy societies and civilization as a whole. The world’s population — bursting to overflowing, straining at the seams to find food and water to sustain 6 billion people — simply caved in to these twisted notions that we must be controlled in order to survive and prosper. George Orwell’s classic "Nineteen Eighty Four" portrayed a horrifying future where tyrants secure their totalitarian power with technology. Primary weapon: the tele-screen that, installed in each citizen's house, could somehow see everything, hear everything, and issue propaganda and commands. Orwell coined scary phrases which entered the language: Big Brother, Thought Police, Newspeak and Doublethink. Orwell’s world was becoming more the accepted mindset than those who scoffed at the possibility would have imagined.

For all those readers who simply accept “that’s the way it is,” read on. The new idioms and sayings of the latter part of the twentieth century would emerge and begin to mold our thinking into the mindset of the Marxist-inspired socialism based on the Communist Manifesto. New methods of mass indoctrination and brainwashing would be introduced by both intelligence forces on either side of the Iron Curtain. With the advent of television, this brainwashing became very easy in the West. Of course, just plain terror did the job in the communist regimes.

The Reptile Brain

Before we embark on a new chapter of the twentieth century, let us review Howard Bloom’s theory of the three brains of the modern hominid as it is discussed in his book "The Lucifer Principle."

As discussed previously, Dr. Paul MacLean was the researcher who first posited the concept of the “triune brain.” According to MacLean, near the base of a human skull is the stem of the brain, poking up from the spinal column like the unadorned end of a walking stick. Sticking atop that rudimentary setup is a mass of cerebral tissue bequeathed us by our earliest totally land-dwelling ancestors, the reptiles. When these beasts turned their backs on the sea roughly three hundred million years ago and hobbled inland, their primary focus was simple survival. The new landlubbers needed to hunt, to find a mate, to carve out territory, and to fight in that territory’s defense. The neural machinery they evolved took care of these elementary functions. MacLean calls it the “reptile brain.” The reptile brain still sits inside our skull like the pit at the center of a peach. It is a vigorous participant in our mental affairs, pumping its primitive, instinctual orders to us at all hours of the day and night (Bloom, pages 25-26).

Bloom goes on to explain how evolution evolved these land dwellers into warm-blooded, furry creatures that forced their mothers to take care of their young. This necessitated that a “few additions be built into the old reptilian brain” (Bloom, page 26):

"Nature complied by constructing an envelope of new neural tissue that surrounded the reptile brain like a peach’s juicy fruit enveloping the pit. MacLean called the add-in the “mammalian brain.” The mammalian brain guided play, maternal behavior, and a host of other emotions. It kept our furry ancestors knitted together in nurturing gangs.

Far down the winding path of time, a few of our hirsute progenitors tried something new. They stood on their hind legs, looked around them, and applied their minds and hands to the exploitation of the world. These were the early hominids. But protohuman aspirations were impractical without the construction of another brain accessory. Nature complied, wrapping a thin layer of fresh neural substance around the old cortical standbys — thereptilian and mammalian brains. The new structure, stretched around the old ones like a peach’s skin, was the neocortex —theprimate brain. The primate brain, which includes the human brain, had awesome powers. It could envision the future. It could weigh a possible action and imagine the consequences. It could support the development of language, reason, and culture. But theneocortex had a drawback: it was merely a thin veneer over the two ancient brains. And those were as active as ever, measuring every bit of input from the eyes and ears, and issuing fresh orders. The thinking human, no matter how exalted his sentiments, was still listening to the voices of a demanding reptile and a chattering ancient mammal. Both were speaking to him from the depths of his own skull." (Bloom, pages 26-27)

If we accept this theory as being scientifically provable, and Bloom certainly posits a case for it being so, then we must in all conscience seek to discover why man’s inhumanity to man continues to be a blight not only on our past and present but also our future evolution. For if we as a people can begin to enter into even a shadowy understanding of who we are and why we are, we have an excellent chance of reversing the current trends and setting a new course toward peace on earth.

A Failed Peace

As the League of Nations of post World War I failed, so would the United Nations of post World War II fail and miserably so. War is not man’s great terrible disease; war is a symptom, a result. The real disease is the virus of national sovereignty. This national sovereignty virus is spread amongst the people of various nations by greedy and power-lusting political leaders, who having recognized the controlling influence of this ideology, have unconscionably manipulated succeeding generations of unsuspecting nationalists to accept the idea that wars are just.

The “just war” argument is perpetuated by nations that have never actually possessed real sovereignty; that is to say, sovereignty that could protect them from the ravages and devastation of world wars. By creating a representative global government of mankind, the nations would not give up sovereignty so much as they would create a real, bona fide, and lasting world sovereignty that would henceforth protect them from all war. Local affairs could be handled by local governments; national affairs, by national governments; international affairs could be administered by global government.

It is important to understand that by "representative world government," I am not referring to the Luciferian "new world order" now receiving such a push by world banks and other greedy international interests. I am referring to truly representative government on a planetary scale. I am referring to government that recognizes the sovereignty of God over all humankind as well as the sovereignty of the individual person in his relationship with God.

World peace cannot be maintained by treaties, diplomacy, foreign policies, alliances, balances of power, or any other type of makeshift juggling with the sovereignties of nationalism. World law must come into being and must be enforced by representative world government — protecting the sovereignty of all mankind.

The individual will enjoy far more liberty under representative world government. Today, the citizens of the great powers are taxed, regulated, and controlled almost oppressively, and much of this present interference with individual liberties would vanish when the national governments are willing to trustee their sovereignty as regards international affairs into the hands of representative global government.

Under representative global government, the national groups would be afforded a real opportunity to realize and enjoy the personal liberties of genuine democracy. The fallacy of national self-determination would end. With global regulations of money and trade would come a new era of worldwide peace. A global language could evolve, and there would be at least some hope of religions with a global viewpoint. Collective security will never afford peace until the collectivity includes all mankind. The political sovereignty of representative mankind government will bring lasting peace on earth, and the spiritual brotherhood of man will forever ensure good will among all men. And there is no other way that peace on earth and good will among men can be realized.

The decade immediately following the end of the World War II proved to be crucial in how civilization would evolve or devolve. The world power mindset was militaristic. Having just fought another “just war,” both the Western and Eastern powers were in war mode — that is to say, the Industrial Military Complex was. The civilian population was sufficiently repulsed by the atrocities to want to forget and move on. The Cold War would ensure that there would be progress; however, it would be through preparedness for war not peace. Immediately after the so-called "success" of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombs, the Industrial Military Complex would shape our future after their twisted and perverted designs.

Not content with atomic weapons of mass destruction, the atheist scientists went on to develop hydrogen bombs which would dwarf the destructive power of the atomic weapons and release a new terror on humanity. Fear and apathy in the West allowed this to happen; totalitarian communism allowed a parallel terror to arise in the East. The seeds were sown for nuclear holocaust. It is not a question of “if” but “when.”

The United Nations, like its predecessor the League of Nations, was destined to fail. National sovereignty would again become the main stumbling block for this idealistic solution to war and oppression. In fact, influence by the emerging secular humanist mindset would create circumstances whereby this once idealistic grouping of nations would come to do more harm than good, bankrupting itself both morally and financially along the way.

Western-style governments have promulgated the notion that citizens are born for the exclusive benefit of governments. Such governments have completely turned their backs on the reality that they were created and devised for the benefit of mankind. Until truly representative global government emerges from the carnage and despair of the past century, wars will become more and more devastating — until they are almost racially suicidal.

How many world and regional wars must be fought and how many Leagues of Nations and United Nations must fail before human beings will be willing to establish the government of mankind? How many bombs must be dropped before our species can begin to enjoy the blessings of permanent peace and thrive on the tranquility of good will — worldwide good will — among all human beings?

The civilian population of the world lost all hope and turned away from God. The churches of Christianity had over the ages become sect-divided, entering into unholy alliances with the state in the West. In communist regimes, they had simply been neutralized and forced underground. The soil of human desperation worldwide was well prepared for the state to replace God. The secular revolt had done its job and worldwide secularism would emerge as the new religion. Religious practice would become a token religion worship of God and the teachings of Jesus would be submerged under the fundamentalism of all religions and their leaders as fear and remorse seized the global population in the west and secular humanism flourished in the east. In both communism and capitalism and all intervening systems, the state would eventually seek to replace God by marginalizing the individual rights into a collective system of socialism.

Meanwhile capitalism, whose new ally was materialism and the Industrial Military Complex, continued to greedily maneuver the enemy — socialism and unionism — into a suicidal position. The more the socialist-unionist movement gained ground, the more the capitalists coalesced into huge monolithic corporations that would eventually eclipse government itself. The “profit motive” reigned supreme all the way through the balance of the twentieth century. Communism and capitalism both fed voraciously off of materialism, while the masses just went along, their rights spirited away in the west and had long gone in the east. Political leaders on both sides of the Cold War had their sights set on domination of the opposition, using military might as their weapon. Virtues were basically abandoned as each side craved victory at any cost. The civilian population in the west, feeding off the new-found prosperity of capitalism, remained apathetic — whatever the state dictated was readily accepted. Whatever the state [god] dictated was fine, provided the state provided all to its citizens. This ideology would eventually be established in western democracies as social democrats gradually won over the minds of the majority.

So we see the sophistries of secularism, materialism, and atheistic science beginning to triumph over humankind. Much more devastation and human suffering would occur as the folly of this worldwide mindset took hold of the latter half of the twentieth century. Political ideologues on both sides of the Cold War quickly recognized the power of propaganda — and were keen to use television as a decisive tool in the indoctrination and brainwashing so necessary for the Cold War mentality to prosper.

As science confronted conventional religions worldwide, continually disproving the mythical stories of ancient history, the civilian population became confused. People either opted out of religious tradition or turned to fundamentalism. This harvest of human despair would come full circle as we shall see in future chapters.

We can now see, in the aftermath of the 1947 Roswell crash, why our nearby neighbors would wish to monitor and even interact with our civilization. With the advent of nuclear weapons, we had not only become a threat to our planet but also to them. The universe law of cause and effect has come into play. Any reader who sincerely believes the UFO/ET phenomenon is just a “conspiracy theory” would be wise to read extensively on the subject before making a final determination. We shall see in future chapters the reason for “Cosmic Watergate.” Suffice to say that history is eventually the only test of truth or fiction. With the benefit of hindsight and factual evidence not necessarily available previously, historians will eventually piece together this paradigm shifting event in Roswell, New Mexico.

The solution of representative global government will be dealt with in future chapters; however, the essential key must first be recognized. This key is true political leadership, both at the national level, then coalesced at the global level. Knowledge is not enough; ideas without idealism is a fallacy. True wisdom gained through the experience of living through a wide range of human endeavor is the only prerequisite for leadership. Virtues emanating from this experience — principles, ethics, morals, and values — are essential. Take a quick look at the worldwide political leadership and ask yourself, "Would I want him or her to be part of a global government?"

The reader very quickly realizes the problem that lies ahead.

Chapter 6

The Superpower Wars

And let us bathe our hands in … blood up to the elbows, and besmear our swords. Then we walk forth, even to the market place, And waving our red weapons o’er our heads, Let’s all cry “Peace, Freedom and Liberty!”

-William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

In the early days of the Cold War, the two superpowers, the United States and the USSR, had built up a mighty arsenal of planet-destroying nuclear weapons. The problem that emerged early on was this: neither side could see the merit in waging a nuclear war. All assessments commissioned by both sides indicated that a nuclear holocaust would not only destroy life itself but also the planet. We would simply cease to exist.

Facing such a hollow victory, the military-minded politicians on both sides had no choice but to seek domination over the other through regional wars, fought with conventional weapons and soaked in the blood of the innocent.

So we see in the 1950s the Korean War; and in the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War. History records meticulously and unerringly (with the benefit of hindsight and the release of secret documents) that both wars were waged regionally for the benefit of the superpowers. Both were ideological wars, justified in the West as a stand against the rising spread of the evil empire of communism, and in the East as a stand against imperialism. These two wars were based on philosophical and financial benefit. In the United States, with the need for a continuing cohesion of national sovereignty, the mindset was to defeat communism at any cost. Both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts involved an ideological struggle between communism in the north and capitalism in the south. The USSR, requiring a similar coalescence of communist states, saw these two conflicts ideally suited to their purpose.

Neither superpower dared use its nuclear arsenal.

By waging war using conventional methods, the two superpowers were able to quiet their citizens while at the same time flexing their military muscles and feeding their industrial military complexes. The victims, as always, were the hapless citizens way down in the pecking order. Politicians, drunk with the delusion of national sovereignty and the power and the glory that goes with it, simply followed the well-defined pattern of the strong using and oppressing the weak. Words such as "freedom," "justice," and "equality" were bandied about by political manipulators whose only agenda was financial gain. The United Nations, an inept and philosophically flawed grouping of nations, played a pathetic, perverted role in these regional wars.

In reviewing these two episodes of idiocy, we see once again the folly of allowing national sovereignty to set the agenda for the world. Bloom describes it this way:

But what about freedom, justice, and equality? Isn’t the goal to put all nations on an equal footing? Isn’t that what peace should be about? An equality of nations will never exist in our lifetimes.Why? Because peace, freedom, and justice are deceptive concepts. Hidden beneath their surface are the instincts of the pecking order. The barnyardchickens studied by naturalist Schjelderup-Ebbe had their periods of peace, but they never had equality. No matter how quiet things were, there was always a dominant bird, and there was always some unfortunate chicken trampled to the bottom of the social ladder. The state of things is not restricted to fowl down on the farm. Chimpanzees, baboons, and apes — the animal relatives with whom we share the greatest number of instincts — are all prisoners of deep-rooted hierarchical drives. Apparently, so are we. When we preach the ideals of freedom, peace, and justice, our intentions are less than honest.(Bloom, page 264)

The pattern that has evolved in the long climb from savagery and barbarism is still with us. It molds our thinking and creates our destiny as we struggle to find a solution that results in peace for all mankind. As long as sovereign nations refuse to coalesce into a global government, equally represented by all nations, peace will remain a distant dream. The political spoils men of the second half of the century became adept at using the slogans of freedom, peace, and justice as motivating weapons to convince their unsuspecting fellows that war is not only inevitable but justified. When we strip off their moral disguises, these slogans are nothing more than political rhetoric used by those in power to achieve hierarchical superiority over those nations and people who are on the lower ranks of the barnyard pecking order. This subversive tactic, so cleverly used by both superpowers, would be perfected and drawn upon on many occasions as the century wore on.

It is not only the innocent who suffer terribly in such police wars, it is the youth who are slaughtered and deserted when their political leaders see retreat as the only political expediency. The pathetic stories of the MIAs — those missing in action —in both wars stirred a nation’s heart. These forgotten heroes were left to languish in prisoner-of-war camps that make World War II conditions look like a walk in the park. Not content with deceitfully leading their nations to war, these pitiful excuses for political leadership simply turned a blind eye to the plight of their patriotic sons. Treachery has always been the hallmark of the consummate politician. Power lust is the aphrodisiac of the modern political mind. These puppets of the Industrial Military Complex have emerged, carried out their treasonous deeds, and crept back into the obscurity of a wealthy retirement to write their twisted memoirs. They are too numerous to mention; we all know who they are.

It must also be remembered that wars — necessary for the continuation of the Industrial Military Complex of both the superpowers — are also extremely expensive. And it is the citizens who always pay. Taxation regimes that provide the financing so necessary for war mongers rose sharply in the West, and in the East the communist response was to milk the economy mercilessly. Both sides of the Cold War would eventually be bankrupted by decades of war mongering. In the meantime, the cost of war had to be paid for by the citizens. In the West, the capitalist system controlled by the Industrial Military Complex simply pulled the strings of political hacks to enact more oppressive and far-reaching methods of tax gouging. In the East, the gouging was not as obvious since communism is totalitarian and therefore does not require any legislation to apportion resources to fund wars.

The period between the 1950s and the early 1970s saw a consolidation of Marxist-inspired communism in the East and socialism in the West. In order to camouflage socialism and its Marxist origins, the clever and deceitful social engineers in the West invented a new phrase that would become universally accepted and known as “social democracy.” This method of camouflaging Marxist socialism proved to be most effective and allowed a gradual socialization of the free world. Those in this era wise enough to expose Marxist socialism for what it really was were branded anti-socialists. The clever and deceitful social engineers had become expert at using the much-refined and honed reductionism techniques, destroying any attempt at lifting the camouflage of social democracy. We will examine this reductionism technique in a later chapter.

Although the communists were plainly and philosophically wrong in their secular humanist thinking, the capitalists were similarly incorrect in propagating materialism fueled by greed and power. Lurking in the background of both mindsets was the Communist Manifesto, represented by communism in the East and socialism in the West.

These consolidating decades saw many social and political changes as both sides of the Cold War fought desperately to reach the superior position in world power. Allies on both sides, realizing the benefit and security of allying themselves with either the United States or the USSR, quickly rallied to the use of three misleading words — freedom, peace, and justice — with which the masters of oratory flooded the airwaves.

Television became a valuable tool to propagandists and spin doctors on both sides of the Cold War. This medium was quickly recognized globally by the entire electronic media industry as a mass communication tool that could brainwash even the most intelligent minds using short patriotic sound bytes. During the Vietnam War, however, television brought the horror of war into American and Western living rooms. The daily record of carnage would forever be embedded in the consciousness of families across the U.S.

As an attempt by youth to avoid their political leaders’ folly, the hippy movement was born in the 1960s and flourished through universities and high schools of the free world. The movement took a variety of forms. It swept pacifism up among the burgeoning “causes.” The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., winner of the Nobel peace prize in 1964, was a significant figure not only in the struggle for racial desegregation in the United States but also in his emphasis on nonviolence in dealing with both racism and war. Yet, pacifism lost its clearly defined character in these years, and the peace movement came to include advocates of violence as well as advocates of nonviolence — illegal as well as legal actions. The shift was notable from legally approved pacifism in the form of exemption from military service to a struggle against a particular war, rather than against war in general.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans took part in peace marches, peace demonstrations, and peace vigils during the war in Vietnam. Many people, including such eminent men as King, the influential pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, and President John W. Ward of Amherst College, were arrested for civil disobedience while taking part in antiwar demonstrations. Many senators, congressmen, clergymen, and educators demanded “Peace Now.” Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the United States Congress (1916) and who voted against entry into both world wars, led ten thousand women to Washington, D.C., in January 1968 to protest the war in Vietnam.

By 1970, the United States military structure confronted a peace movement within its own ranks. In 1971 about a thousand Vietnam veterans camped in Washington, D.C., to lobby for an immediate end to the war. Within the services, underground newspapers appeared on army posts and groups such as the Concerned Officers Movement were formed.

This era of rebellion proved to be a turning point in how the political manipulators dealt with insurrection. With television cameras poised to capture any event, it was no longer advisable to use brute force against the nation’s young. A new method had to be devised that would suit the power controllers and manipulators. Of course, in the East, any dissidents were simply rounded up, shipped off to gulags, tortured, and exterminated.

A new method of dealing with insurrection in the West was devised by the CIA and passed on to other countries with similar aspirations; it became known as “mind control.” This deliberate interference with the individual’s free will is recorded in our historical record as the most despicable act of terrorism known to man. The Western media stood idly by as the political manipulators of this atheistic science achieved their narrow and self-serving agendas. With mind control through mass communication, a new era of tyranny evolved. As Western governments learned how to use this tool and became more confident in their ungodly manipulation of human beings, the rights embodied in each nation’s constitution would be gradually eroded until they were eventually just ignored.

We owe much to the “flower power” era of the hippies — free thought and rebellion against the totalitarian state, to name two. However, as is always the case, many of the followers of the hippy era, having been brainwashed by subversive elements within the movement, would clean themselves up, get their degrees, and become the future political and bureaucratic leaders of the latter part of the century. This unforeseen and unexpected emergence would add strength to the ever-spreading virus of socialism.

The spreading disease of socialism in the West created two problems. First, under the guise of “national interest,” secret agencies of government systematically hijacked the constitutional rights of the citizens while at the same time devising devious and treacherous methods of manipulating and controlling populist ideas. This furthered the agenda of the Industrial Military Complex, which had become a power unto itself and, in fact, was the response of capitalism to the socialist disease.

The second problem manifested at about this time as the super powers in the West struggled to find a solution to pay for their war-mongering. In 1971, the Group of Seven (G-7) powerful nations abandoned the long established institution of fixing world currencies to a gold standard and adopted paper gold. This became known universally as the Bond Market. No longer did the citizens of so-called free democracies have any control over the financial zeal of their governments or the multinational conglomerates of capitalism. This act of idiocy and tyranny would play out in a most horrendous way as we shall see in future chapters. Was there no end to the lack of wisdom these political manipulators and social engineers demonstrated?

It is clear, then, from historical events that the Western world had deliberately set about to destroy its opponents in the Cold War. We have seen from this moment onward how world debt has risen exponentially as each participating nation either within the G-7 or at the periphery went on an irresponsible spending spree known as the "borrow-and-spend" era. The tax-and-spend era had been too difficult to manage politically; the power and control manipulators of political ideology had found it too difficult to communicate why ever-increasing taxes were necessary. Borrowing and spending by the elitist capitalists of Western civilization was nothing short of a suicidal plunge into world bankruptcy. The world’s financial markets soon created a new form of international gambling under the guise of gold and silver. This, of course, suited the narrow perspective of the secular humanist and many prospered from paper transactions. The long-held view of social virtue quickly disappeared, submerged beneath the lust of materialism.

Such was the mindset of certain rogue elements in concert with criminal minds — and in 1963, a U.S. president was assassinated. That this could be an act of tyranny was unthinkable in the modern era. Had we not achieved a semblance of civilization? The simple answer is “no.”

The mistake John F. Kennedy made was that he forgot the barnyard pecking order. He became a threat to the overarching agenda of power manipulators within the Industrial Military Complex, and had to be eliminated swiftly. His brother, Robert Kennedy, followed soon after, as he too had failed to recognize his position and had become a threat. These acts of deliberate tyranny were just punctuating moments in the ideological war being waged between socialists and capitalists. Dominance, even over the president of the United States, was sought at any cost.

The might of the Industrial Military Complex, exampled by the Kennedy assassinations, ensured that future political leaders would toe the line and apply the policies as prescribed by the elitist power controllers of the modern era. Without representative global government, these perverted minds are uncontrollable and continue to reign terror over the world’s populations. Citizens are not born for the benefit of government. Government is formed for the benefit of the citizens. All governments in the West and the East have chosen to forget or ignore this universe reality.

The big issues for all who survived the twentieth century are how did we get into this mess and how do we get out of it? As we have seen through our review of defining historical moments, we got into the mess by blindly following knowledgeable yet unwise lawyers and politicians. During the transition centuries of the eighteenth and nineteenth, politics was handed over from the totalitarian rule of the clergy to the lawyers. The practice of law became the prerequisite for elected office. The problem is that lawyers, trained myopically in the practice of law, are and always will be ill-prepared for public service. Their profession is too narrow and lacking in practical life experience; it is theoretical rather than practical. The lawyers of any society in response to the popular mandate write the legislation; the politicians holding power enact the legislation. Thus, the process takes on a self-serving agenda. Experience and real foresight are lost in this mechanical process of government — good ideas supplant good ideals. Political expediency, motivated by the lust for control and power, replaces any semblance of wisdom that may be nurtured in the minds of the participants. Popular polls become the litmus test for far-reaching decisions rather than what may be in the best interests of all.

This, then, identifies the great problems. The solution requires further investigation.

With the consolidation of communism in the East and a creeping form of socialism in the West, capitalism did what it had to do: fight for survival. As the unionism posited by Marx began to assert its will over workers and capital through well-organized and well-planned strategies of increased wages and working conditions, the response was to coalesce into even greater and more powerful multinational and, later, transnational corporations. This became an all-out war between the Marxist-inspired communists — represented worldwide by actual communism and the camouflaged versions of socialism — and the elite capitalists of wealth and power. In the middle were the ordinary people, the innocent of society. Communism and socialism are identical: one is overt, the other covert. Socialism spread like a cancer in the West, reaching into every aspect of life. The misguided unions, thinking they were fighting for a glorious cause — the destruction of capitalism — were used like the pawns they were and still are. The Communist Manifesto set out the role of unions; stupidly, union members followed.

This ideological war raged all through the rest of the twentieth century. The stakes were high for both sides of the Cold War and the secret ideological war between the protagonists. There were no rules of the game; anything was acceptable on both sides. The citizen was quickly relegated to the position of the lowest common denominator in the pecking order, as history has shown. The state became the most important entity. Citizens were viewed as mere pawns, numbers in the game. Howard Bloom in The Lucifer Principle explains it eloquently:

There’s good reason for a group to want to climb as high in the pecking order as it can. The super organism at the summit has the best territory, the best food, the best of everything. That’s why some ant species go to war. The ant colonies that win increase their territory and build insect empires. The larger the size of an ant society’s territory, the better each ant citizen is fed and the bigger each worker is able to grow. When it comes to sex, the winning colony scores an extra bonus. During the mating session, it is able to produce more winged, sexually active queens and males. As a result even its chances to start fresh offshoots is greater than those of its less successful neighbors.

The pecking order phenomenon is not restricted to ancient times. Humans in the modern era are still motivated by its primordial rule: Friends flock to the bird on top; they shun and even abuse the bird on the bottom. This simple principal has cropped up in the recent history of America.

(Bloom, The Lucifer Principle)

Bloom’s analogy, using the pecking order principle of the animal kingdom, demonstrates that as a higher species, modern hominid will fight incessantly to progress a particular group to the top of the pecking order. This inherent reptile brain propensity knows no bounds. Rules do not apply and any means are employed by either side to achieve their identified objectives. And so we see during the early part of the second half of this century that the protagonists in this ideological war would fight it out to the death. Citizens and their human rights would be forgotten and attenuated under the general guise of national security interests in Western democracies, as successive governments of the right or left introduced legislation relegating the citizenry as slaves to the state.

As the power of the unions grew and asserted their rights over capitalism, the reaction from the other side was to retreat and regroup into more powerful amalgamations of corporate interests. In the middle were the innocent and ideologically impoverished workers and the innocent and enthusiastic entrepreneurs of small- and mid-size family businesses of the middle classes. With high stakes at risk, the most vulnerable in the pecking order would be the citizens of the state. Apathy and confusion abounded. Workers followed the dictate and doctrine of Marxist-inspired unionism and the middle classes followed the dictates and doctrine of capitalism. Little did either group suspect they were seen only as pawns in the game. Legislation was written by lawyers and enacted by politicians daily, as both ideological protagonists sought to gain the advantage by introducing new playing fields and self-serving rules.

It is interesting to note that in every democracy in the West, whenever socialist legislation was introduced during leftist government regimes, the incoming conservative regime would ignore such intrusions into freedom and liberty. They would simply set about introducing an urgent legislation program that reflected the popular vote. And so it was all the way through the balance of the twentieth century as the gradual socialization of western democracy took hold. Citizens became economic slaves to the state either through oppressive taxation regimes or through the social dependency shared by those at the bottom of the pecking order. Individual incentive to climb up the pecking order was eroded away in the oppressed of society. It became merely a cruel illusion as the middle classes encountered the “red tape” of the ever-growing powerful bureaucracies that legislative reform created. Both sides of this ideological war became obsessed with change for the sake of change. Long-held and hard-won virtues — principles, ethics, morals, and values — fell prey to powerful and vicious minority groups. Freedoms and liberties were usurped and constitutions simply ignored.

Idealism cannot survive in an evolving civilization if the idealists of each generation permit themselves to be exterminated by the baser orders of humanity — the idea-ists, militarists and bureaucrats. And here is the great test of idealism: can an advanced society maintain the military preparedness that renders it secure from all attack by its war-loving neighbors without yielding to the temptation of employing military strength for selfish gain or national aggrandizement? National survival demands preparedness, and religious idealism alone can prevent the prostitution of preparedness to aggression. Only love and brotherhood can prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.

The materialistic scientist and the extreme idealist are destined always to be at loggerheads. This is not true of those scientists and idealists who are in possession of a common standard of high moral values and spiritual test levels. In every age, scientists and religionists must recognize they are on trial before the bar of human need. They must eschew all warfare between themselves while they strive valiantly to justify their continual survival by enhanced devotion to the service of human progress. If the so-called science or religion of any age is false, then it must either purify its activities or pass away.

The great blunder that emerged in this consolidation period, and resulted in ever more diabolical repercussions, was the Cold War between the superpowers and the less identifiable war between the “left” and the “right” in Western society. The religions of the world, particularly Christianity, would be of no assistance in this purely ideological struggle. Christianity, in a desperate attempt to hold onto its place in the pecking order of society, had made an unholy alliance with the state. In doing so, it had breached its covenant with high Jesusonian ideals.

And religion was still essentially at odds with science. Science should do for humankind materially what religion does for us spiritually: extend the horizon of life and enlarge our personality. True science can have no lasting quarrel with true religion. The scientific method is merely an intellectual yardstick with which to measure material adventures and physical achievements. But being material and wholly intellectual, it is utterly useless in the evaluation of spiritual realities and religious experiences.

The modern mechanist views us all as units in a complex mechanism. Yet, if the universe were merely material and we were only machine parts, we would be wholly unable to recognize ourselves as such. Likewise would such a machine-person be wholly unconscious of the existence of such a material universe.

The Industrial Military Complex in the East and West, employing the best scientific minds available, set about to drive technology relentlessly. The great technological advances from this competition would enhance our materialistic life, but our spiritual life would suffer retrogression as self-gratification slowly took hold of modern society. Confused and spiritually bereft, each generation would wander aimlessly, searching for the answers.

At about the same time, a new spiritualism emerged and this would become internationally known as the “New Age.” This “New Age” spiritualism would fill the void for many during this period. The problem with the “New Age” form of spiritualism is that — like orthodox religion — it drew heavily on myth and mysticism. It simply replaced the concept of church with self-appointed, self-serving and self-opinionated gurus. This ever-growing “New Age” of spiritualism would, however, provide a bridge for a later spiritual renaissance, with which we will deal in later chapters.

Before his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy announced to the world that the United States would be the first to land on the moon. This new era in the ideological war between the super powers would prove to be the undoing of both. The enormous financial burden, resulting from social reform, regional wars and the “space race” would be suicidal for both sides. In the United States, the combination of social reform, the Vietnam War and the race to the moon would see the beginnings of financial catastrophe for the United States. Not content with addressing the problems on earth, the political leaders decided arrogantly to conquer space. This was a multifaceted program devised skillfully by the intelligence agencies of the CIA and the KGB. The unwise political leaders of the day quickly pounced on this new frontier— the moon and then other planets in our solar system — to divert the attention of the masses away from the real problems confronting mankind.

These problems would later emerge and be identified as follows:

World population

Environment

UFO/ET "threat"

Social degradation

Crime

With this new subterfuge and the global excitement it generated, the super powers were able to carry out a secret program for future world domination of the population, under the cover provided not only by the Cold War but also by the space race. Many new secret technologies received the funding to be developed and put into use without any accountability to the citizens. The widely used pretext of “National Security,” a convenient euphemism, provided western governments with unlimited power. They used this unlimited power mercilessly, as the race for ideological domination became obsessive. All the while, the apathetic and innocent citizens put their trust in the lawyers and politicians. Social virtues suffered enormously as the message transmitted from political leaders to the people became more and more compromised by the undisciplined response of the political regimes to unlimited power. Unions, governments, and commerce all grew disproportionately at the expense of the people. In the West, taxation and debt would need to grow exponentially to feed the ever-growing voracious appetite of the state. No attempt was made to hide the literal fact that citizens were now considered as state property from birth to death. We were merely pawns in the game — numbers to be accounted for.

Upon closer examination of the history of the twentieth century and those preceding it, we may see something else working systematically in this global conflict if we look hard enough. The barnyard pecking order was playing out. Not only do we detect an ideological war between communism and capitalism, but a long-nourished ideal that a certain elite group should rule the world. In the eighteenth century, Adam Weishaupt had alluded to this elitist mindset when he authored The Illuminati Manifesto.

Weishaupt was a Jesuit-trained professor of canon law who taught at Engelstock University when he defected from Christianity to embrace the Luciferian conspiracy. It was in 1770 that the professional money lenders, the then recently organized House of Rothschild, retained him to revise and modernize the age-old protocols of Zionism. From the outset, these protocols were designed to give the Synagogue of Satan, so-named by Jesus Christ, ultimate world domination so they could impose Luciferian ideology by means of standard despotism on what would remain after the final social cataclysm.

Weishaupt completed his task May 1, 1776 ("May Day"), and officially organized the Illuminati to put the plan into execution. (This is why May 1 is the great day celebrated by all communist nations. May 1 is also Law Day as declared by the American Bar Association.) That plan required the destruction of all existing governments and religions. That objective was to be reached by dividing the masses of people into opposing camps in ever-increasing numbers on political, social, economic, and other issues, the very conditions we have today. The opposing sides were then to be armed and incidents provided that would cause them to fight and weaken themselves and gradually destroy national governments and religious institutions.

Was this the over-arching ideology that fostered both communism and capitalism? Many who studied Weishaupt’s Manifesto were shocked to find that in it he proposed the two opposing factions of communism and capitalism as the method of achieving world domination through social anarchy. We shall expose this Manifesto in a later chapter and the reader can evaluate the content.

In order to identify the problems of this century competently, we must in all conscience utilize reliable records and reliable descriptions of the various ideologies and philosophies. So let us once again revisit some history.

First, let us look more closely at the two regional wars that were fought on purely ideological grounds, or so we were led to believe.

The Korean War was purportedly about the United Nations stepping in to defend South Korea against communist aggression from North Korea. Wrong — this war was about the barnyard pecking order as in Bloom's example. The dominant super powers needed a cause at home, so they simply maneuvered the pawns, North and South Korea, into a hostile ideological posture, with China as a back up to the North and the United Nations as support for the South. The two superpowers went at it hammer and tongs. Neither side was meant to win; this was just a test of strength as the two dominant nation powers flexed their military muscles. Of course, the prize was philosophical dominance — and therefore both politically and financially expedient.

Chapter 7

The Korean War

"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."-Henry Adams

The roots of the Korean War are deeply embedded in history. While few regions are less suited to warfare than is the mountainous, river-slashed Korean peninsula, few have known more conflict. For centuries, Korea’s three powerful neighbors — China, Japan, and the Soviet Union — vied for its control. By 1910, Japan had established a supremacy it maintained until its defeat in World War II.

Seven days before the Japanese surrender that ended World War II, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Soviet troops entered Korea. By agreement, the Soviet Union accepted the surrender of all Japanese forces in Korea north of the 38th parallel of latitude, while the United States accepted the surrender of Japanese units south of the 38th parallel. The Soviet Union quickly sealed off the 38th-parallel border. It soon set up an interim civil government for the nine million Koreans of the north, which contained most of Korea’s industry. The government was run by Soviet-trained communist officials.

The United States maintained a military government in the south. The 21 million Koreans of the largely agricultural region were not satisfied with it. A U.S./Soviet commission, established to make plans for the reunification of Korea under a free government, made no progress. In 1947, the United States took the problem before the United Nations, which voted that free elections under its supervision should be held throughout Korea in 1948 to choose a single government. The Soviet Union refused to permit the United Nations election commission to enter the north. Elections were thus held only in the south, where a National Assembly and a president, Syngman Rhee, were chosen. The new democracy was named the Republic of Korea.

In the north, the Soviet Union proclaimed a Communist dictatorship called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). Pyongyang was named its capital. Late in 1948, Soviet forces began to withdraw from North Korea, leaving behind an entrenched communist regime and a well-trained, well-equipped North Korean army. U.S. occupation forces left South Korea in 1949. They left behind a government still “feeling its way,” and an army ill-trained and ill-equipped compared to that of the north. Nevertheless, South Korea successfully resisted North Korean attempts at subversion, communist-supported guerrilla activities, and border raids by North Korean forces. Frustrated, North Korea early in 1950 decided upon war to achieve its goal of Korean unification under Communist rule.

In June 1950, North Korea’s army totaled 135,000 men. North Korea’s infantry was also supported by approximately 150 Soviet-made medium tanks, ample artillery, and a small air force. South Korea’s ground forces included a 45,000-member national police force and an army of 98,000. South Korea was armed largely with light infantry weapons supplied by the United States. It had no tanks or combat aircraft, and its artillery was inferior to that of North Korea. Its officers and enlisted men generally had less training and experience than did those of North Korea. After the insurgency showed signs of failing, the northern government undertook a direct attack, sending the North Korea People’s Army south across the 38th parallel before daylight on Sunday, June 25, 1950. The invasion, in a narrow sense, marked the beginning of a civil war between peoples of a divided country. In a larger sense, the Cold War between the great power blocs had erupted in open hostilities.

The Western Bloc, especially the United States, was surprised by the North Korean decision. Although intelligence information o