Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain! And remember the Lusitania, the Arizona, the Oklahoma and the Maddox. The media reports of attacks on those ships persuaded the American public to give up living in peace, and set aside their objections of getting involved in four horrible wars.
Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst ran a story titled, “The War Ship Maine was Split in Two by an Enemy’s Secret Infernal Machine,” that blamed the Spanish for what was an internal explosion that killed 268 sailors, even though there was no evidence that Spain had anything to with it. This, along with fabricated stories such as the Spanish feed Cuban children to the sharks, convinced the public that the Spanish needed to be defeated, which in turn allowed the government to have their splendid little war.
Hearst’s reporting was called “yellow journalism.” This type of journalism still persists today. The media, with their sensational fabricated news stories, along with their supporting cast of politicians, think tanks and defense contractors, is what I call the War Propaganda Machine.
Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 with the slogan, “he kept us out of war.” Less than a month after his second inauguration, he asked congress to declare war on Germany. The Committee on Public Information was created eleven days later to disseminate the war propaganda. His excuses for war was the sinking of the Lusitania and an alleged telegraph from Germany asking Mexico to go to war against the United States. Mexico had no intention to get involved in a war and the sinking of the Lusitania was orchestrated by the British.
Winston Churchill, who was the First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, was in the secret Room 40 monitoring the German submarine that would torpedo the ship. The Lusitania could have taken a different route or outran the sub, since it was twice as fast, but it didn’t. Instead, it slowed down right where a known enemy submarine was located. There was a secondary explosion after the torpedo hit the ship which was probably caused by the enormous amount of weapons in the hull. A dive team estimated that there were about four million rounds of American made Remington .303 bullets in the Lusitania’s hull. The secondary explosion sunk the ship in only eighteen minutes.
Churchill wanted to get the United States in the war and the sinking of the Lusitania helped facilitate his goal. Churchill wrote in a letter, “It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the U.S. with Germany. For our part we want the traffic, the more the better and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.”
A similar story gathered support from a reluctant populace to get the United States involved in the Second World War. A researcher named Robert Stinnett wanted to prove that the conspiracy theories surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor were untrue. He discovered the opposite, and wrote the book, ‘Day of Deceit.’
The Roosevelt Administration knew that the attack was coming, since the Japanese codes had already been broken. Merchant ships were ordered to avoid the seas where the Japanese fleet was sailing, so that the military leaders in Hawaii wouldn’t be alerted.
Over a sixteen year period, Stinnett reviewed two hundred thousand pages of documents from the National Archives. The smoking gun of a conspiracy was the Eight Action Memo written by Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, the communications routing officer for President Roosevelt. The memo lays out the actions necessary to ensure that Japan would commit an overt act of war. The memo states:
It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado; and it is barely possible that vigorous action on our part might lead the Japanese to modify their attitude. Therefore the following course of action is suggested:
- Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore
- Make an arrangement with the Netherlands for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies
- Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang-Kai-Shek
- Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore
- Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient
- Keep the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific[,] in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands
- Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil
- Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire
If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better. At all events we must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war.
…A. H. McCollum
The Roosevelt Administration followed these guidelines to achieve the goal of getting the United States involved in World War Two.
President Lyndon Johnson used a fabricated attack on the Maddox to ensure passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in order to go to war with North Vietnam. The resolution stated:
Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression,
As usual, a compliant media sold the lies to the American people. The New York Times ran the headline: RED PT BOATS FIRE AT U.S. DESTROYER ON VIETNAM DUTY Maddox and Four Aircraft Shoot Back After Assault 30 Miles Off Coast.
After Nine Eleven, the media promoted the Osama bin Laden Mountain Fortress story to justify the invasion of Afghanistan. An illustration of a multi-level cave, that could accommodate a thousand people, complete with hydro-electric power, and a large cache of stinger missiles was shown to the public. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went on television to say that there were many mountain fortresses. That became the impetus for the Afghan War.
After twenty years, in the longest war in American history, and after 2.3 trillion dollars spent and two hundred thousand lives lost, not one single mountain fortress was found.
Next up was the invasion of Iraq by using the infamous “weapons of mass destruction” lie to get us into another war.
The media is currently working overtime with their war propaganda by accusing Russia of committing atrocities in Ukraine to gather support of American involvement in the war. Unfortunately, the United States was involved before the Russian troops moved into Ukraine.
Anyone can listen to the phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, where they plot regime change in Ukraine. They got the change they sought, which led to the Russian speaking people in Eastern Ukraine to vote overwhelmingly to break away from Ukraine.
The politicians are telling the American public that Ukraine has the right to reclaim the territory they lost in battle. Libertarians do not believe that governments have the right to determine who they will govern. Instead, the people have the right to chose their government.
Libertarians should oppose all foreign entanglements, and all foreign aid. And we need to recognize the pattern of war propaganda, so we can effectively counter the War Propaganda Machine.