The People as Enemy: The Leaders' Real Agenda in World War II , by John Spritzler, (Black Rose Books, 2003)
reviewed by Dave Stratman
John Spritzler's The People As Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II is a powerful, necessary, and inspiring book. Read it and you will never see World War II in the same way. More to the point, you will never see contemporary capitalist society in the same way. Spritzler explodes the myth of 'the good war' by taking apart, piece by careful piece, much of the structure of lies and myths designed to buttress capitalist rule, and exposes the system in its ugliness and ultimate weakness.
Spritzler shows too that there is a powerful counter-force to capitalism at work in society: working men and women fighting everywhere for a better world, a force so threatening that the most powerful elites on earth waged a world war to extinguish it. This counter-force was not defeated on the field of battle in World War II so much as misled and betrayed by Communist leaders in a little-known history from which we have not yet recovered. The People as Enemy is a giant step toward understanding and breaking free of that history.
There are three key myths about World War II which this book lays bare: that the war was caused by conflicts between nations; that the top priority of the Allied leaders in the war was to defeat the Fascists; and that Allied bombing of civilians was part of the effort to defeat the Fascists.
World War II was a desperate means of social control undertaken by the elites of the warring nations as the only alternative to working class revolution. In each of the belligerent nations which Spritzler examines: Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the U.S., government leaders were driven to war not chiefly by fear of other countries but by fear of their own people. The ruling elites of these countries went to war because they saw no other way to stay in power.
War between nations was the form in which the ruling elites prosecuted the class war against their own people. Depression began in 1929 and gripped the world. Countries were swept by mass strikes and factory occupations, mass marches, worker demands for a just world, threats to the established power. German Nazis and Japanese militarists, Stalin and 'democratic' British and American leaders, seized upon war as the way to whip up nationalist fears of the Foreign Enemy, replace calls for revolution with national unity behind establishment leaders, put down strikes and labor upheaval, and crush dissent. Of the U.S., Spritzler writes, “FDR led the U.S. into war because he knew there was no other way to control the American working class that was growing increasingly revolutionary. Just as for the Fascist leaders, the function of war for American leaders was not to defend against a threat from foreign nations, but to serve the needs of domestic social control.”
The People As Enemy shows war as the ultimate and critical means of counterrevolution by rulers, their favored means to stay in power when all else fails; there is no horror they will not inflict, no atrocity they will not commit to enforce their rule. The weapons of the ruling elites to maintain their power in the 1930s and '40s were Fascism - and, as Spritzler also shows, Communism - fake democracy, war, genocide, nationalism, and other devices designed to deflect workers from their real enemies and set them upon each other.
The People As Enemy provides a wealth of hidden history. Spritzler's description of the amazing breadth of working class struggle in the United States in the years preceding the war is especially eye-opening, as is the evidence that the British establishment was not 'appeasing' Hitler at Munich out of fear, but rather intentionally nurturing Nazi power as a force against the German working class and against the Soviets.
The book has profound implications beyond World War II. Echoes of the past in the present and specifically a consciousness of the Iraq war are never distant in this book. It suggests that the real force driving the history of the twentieth century was working class struggle for a new world and ruling class efforts to contain it. The rhythm of the century was revolution and counterrevolution - a rhythm in which we, of course, are still caught. Seldom has a work of history been more acutely relevant to understanding our present and our possible futures.
John Spritzler is an editor of New Democracy and a biostatistician at the Harvard School of Public Health working on AIDS research.
Dave Stratman, Editor of New Democracy , 5 Burr Street Boston, MA 02130 617-524-4073, newdemocracyworld.org, Newdem@aol.com