PBS's Distorted Wars
by Spencer Warren
Issue 112 - July 23, 2008

We should have been on guard after last autumn’s broadcast by PBS of the relatively even-handed Ken Burns documentary series on World War II, The War (reviewed here at http://acuf.org/issues/issue93/071006med.asp). Now we know the reason: PBS’s return to form with the three-part series, The War of the World, an account of the unprecedented extreme mass violence of the twentieth century by the British historian Niall Ferguson, based on his best-selling book. Just broadcast, Ferguson adopts the un-historical looking backward approach employed by the much less learned Pat Buchanan in his latest controversial book, The Unnecessary War, and reaches some of the same conclusions. Ferguson goes further, however, in drawing parallels between the Western allies, the U.S. and Britain, and Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: He criticizes our practice of total war (which of course was in self-defense), and, like Buchanan and the paleoconservatives, he blames us for the communization of Eastern Europe by Stalin after the war (“totalitarian fellow-travelers,” he calls us). Later, he draws a moral equivalence between the U.S. and Soviet Russia in the Cold War. Obama’s leftist supporters and his wife, if not the candidate himself, will love this program.

Ferguson tries to hang his potted history on sweeping generalizations. We should see the twentieth century as a “Global 100 Years War” caused by economic volatility, ethnic rivalry and empires in crisis. Racism helps to explain the astonishing scale of much of the violence, he says. True enough, but what about the development of modern industrial economies, which gave the State much more power than it had ever commanded before, permitting mass mobilization of entire nations and new weapons of astonishing destructive power? Might not the Napoleonic Wars, which were plenty violent, have been just as bad as the two world wars if modern technology had arrived a century earlier? And, speaking of Napoleon, he climbed to power in the chaos left by the social and political destruction of the radical French Revolution, which introduced to the world state terror in pursuit of the Rousseauian utopia of complete human equality. The French Revolution marked the beginning of modernity in that it promised the liberation of humanity from the oppression of hereditary privilege, in the name of pure reason. The unprecedented mass violence it employed, which it justified in the name of its utopian goals – unlike the far different American Revolution – became the prototype of the totalitarian revolutions and movements of the last century, communism and Nazism. And the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon – who initially was greeted by many as the liberator of Europe -- brought far more combat deaths than the earlier dynastic wars. That giant of conservatism, Edmund Burke, supported the American colonists in their revolt against his King, but condemned the French Revolution with all his power. His classic, Reflections on the Revolution in France, written in 1790, foretold the radical course the then moderate revolution would take and essentially foretold the totalitarian revolutions of Ferguson’s century.

Ferguson ignores the central role of ideas that served to “liberate” man from God and make him his own god. With the new technology in weaponry, this liberation from age-old restraints, which had been based on the Judeo-Christian recognition of man as a fallen creature, also helps to explain the awful carnage of the twentieth century.

The heart of the documentary, part 2, focuses on World War II. Ferguson begins with Stalin’s Gulag, including the slave labor employed to build great industrial projects as part of Stalin’s plan to drag a backward country into the modern world. Stalin and Hitler were fully equals in their indescribable evil, Ferguson tells us. From 1935 to 1941 Stalin was responsible for 7 million executions and 20 million arrests; Ferguson visits a burial ground of victims outside St. Petersburg, where photographs of victims have been attached to the trees – the burial ground was not identified as such until 1989.

However, Ferguson then goes on to condemn the U.S. and Britain. To win the war, he complains, the Western Allies committed the sins of: 1) allying with Stalin; 2) adopting “totalitarian” methods – which Ferguson never identifies – at home; and 3) adopting military methods that were “comparable to the very worst techniques of their enemies.” Here Ferguson is echoing some of the themes of Buchanan, which were developed earlier by right-wing old guard British Tories like the revisionist historian John Charmley and Alan Clark, whose work appears to have influenced Buchanan.

Like these reactionaries, Ferguson is committing a gross fallacy as an historian, one explained in detail by the great British historian Herbert Butterfield in his classic, The Whig Interpretation of History, published in 1931. Butterfield was critical of historians who viewed British history as a steady march through the centuries toward the triumph in their own day of the classic liberal ideals of liberty, parliamentary supremacy over the monarchy, and scientific progress. In other words, they were examining the past not on its own terms, as it appeared to the people in the past, but through the lens of their own time; they were looking at history backwards. Butterfield criticized the practice of “judging the past by the present.” Further, as if foreseeing how an ideologue like Pat Buchanan would corrupt history, he wrote: “. . . for all this desire to pass moral judgements on various things in the past, it is really something in the present that the historian is most anxious about.” We call this today “having an agenda.” This results in a selective and biased examination of history in order to find a line of logical causation and purpose – or teleology -- that supposedly has led inexorably to the present. He ends his book writing that “the truth of history is no simple matter, all packed and parcelled ready for handling in the market-place. And the understanding of the past is not so easy as it is sometimes made to appear.”

Churchill, Roosevelt and their military leaders faced a momentous crisis of national existence. Unlike Ferguson, they did not know how the crisis would be worked out, and quite wisely assembled the maximum force at their command to defeat their enemies – themselves employing maximum, unprecedented, unrestrained force in their aggression -- as rapidly as possible with as little loss of life as possible to their own citizens. Ferguson implies they were immoral in not limiting the power they unleashed in their conduct of the war – without taking into account the complex surrounding realities and a perverse suggestion for any surviving veterans watching his documentary. Especially absurd is his complaint of our alliance with Stalin. What else was Britain to do when her one extraordinarily perilous year of taking on Hitler alone was ended on June 22, 1941 when Hitler invaded Russia? This eastern war consumed by far the major portion of the Wehrmacht, thus saving the lives of hundreds of thousands if not a million or more American and British boys’ lives. Also saving their lives was the full mobilization of our economies for war production; it confirmed conservatives’ fears how war expands the State, but it was mostly temporary and hardly “totalitarian,” as the arrogant Ferguson asserts without any examples, sounding like a narrow-minded extreme dogmatist who refuses to look at the factual situation as it presented itself at the time.

Ferguson’s low point – to the eternal shame of PBS – occurs when he is standing before still existing ovens at Auschwitz. American and British and Russian tourists to the concentration camp sites “derive a certain satisfaction from . . . waging a just war,” Ferguson intones, but “in pursuit of victory the Allies also, in different ways, meted out death to innocent men, women and children. This wasn’t simply a war between evil and good. It was a war between evil and lesser evil.”

Ferguson then treats us to pictures of the “lesser evil,” U.S. Marines, allegedly shooting wounded Japanese soldiers on the island of Pelelieu and, in a different scene, a line of fully naked Japanese prisoners being led away. Yes, American troops did sometimes kill wounded Japanese, whom they could not guard or care for in the ferocious nightmare battles, such as the infamous one at Pelelieu, into which they had been forced, snatched from their normal lives back home in America by Japan’s sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. With regard to the naked prisoners, these had to be stripped because the few who did surrender (rather than fight to the death as the vast majority did, a fact which Ferguson omits) often hid weapons in their clothes and tried to use their “surrender” as a ruse to kill our soldiers and Marines. Ferguson also throws at our troops the worst tag from contemporary America and Britain: they were racists toward the Japanese. “Tut, tut,” he seems to be saying, how appalling for these boys (most about age 20) to hate and de-humanize as “Japs” their fanatical enemy, whose treachery and greed – and manifold atrocities, like the Bataan Death March -- had grabbed them from their homes and families and thrust them into this hell. (For a brief summary of Japan’s rampage of atrocities in the war, killing more than ten million Chinese civilians alone, see http://acuf.org/issues/issue78/070216med.asp .) How evil of the American boys to react as most human beings would; they should have been saints – or intellectuals – and restrained themselves. But we must ask what gives a mere intellectual like Ferguson the right to criticize these men, forced into manhood too early for their young years?

The juxtaposition of the Auschwitz ovens with Ferguson’s assertion of a measure of moral equivalence between the U.S. and Britain, and Hitler and Tojo, demonstrates Ferguson’s propagandistic intent, clothed in the accoutrement of a claimed historical documentary. And brought to us with taxpayer dollars!

The gravamen of Ferguson’s odious comparison is the allied bombing of cities in Germany and Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Unfortunately, and just as Butterfield explained, Ferguson again omits crucial facts, beginning with the Luftwaffe’s attacks on Warsaw in 1939, and, in 1940, its destruction of Rotterdam and the Blitz against London and other British cities. Among other crucial points ignored by Ferguson: First, strategic bombing was the only way Britain could get back at Germany early in the war. Second, precision bombing of industrial and military targets proved extremely difficult given the technology available, but it was attempted first. Thereafter, Britain’s Bomber Command turned to area bombing. When the U.S. Army Air Force undertook its role in 1943, it believed it could practice precision bombing, although we also bombed targets in cities. The U.S. bombed Germany by day, the RAF by night. Bomber Command increasingly turned to massive city raids to destroy civilian morale as well as industrial and military targets. About 35, 000 – 50,000 – men, women and children -- were killed in the fire bombing of Hamburg in 1943, and at least 35, 000 in the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945, amongst many examples. The Dresden attack went too far and was wrong, given that Allied and Soviet armies were at the time racing across Germany and the war’s end was in clear sight. But who set off the train of events that led to the unleashing of such violence, which in this one case went too far? Further, even Ferguson concedes the bombing helped shorten the war, calling its effect “undeniable.” Yet he never examines this self-contradiction. With regard to the bombing of Japan, it began in earnest in the autumn of 1944, when the liberation of the Mariana Islands brought the massive new B-29 into range of the enemy home islands. Again, precision bombing was tried, but winds, cloud cover, heavy losses and other factors made it impractical. At the direction of General Curtis LeMay, the B-29 then was used for lower-level fire-bombing attacks on the largely wood-constructed enemy cities. About as many people, 80,000, died in the massive Tokyo raid of March 1945 than from the explosive force (as distinct from later radiation-connected deaths) of the two atomic bombs.

Ferguson reaches another low point when he blames the U.S. and Britain for the prolongation of the war, and for the huge casualties, in the millions, in the war’s final years. The problem was our policy of getting rid of the Axis “no matter what the cost.” And he complains, “What of the escalating moral costs involved in defeating an enemy determined to fight to the bitter end?” So, according to Ferguson, the U.S. and Britain were at fault with the aggressors. Should we have negotiated with Hitler (thereby sundering the alliance with Russia, which, again, was inflicting by far the most casualties on the Wehrmacht) and with Japan? Once again, standing on his Olympian “neutral” mountain, looking down upon all the folly, Ferguson does not say. How else could we have fought the war to victory, or should we have abandoned the goal of victory, leaving Hitler and the Japanese militarists in power, planning to strike again in the future, with all of Europe left in the dark night of Nazi oppression? Again, he does not say. The better view was expressed by Churchill, his voice rising in passion, in an address to Congress at one of the bleakest periods of the war, just weeks after Pearl Harbor, on December 26, 1941: “. . . we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget.” Has Ferguson ever considered that because we did teach them such a lesson, horrible as it was, Germany and Japan have been the peaceful states they have been for the past six-plus decades, reversing entirely the traits of their earlier history? Has he considered the lesson had to be so horrible because these two countries had become so horrible? Has he considered that many more would have suffered and died had the Allies not crushed the enemy with maximum force as quickly as they could? Or has he considered that the fight to the finish was waged to ensure that the sacrifices of so many of our countries’ young lives would not be in vain?

Ferguson also blames the alleged U.S. mistreatment of the (few) surrendering Japanese soldiers for Japan’s fight to the bitter end. Japan had no hope of victory after 1943, and would have ended the war (how Ferguson does not say, perhaps because his ludicrous, truly laughable contention ignores the military’s control of the country). Thus it is our fault that the enemy fought so ferociously defending Okinawa from April-June 1945, which cost the U.S. more than 12,000 dead and 36,000 wounded. And it is our fault the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anyone remotely knowledgeable about the subject knows it was Japan’s fanatical militaristic code that led its militarist-controlled government (for long, until 1945, with the approval of Emperor Hirohito) to fight to the end, never to surrender. The case that both bombs had to be dropped to make Japan surrender, thus sparing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans (including my father and uncle) who would have been involved in the invasion of Japan, is overwhelming. See Robert J. Maddox, ed., Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism and Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision. (Maddox actually checks the left-wing revisionists’ use of sources as listed in their footnotes, and finds they repeatedly distort these sources to promote their current-day radical agenda, one which has influenced school textbooks.) A summary of the crucial facts, based on the latest scholarly research, can be found in two articles by Maddox at http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/04/disputing_trumans_use_of_nucle.html and

http://hnn.us/articles/38637.html. Other leading books are Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire; Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists; Robert P. Newman, The Enola Gay and the Court of History (examining the disgraceful pro-Japanese Smithsonian exhibition which had to be canceled due to public outrage) and Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult. In addition to saving countless Allied lives, the bombs immediately ended the barbaric Japanese imprisonment of Allied POWs and saved hundreds of thousands of Chinese and other East Asian civilians – more than the number killed in the atomic bombings – who were dying every day under the cruel Japanese yoke. And, again, is not this atomic scar a major reason Japan has not threatened the world ever since, unlike its rampage of death from 1931 to1945?

Ferguson’s third program predictably equates the U.S. and Soviet Russia in the Cold War and dismisses President Reagan’s part in winning the Cold War, instead focusing on Gorbachev’s reform efforts which led to the collapse of the entire rotted communist edifice.

With a series like this, PBS (more accurately LBS, the Liberal Broadcasting Service) is playing a part in the left-wing’s Orwellian falsification of the U.S. role in World War II, which was also seen in Clint Eastwood’s two recent films about Iwo Jima. (See reviews at http://acuf.org/issues/issue78/070216med.asp and http://acuf.org/issues/issue73/061211med.asp .) Eastwood also adopts something of Ferguson’s detached, “even-handed” perspective. This expanding “neutral” and “dispassionate” examination of our past – which in truth is a falsification of our past to serve the leftist anti-American agenda – helps to undermine national confidence among certain sections of the population (such as young people, some of whom get a heavy dose of this in school). It contributes thereby to a reluctance among certain people to stand up for our nation and instead embrace our enemies – because our country in their eyes is always doing wrong. This may help to explain our government’s weakness, for example, in not stopping immigration from Muslim countries and not allowing the profiling of Muslim men in airline travel – which would have prevented 9/11.

PBS serves the leftist cause in the Culture War. It blocks access of real conservatives by putting a neocon (i.e. conservative liberal) like David Brooks on as the “conservative” commentator for its News Hour program. (Brooks, among other things, favors big government and homosexual “marriage.”) It uses taxpayer dollars to support the radical Bill Moyers program, which did not even make a pretense of journalist practice in the host’s fawning “interview” several months ago with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. There is nothing wrong with having a radical with a regular program – provided he conducts the program in a professional manner – but where is the equivalent conservative (not neocon) program? Has PBS ever asked the ACU to suggest a host for such a program? Will PBS ever produce, say, a program hosted by a conservative economist devoting three hours to the failures of big government in the twentieth century? Another example of bias includes the presence of the liberal Daniel Schorr in an exclusive commentary slot on Saturday’s All Things Considered (a false title) with no equivalent conservative slot.

With the massive presence of cable and satellite TV and radio, and the more intelligent programming some of the new channels bring (without taxpayer subsidy), there is no reason any longer for taxpayer funding of PBS. If the well-off viewers who comprise most of its audience want their opera or symphony broadcasts, they can rent a DVD. Yet what did the late Republican Congress do about the problem? Did President Bush ever speak out about this waste of taxpayer dollars? (Recently figures were published showing that the Washington D.C. TV station’s (WETA) ratings are so low that the classic old movies shown on Saturday night to very low ratings -- again, should taxpayers have to support these, which can be rented on DVD or seen on cable? -- draw better than the other evening programs!) Republicans’ failure seriously to take on PBS is just one illustration of their lack of strategic thought – one reason they largely squandered their long-sought years of power.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline On Line’s media critic.