World War 2 Was The Good War?

Just in time for Father's Day, it's the World War 2 episode of War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War

Episode transcript:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that dads are obsessed with World War II. As soon as one becomes a parent, they feel the need to know everything there is to know about D-Day, and to watch every Tom Hanks-Steven Spielberg collaboration while the baby naps.

It’s the myth that launched a thousand Oscars: that World War II was The Good War, a wholesome battle between Good and Evil in which Captain America saved the Free World. We are taught that it was a humanitarian war waged humanitarianly for humanitarian reasons, thus justifying every subsequent American military action because remember the time we beat the Nazis?

Now, this may be a hot take in today’s political climate but I’m gonna say it: Nazis are bad. They were bad then, and they’re bad now, and a Sieg Heil to “own the libs” is still a Sieg Heil. Nazism is a trash ideology for trash people and Adolf Hitler deserved to lose the war. The only good thing Hitler ever did for the world was kill Hitler.

In the 80 years since Hitler shot himself in the head, World War II’s Happy Ending has been used to perpetuate a myth that there’s something special about American military force and it is an unequivocal good wherever it is applied.

Let’s return to our trust destructiveness-stupidity graph, as used in episode one. The Y axis is the war’s stupidity, and the X axis is the war’s destructiveness. World War II killed as many as 85 million people, but fascism deserves to be defeated. So it was really destructive, but it wasn’t for a stupid cause, like protecting access to Iraqi oil revenue or annexing Greenland for shits and gigs. However, the way we talk about World War II is often through the lens of the historical fiction writers and Steven Spielbergs who tell stories about it, not the people who actually fought and lived through it.

The Spielberg/Survivor dichotomy is best explained by Howard Zinn, famous historian, World War II veteran, and certified Saving Private Ryan hater.

Zinn had volunteered for the Air Force at the age of twenty, training as a bombardier. That is a fancy French-sounding words for “the person who drops the bombs from the plane.” He applied those skills when reviewing Spielberg’s 1998 film, absolutely torching it.

In an essay for The Progressive magazine, aptly titled “Private Ryan Saves War,” he wrote:

“I watched Private Ryan’s extraordinarily photographed battle scenes, and I was thoroughly taken in. But when the movie was over, I realized that it was exactly that—I had been taken in. And I disliked the film intensely. I was angry at it because I did not want the suffering of men in war to be used—yes, exploited—in such a way as to revive what should be buried along with all those bodies in Arlington Cemetery: the glory of military heroism.”

Zinn explicitly addresses the question of the destructiveness-stupidity scale, stating emphatically:

“Yes, getting rid of fascism was a good cause. But does that unquestionably make it a good war? The war corrupted us, did it not? The hate it engendered was not confined to Nazis.

We put Japanese families in concentration camps.

We killed huge numbers of innocent people—the word ‘atrocity’ fits—in our bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, and finally Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

As a veteran, Zinn had personal insight into how the war was fought, and as a historian, he chronicled how the success of the war was instantly used to wage new ones, this time, against communism.

It feels genuinely edgy to say “the allies did bad things during World War II.” Podcasters pride themselves on hot takes, and their hot takes are usually just the Republican party’s literal platform, and nothing says “counterculture” like repeating the talking points of the President of the United States, Joe Rogan. But this feels like dangerous territory, which is all the more reason it needs to be discussed.

World War II was not benevolently fought for benevolent reasons. It pains me to say this, but the same Franklin Delano Roosevelt who did the New Deal and sings with Annie in the musical is the same Franklin Delano Roosevelt who ignored the Holocaust.

Not just ignored, but actively turned down opportunities to save Jews when they were literally at his doorstep. In 1939, six years into Hitler’s reign, a German ocean liner called the SS St Louis contained 937 Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich. It sailed across the Atlantic from Hamburg to Havana, where the the American Jewish Joint Distribution committee negotiated on their behalf with the Cuban government, but the negotiations failed and the ship was forced to leave the harbor. The ship then sailed near the Florida coast, but the United States government didn’t allow the passengers to land because they did not have the paperwork to do so.

From the boat, the Jewish refugees could literally see Miami. Some even cabled FDR asking for refuge but Roosevelet left them on read. A State Department telegram sent to a passenger said that they must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible to the United States.”

Following the US government’s refusal, the boat turned around and returned to Europe. Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands stepped up and admitted a percentage of the passengers. From there, many were able to obtain their papers and leave for the United States before Germany invaded Western Europe in May 1940, but the 254 passengers who didn’t were killed in the Holocaust.

They got out—they saw Florida—and were sent back and murdered. They left that part out of Annie.

The US Coast Guard went so far as to patrol the shore to make sure nobody would jump off and swim to safety. Because bringing people to safety was not in the interest of the US Coast Guard.

On December 13, 1942, Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, wrote in his diary, “At bottom, however, I believe both the English and the Americans are happy we are exterminating the Jewish riffraff.” Gonna take a second to say that my brainrot is so bad that I saw the date “December 13” and thought, “wow, that’s Taylor Swift’s birthday.”

But let’s get back to the matter at hand. Goebbels was likely engaging in wishful thinking but the English and American governments were not demonstrating through any action whatsoever that they were concerned about the Jews who were dying by the millions. Roosevelt punted the problem of Jewish refugees from the White House to the State department where it never became a matter or high priority, or a matter at all, really.

You can say that that was before the US joined the war so they weren’t really paying much attention to the Nazis and what they were doing. But even after they joined the war to fight for freedom everywhere, they didn’t care for the Jews.

According to Zinn, “Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself brought on the final solution of genocide.” Until the war began, Hitler’s goal for the Jews was not extermination but emigration.

Historian Raul Hilberg, widely regarded as the founding father of the academic discipline of Holocaust studies, wrote a three-volume, 1,273 page magnum opus, The Destruction of European Jews. On one of the 1,273 pages, he wrote, “From 1938 to 1940, Hitler made extraordinary and unusual attempts to bring about a vast emigration scheme…the Jews were not killed before the emigration policy was literally exhausted.” The Nazis found that the Western powers were not interested in saving Jews so might as well kill them.

Even when presented with opportunities to stop the killing of Jews without having to take them in as refugees, Western powers didn't bother. The question of “Should the allies have bombed Auschwitz?” remains one of the go-to dinner party debates. Well, it is when I’m at dinner parties. Maybe that’s why I’m not invited to that many dinner parties.

In April 1944, Jewish prisoners Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler miraculously escaped the Auschwitz concentration camp and fled through Nazi-occupied Poland. They found refuge in Zilina, Slovakia, and connected with the Jewish Underground, and told them what they experienced. This was the first testimony, in forensic detail, of the gas chambers and the Nazi extermination program.

Vrba and Wetzler’s story made its way to the allies, who debated whether or not to add Auschwitz to its list of Nazi-held targets they were already bombing. After successfully lobbying the Hungarian government to stop deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in July 1944, individuals and organizations began calling on the allies to bomb Auschwitz’s gas chambers, crematoria, and the rail lines that lead to them. The United States War Department insisted that military resources should not be used for non-military purposes, and that bombing death camps was “unfeasible” because it would have diverted air power from the other missions. “Furthermore,” according to the official Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial and Museum, “the Department felt that the most effective way of helping the victims of persecution was the most rapid possible victory over the Third Reich, and that all resources should be directed towards this aim.” The British Air Ministry took the same position.

This pisses me off. The Allies insist that they’re fighting the Nazis for the persecuted Jews’s sake, and that they’re killing Nazis to save Jews, but given the opportunity to actually save Jews, why not cut the middle man and take it?

Perhaps it’s because war isn’t a humanitarian undertaking after all. By the time the Nazis lost, eleven million people, six million of them Jews, were murdered in the Holocaust.

The novelist and pacifist Nicholson Baker wrote, “The Jews needed immigration visas, not Flying Fortresses. And who was doing their best to get them visas, as well as food, money, and hiding places? Pacifists were.”

In his May 2011 essay for Harper’s Magazine titled “Why I’m a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War,” Baker defends pacifists past and present. He writes:

“‘We’ve got to fight Hitlerism’ sounds good, because Hitler was so self-evidently horrible. But what fighting Hitlerism meant in practice was, largely, the five-year long Churchillian experiment of undermining German ‘morale’ by dropping magnesium firebombs and 2,000-pound blockbusters on various city centers. The firebombing killed and displaced a great many innocent people—including Jews in hiding—and obliterated entire neighborhoods. It was supposed to cause an anti-Nazi revolution, but it didn’t. ‘The victims are stunned, exhausted, apathetic, absorbed in the immediate tasks of finding food and shelter,’ wrote Britain in 1944. ‘But when they recover, who can doubt that there will be, among the majority at any rate, the desire for revenge and a hardening process—even if, for a time, it may be subdued by fear?’ If you drop things on people’s heads, they get angry and unite behind their leader. This was, after all, just what had happened during the Blitz in London.”

Eighty-five years later, this is still the same logic used to defend the war in Gaza. That by bombing everything and everyone, the people will rise up and overthrow Hamas. But the people are too busy being bombed and trying to procure what little food and water is allowed in to organize a revolution. And not enough is said about the cycle of revenge.

Meanwhile, back in 1941, while Hitler was running death camps, the US was having war parades. Baker writes:

“On June 13, 1942, with the Allied land assault on Europe still two years away, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City threw an enormous [war parade]. It went on for a full day. There were tanks, planes, and picturesque international costumes, but there were also floats meant to stir emotions of enmity and fear. A float called ‘Death Rides’ moved slowly by: it was a giant animated skeleton beating two red swastika-bearing drums. There was a huge mustachioed figure in a Prussian helmet and body armor, riding a Disney-style dinosaur that strode heedlessly through corpses—the float was called ‘Hitler, the Axis War Monster.’ There was a float called ‘Tokyo: We Are Coming!’ in which American airplanes set fire to the city, frightening off a swarm of large yellow rats. The New York Herald Tribune’s reporter wrote that the only thing missing from the parade was subtlety. This is what the United States was doing during the early phase of the Holocaust: beating big red toy death drums on Fifth Avenue.”

While the Nazis were building concentration camps, the US was building EPCOT, down to the rodents. But instead of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, it was yellow rats racistly intended to represent Japanese people.

In January 1942, senior SS officials met in a beautiful scenic villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. They got out of town for some fresh air, walked along the banks of the River Havel, and decided how they would deport all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe to Poland to be murdered. The site of the Wannsee conference is now a memorial and museum, easily accessible from Berlin on the S-Bahn. It’s like taking MetroNorth from Grand Central Station to a country house in Connecticut. The ease and beauty makes the depravity even more depraved.

It wasn’t until November 1942 when the Western press was forced to report on the Final Solution. Rabbi Stephen Wise, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, called a press conference, revealing that he had received an urgent telegraph from Switzerland that August. The Associated Press reported that Wise “had learned through sources confirmed by the State Department that about half the estimated four million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe had been slain in an ‘extermination campaign.’”

There was a surge of press coverage. Roosevelt and Churchill promised retribution for the Jews who had been killed, but didn’t promise to help the Jews who were still alive, and held captive by the Nazis.

It was only after the war when British Member of Parliament Sydney Silverman said, “We could not do so much to help them. No one desired that our war activity should be moderated in any sort of way or that our war effort should be in any way weakened in order to bring succor to those threatened people.”

I had to Google it, and succor means “assistance and support in times of hardship and distress.” No one in British Parliament cared to make even minor adjustments to offer “assistance and support in times of hardship and distress.” It’s only after the war that the Allies rebranded themselves as Concentration Camp Liberators after years of Being Concentration Camp Shrugger Offers.

Meanwhile, pacifists on both sides of the Atlantic were campaigning for an armistice to save what few Jews Europe had left. Jessie Wallace Hughan, an English teacher in her late sixties, founded the War Resisters League. They advocated for an end to the war, conditional on the release of Hitler’s captives—Jews and political prisoners— arguing that that might end Hitler’s reign. In a blunt letter to The New York Times, she wrote, “There are many anti-Nazis in the Reich, and hope is a stronger revolutionary force than despair. We must act now, because dead men cannot be liberated.” The Times didn’t publish it.

A group called the Jewish Peace Fellowship called for an armistice to prevent further Jewish extermination and to “make an end to the world-wide slaughter.” British publisher Sir Victor Gollancz sold a quarter of a million copies of a pamphlet called “Let My People Go: Some practical proposals for dealing with Hitler’s massacre of the Jews and an appeal to the British public.” He criticized Churchill for prioritizing possible retribution later over rescuing Jews now. He urged British citizens to write their representations to demand that immigration regulations be lifted for Jewish refugees and “the boldest possible measures of rescue adopted.”

The Allies didn’t want to ask Hitler to let Jews emigrate because they feared that Hitler would say yes. They said so themselves. Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, candidly told Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State and Secretary of Ridiculous First Names, that the problem with asking Hitler to free the Jews was “Hitler might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.” Churchill agreed, responding to a letter demanding they do literally anything, “Even if we were to obtain permission to withdraw all the Jews, transport alone presents a problem which will be difficult of solution.”

It would be difficult, insofar as it would demand drafting a plan, and implementing it. As Baker points out in his essay, that in 1940, the British had quickly evacuated nearly 340,000 men from Dunkirk in just nine days. The US Air Force had thousands of new planes that could easily make the jaunt. But saving lives is not as fun as taking them.

Baker does not think bombing the death camps or its train tracks would have been all that helpful, but an armistice definitely would have. But it didn’t happen.

He wrote:

“So the Holocaust continued, and the firebombing continued, to parallel, incommensurable, war-born leviathans of pointless malice that fed each other and could have each stopped long before they were,” he writes. “The mills of God ground the cities of Europe to powder—very slowly—and then the top Nazis chewed their cyanide pills or were executed at Nuremberg. Sixty million people died all over the world so that Hitler, Himmler, and Goering could commit suicide? How ridiculous and tragic.”

It’s true: a studio executive wouldn’t greenlight a movie with that anticlimactic an ending. They would have demanded to see Harrison Ford–at any age, or de-aged—delivering a rousing monologue about freedom to Hitler before breaking his neck and stomping on his stupid little moustache. But this was the ending we got. And that was the ending sixty million people got.

You’d think that what Baker artfully calls “the mills of God grinding cities to powder” would incentivize nations to avoid going to war again, but as soon as the war was over, the US had its new big bad: the Soviet Union, who had been one of the Allies. There are pictures of Winston Churchill, FDR, and Josef Stalin bro-ing out at the Yalta Conference. But after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, it was the end of one war and the beginning of another: an atomic arms race with the USSR.

It’s a tragic irony that World War II is used to justify subsequent wars when the people who fought it, fought it so that wouldn’t be the case. In February 1946, Edgar L. Jones, who served as an ambulance driver and journalist during the war, published a seering plea in The Atlantic called “One War is Enough.”

“Cynical as most of us overseas were, I doubt if many of us seriously believed that people at home would start planning for the next war before we could get home and talk without censorship about this one,” he wrote. “Although our hopes and fears were varied, our common goal was most assuredly more than the elimination of a few world powers so that the remaining nations could square off for yet another war. Nor did we endure the half-life of a regimented military existence just to have people tell us that it is inevitable that our children will have to suffer similar bitter experiences.”

“We had a right, I think, to expect that in return for our services the global home front would give peace a fair trial.”

He said “all we are saying is give peace a chance” years before John and Yoko sang it.

Jones cited the sacrifices made in the war and the return to the status quo that all but assured the next one.

“Regardless of the existence of personal misgivings, we as a nation, are placing our reliance not on international cooperation but upon the atomic bomb and the willingness of ‘our boys’ to back our decisions with their lives. If it takes two to make a war, we are certainly making sure we are one of them,” he cried.

Jones also punctured the myth that “our boys” overseas were all Captain America types happy to be there for Uncle Sam, writing: “The fighting man was not a deep-thinking man, despite all the lofty sentiments attributed to him. He left the peace talk to civilians who had the time and place for it. Having been maneuvered into a position where he had to kill or be killed, he did not trouble himself with the pretenses that he was a crusader. He fought because his people at home expected him to fight, and he let them seek the necessary justification for his own ruthlessness. The most he wanted was to end the war, and all wars, as soon as possible, so that he could live in peace and let others, including his own children, live in peace. He expected the home front to share his aversion for war and to figure out a better way to settle civilian disputes.”

Jones explained that not only did the soldiers not have the eagerness and unbridled patriotism of Captain America, many didn’t have the morality and decency of Steve Rogers either.

“What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway?” Jones asked. “We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”

You would never see that part in a Steven Spielberg movie. A Tarantino movie, maybe, as long as somewhere between boiling enemy skulls there was also a woman with feet.

Jones wasn’t the only veteran to suggest that the US troops fought Axis barbarism with a little Allied barbarism. Kurt Vonnegut, your high school crush’s favorite author, was a Prisoner of War in Dresden, who survived the Allied bombings of the city in the basement of a slaughterhouse. He wrote about the experience in his seminal novel Slaughterhouse Five, and also in a nonfiction piece shortly after his return called “Wailing Shall Be In All Streets,” which promptly turned down everywhere he submitted. Presumably because he was still an unpublished writer, but also because nobody wanted to hear what he called the “obscene brutality” of Allied conduct in the German city of Dresden. Or more specifically, on Dresden, because the destruction came from the air.

“It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why there were fighting—other than the enemy was a bunch of bastards,” He wrote. “A new kind of war, with all destruction, all killing approved. Germans would ask, ‘Why are you Americans fighting us?’ ‘I don’t know, but we’re sure beating the hell out of you’ was a stock answer.”

In what would later be known as his signature sardonic tone, Vonnegut addressed the American airmen who dropped the bombs:

“It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children…We had to exhume their bodies and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks—so I know. The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great was the toll. There was not enough labor to do it nicely, so a man with a flame-thrower was sent down instead, and he cremated them where they lay. Burned alive, suffocated, crushed—men, women, and children indiscriminately killed. For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal, but the result was equally cruel and heartless. That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth.”

Oy. He pre-empted inevitable criticism by acknowledging Nazi horrors and inhumanity, but that did not negate the horrors that he witnessed firsthand as a Prisoner of War whose prison labor was the cleanup.

“There can be no doubt that the Allies fought on the side of right and the Germans and Japanese on the side of wrong. World War II was fought for near-Holy motives,” he explained. “But I stand convinced that the brand of justice in which we dealt, wholesale bombings of civilian populations, was blasphemous. That the enemy did it first has nothing to do with the moral problem. What I saw of our air war, as the European conflict neared an end, had the earmarks of being an irrational war for war’s sake.”

Two decades later, in 1967, Vonnegut wrote a letter the Draft Board as part of his son Mark’s case requesting classification as a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War. He wrote:

“I was volunteer in the Second World War. I was an infantry scout, saw plenty of action, was finally captured and served about six months as a prisoner of war in Germany. I have a Purple Heart. I was honorably discharged. I am entitled, it seems to me, to pass on to my son my opinion of killing. I don’t even hunt or fish any more. I have some guns which I inherited, but they are covered with rust.”

“Mark is proud to be an American, and in his father’s opinion, he is being an absolutely first-rate citizen now.

He will not hate.

He will not kill.

There’s no hope in that. There’s no hope in war.”

Even with his nepo baby cred, the Draft Board denied Mark Vonnegut’s application. He would later get out of conscription by taking the psychological examination and receiving a psychiatric 4-F classification. A win is a win.

I also can’t not talk about the atomic bomb. Everyone now knows the enheimer part of Barbenheimer. Oppenheimer won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 2024, and Cillian Murphy and his cheekbones won Best Actor. It was an unlikely cultural phenomenon—a three hour epic about physics that had the same release date as a movie about a doll (and by extension, the female experience). Oppenheimer showed how bad J. Robert Oppenheimer felt after the bomb, but not how bad Japanese people felt.

More than 200,000 people were killed in the devastating bombings in 1945. When Christopher Nolan’s film was released in Japan in 2024, eight months after it premiered in the US, Europe, China, and South Korea, it premiered with content warnings that it might bring up memories.

The August 31st, 1946 issue of The New Yorker was dedicated to a report by John Hershey. On the cover, over a happy summer picnic scene, was a white paper overlay that read “Hiroshima: This entire issue is devoted to the story of how an atomic bomb destroyed a city.” No “Talk of the Town.” No cartoons. No “Shouts and Murmurs”—that would have been in poor taste, like this comedy podcast about war, but worse.

The report opens: “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”

Later, we learn:

“Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moments of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.”

Another harrowing moment follows the German priest, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge after the blast. Hershey writes:

“The street was cluttered with parts of houses that had slid into it, and with fallen telephone poles and wires. From every second or third house came the voices of people buried and abandoned, who invariably screamed, with formal politeness, ‘...Help, if you please!’ The priests recognized several ruins from which these cries came as the homes of friends, but because of the fire it was too late to help.”

Neither Miss Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department at a tin company, nor Father Kleinsorge, the German priest, were involved in the bombing of Pearl Harbor, yet they suffered the consequences.

Another thing missing from contemporary reflection on World War II is not just the horrors abroad, but also the horrors at home. The US military, while fighting for freedom and dignity and human rights against the racist tyranny of Nazism, was segregated by race.

World War II was also pitched in the States as a war against racism, but if the war was truly a moral war against the Nazi idea of superior and inferior races, then they should have at least tried to desegregate the United States itself.

Zinn says of his air crew’s journey to England aboard the Queen Mary: “There were 16,000 men aboard, and 4,000 of them were black. The whites had quarters on deck and just below deck. The blacks were housed separately, deep in the hold of the ship, around the engine room, in the darkest, dirtiest sections. Meals were taken in four shifts—except for the officers, who ate in prewar Queen Mary style in a chandeliered ballroom—the war was not being fought to disturb class privilege, and the blacks had to wait until three shifts of whites had finished eating.”

After Pearl Harbor, a congressman said, “I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps…. Damn them! Let’s get rid of them now!”

The Japanese people in America, Alaska, and Hawaii were not the same Japanese people who bombed Pearl Harbor, seeing as they were on the ground at the time.

Japanese internment proceeded to round up 110,000 men, women, and children, moved to camps and kept them under prison conditions. In 1944 the Supreme Court upheld this forced evacuation on the grounds of “military necessity.” In the 1980s, historian Peter Irons showed that the Army falsified material in its brief to the Supreme Court.

The war’s legacy codified such essential institutions as wealth inequality and perpetual militarism. “Fortunes were made during the war, and wealth was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,” Zinn explained. “By 1941 three-fourths of the value of military contracts were handled by fifty-six large corporations.”

The real defeat of fascism is the military contracts we made along the way.

Admiral Gene LaRocque, another disgruntled veteran, told historian and winner of the All Time Best Name Award Studs Terkel about the war:

“I had been in thirteen battle engagements, had sunk a submarine, and was the first man ashore in the landing at Roi. In that four years, I thought, What a hell of a waste of a man’s life. I lost a lot of friends. I had the task of telling my roommate’s parents about our last days together. You lose limbs, sight, part of your life—for what? Old men send young men to war. Flag, banners, and patriotic sayings … We’ve institutionalized militarism. This came out of World War Two.… It gave us the National Security Council. It gave us the CIA, that is able to spy on you and me this very moment.”

I’d like to take this opportunity to say hi to the CIA, and the NSA, and while we’re at it, my Chinese spy on TikTok who knows me more intimately than my therapist does.

Admiral LaRocque also said: “I hate it when they say, ‘He gave his life for his country.’ Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.”

In the words of Vonnegut, “That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth.”