by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
During 1940 the determined efforts of President Franklin Roosevelt to involve America in the war against Hitler’s Germany were blocked by the overwhelming opposition of the American people, running at 80% according to some polls. A group of young Yale Law School peace activists had launched the America First Committee and it quickly attracted 800,000 members, becoming the largest grassroots political organization in our national history. The leadership of the AFC included many of our most prominent business and journalistic figures, and famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, one of our greatest national heroes, served as its top spokesman.
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With American antiwar sentiment so seemingly strong and resolute, various political stratagems were employed to reduce it. In late October 1941, just few weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor finally settled the issue, FDR announced in a nationwide radio broadcast that he had obtained a German map that revealed the secret Nazi plans to seize control of Latin America, which Hitler would then use as a base to attack the United States as part of his bold plan of world conquest.
Our President declared:
Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government – by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it…This map makes clear the Nazi design, not only against South America but against the United States as well.
Probably millions or even tens of millions of Americans believed FDR’s words about that direct threat to our national security and therefore softened their resistance to our country’s involvement in the European war. But as historians have long since acknowledged, the map was a forgery, probably produced by FDR’s own close British collaborators. In an earlier private conversation with the British ambassador, FDR had warned that his secret activities with the British would probably lead to his impeachment if they were revealed.
I think few Americans at the time were willing to publicly accuse our President of such major falsehoods, but from a distance of more than eighty years, what strikes me is the sheer absurdity of FDR’s accusation. Germany had no significant navy and had been stymied for over a year by the barrier of the English Channel, only 18 miles wide. Yet apparently a large majority of the American media and the American public were willing to believe that the Germans could easily cross the thousands of miles of the Atlantic Ocean and gain control of the countries of South America, whose total population was considerably larger than that of Germany itself. So the excitement of being privy to a secret intelligence document seems to have triumphed over rational thought in the minds of many people, including eager journalists.
FDR’s illegal efforts to involve us in a totally unnecessary war outraged many of our Military Intelligence professionals at the time, but they were bound by an oath of secrecy, and their views only became known years or decades later when they published their books and personal memoirs. Extensive archival research by Prof. Joseph Bendersky fully uncovered their extremely bitter contemporaneous sentiments, and he noted the “fierce delight” they took in FDR’s eventual death: “Finally, the evil man was dead!”
Just after the end of the war, Gen. George Patton, one of our most illustrious military commanders, told his colleagues that he intended to resign his commission so that he could begin a nationwide speaking tour to provide the American public with the true facts about the war that they had just fought. Patton soon died in a highly-suspicious vehicle accident, and decades later his self-confessed American assassin revealed that he had killed Patton under direct orders from top figures in our own government.
Government officials have long recognized that secret information, even if heavily distorted or completely false, can be used to effectively shape media coverage. Many journalists and pundits are always eager to receive leaks, confidential tidbits that they are willing to make the centerpiece of their one-sided stories, thereby allowing themselves to be manipulated.
A perfect example of this process occurred during the run-up to the Iraq War, when leaks of secret intelligence information from Bush Neocons were widely promoted in such elite media outlets as the New York Times and the New Yorker. This persuaded our gullible citizenry that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons and also planned to attack our country with anthrax and other deadly biological weapons, while seemingly being in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, his regional arch-enemy. As I described a decade ago, most of Congress and the American people fully accepted such obvious nonsense, resulting in our disastrous Iraq War, which began the destruction of much of the Middle East:
