{"id":23154,"date":"2026-09-01T07:22:51","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T11:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=23154"},"modified":"2026-09-01T07:22:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T11:22:51","slug":"world-war-ii-the-no-good-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/01\/world-war-ii-the-no-good-war\/","title":{"rendered":"World War II, the “No Good” War"},"content":{"rendered":"
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World War II, the \u2018No Good\u2019 War<\/a><\/h1>\n

by Jim Bovard<\/a><\/span> | Sep 1, 2026<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"dresden,

Dresden after the 1945 bombing by U.S. and British<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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September 1 is the anniversary of the start of World War II in Europe. On that date in 1939, Nazi Germany launched an invasion of Poland from the west and a few weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin signed a non-aggression pact shortly before they carved up Poland but that ceasefire didn\u2019t last beyond June 1941.<\/p>\n

World War II has been heralded for more than fifty years as the \u201cGood War\u201d\u2014in contrast to subsequent U.S. military debacles in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. But World War II cannot be glorified without hiding a heap of lies and millions of corpses.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Less than six months before the war started in Europe, H.L. Mencken warned in The Baltimore Sun<\/em>, \u201cThe main reason why it is easy to sell war to peaceful people is that the demagogues who act as salesmen quickly acquire a monopoly of both public information and public instruction.\u201d Looking at the peril of another world war, Mencken predicted, \u201cOn the day war is declared, the Espionage Act will come into effect, and all free discussion will cease\u2026Any argument against the war itself, and any criticism of the persons appointed to carry it on, will become aid and comfort to the enemy.\u201d Mencken wrote, \u201cA few weeks of [pro-war] razzle-dazzle will suffice to convert most people to the war and to intimidate and silence the stray recalcitrant who holds out.\u201d Thanks to massive pressure to conform and submit, \u201cThe dissenter is not only suspected by all his neighbors; he also begins to suspect himself.\u201d Unfortunately, the U.S. government vindicated Mencken\u2019s worst fears on censorship during the war and far beyond.<\/strong><\/p>\n

President Franklin Roosevelt worked ceaselessly and shamelessly to drag America into the European conflict.<\/strong> He capped off his 1940 reelection campaign by promising voters, \u201cYour president says this country is not going to war.<\/span><\/a>\u201d FDR portrayed World War II as a fight for democracy, which required endless hornswoggling of the American public regarding U.S. allies.<\/p>\n

The Roosevelt administration engineered a movie tribute to Stalin\u2014Mission to Moscow<\/i>\u2014that was so slavish that Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich observed that \u201cno Soviet propaganda agency would dare to present such outrageous lies.\u201d In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt denounced those Americans with \u201csuch suspicious souls\u2014who feared that I have made \u2018commitments\u2019 for the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties\u201d with Stalin at the summit of Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. Roosevelt helped set the two-tier attack that permeated much of postwar American foreign policy\u2014denouncing cynics, while betraying foreigners whom the U.S. government pretended to champion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a private conversation at the Yalta conference in early 1945, Roosevelt assured Stalin that he was feeling \u201cmore bloodthirsty\u201d than when they previously met. Immediately after the Yalta conference, the British and American air forces turned the German city of Dresden into an inferno, killing up to 50,000 civilians. The Associated Press reported that \u201cAllied air bosses\u201d had adopted \u201cdeliberate terror bombing of great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler\u2019s doom.\u201d Ravaging Dresden was intended to \u201c\u2018add immeasurably\u2019 to Roosevelt\u2019s strength in negotiating with the Russians at the postwar peace table,\u201d as Thomas Fleming noted in The New Dealers\u2019 War.<\/i> Vast numbers of dead women and children became simply one more poker chip.<\/strong> Shortly after the residents of Dresden were obliterated, Roosevelt pompously announced, \u201cI know that there is not room enough on Earth for both German militarism and Christian decency.\u201d Government censorship and intimidation helped minimize critical coverage of the civilian carnage resulting from U.S. carpet-bombing of cities in both Germany and Japan.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prior to the Yalta conference, Roosevelt confided to the U.S. ambassador to Russia that he believed that if he gave Stalin \u201ceverything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won\u2019t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.\u201d Stalin wanted assurances from Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that millions of Soviet citizens who had been captured during the war by the Germans or who had abandoned the Soviet Union would be forcibly returned. After the war ended, Operation Keelhaul forcibly sent two million Soviets to certain death or long-term imprisonment in Siberia or elsewhere. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Operation Keelhaul \u201cthe last secret\u201d of World War II and it was covered up or ignored by Western media until the 1970s. Those mass deaths facilitated by the U.S. and British governments rarely rate even an asterisk by the media-beloved historians who tout the \u201cGood War.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many American soldiers and sailors died because of FDR\u2019s boundless hatred of Germans.<\/strong> In the final years of the war, FDR gave a huge boost to Nazi propaganda when he floated plans to subjugate the German people permanently by banning all factories and even airplanes in the conquered territory. The president told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., \u201cWe either have to castrate the German people or you have to go to treat them in such manner so they can\u2019t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.\u201d<\/strong> FDR declared that after the war, every German \u201cshould be fed three times a day with\u2026Army soup,\u201d adding that \u201cthey will remember that experience all their lives.\u201d Cordell Hull, Roosevelt\u2019s long-serving Secretary of State, condemned the Morgenthau plan (as it became known) as an \u201cextreme starvation plan.\u201d (David Beito\u2019s book, FDR: A New Political Life<\/i><\/span><\/a>, <\/i>is an excellent source on FDR\u2019s conniving.) The combination of the Morgenthau Plan and the bombing of civilian areas in Dresden, Hamburg, and other German cities, killing nearly 600,000 civilians, may have spurred far more Germans to keep fighting to the death.<\/p>\n

In the final communiqu\u00e9 from Yalta, Roosevelt, along with Churchill and Stalin, declared that \u201ca new situation has been created in Poland as a result of her complete liberation by the Red Army.\u201d Liberation? Tell that to the Marines. A few weeks later, on March 1, 1945, FDR gave a speech to Congress touting his triumph at Yalta, declaring, \u201cThe decision with respect to the boundaries of Poland was, frankly, a compromise\u2026It will include, in the new, strong Poland, quite a large slice of what now is called Germany.\u201d He agreed with Stalin at Yalta on moving the border of the Soviet Union far to the west\u2014thereby effectively conscripting eleven million Poles as new Soviet Union citizens.<\/p>\n

Roosevelt told Congress that the deal at Yalta was \u201cthe most hopeful agreement possible for a free, independent, and prosperous Polish people.\u201d But he betrayed the exiled Polish government in London and signed off on Soviet-style elections with no international observers\u2014effectively giving Stalin unlimited sway on choosing Poland\u2019s rulers. Any illusions about Soviet benevolence towards Poland should have been banished when the Red Army massacred the Polish officer corps at Katyn Forest<\/strong>\u2014an atrocity that the U.S. government assiduously covered up (and blamed on the Nazis) during the war and long after.<\/p>\n

Poland was \u201ccompensated\u201d for the loss of territory to the Soviet Union with a huge swath of Germany, a simple cartographic revision that spurred vast human carnage. But post-war atrocities against Germans were almost totally ignored for the remainder of the twentieth century.<\/strong> In 2012, historian R. M. Douglas, author of Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War<\/em> <\/strong>(Yale University Press), vividly captured<\/span><\/a> the carnage that continued after the war formally ended:<\/p>\n

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\u201cBetween 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians -the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16 -\u2018were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times<\/em> noted in December 1945, the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in the course of the operation.<\/p>\n

Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies\u2019 cynical formulation, \u2018reparations in kind\u2019) in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe \u2013 many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. Ironically, no more than 100 or so miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of indictment that listed \u2018deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population\u2019 under the heading of \u2018crimes against humanity.\u2019<\/p>\n

By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a manmade disaster and one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Yet although they occurred within living memory, in time of peace, and in the middle of the world\u2019s most densely populated continent, they remain all but unknown outside Germany itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

George Orwell denounced the \u201crelocation\u201d as an \u201cenormous crime\u201d that was \u201cequivalent to transplanting the entire population of Australia<\/span><\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Philosopher Bertrand Russell protested, \u201cAre mass deportations crimes when committed<\/span><\/a> by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?\u201d<\/p>\n

But the German civilians killed after the war were simply another asterisk ignored by Good War chroniclers.<\/p>\n

Jon Utley was a legendary conservative-libertarian philanthropist who rescued The American Conservative<\/em> and also generously supported Antiwar.com. Utley\u2019s mother, Frida Utley, did piercing writing on the post-World War II abuses in Germany. Her pathbreaking work is archived here<\/b>. <\/span><\/a> She wrote, \u201cSome twelve million people were expropriated and driven from their homes for no other crime than that of being Germans. Out of a total of twelve to thirteen million people who had committed the crime of belonging to the German race, four or five million are unaccounted for. More people have been rendered homeless by an Allied peace than by a Nazi war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nazi Germany committed great crimes against humanity and that regime deserved to be terminated by its opponents and its victims. But humanity was ill-served when the victors were permitted to expunge all of their own atrocities and lies<\/strong>. Legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle offered a far more honest assessment of World War II than did FDR: \u201cThe war gets so complicated and confused in my mind; on especially sad days, it\u2019s almost impossible to believe that anything is worth such mass slaughter and misery.\u201d The halo that kowtowing historians slapped over World War II made it far easier ever since for politicians to drag America into military quagmires.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

World War II, the \u2018No Good\u2019 War by Jim Bovard | Sep 1, 2026 September 1 is the anniversary of the start of World War II in Europe. On that date in 1939, Nazi Germany launched an invasion of Poland from the west and a few weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23158,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2005,2250,4930,4931,236,118,1041,358,4697,28,910,4932,2248],"class_list":["post-23154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-conservative","tag-bertrand-russell","tag-d","tag-david-beito","tag-fdr","tag-germany","tag-hitler","tag-jon-utley","tag-morgenthau-plan","tag-roosevelt","tag-stalin","tag-thomas-fleming","tag-yalta"],"yoast_head":"\nWorld War II, the "No Good" War - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/01\/world-war-ii-the-no-good-war\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"World War II, the "No Good" War - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"World War II, the \u2018No Good\u2019 War by Jim Bovard | Sep 1, 2026 September 1 is the anniversary of the start of World War II in Europe. 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On that date in 1939, Nazi Germany launched an invasion of Poland from the west and a few weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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