Prof. Harry Elmer Barnes . . . has produced a detailed account of the events leading up to Pearl Harbor (as reported in The Tribune, Dec. 7), using documents generally unknown to the public. And what does it all come to?

That Roosevelt, while hypocritically pretending to desire peace, was actually provoking, or rather plotting, a Japanese attack, and that Roosevelt was actually driving for war against the Axis from 1939 on, and never meant his “again and again” statement of the campaign of 1940.

I say Barnes is bringing a microscope to show us an elephant. If there were naïve souls in 1940 who did not know that Roosevelt was for war, and was pulling every wire known to political manipulation to get war, their simplicity cannot now be set right by any documentary proof.

As to Pearl Harbor, it was what Roosevelt had been hoping for. If he was very pious, it was what he had been praying for. If there had been any incantation that could have summoned it up out of a witches’ cauldron, he would have been boiling newts’ heads and snakes’ eyes in the White House kitchen.

But wherefore all the moral indignation? It was Roosevelt’s highest duty to the get the United States into the war by whatever means would achieve that result. Because the American people were so stupid, ignorant, and complacent as to believe in ignoble ease and complacent sloth, Roosevelt was compelled to lie, bamboozle, and scheme behind a façade of pacifism.

He had the courage to disregard morality to save the country, and his Machiavellian policy should be given its proper meed of historical praise. (Chicago Tribune, December 20, 1967)

In Murray’s moving reminiscence of his friend, mentor, and exemplar (one cannot take in his praise of Barnes’ character and scholarly industry without being struck by how well it also fits Murray himself), he justifies the publication of Barnes’ study (which for was little more than “raking up of old coals”) as necessary for facing up to a “crucial act” of American history:

[T]his subject, far from being antiquarian, is crucial to the understanding of where we are now and how we got that way. For America’s entry into World War II was the crucial act in expanding the United States from a republic into an Empire, and in spreading that Empire throughout the world . . . . Our entry into World War II was the crucial act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex, a permanent system of conscription. It was the crucial act in creating a Mixed Economy run by Big Government, a system of State-Monopoly-Capitalism run by the central government in collaboration with Big Business and Big Unionism. It was the crucial act in elevating Presidential power, particularly in foreign affairs, to the role of single most despotic person in the history of the world. And finally, World War II is the last war-myth left, the myth that the Old Left clings to in pure desperation: the myth that here, at least, was a good war, here was a war in which America was in the right. World War II is the war thrown into our faces by the war-making Establishment, as it tries, in each war that we face, to wrap itself in the mantle of good and righteous World War II.

The contemporary relevance of the foregoing should be obvious.

It is a joy for me to note that instead of unprofitably collecting mold in attics, all nine issues of Left and Right are available online in facsimile. Their inexpensive (and so charmingly ugly) typeface should remind bloggers of the costs that once attached to getting one’s point-of-view past the gatekeepers. Many of those for whom the Second World War (or, for that matter, the Vietnam War) is as psychologically remote as the Siege of Troy take for granted the contemporary abundance of online content. Few today have any idea of the labor that went into laying out the pages, sending them to the printer, lugging the bound issues back to one’s home for envelope-stuffing and -labeling, carting off to the post office those that were sold, and inventorying the unsold in one’s basement (or bedroom).

To put things in perspective: whereas Murray labored over three years to physically publish Left and Right’s 59 articles and editorials for the benefit of a few hundred subscribers, Lew Rockwell now posts online an equivalent quantity and quality in a little more than a week. And reaches millions.

Let’s take a moment today not only to reflect on Roosevelt’s 65-year-old infamy and the lives it destroyed to whip Americans up into a war frenzy, but also to remember courageous men like Barnes who exposed the official murderous lies behind the first Pearl Harbor, and David Ray Griffin, who has exposed those behind the second.