D-Day = Disinformation Day

June 6, 2023 marks 79 years since the fabled Allied invasion known as “D-Day.” 

Lost amid the annual self-congratulatory orgy is the minor detail that by the time of the D-Day invasion, the Soviets were engaging 80 percent of the German Army on the Eastern Front. 

Author Alexander Cockburn explained that WWII had already been won “by the Russians at Stalingrad and then, a year before D-Day, at the Kursk Salient, where 100 German divisions were mangled. Compared with those epic struggles, D-Day was a skirmish. Hitler’s generals knew the war was lost, and the task was to keep the meeting point between the invading Russians and Western armies as far east as possible.” 

Even the National World War II Museum admits: 

“Let’s be blunt: the German army lost World War II on the Eastern Front. For most of the war, 75-80 percent of the Wehrmacht had to be deployed in the East, a preponderance dictated by the sheer size of the front, and 80 percent of German war dead perished there: about four million of the five million German soldiers killed in World War II.”

Of course, this doesn’t fit the “good war” myth, so it’s down the memory hole. 

The next time someone you know speaks of WWII in hallowed tones, remind them that:

• The U.S. fought that war against racism with a segregated army. 

• It fought that war to end atrocities by participating in the shooting of surrendering soldiers, the starvation of POWs, the deliberate bombing of civilians, wiping out hospitals, strafing lifeboats, and in the Pacific boiling flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts. 

• FDR, the leader of this anti-racist, anti-atrocity force, signed Executive Order 9066, interning over 100,000 Japanese-Americans without due process…thus, in the name of taking on the architects of German prison camps became the architect of American prison camps. 

• Before, during, and after the Good War, the American business class traded with the enemy. Among the US corporations that invested in the Nazis were Ford, GE, Standard Oil, Texaco, ITT, IBM, and GM (top man William Knudsen called Nazi Germany “the miracle of the 20th century”). 

• While the U.S. regularly turned away Jewish refugees to face certain death in Europe, another group of refugees was welcomed with open arms after the war: fleeing Nazi war criminals who were used to help create the CIA and NASA while advancing America’s nuclear program. 

The enduring Good War fable goes well beyond Memorial Day barbecues and flickering black-and-white movies on late-night TV. WWII is America’s most popular war. According to accepted history, it was an inevitable war forced upon peaceful people thanks to a surprise attack by a sneaky enemy.

This war, then and now, has been carefully and consciously sold to us as a life-and-death battle against pure evil. For most Americans, WWII was nothing less than good and bad going toe-to-toe in khaki fatigues.  

Reality: American lives weren’t sacrificed in a holy war to avenge Pearl Harbor or to end the Nazi Holocaust. WWII was about territory, power, control, money, and imperialism. 

What we’re taught about the years leading up to the Good War involves the alleged appeasement of the Third Reich. If only the Allies were stronger in their resolve, the fascists could have been stopped. Having made that mistake once, the mantra goes, we can’t make it again.

Comparing modern-day tyrants like Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler activates the following historical façade: 

After whipping the original axis of evil in a noble and popular war, the U.S. and its allies can now wave the banner of humanitarianism and intervene with impunity across the globe without their motivations being severely questioned — especially when every enemy is likened to der Fuehrer. 

But it wasn’t appeasement that took place prior to WWII. It was, at best, indifference; at worst it was collaboration… based on economic greed and more than a little shared ideology.

U.S. investment in Germany accelerated by more than 48 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in Europe. For many U.S. companies, operations in Germany continued during the war (even if it meant the use of concentration-camp slave labor) with overt U.S. government support.

For example, American pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by U.S. firms. As a result, German civilians began using the Ford plant in Cologne as an air raid shelter.

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The pursuit of profit long ago transcended national borders and loyalty. Doing business with Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy proved no more unsavory to the captains of industry than, say, running sweatshops in China does today. What’s a little repression when there’s money to be made? 

Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels said, “It is not enough to reconcile people more or less to our regime, to move them towards a position of neutrality towards us, we want rather to work on people until they are addicted to us.” 

Little has changed in the way criminality is aggressively packaged and sold to a wary public today… except for the technology by which the lies are disseminated. 

Thus, it is our moral obligation to see through our own propaganda and kick the addictive habit of lazy thinking. We must address the many uncomfortable truths — not just about WWII but about virtually everything. 

The lies and deception did not begin in March 2020, folks. Ending this evil cycle begins with each of us deciding we will refrain from knee-jerk, emotional reactions and never again buy what the parasites are selling.