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 16 speakers invited to make a presentation, with my topic being “The True History of World War II.” I thought my 35-minute talk went well, and the audio version is now available:
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Mises Institute · The True History of World War II
Each speaker 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.
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.
Click here to read the full article on The Unz Review.
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A theoretical physicist by training, Mr. Unz serves as founder and chairman of UNZ.org, a content-archiving website providing free access to many hundreds of thousands of articles from prominent periodicals of the last hundred and fifty years. From 2007 to 2013, he also served as publisher of The American Conservative, a small opinion magazine, and had previously served as chairman of Wall Street Analytics, Inc., a financial services software company which he founded in New York City in 1987. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, Cambridge University, and Stanford University, and is a past first-place winner in the Intel/Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He was born in Los Angeles in 1961.
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