i must have seen something somewhere recently about the centennial of wwI that bothered me in terms of the way it was framed, because the dream i had this morning was just off the wall, starting some time in about 1917 and ending in the mid 70s. i'm not going to go over it because it's a little blurry but it was some kind of episode of quantum leap. or sliders for the younger folk. or dr. who for the elderly, i suppose.

what i remember, though, is how insistent i was on a proper narration of events and how frustrated i was about people continuing to fall for propaganda that is now a hundred years old. it's made me wonder if this isn't a good time to review some basic historical misunderstandings of the last century.

i think historians will eventually think of one war rather than two.

1) the soviet experiment was not one in worker self-management, but something constructed by the vulgar marxism of the banking elite (new york, london) to determine if marx' ideas could really be used to reduce workers to compliant slaves and increase production and profit, as he claimed. if you're a member of the banking elite, you don't want to write off marxism without trying it out. it's pretty seductive, really. what you want to do is put them in competition with each other and see which is better at being oppressive. it turns out capitalism was the more oppressive system, and faking democracy is better at producing compliant people than faking socialism, so the bankers chose it and dismantled the soviet state. socialists, communists and anarchists of all types were mass executed in the process.
2) as is the tendency in russia, a nationalist appeared from nowhere and took over the state. it didn't null the experiment, but it did provide a problem for a few decades.
3) therefore, hitler, who was created to remove stalin - and nearly did.
4) hitler also backfired, but not as badly as stalin.
5) wwII was primarily a war between russia and germany. the american tactic through the war (sometimes misinterpreted as"isolationism") was non-interference, in the hope that the germans (who they supported) would remove stalin from power. however, once it was clear that stalin had the upper hand, it was determined that they must become involved to prevent soviet global dominance.
6) that is to say that the goal of the invasion of normandy was not to liberate france from germany (who had already lost the war on the eastern front and was merely waiting to be occupied by the soviets) but to occupy germany in order to prevent a soviet invasion of france, italy, the uk and spain.
7) likewise, the purpose of bombing japan with atomic weapons was not to end the war faster but to ensure that it would be occupied by american soldiers rather than russian ones. the russians were fast approaching. truman wanted leverage to get a direct peace treaty, and got it.

you have to meet the conspiracy theorists halfway. they're good at constructing evidence that demonstrates that whatever thing was a plot, and are often in the end proven right. what the theorists don't realize most of the time, though, is that they're uncovering a plan that ultimately *failed* and that the conclusion to draw from the evidence they put together is almost always one of mass incompetence, rather than diabolical genius.

everything up there is pretty standard history at this point, but the propaganda continues to define the narrative.