Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (18 page)

Day of Deceit

One problem with Stinnett’s conclusions is that those officers involved in breaking the Japanese naval codes consistently and vehemently denied over the years that they had managed to achieve this before Pearl Harbor, only succeeding a year later. Could these men also be part of the plot? To accept Stinnett’s conclusion you had to believe that, if anything, the conspiracy was even wider than alleged by Barnes and Toland. But there is a much greater objection to the accusations contained in
Day of Deceit
. Experts in cryptography, after studying his book, charged that Stinnett had either quite simply misunderstood the thousands of documents he had pored over or failed to read those that were most significant. In particular, he had failed to understand difficulties and time lags involved in breaking, reading, and decrypting a code.

The writer Stephen Budiansky has pointed out that the most authoritative account of the U.S. breaking of the code is contained in a document titled
History of GYP-1
, which was declassified and placed in the U.S. National Archives in 1998. This showed, according to Budiansky, that an initial, limited break
had
been achieved in September 1940, but that the Japanese had then changed their code and key books. Some of the decoded messages from that period, discovered by Stinnett in the archives, were perfectly explicable, but they had been decoded
after
the war. Altogether, concluded Budiansky, the documents “show unmistakably that not a single message sent throughout the year 1941 in the Operations Code was broken and read by the United States before December 7.”
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In fact, the earliest decoded message in the archives, according to Budiansky, has a decryption and translation date of January 8, 1942. Stinnett responded in part by accusing Budiansky—author of a history of Allied code-breaking—and other critics of having “close ties with the National Security Agency” and of launching “a two-year media campaign” to discredit his conclusions.

The Final Piece of the Jigsaw

It is hard to let the question of Pearl Harbor go without returning to Gore Vidal, probably the most internationally famous of those still alive who claim that Roosevelt had foreknowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor and provoked it. In his collection of writings
The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2001
, Vidal included a letter sent to the
Times Literary Supplement
in response to one from the author Clive James. James had raised the tricky question of how risky and perverse it would have been for Roosevelt to assume that an attack by Japan would automatically lead to the war the president had really wanted all along—the one with Nazi Germany. Pouring scorn on James for his “received opinion,” Vidal made the following argument: “On December 4th General Marshall had presented FDR, at his own request, with a war plan in which he proposed that, as Hitler was the principal enemy of the U.S. and the world, the United States should raise an expeditionary force of five million men and send it to invade Germany by July 1st 1943.” The plan, Vidal reminded readers, was somehow leaked to the
Chicago Tribune
, where it was duly noted by Hitler. It thus provided a “rational, if odd reason,” in Vidal’s view, for declaring hostilities.
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In fact, Hitler gave many reasons for declaring war on the United States in his address to the Reichstag on December 11, 1941, as he always did when he decided to declare war on another country or to invade it. The speech suggests broader considerations than one leaked contingency plan:

We know the power behind Roosevelt. It is the same eternal Jew that believes that his hour has come to impose the same fate on us that we have all seen and experienced with horror in Soviet Russia . . . We know that their entire effort is aimed at this goal: even if we were not allied with Japan, we would still realize that the Jews and their Franklin Roosevelt intend to destroy one country after another. The German Reich of today has nothing in common with the Germany of the past. For our part, we will now do what this provocateur has been trying to achieve for years. And not just because we are allied with Japan, but rather because Germany and Italy with their present leaderships have the insight and strength to realize that in this historic period the existence or non-existence of nations is being determined, perhaps for all time.
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A Brief History of Revisionism

What Vidal was demonstrating when he cited Marshall’s leaked war plan, not least in his ascription to an adversary of the desire to cling to received opinion, was belief in a different history. He was suggesting that there is often, running parallel to the Establishment version of past events, another and truer version. A version uncontaminated by prejudice and what has come to be called spin. Such history is described as revisionist by its practitioners and supporters, and given a whole lot of other epithets by more established historians.

The study and writing of history have always been problematic. Primary sources disagree, and there are historiographical fashions. Some histories become almost canonical—unchallengeable retailers of the truth about the past. It is often said that history is written by the victors in any struggle, and that the identities of heroes and villains are therefore constructed so as to fit in with the requirements of the winner. Marxist historiography disputed the analytical usefulness of “bourgeois” history, and cast the passing worlds in terms of the struggle between social and economic classes. Social histories forswore the concentration on “great men,” insisting that you only understand the past if you examine the lives of the masses. But revisionist history did something else. It was (and is) less an alternative way of studying than an adoption of deliberately alternative opinions about the past.

Probably the leading ideologue of American revisionism was Harry Elmer Barnes, the historian and America Firster who devoted so much time to proving that Pearl Harbor was a conspiracy. His definition of revisionism was that it constituted an “effort to revise the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere, and a more objective attitude.”
³³
But the calmness is often hard to discern and the desire seems rather to destroy conventional wisdom than patiently to correct it. This destruction for many people became something of a pleasure. But it was also—in the case of the isolationists, who had comprehensively lost the fight against American intervention—a vindication of their beliefs.

A second direction for the revisionist impulse has been altogether less entertaining and more malign. Up to the end of the war, there was always a strong motive for isolationists to argue that the Nazi threat to the world was somehow less lethal than it had been painted. But after 1945, there was one overwhelming problem with any such position: to most people in America, almost any action taken against the regime that had authored the Holocaust could be seen as justifiable. Some revisionist historians therefore began to look around for other arguments. One such might be that the Allies, in the bombing of civilian areas and their use of the atomic weapon, had proved themselves to be bad guys too. But could it also be established that the Nazi horrors were actually less, well, horrific?

This was exactly the progression followed by Harry Elmer Barnes, who had always been disinclined to accept everything that was said about Hitler’s aggressiveness. At some point in the early 1960s, his skepticism reached so far that he even began to question the claim that Hitler had ordered and presided over the near total destruction of Europe’s Jewish population. Indeed, the very growth of knowledge and understanding about what had happened to the Jews was taken by Barnes as evidence of a lack of authenticity:

These camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dora, but it was demonstrated that there had been no systematic extermination in those camps. Attention was then moved on to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska, Tarnow, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Brezeznia, and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that appears to have been extended as needed.
³⁴

That no systematic extermination was discovered in Dachau, etc., was hardly surprising, since the earliest camps to be liberated were work camps inside the Reich itself, and these had furnished a fair number of survivors. The second string of camps had wholly or in part been extermination camps, from which, by definition, almost nobody returned. But it is clear from Barnes’s cynicism about how the list had been “extended as needed” that he regarded accounts of extermination as essentially manufactured. He continued: “The smother-out legend represents the German plan as the extermination of all Jews that the Germans could lay their hands on. No authentic documents have been produced that support any such contention.” Barnes had clearly never heard of the Wannsee Conference.

The next step was to discover who was behind the attempt to smear the Nazis with the accusation of genocide. In 1964, the French writer Paul Rassinier, who had himself been incarcerated in one of the Reich’s work camps, published a book titled
The Drama of the European Jews,
which questioned eyewitness and survivor accounts of the death camps, doubted the logistical feasibility of mass gassing, and concluded that there never had been a deliberate attempt by the German authorities to physically eliminate the Jews of Europe.

The elderly Barnes reviewed this work. Under the heading of “Zionist Fraud,” Barnes agreed that the charges against Nazi Germany had been willfully exaggerated. Not that he denied altogether that atrocities had taken place, “committed by certain brutes in the concentration camps of the Third Reich, many of whom were Communists, who had infiltrated as guards.” But Barnes agreed with Rassinier that the scale of the killings had been inflated from around a million to an absurd six million, a figure accepted by “shameless propagandists, doubtful witnesses, and others ill-informed.” Rassinier showed, said Barnes, why this exaggeration had taken place:

The courageous author lays the chief blame for misrepresentation on those whom we must call the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of [German] marks from non-existent, mythical and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner . . . By presenting a reparations invoice based on the figure of six million Jews exterminated, each one representing an indemnity of 5,000 marks, the International Zionist Movement has been concerned mainly with lightening the permanent deficit weighing on the bankers of the Diaspora; indeed, even to get rid of it and transform it into an appreciable profit.

This is very nearly the ultimate libel. The suggestion that the Holocaust had been invented largely to make surviving relatives a lot of money is uniquely offensive. Obliviously, Barnes plowed on: “It only weakens the case when, with the use of false documents, the weakest sort of testimony, and statistics outrageously inflated, the State of Israel claims indemnity for six million dead. This completely inaccurate figure only serves Communist and other political causes in Europe, and outright financial purposes in Tel Aviv.”
³⁵

Barnes died in 1968, his name living on in a publication called the
Barnes Review
, ostensibly devoted to revisionism but, in fact, a repository of neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, and Holocaust-denial writings. It is a sad memorial to an almost distinguished life.

Flynn and the Reds

But let us return to Mr. Flynn, whom we last saw declaiming about Roosevelt’s duplicity in deliberately provoking a Japanese attack. The declaration of war and the dissolution of the America First Committee did nothing to daunt Flynn’s ardor, and he continued to pursue his enemies throughout and after the war. Some of his targets were those he believed to have sabotaged the America First and antiwar movement. Even before Pearl Harbor, he’d had these people in his sights, laying before his friends and backers in the Senate his belief that Hollywood had been transformed into a mechanism for inculcating prowar sentiments. As a result, his old friend Gerald Nye of Montana had gone on the radio on August 1, 1941, to deliver an address that, according to Flynn’s biographer John E. Moser, was largely written by the hard-talking journalist.
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Nye’s argument was that the major motion picture studios were acting as “gigantic engines of propaganda” in an attempt to shift public opinion in favor of intervention. The reason, claimed Nye, was that the studios had financial interests in Britain, which gave them “a stake of millions of dollars annually in Britain winning this war.” If Britain lost, “seven of the eight leading [motion picture] companies will be wiped out.” Of course, the administration had been acting to ensure that movies reflected the government’s line, an interference that had met with compliance from an industry that “swarms with refugees . . . from Russia, Hungary, Germany, and the Balkan countries” who were naturally “susceptible to . . . national and racial emotions.”

At Nye’s suggestion, the Senate agreed to hold an “investigation of war propaganda disseminated by the motion picture industry and of any monopoly in the production, distribution, or exhibition of motion pictures.” The wording ensured that the inquiry would be conducted by the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, chaired by fellow America Firster, Burton Wheeler of Montana.

The hearings began on September 9, 1941, just two days before Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech. Flynn, who had quite possibly written the resolution calling for the investigation, now turned up as a witness before the committee. Nye also gave evidence. In the cinema, said Nye, “Mr. or Mrs. or Miss America sits, with guard completely down, mind open, ready and eager for entertainment,” and instead received propaganda. His Senate cosponsor, Bennett Champ Clark, argued that “dozens of pictures are used to infect the minds of their audiences with hatred, to inflame them, to arouse their emotions, and make them clamor for war. And not one word . . . of the argument against war is heard.” Clark’s view was that the cinema was too great a force and “too dangerous a power for any democracy to permit, concentrated in the hands of a few men.”