One of the greatest reasons why the world is in such a tremendous state of crisis today is the total and complete mismanagement of World War II by America, specifically by Franklin Roosevelt. In 1943, in early 1943, World War II was, for all intents and purposes, over. The main part of the Japanese fleet had been sent to the bottom at the Battle of Midway, the German sixth Army had been destroyed at Stalingrad. Key military figures in both Italy and Germany were frantically trying to contact the United States, to overthrow their governments, and end the war. An informal agreement had been reached with the Italian military for Italy to exit the war.
U.S. PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT WRECKS CHANCES TO END WORLD WAR II
At this point in time, US president Franklin Roosevelt made one of the most completely insane, criminal, and stupid decisions in the entire history of the world - and that's a real achievement. Roosevelt, without even consulting his allies, without even gaining approval - though he sort of told Churchill about this about five seconds before he announced it - announced that the policy of the allies would be unconditional surrender. In other words, there is no point of the Italians to negotiate; there is no point of the Germans to negotiate, because there'd be no negotiations. Either they'd surrender totally and completely with no conditions whatsoever, or the war would be fought to the death.
This completely undermined the power of the anti-Nazi resistance within Germany. It completely derailed in the short term the plan by the Italian military to surrender Italy. Now, the latter point was that this had to be done quickly, to avoid the Germans finding out about it. Since Roosevelt wrecked all the negotiations, the Germans did find out about it, and seized control of Italy, thus the plan by the Allies to quickly take control of Italy turned into a complete disaster that led to a huge slaughter, and never really got untangled until early 1945. This is a matter of enormous significance. If the war had ended in 1943, the majority of Holocaust victims would've survived. The majority of the German cities, and the Japanese cities would not have been incinerated by the British and the Americans. The Russian army would've ended the war way out on the Eastern front, and the nightmare of communist rule in Europe after the war would not have happened. Now, the series of disasters of produced by America did not stop there.
BRITISH AND AMERICAN FORCES DOUBLE CROSS RUSSIA
In the summer of 1943, the British and the Americans double-crossed the Russians, and violated - for the second time - the solemn agreement to open up a second front in Europe. This meant that the Russians would continue to bleed and die on their end of the front, without the Allies opening up a second front. Now, part of the problem, as we've discussed in other lectures, was the delusion, particularly on the part of the British, but also on the part of the Americans, that the knowing and deliberate mass murder of German civilians, the wholesale firebombing of cities would scare the Germans so badly that they would surrender, and therefore there would be no need for D-Day. This policy was a complete atrocity from day one. It's a well-known military fact after the war, but during the war, England and America consistently lied, and claimed that they were pursuing "precision bombing," and were only aiming at military targets and - gosh, if some civilians got killed, that was terrible - but of course, that wasn't what they were planning. This is an absolute, flat-out lie. An absolute, flat-out lie. So, this point needs to be kept in mind.
Now, another problem was that the Americans kept badgering - aside from not opening up a second front to help the Russians - they kept badgering the Russians to violate their nonaggression pact with Japan, and invade China, which they eventually did, which helped produce communism in China, and the death of over 80 million Chinese citizens. This was another complete insanity, which led to total disaster. Now, in late 1943, the single most-important conference of the war took place: the Tehran conference. Now, the two scoundrels Roosevelt and Churchill showed up, having completely violated their pledges to the Soviet Union to open up a second front. This meant they were in a very poor negotiating position with Stalin. Now what was agreed to was basically a deliberate campaign of further civilian mass murder of German civilians. An absolute unbelievable agreement was reached, where 15 million German civilians were to be deported from Czechoslovakia and Poland into Germany - actually, the eastern part of Germany, which was later classified as Poland. And when this happened, 2 million of them died in the process. The notion that Roosevelt and Churchill claimed later, that "oh, I thought would that it be done in a humane way" is so ridiculous it doesn't really merit serious consideration.
THE DEVASTATION OF "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER"
Now as the war progressed, the bombing campaign failed to produce the desired results. It did do a very good job of incinerating thousands of years of art and culture; did a very good job of massacring German civilians; it completely failed to end the war. It also, according to postwar and military analysis, was a complete misuse of resources, since if they targeted military targets instead of murdering civilians, they could've ended the war a lot more quickly. Had it not been for unconditional surrender, it's possible that it might have worked, but the fact is it didn't.
So, the Allies had to organize D-Day in 1944. Now, the important point about D-Day was that D-Day was as much directed against the Russians - the war was basically over, it had been won by the Russians - and D-Day was as much designed - far from liberating Europe, but to prevent the Russian army from reaching the Atlantic coast, since the bombing campaign had completely failed to produce the desired surrender. So the Allies launched D-Day, and fighting (I might say about 20% of the German forces; they always act like it's the most decisive battle in the history of the world) World War II was over. The Russians would've won, would've arrived on the Atlantic coast without D-Day. So anyway, they launched D-Day, and then moved about 1 mile an hour into Germany.
And then in 1944, another act of total mass insanity was launched by Roosevelt, which was the Morgenthau plan. The Morgenthau plan - which Roosevelt signed, and later claimed he didn't sign - was a plan to de-industrialize Germany in a manner that most economic analysts would've led to mass starvation throughout central Europe. This was all basically a campaign of genocide, and even though Roosevelt felt forced to repudiate the Morganthau plan, the Morgenthau plan was informally adopted as part of the initial occupation of Germany. What this did was to further prevent any ending of the war. Now, the war in Germany ended up being fought to the death, basically, it didn't end until the Russian army ended up in Berlin.
Meanwhile, in Asia, the policy of unconditional surrender guaranteed the war would go on to the very bitter end there. The Americans adopted a campaign of wholesale civilian mass murder once they got within air range of Japan. Probably the greatest single war crime organized by America in the war was the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, where more people died than in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki . It's very important to understand Hiroshima and Nagasaki would've looked exactly the same at the end of the war without the nuclear bomb. It just would've taken 1000 bombers a couple of days to do what one bomber did in half an hour. So, it's a very important point about morality and ethics of the whole situation.
Anyway, the war eventually came to a total end in 1945. Now, the extension of the war from 1943 to 45 was just an utter catastrophe, because it led to such a wholesale level of slaughter and destruction that there was the mad scramble to recover in the postwar period, regardless of how this affected the environment. But the disasters didn't stop there. Roosevelt died without really training Truman in much of anything about what was going on, another act of total insanity. And when Truman came to power, he adopted an extremely hostile and threatening attitude towards the Soviet Union, even though the Soviet Union had lost 17 million people, as opposed to America's 300,000. So in particular, America kept demanding that Russia hold free elections in Poland. Well, no government - no Russian government, capitalist, communist, Democratic - would stand for being told how to run its occupation of Poland by a foreign country. It would not. And Churchill then gave his famous Iron Curtain speech, where he suggested that the West threaten Russia with a potential nuclear attack.
THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR II
Truman had seen a copy of the speech since he was standing next to Churchill beforehand, but then lied about it, and claimed he had never seen it. All this did not do very good things to encourage Stalin to be more cooperative, and he threw resources into China to enable the Communists to crush the nationalists. Meanwhile, America on its part slapped an arms embargo against Chiang Kai-shek, who'd been given very little aid to begin with. The end result was the victory of Mao in the Chinese Civil War. The hostile attitude of Truman towards Russia led to the beginning of the Cold War, which became a very hysterical situation after the Communists seized control of China and, much to the shock of America exploded an atomic bomb in 1949. This was just an absolute shockwave in America, and this directly led to the - the mass hysteria in America led to the mass hysteria of religion in America, where evangelism began to soar: in God we trust was put on coins, and the Democrats were eventually thrown out of the White House in the election of 1952.
But the subset of all this was to set in motion an enormous arms race - an absolutely enormous arms race - that further squeezed the global environment, and further created a sense of desperation in terms of economic growth, and to hell with the environment in the postwar period. These facts are directly related to the beginning of the global environmental crisis, that today, threatens the world. Now in our time, there's been a great reinterpretation of World War II as sort of a glorious struggle, and this great battle against evil, to say nothing of the fact that the Stalin's regime was every bit as murderous is Hitler's, and Mao's was even more murderous, and Stalin did the overwhelming majority of the fighting in World War II. But, this has been reinterpreted to be a glorious, sacred struggle, and therefore with America naturally saving the world in every instance, and therefore this is the logic for an American imperium over the entire world.
Obviously, this is a deception. Obviously, this is a lie. Obviously, this is a criminal fraud. But this is what this is based on. Now you cannot live a lie; you cannot live a deception. And this is why the outlook for the world is very problematical in our time, and this is why other countries need to take a very close look at American imperialism. The American people need to reevaluate their supposed role as spending an absolute fortune to garrison the world. At the end of the day, this is a system of imperialism that is not going to work. It is already coming apart at the seams, and the whole role of America needs to be re-studied, and moved into a more cooperative situation with the rest of the world. This is the end of this lecture.