Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  Next, Zinn asks another—somewhat more reasonable—question:

  Or was it, as British scientist P. M. S. Blackett suggested (Fear, War, and the Bomb), that the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war against Japan? The Russians had secretly agreed (they were officially not at war with Japan) they would come into the war ninety days after the end of the European war. That turned out to be May 8, and so, on August 8, the Russians were due to declare war on Japan. But by then the big bomb had been dropped, and the next day a second one would be dropped on Nagasaki; the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan.89

  And thank goodness for that. Zinn tries to make the fact that the Japanese didn’t surrender to the Soviets—and, like the Eastern Europeans, suffer half a century of Communist oppression—into some kind of tragedy.

  And what about Zinn’s suggestion that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely unnecessary because Japan was already ready to surrender? As Sadao Asada pointed out in the Pacific Historical Review in critique of the “revisionist” line followed by Zinn, “Most assuredly Japanese sources do not support the ex post facto contention of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (1946) that ‘in all probability’ Japan would have surrendered before November 1 ‘even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” He placed Zinn’s sources—Blackett, Gar Alperovitz, and Martin Sherwin—in the camp of revisionists who have argued that “the bomb was meant as a political-diplomatic threat aimed against the Soviet Union in the emerging cold war.” This was also the view of Japanese apologists after the war. The monograph “Why Were the Atomic Bombs Dropped?” that “recapitulate[es] the Blackett thesis” that the victims were “killed as human guinea pigs for the sake of [America’s] anti-Communist, hegemonic policy” was originally published in Japan in 1968.

  The argument that Japan was “virtually a defeated nation” when the bombs were dropped in 1945, Asada explains, “confuses ‘defeat’ with ‘surrender’: Defeat is a military fait accompli, whereas surrender is the formal acceptance of defeat by the nation’s leaders, an act of decision-making.” Because Japan’s “governmental machinery was, to a large extent, controlled by the military and hampered by a cumbersome system that required unanimity of views for any decision, Japanese leaders had failed to translate defeat into surrender. In the end it was the atomic bomb, closely followed by the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, that compelled Japan to surrender.” The bomb enabled “the prime minister to bring Hirohito directly into a position where his ‘sacred decision’ for surrender could override the diehards.” The bomb helped the military “save ‘face,’ ” by giving them the excuse that they had been beaten by science.

  As Asada points out, “Alperovitz makes much of Togo’s cable to [Ambassador] Sato [Naokake] dated July 12 [which] conveyed Hirohito’s message ‘the war be concluded speedily.’ ” But “what the deciphered Japanese dispatches reveal, however, were indecision and contradiction in Tokyo; the Japanese government could never agree on surrender terms,” with the military presenting obstacles and delays. Asada describes the militaristic fanaticism that contradicts Zinn’s claim that the Japanese no longer posed any threat: “Women practiced how to face American tanks with bamboo spears,” and the Japanese were committed to “glorious deaths” in “kamikaze planes as human rockets, in midget submarines as human torpedoes, and in suicide charges in ground units.” Japan’s surrender probably “forestalled sacrifices on both sides far surpassing those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Even after Hiroshima, some Japanese military leaders did not believe that the U.S. had more than one bomb, or that they could be dropped quickly—one after the other—until we dropped the bomb on Nagasaki.90

  But Zinn conjectures, “The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment?”91

  In case the suggestion about experimentation on human beings that exceeded even that of the Nazis is lost, Zinn turns back to Europe, claiming that Germany was “crushed primarily by the armies of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, aided by the Allied armies on the West. . . . the Fascist powers were destroyed.”

  And then: “But what about fascism—as idea, as reality? Were its essential elements—militarism, racism, imperialism—now gone? Or were they absorbed into the already poisoned bones of the victors?”92

  Zinn answers the question: “The war not only put the United States in a position to dominate much of the world; it created conditions for effective control at home.”93 The “control” of Americans by means of a purportedly ginned-up and needless “Red Scare” is the subject of our next chapter.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Writing the Red Menace Out of History

  The U.S. government had learned “that war solves problems of control.” Or so claims Zinn. Thus, after World War II, the Truman administration “worked to create an atmosphere of crisis and cold war.” It “presented the Soviet Union as not just a rival but an immediate threat. In a series of moves abroad and at home, it established a climate of fear—a hysteria about Communism—which would steeply escalate the military budget and stimulate the economy with war-related orders. This combination of policies would permit more aggressive actions abroad, more repressive actions at home.”1

  In reality, Americans did not need propaganda to feel fear about the Soviet Union. Not only did they retain the distrust they had felt even in the war years—as the polls cited above show—but they could also see how the Soviets had “broken their promises in regard to Poland, violated self-determination in Eastern Europe, and provoked trouble in both Iran and Turkey,” as historian Howard Jones has pointed out in “A New Kind of War”: America’s Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece.2

  Zinn acknowledges that “the rivalry with the Soviet Union was real,” but presents the Communist regime in a way that would surprise most: “that country had come out of the war with its economy wrecked and 20 million people dead, but was making an astounding comeback, rebuilding its industry, regaining military strength. The Truman administration, however, presented the Soviet Union as not just a rival but an immediate threat.”3 And so it was. At the end of the war, the Red Army had a “disproportionate conventional force advantage in Europe” over the United States, according to Yale Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis. And Stalin “launch[ed] a massive program to build a Soviet bomb that imposed a considerably greater burden on his country’s shattered economy than the Manhattan Project had on the United States—the use of forced labor and the wholesale neglect of health and environmental hazards were routine.”4

  Anne Applebaum would disagree with Zinn’s claim of the USSR’s “astounding comeback.” In fact, the “nationalization of the economy prolonged the shortages and economic distortions created by the war. Central planning and fixed prices distorted markets, making trade between individuals as well as between enterprises difficult. These problems were compounded by weak, nonexistent, or competing national currencies” in Poland, Soviet-occupied Germany, and Hungary. After factory workers went on strike in Budapest in 1947, for example, the regime used informers to “identify and dismiss ‘troublemaking’ workers.”5 Soon, of course, there were no more labor strikes.

  According to Zinn, “revolutionary movements in Europe and Asia” were presented to “the American public as examples of Soviet expansionism—thus recalling the indignation against Hitler’s aggressions”—in order to make it appear that the Soviet Union was a “threat.” In Zinn’s telling, these were nothing more than democratic movements for self-rule.

  For example, in China, according to Zinn, “a revolution was already under way when Wo
rld War II ended, led by a Communist movement with enormous mass support. A Red Army, which had fought against the Japanese, now fought to oust the corrupt dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek, which was supported by the United States.” Actually the Red Army had been fighting Chinese nationalists, and for nearly a “quarter of a century,” in what Gaddis describes as a “civil war.”6 Zinn continues: “In 1949, when the Chinese Communist forces moved into Peking,” the civil war was ended and China had the “closest thing . . . to a people’s government, independent of outside control.”7 That is another lie. At Yalta, Stalin was given “hegemony” over Manchuria, from which he “protected and supported the Chinese Communists, under Mao Tse-Tung.”8 The U.S. State Department held out hope that Mao would break with Stalin in the way Yugoslav communist dictator Marshal Josip Broz Tito had. But Mao was “a dedicated Marxist-Leninist who was more ready to defer to Stalin as the head of the international communist movement,” as he indicated in a June 1949 announcement about allying with the Soviet Union. Mao intended to follow Stalin’s example as a dictator. His two-month visit to Russia in December 1949 resulted in the Sino-Soviet Treaty, “in which the two communist states pledged to come to the assistance of the other in case of attack.”9 In 1950, Stalin gave the “ ‘green light’ ” to North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung to invade South Korea—“part of the larger strategy for seizing opportunities in East Asia that he had discussed with the Chinese.” Shortly afterward, Stalin “encouraged Ho Chi Minh to intensify the Viet Minh movement against the French in Indochina.”10

  If Mao was a popular leader of the people, as Zinn claims, he had a strange way of showing it. After becoming appalled by Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of “the Stalinist ‘cult of personality’ early in 1956,” Mao decided to defiantly double down and outpace the Soviet Union to make China the real “revolutionary country.” In addition to his “industrialization and collectivization campaigns,” he also followed Stalin’s example in conducting “his own purge of potential dissidents,” luring followers to criticize him in his “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend” campaign. Mao ordered peasants to abandon their crops and melt down farm implements to make steel in an effort to make them proletarians. Private property and self-sufficiency even on the peasant level could not be tolerated. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was “the greatest single human calamity of the 20th century,” in Gaddis’s estimation. Over 30 million died in the famine that resulted between 1958 and 1961, “the worst on record anywhere.”11

  The fact is, the American people had very good reasons to be afraid of Communism, which has left a trail of murderous carnage everywhere it has been tried. And in the 1940s, it was going from triumph to triumph on the international scene. A Brookings Institution report stated that “the indefinite westward movement of the Soviet Union . . . must not be permitted ‘whether it occurs by formal annexation, political coup, or progressive subversion.’ ”12 This was good advice—confirmed by what a CIA agent reported in September 1946—about secret remarks made in May of that year by Soviet Vice-Consul Araniev in Shanghai about seeking “worldwide communist revolution by means other than war,” such as establishing “communist cells in China” and elsewhere. Araniev “remarked that World War II had been only a truce between Russia and its ideological enemies—the capitalist countries, now led by the United States. . . . the ‘new fires’ in Greece and China were ‘rehearsals’ and ‘trials of strength’ that were political and psychological in nature.” Communist ideas would be propagated “on a worldwide scale” through establishment of communist cells of three to five members inside trade unions, the army, transport factories, and any other organization of workers’ ” so that “[s]trikes, sabotage and other means” would “discredit capitalist governments.”13

  Howard Jones explains, “The Kremlin sought a temporary relaxation of hostilities to allow ‘economic and ideological rehabilitation at home and the consolidation of position abroad.’ ” While the Soviets tried “by legal or revolutionary means” to “establish communist regimes” in France, Italy, Spain, and Greece, they simultaneously “sought economic and political penetration of the Middle East, Far East, and Latin America.” And, “[t]o obscure these activities, they would engage in propaganda designed to convince the world of their peaceful intentions.”14 The Soviets were financing communist candidates in Europe. And according to Gaddis, during the 1948 elections in Italy, the “large communist party generously financed from Moscow looked likely to win.”15

  But to this day, Zinn serves as a propagandist for the Soviet Union’s “peaceful intentions,” insisting in A People’s History that the regime not only had nothing to do with the rise of Mao, but it also had nothing to do with similar events in Greece and the Philippines. According to Zinn, after World War II in Greece, the National Liberation Front (the EAM), just “a popular left-wing” movement, was “put down by a British army of intervention.” When another “left-wing guerilla” movement sprang up against the reestablished “right-wing dictatorship” and “Great Britain said it could not handle the rebellion,” the United States came in under the “Truman Doctrine” that would infuse Greece and Turkey with four hundred million dollars in military and economic aid to resist Communist takeovers. The effort was described by President Truman as “resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Zinn comments sarcastically:

  In fact, the biggest outside pressure was the United States. The Greek rebels were getting some aid from Yugoslavia, but no aid from the Soviet Union. . . . the United States moved into the Greek civil war . . . with weapons and military advisers. . . . two hundred and fifty army officers, headed by General James Van Fleet, advised the Greek army in the field. Van Fleet started a policy—standard in dealing with popular insurrections—of forcibly removing thousands of Greeks from their homes in the countryside, to try to isolate guerillas, to remove the source of their support.

  After the “rebellion was defeated in 1949,” Greece was safe for the flow of “[i]nvestment capital from Esso, Dow Chemical, Chrysler, and other U.S. corporations” and access to oil in the Middle East.16

  These short paragraphs are peppered with many lies. The Soviets had their sights set on Greece, which was “under German occupation until late 1944,” during the war, as the actions of Soviet agent Donald Maclean, a high-ranking official of the Foreign Ministry, showed. The decrypted Venona messages—radio messages from KGB agents in Washington and New York to Moscow recorded by the U.S. Army Signal Corps—show that in 1944 and 1945, Maclean sent the KGB almost a dozen messages about discussions between Churchill and Roosevelt—including about Greece, which was facing “chaos” as “pro- and anti-Communist Greek resistance forces and the Greek government-in-exile battled for control.” Maclean messaged the Russians that he hoped “we will take advantage of these circumstances to disrupt the plans of the British.” He was also advising the Soviets in 1944 about Allied plans regarding the liberation of other parts of Europe, such as France and Italy.17

  After the war the leaders of the EAM (Zinn’s “a popular left-wing” movement) joined the KKE, the Greek communist party. A KKE delegation in early 1946 had gone “to Moscow to seek aid,” but had been told to “focus on political means”—in line with the new strategy of using “means other than war.”18 And “the Soviet delegation” at the United Nations “lashed out at Greece for allegedly causing unrest in the Balkans by seeking unwarranted territorial claims in the north,” “criticized the British for maintaining troops in Greece” (“in part to counter Western complaints about the continued Soviet presence in Iran”), and “expressed interest in Turkey, Iran, and a base in the Dodecanese islands.” Significantly, as Jones explains, “Greece was the chief obstacle to Soviet penetration of the eastern Mediterranean, making it evident that the antagonistic policies of Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria toward Greece paralleled Soviet interests in the region. . . .”19
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br />   Was this a “popular insurrection,” with guerilla freedom fighters supported by the people? No. As Jones points out, “In Greece anti-communist groups were in the majority and the country’s leaders were receptive to aid and advice. Most importantly, the Greek populace was favorably disposed toward the United States.”20

  And what about Zinn’s claims that as part of “standard” procedure, “thousands of Greeks were removed from their homes in the countryside, to try to isolate the guerillas, to remove the source of their support”? In fact, the guerillas did not have the support of the people in the countryside. Communists “infiltrated cells of workers in the cities, towns, and large villages. Referred to as ‘self-defense personnel,’ the cells built an intelligence and supply network that worked behind the lines of the Greek army in recruiting, raising money, gathering information about troop movements, and terrorizing the population.”21 The “Democratic Army” “raid[ed] and pillag[ed]” villages, used forced recruitment, and carried out “terrorist executions by guns, knives, and axes.”22 This certainly does not sound like the popular movement that Zinn represents it to be.

  The Communist guerillas also sabotaged American relief efforts to such an extent that a Time magazine correspondent in Athens in 1948 described the Truman Doctrine as “failing.” Jones explains, “Houses, shops, schools, public utilities, railroads, bridges, trains, animals, food—nothing was safe from the growing number of raids on towns and villages.” Over four hundred thousand refugees were “living in tents, shanties, mud huts, or abandoned public buildings and warehouses. . . . and many of these evacuated by the government from guerilla territory because the Greek army could not protect them.”23 Contrary to Zinn’s claim, Greeks had to be removed from their own homes for their own protection from the Communists!