The Mises Institute Revisionist History of War Conference
On May 15-17, the libertarian Mises Institute hosted a “Revisionist History of War Conference” at its Auburn headquarters.
I was one of sixteen speakers invited to make a presentation, with my topic being “The True History of World War II.” I thought my thirty-five minute talk went well, and the audio version is now available:
Each speakers was invited to submit a written article roughly corresponding to his presentation, and these will be published in the conference proceedings. Mine appears below, with many portions of my text being drawn from the numerous previous articles on this same subject that I have published since 2018.
Considering the Analogy of the Russia-Ukraine War
World War II was certainly the most colossal military conflict in human history and it became the shaping event of our modern world, with its consequences and influence still extremely important nearly eighty years after the guns fell silent.
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Major wars are naturally accompanied by a great deal of governmental media propaganda, and this was certainly the case with the Second World War.
Over time that propaganda eventually congealed into a distorted historical narrative that has become so ubiquitous across our schools, news media, and popular entertainment that it is casually assumed to be true and correct by nearly our entire population more than three generations after the events in question, sometimes with seriously damaging political consequences. This powerful synthetic narrative of “the Good War” still greatly influences American politics and foreign policy down to the present day, so trying to accurately reconstruct the reality of what actually happened long before almost any of us were born seems a useful and important project.
In attempting to pierce the many thick layers of those government-sponsored distortions regarding World War II, I think it is helpful to start with a recent and analogous case, one that is far better understood by large portions of the more thoughtful American public.
As the late Prof. Stephen Cohen pointed out several years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin probably ranks as the most consequential political figure of our young twenty-first century. Yet over the last decade or so, no national leader since Adolf Hitler has been so massively demonized by the Western media, and this almost unprecedented campaign of vilification went into overdrive following the outbreak of the Ukraine war in February 2022.
Once Russian troops crossed the Ukraine border, the response of America and the rest of the West was closer to an outright declaration of war against Russia rather than merely a reversion to the decades of old Cold War policies directed against the Soviet Union.
Some $300 billion of Russia’s financial assets held in Western banks were frozen, Russian institutions were disconnected from supposedly neutral international systems such as SWIFT, Russian civilian flights were banned over Western territory, and even Russian musical compositions were removed from the performances of Western symphonies. An enormous wave of very harsh Western economic and trade sanctions was imposed against Russia, while the Western property holdings of wealthy Russian private citizens were seized.
The obvious intent of all these coordinated measures was to inflict severe economic and psychological damage upon ordinary Russian society and its ruling elites, thereby destabilizing the government of that country and perhaps leading to its collapse or overthrow. Indeed, some prominent American political and media figures explicitly called for the assassination of President Putin, the sort of public statements that would have been absolutely unthinkable during our long Cold War struggle against the hostile Soviet Communist regime.
As part of this process, nearly all of our mainstream media organs began loudly promoting an extremely distorted and dishonest narrative of how the conflict began. The Russian attack on Ukraine was so universally described as an “unprovoked invasion” that this two-word phrase almost seemed triggered by a single keystroke press.
But as most of us know, the actual facts were entirely different. Instead the military conflict that began in early 2022 was arguably one of the most “provoked” major wars in modern history, with the military and political provocations of the West and its Ukrainian client state having gone on for at least eight years, finally reaching a fever-pitch just before the Russians attacked.
In 2014, Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, one of our most distinguished political scientists, gave a lengthy lecture explaining how the recent Western-backed coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically-elected and Russian-leaning government might eventually lead to a war with Russia, especially given the widespread talk of bringing Ukraine into NATO. Once the war began in 2022, his prescient presentation went super-viral on YouTube, quickly attracting a worldwide audience of many millions, and its current total of 30 million views probably ranks it as the most widely-watched academic lecture in the history of the Internet.
Although the mainstream Western media almost totally boycotted and ignored his analysis, Mearsheimer was hardly alone in his description of the causes of the Ukraine war, a bloody conflict that has now probably taken more than a million European lives. Many other very highly-regarded academic scholars and former government officials soon explained the roots of the war in similar terms. These individuals included Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and former Ambassador Chas Freeman, as well as Ray McGovern, the former head of the CIA’s Soviet Policy Branch and a longtime Presidential Intelligence Briefer.
These knowledgeable experts and many others of similar views have become regular weekly interview guests on the YouTube channel of Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Dialogue Works channel, and various other venues. This has allowed them to challenge the official media narrative by presenting their completely contrary analyses on all these controversial matters. Some of them have also regularly published articles providing their written perspectives, as have many bloggers and websites of similar views.
For years, Tucker Carlson had been the most popular host on cable television. So when he was fired by FoxNews last year, he quickly created his own new interview show, easily available on Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms, and it soon became hugely popular, sometimes attracting an audience larger than almost anything similar featured on traditional media. Last year, he traveled to Moscow to interview President Putin for 90 minutes, and the resulting show attracted many tens of millions of viewers across his various platforms, leaving his former television colleagues green with envy.
So although the mainstream media continues to stubbornly promote a very distorted view of the facts, anyone who seeks to get the other side of the Ukraine war story from highly-regarded individuals can easily do so.
But suppose these powerful video platforms did not exist, nor their social media distribution channels, nor any other elements of today’s Internet.
Under those conditions, Mearsheimer, Sachs, McGovern, and all these other highly-credentialed experts might still hold exactly the same contrary views of our conflict with Russia, but would anyone have ever heard about them? Mearsheimer’s 2014 lecture would have only been seen by its original audience of several hundred, and when the war broke out eight years later, perhaps a few of them might have dimly remembered his arguments, rather than the thirty million who then discovered his presentation and watched it in 2022. After Carlson was fired by FoxNews, he would have disappeared almost without a trace, never attracting the many millions of viewers who have continued to watch him on the Internet.
Furthermore, suppose that the Western conflict with Russia had ultimately been entirely successful, with military reverses or economic devastation eventually leading to the collapse of the Russian government. If Putin and his entire political circle had been overthrown, then killed or driven into exile, while his country was subdued and firmly brought into the American orbit, would anyone have much questioned the exact circumstances under which the war began?
I think these thoughts should be firmly kept in mind as we begin exploring the history of the Second World War, a conflict whose standard historical narrative all of us have absorbed throughout our entire lives from every mainstream media source.
The Origins of World War II According to A.J.P. Taylor
There exist countless starting points for those who seek to discover the true history of World War II. But I think that one of the best of these comes in a relatively short book published in 1961 by A.J.P. Taylor, a renowned Oxford historian.
As a Harvard freshman, I had taken an introductory history course, and one of the primary required texts on World War II had been Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War. In that book, he persuasively laid out a case for how the conflict began that was radically different from what I had always been told in all my media accounts. That sharp difference was true at the time and it has remained so during the decades since then.
As most of us know from our standard history books, the flashpoint of the conflict had been Germany’s demand for the return of Danzig. But that border city under Polish control had a 95% German population, which overwhelmingly desired reunification with its traditional homeland after twenty years of enforced separation following the end of the First World War. According to Taylor only a dreadful diplomatic blunder by the British had led the Poles to refuse that reasonable request, thereby provoking the war. The widespread later claim that Hitler sought to conquer the world was totally absurd, and instead the German leader had actually made every effort to avoid war with Britain or France.
The 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II naturally prompted numerous historical discussions in the media, and these led me to dig out my old copy of Taylor’s short volume, which I reread for the first time in nearly forty years.
I found it just as masterful and persuasive as I had back in my college dorm room days, and the glowing cover-blurbs suggested some of the immediate acclaim the work had received. The Washington Post lauded the author as “Britain’s most prominent living historian,” World Politics called it “Powerfully argued, brilliantly written, and always persuasive,” The New Statesman, Britain leading leftist magazine, described it as “A masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written,” and the august Times Literary Supplement characterized it as “simple, devastating, superlatively readable, and deeply disturbing.” As an international best-seller, it surely ranked as Taylor’s most famous work, and I could easily understand why it was still on my required college reading list nearly two decades after its original publication.
Yet in revisiting Taylor’s ground-breaking history, I made a surprising discovery. Despite all the international sales and critical praise, the book’s findings soon aroused tremendous hostility in certain quarters. Taylor’s lectures at Oxford had been enormously popular for a quarter century, but as a direct result of the controversy “Britain’s most prominent living historian” was summarily purged from the faculty not long afterwards. At the beginning of his first chapter, Taylor had noted how strange he found it that more than twenty years after the start of the world’s most cataclysmic war no serious history had been produced carefully analyzing the outbreak. Perhaps the retaliation that he encountered led him to better understand part of that puzzle.
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Despite the intense mainstream hostility to any such candid account of the origins of the world war, others have occasionally undertaken that same project, and sometimes with considerable difficulty they have managed to get their books into print.
Decades after Taylor’s pioneering volume, an outstanding historical analysis reaching very similar conclusions was published in German by Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, who had spent his career as a fully mainstream professional military man, rising to the rank of major general in the German army before retiring. A couple of years ago I finally read the English translation of 1939 – The War That Had Many Fathers, which appeared in 2011, released exactly a half-century after Taylor’s seminal work.
The author considerably extended Taylor’s analysis, with his 700 pages describing in great detail the enormous efforts that Hitler had taken to avoid war and settle that boundary dispute, even spending many months on fruitless negotiations and offering extremely reasonable terms. Indeed, the German dictator had made numerous concessions to Poland that none of his democratic Weimar predecessors had ever been willing to consider. But these proposals were all rejected, while Polish provocations escalated, including violent attacks on their own country’s sizeable German minority population, until war seemed the only possible option.
The historical account presented in both these major works suggested eerie echoes of the factors behind Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Then as now, politically influential elements in the West seemed quite eager to provoke the war, using Danzig as the spark to ignite the conflict much like the simmering bloodshed in the Donbass had been used to force Putin’s hand.
