source: donaldjeffries

Valuable info from the cutting room floor

My new book, American Memory Hole: How the Court Historians Promote Disinformation, will officially be released on August 27. It is available for pre-sale now. There was so much hidden history unearthed by researchers Chris Graves, Peter Secosh and myself, that we simply couldn’t put it all in the book. Too many scenes had to be cut.

Buy “American Memory Hole”

One figure who comes out looking even more horrid and corrupt than I imagined was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The man the court historians tell us is our second greatest president, behind only Abraham Lincoln, who turned tyranny into an art form. You will learn about the crimes committed against not only the Japanese- Americans interned in U.S. concentration camps, but German-Americans and Italian- Americans as well. Unlike the Japanese, they received no belated reparations, and court historians don’t even acknowledge that they were sent to the camps. Peter Secosh discovered the U.S. crimes at Okinawa. Okinawa was a Japanese territory, and in April, 1945, only months before World War II ended, U.S. troops landed on the main island there, and in the battle that followed, 94,000 civilians were killed. The U.S. set up concentration camps afterwards, and some 3,000 Okinawans died there.

Survivors of these never publicized camps described the deadly conditions there. Most deaths occurred from starvation and malaria. The conditions were decidedly unsanitary, and little food was provided. It is estimated that around 100,000 were interned in three separate camps. As one elderly survivor recalled, “We had to wait in a long line just to get one onigiri rice ball, distributed each day under the scorching sun. . . . Small kids always had diarrhea.” So many deaths occurred that bodies were buried in a single mass grave. Because of the lack of reliable records, it is almost certain that even more people died than reported. The U.S. still waited three months to release prisoners from the camps, after Japan’s August, 1945 surrender. The camps in fact continued to exist until June, 1946. Remember, the North hanged Henry Wirz, commandant of the South’s Andersonville prison, who couldn’t feed northern prisoners because Union generals had stolen all the food and destroyed the crops.

But the story doesn’t end there. In 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco granted these islands to the United States. The Okinawans’ land and homes were seized at gunpoint and their houses and farms were bulldozed or burned to the ground to make way for dozens of U.S. military bases. 250,000 Okinawans—almost half the population—would be displaced. Some fifty-thousand American troops were stationed on this island that the US military boasted was the “Keystone of the Pacific.” Okinawans were angered by the noisy combat training areas, and learning that American nuclear and chemical weapons were stored on Okinawa, while pollutants from the bases fouled nearby farmland. It won’t surprise readers of my work to learn that thousands of robberies, assaults, rapes, and murders, were committed by U.S. troops there. Okinawa was given back to Japan in 1972, but the American bases remained.

In addition to interning Japanese-Americans, German-Americans, and Italian-Americans, our government also imprisoned indigenous Aleuts in Alaska. Shortly after Japan invaded the area, American naval personnel arrived with orders to round up and evacuate Aleuts to internment camps almost 2,000 miles away near Juneau. The stated purpose of the government’s evacuation order was to protect the Aleuts, who were American citizens, from the dangers of war. In order to prevent the possibility of any occupying Japanese forces using the islands, the Aleuts were forcibly evacuated from their homes, and most of their villages burned to the ground. Nearly nine hundred Aleuts were imprisoned in these “Duration Camps,” which lacked plumbing and electricity, and featured holes in the walls and roofs, along with broken doors and windows and rotted floors.

Women at one of these camps wrote a petition in October 1942, protesting their living conditions: “We the people of this place want a better place to live… We drink impure water and then get sick…We got no place to take a bath and no place to wash our clothes or dry them when it rains…we live in a room with our children just enough to turn around in. We use blankets for walls just to live in private.” The OIA (Office of Insular Affairs) dismissed the women’s concerns, telling them that “under war conditions, they could not expect to enjoy the comforts and conditions as they existed on the Pribilof Islands.” In May, 1943, the U.S. government forced some Aleutian men into literal slavery, warning them they wouldn’t be allowed to go home after the war if they didn’t “volunteer” to harvest seals for the war effort.

Finally released in mid-1945, the Aleuts came home to disastrous conditions. Reports from the OIA revealed that, under the “care” of the occupying U.S. troops, “all buildings were damaged due to lack of normal care and upkeep…inspections revealed extensive evidence of widespread wanton destruction of property and vandalism…contents of closed packing boxes, trunks, and cupboards had been ransacked, clothing had been scattered over floors, trampled and fouled, dishes, furniture, stoves, radios, phonographs, books, and other items had been broken or damaged.” As always, going back to the absolute grifting operation under the Union Army’s General William T. Sherman, lots of valuable property was discovered to be “missing.” It’s a Greatest Generation thing, you wouldn’t understand. In 1988, Congress authorized paying $12,000 each to surviving Aleuts.

World War II was not a “good war.” Unknown to most is the fact that Americans also indiscriminately fire bombed Chinese cities, killing thousands. China was supposed to be on our side. In the Pacific, long-range American B-29 bombers burned up nearly all Japanese cities. On just the night of March 9th, 1945, over 100,000 people were burned to death in the most heavily populated civilian areas of Tokyo. That was the equivalent to the wartime number of American casualties in the entire Pacific Theater. Another one million Japanese who escaped were left homeless. Over 400,000 Japanese civilians died during a nine month bombing campaign. By contrast, 120,000 were killed when we became the only nation to date to drop the atomic bomb, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The court historians tell us that this “saved lives.”

There is so much more real history to learn just from the World War II era. Harry “Give ‘em Hell” Truman was dining on board the USS Augusta on his way back from Potsdam when he learned of Hiroshima. He jumped up and exclaimed, “This is the greatest thing in history.” He went on to declare that sharing the news of Hiroshima was the “happiest” announcement he had ever made. Truman’s reported jubilation made even some of his supporters uncomfortable. One Democratic committeeman admonished him by telegram two days later: “no president of the United States could ever be jubilant over any device that could kill innocent human beings. Please make it clear that it is not destruction but the end of destruction that is the cause of jubilation.” Supposedly, old Joe Kennedy almost got into a fight with Harry “the buck stops here” Truman in the White House, over the needless death of his son Joe, Jr.

One of the most enthusiastic proponents of firebombing was General Curtis LeMay. The character Dr. Strangelove was said to have been based on LeMay. LeMay also was one of President Kennedy’s fiercest enemies in the Pentagon. He would be a logical suspect as a high ranking conspirator in the JFK assassination. JFK’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara would later state: “Was there a rule then that said you shouldn’t bomb; shouldn’t kill; shouldn’t bomb to death 100,000 civilians in a night? LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” The atrocities committed by the Allies- you know, the “good guys” in World War II; the bombing of Dresden, the serial raping and plundering, were documented in my book Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963. Hollywood can propagandize all it wants; there was absolutely nothing to be proud of about our “victory.”

U.S. Major General Claire Chennault played a major role in the firebombing of the Chinese city of Wuhan. Which is now best known for the lab where Republicans believe a bioweapon was released from. It was the largest city in central China with over a million residents. Chennault, a great hero who went on to form Flying Tigers Airlines and was portrayed by John Wayne onscreen, wanted to wipe out the entire city. According to his memoirs, Way of a Fighter: The Memoirs of Claire Chennault, Chennault described difficulties getting the necessary backing for his firebombing proposal. He was upset that General Joseph Stilwell, the senior US commander in the China Theater, refused to permit him to destroy Chinese cities. My mother in law would work for his widow, Madame Anna Chennault, the reputed richest woman in the world, for many years. She gave us an $8 salad bowl set for a wedding gift.

The Greatest Generation was really proficient at bombing civilians. Kind of like how Barack Obama bragged about being good at killing. We bombed Italian cities even after they switched sides and became our allies in 1943. After Germany invaded Yugoslavia, our brave boys bombed the cities occupied by Germans, but as always were wildly inaccurate and irresponsible, regularly killing Yugoslavian civilians in the process. Nobody ever said freedom was free. Being good Christians, Allied bombers blasted Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1944. 600 Allied bombers blasted Belgrade, and they timed the first bomb to correlate to when the city center was fully packed with Christians attending Easter services. No military targets were hit during this carpet bombing. Our bombs hit religious and cultural structures as well as several schools and hospitals. Over 1,200 civilians were killed.

Much as there had been no military reason to bomb the beautiful German city of Dresden, there were no military targets in Belgrade. And only eighteen Germans were killed, a fraction of the Yugoslavian civilians who perished. The Greatest Bombers also attacked another ally, France. During the hallowed Normandy invasion, Allied bombers killed nearly as many French civilians as German soldiers. For no reason at all, the French coastal resort city of Royan in southwestern France was destroyed by American bombers three weeks prior to the end of the war, killing 2,700 civilians. Much as author Kurt Vonnegut was so appalled by the bombing of Dresden that he wrote Slaughterhouse Five about it, historian Howard Zinn, whom I am honored to have been compared to by some, was a bombardier on the Royan mission, and was sickened by his participation in what he recognized as a brutal war crime.

Moving into the JFK assassination sphere, Peter Secosh found an astonishing series of cosmic connections. John Connally, who was shot along with JFK on November 22, 1963 but survived, had a daughter Kathleen, or KK. KK dated Robert Hale, a high school friend of Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1959, they eloped against their parents’ wishes. After being married only forty four days, KK Connally was found dead from a gunshot wound. Hale testified that she had pointed a shotgun at her head, and he’d tried to stop her, but it went off. The jury ruled it to be accidental death. Getting even stranger, in 1962, Robert Hale and his twin brother were caught burglarizing the apartment of Judith Campbell Exner, who would later concoct a dubious tale that effectively destroyed the Camelot legend.

Hale’s father was the ex-head of the North Texas FBI office, and then security chief at a General Dynamics plant. The Hale brothers weren’t even arrested by the FBI agent who caught them in the act, or ever prosecuted for burglary. Robert Hale went on to a series of LSD-fueled adventures in various communes. He eventually became an eccentric religious survivalist, known as Preacher Bob. He moved with his brood to Alaska, and at length was accused of sexually abusing his daughter. He was indicted on thirty counts, including incest, sexual abuse, and kidnapping. He was convicted and died in prison in 2008. And to add just one more weird tidbit to the story; Fred Korth, who succeeded Connally as Secretary of the Navy, also had a daughter who seemingly killed herself. Just like KK Connally, she chose the decidedly non-feminine method of a shotgun to the head. What are the odds?

I find these kinds of connections fascinating, and they seem to pop up everywhere when researching hidden history. In American Memory Hole, you’ll learn how the man eugenicist Woodrow Wilson (then governor of New Jersey) put in charge of the first forced sterilization program wound up in a World War II hot spot decades later. What is the likelihood that one of the first witnesses that our “free press” interviewed in New York on September 11, 2001 was Rachel Uchitel, later to achieve her fifteen minutes of fame as one of Tiger Woods’ many mistresses? I call these things Cosmic Coincidences, because I rarely attribute anything important to simple coincidence. Did you know that “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf, so memorable during the Gulf “War,” had a father who was instrumental in covering up the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping for the New Jersey State Police? The elite perpetuate themselves in power.  Every president except Martin Van Buren is related to each other.

My books about hidden history sell better than my other ones. A lot better. So I may be continuing this series as long as I can. There won’t be a book titled Hidden History 4, but there will be a book that is essentially that. My publisher just doesn’t like using the numbers, to advertise a series. It’s fitting that I write so much about history, because my mind wanders back to the past constantly. I’m never “in the moment.” Instead, my mind recalls the pretty girl I was too scared to ask to the prom. Or my game winning hit in the Little League championship game that no one related to me was there to see. It’s not productive, but I’ve always been like this. Shamelessly sentimental and nostalgic. Brooding over past failures and reliving past triumphs.

I’m perfectly at home between the covers of my books. There aren’t any old personal unrequited loves there, but in this book, there is Thomas Jefferson, fighting his forgotten battle against Judicial Review. Or John Tyler, taking his heroic stance against a national bank. Or Harry Elmer Barnes, destroying his liberal livelihood by realizing WWI was an utterly pointless exercise in blood shedding. Or John F. Kennedy, whose charismatic smile and Hollywood head of hair has haunted my dreams since I was a seven year old, watching my parents weep at the nonstop television coverage. Even with all the time I’ve spent researching his assassination, I found more information which is included in this book. Remember, those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. The past is prologue.