[Peace-discuss] Manipulating us into war (the "Sumter Syndrome")

[C. G. Estabrook]

Alex Cockburn notes "the extreme unease with which the corporate press 
approaches a story which casting  grave discredit on the government of the 
United States.

"The onslaught on the Isolationists who strove to keep America clear of both 
World Wars furnish the clearest illustration here of this antipathy.  In the 
case of the Second World War,  there is a mountain of evidence attesting to 
FDR’s prolonged, devious  and ultimately campaign to get America into the war. 
The role of the British intelligence services in this enterprise has been slowly 
excavated down the years.

"Professor Thomas Mahl, who published a brilliant excavation of the covert 
British campaign in his 1998 book 'Desperate Deception -- British Covert 
Operations in the United States, 1939-44' writes in his introduction that 'until 
recently, the study of the intelligence history of World War II has lacked 
respectability. The conventional charge is that it smacks too much of conspiracy 
– a word with a very unprofessional ring among American historians… Graduate 
students are warned about the "furtive fallacy" ... How does the historian avoid 
the charge  that he is indulging in conspiracy history when he explores the 
activities of a thousand people, occupying two floors of Rockefeller Center, in 
their efforts to involve the United States in a major war? What should we 
properly call the public rigging of an opinion poll, the planting of a lover, or 
a fraudulent letter by an intelligence agency in order to gain information or to 
influence policy?'

"The ruthless campaign to discredit Charles Beard’s pioneering 1948 book, 
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941 attested to the determination 
by the foreign policy and academic establishments to crush the 
Non-Interventionists and neutralize them as a political force amid the postwar 
rise of American Empire. Denouncing 'conspiracy mongering' was an integral part 
of this campaign – never more vehement than when addressing the whole issue of 
FDR’s conduct in the run-up to Pearl Harbor."

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05282010.html

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