The Politics of Language: Propaganda, Truth & Justice
A Quesnel Cariboo Sentinel Special 3-Part Series (Part 2)
By
Arthur Topham
Pub/Ed
The Quesnel Cariboo Sentinel
May 18th, 2021
[Editor’s Note: Some years back, prior to my former website RadicalPress.com being removed from the internet in March of 2017, I had published a series of images taken from a book published by Ian Verner Macdonald a former Canadian Trade Commissioner who had served successfully in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America following his war service in the RCAF. Mr. Macdonald’s interest in world history inspired him to investigate and research the causes behind WW2 and in the process he put together a rather large collection of images that were used in Canada’s msm during WW2 for propaganda purposes. His book, published in 2009 was titled, “Star Weekly at War”. I became acquainted with Mr. Macdonald and communicated with him via email for a number of years. The following visual images that will be presented to the reader in Part 2 of this 3-Part series are all taken from the Toronto Star Weekly and will illustrate how, during the war, the anti-German propaganda was presented to the Canadian public.
Following the visual presentation I’ve published excerpts from Mr. Macdonald’s Epilogue which will summarize and complete the 2nd part of this Series.
In Part 3 I shall present the other side of the picture that our Canadian forefathers and foremothers were never privileged to have witnessed and which might have given them cause to pause before venturing into a second world war.]
Part 2
STAR WEEKLY AT WAR
EPILOGUE
~ from “Star Weekly at War”
By
Ian Verner Macdonald
“…As an active combatant, Canada was seen by all men of goodwill as making a significant contribution to the defence of Western Christian civilization. Conforming with the English-language media world wide, the Star accepted without question the thesis that Hitler and the Nazis had to be stopped lest ‘we all end up in concentration camps’ or worse, under the heel of a ferocious dictator and his sinister Gestapo. Such was the temper of the times.
There was no hint in the Star Weekly that there could be a much more menacing evil afoot, even though some coverage was given to the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Nazi-Soviet pact that expanded Stalin’s bloodthirsty rule into Poland and the Baltic countries where thousands died at the hands of anti-Christian Kommissars, many tortured to death and their families sent to Siberia in sealed box cars. Even less attention was paid to the devilish mischief wrought by the vengeful, punitive Treaty of Versailles. It was the festering resentment of the misery caused by the unfair terms of this treaty that set the stage for the emergence in the ’twenties of an inspiring populist Fuehrer, promising to restore German honour and dignity, and the German economy, by the retrieval of its conquered territories.
Once Canada was committed by Prime Minister Mackenzie King to enter the war against Germany on Britain’s side on September 9, 1939 (no doubt with mixed feelings since he had written an adulatory letter to Hitler shortly before suggesting that history would remember him as the “Statesman of the 20th Century” for his accomplishments), the Star put the best face on the inevitable death and destruction, shielding readers from the disconcerting reality. Like most other media, the Star Weekly glamourized the war, helping to persuade hundreds of thousands of young men, including this writer, to lust for the opportunity to get into action, preferably in the RCAF even when, for a time, the chance of survival in Bomber Command was slim, at best.
…The Star Weekly has passed from the scene, as have most participants in the war it so vividly and optimistically portrayed, leaving survivors to wonder how a Good War and Total Victory could have brought such calamity and so tragically betrayed the trusting patriots who had dedicated, and often lost, their lives in rallying to the defence of Freedom.
It is now clear that the celebrated Allied Victory did not save Western Christian Civilization as promised, but precipitated its demise. There is even good reason to doubt that the case for making war was ever sufficiently plausible and compelling to justify the inevitable horrendous sacrifice, especially coming on the heels of the Great War (“to end all war”) that already had stripped both the Allied nations and Germany of many of their best and brightest, and, in most cases, of the victim’s priceless progeny.
…In retrospect, the Star Weekly, with the best of intentions and in tune with the times, appears to have accepted the Hollywood version of German intentions, and along with the entire country, acceded to the most monstrous contrived miscalculation in history, carried out against the best interests of the British Commonwealth and Western democracies. Britons and Canadians were led to believe that their German kinfolk, who held no animosity toward them, were the enemy who threatened their freedom when in fact the enemy was the atheistic Soviet regime whose bloodthirsty Kommissars had liquidated, by 1939, at least 20 million Christians and was intent on subjugating Europe at the earliest opportunity. Germany offered the sole effective defence against such a fearful prospect.
Germany, astutely and persistently but with increased frustration, sought peace with Britain in order to concentrate on eliminating the imminent Soviet threat but, on Churchill’s orders, the generous “peace with honour” proposals were rejected out of hand, sounding the death knell for tens of millions, including 45 thousand young Canadians. The same Churchill, when shortly after the destruction of Germany the Soviet threat quickly re-emerged, quipped flippantly to an Aide “It looks like we slaughtered the wrong pig!” Britain and Canada were soon in a military alliance with Germany, but it was a decade too late. The hostile Soviet Union had already enslaved Eastern and Central Europe and the Baltic countries. Poland, the country whose independence Britain had ostensibly gone to war for to defend from Hitler, was cynically delivered into the bloodstained clutches of a far more sinister and malevolent dictator.
Other newsworthy issues and anomalies even more studiously ignored by the Star Weekly were the identities of the sinister forces behind the inexplicable decision to declare war on on Germany alone when both Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September, 1939 (no less illogical than the subsequent refusal of the Churchill government to accept an honourable peace). The rationale for making war was not widely debated at the time, partly because of censorship and self-censorship by the media….
In the dangerous realignments of the immediate post-war era, the miscalculations of Allied “statesmen” became clear; the most calamitous being the designation of our Christian European ethnic and cultural German kin-folk as the “enemy.” In fact, Germany was our natural ally, just as the atheistic, genocidal anti-Christian Stalin dictatorship was our natural enemy. Making war on Germany ensured that Communism (and [edited for legal reasons. Ed.]) would triumph, and that Britain and European importance in world affairs would decline accordingly.
…Could there have been a more palatable outcome than the Pyrrhic victory? “What if Hitler had won?” – a rhetorical question asked usually to evoke shivers of horror among listeners. But if Germany had won, arguably the world would by now be in a much better and safer place. And the “what if” is not nearly as far-fetched as Allied propagandists would have us believe. Germany certainly would have won if Britain and France, and eventually America, had acted in their own obvious best interests and remained neutral or entered the war on Germany’s side….
Had Britain not been deceived and betrayed into war with Germany, with whom she had no authentic quarrel, there would have been no Second World War, tens of millions of lives would have been spared, priceless European architecture would not have been destroyed, Europe would have been united under German leadership, international communism would have become a footnote in history, trillions of dollars could have been used for the betterment of mankind, the environment could have been protected, the Cold War would have been forstalled, (along with the Korean and Vietnmese wars and communist sponsored revolutions elsewhere), negotiations for the resettlement of Six Million or more [edited for legal reasons. Ed.] to Uganda or Madagascar would have reached fruition, there would have been peace and justice in the Middle East, China would have evolved along Taiwanese lines under capitalism, sharing with Japan and the Colonial Powers influence over S.E. Asia, there would have been no UN meddling, no Third World turmoil, no “refugee” migrations, no deprivation of freedom in the name of “human rights,” no Affirmative Action, no asinine Political Correctness and, above all, no subversion and corruption of Western society and the democratic political process by a cunning, avaricious alien minority.
It does not speak well of Establishment historians and journalists that they refuse to address squarely what is probably the most crucial and perplexing enigma of our time, namely, the real purpose of WWII and why politicians, notably Churchill and Roosevelt, knowingly acted against their countries’ best interests. Honest, unbiased, patriotic scholars who have attempted to stimulate discussion of this intriguing issue have been viciously denounced as historical revisionists (or worse), and their findings have been viciously suppressed. [Editor’s note: this, I would add, has been my own fate with respect to the past 14 years of enforced litigation, arrests, jail, trials, home invasions, msm vilification, etc. and is still ongoing as I type these words.]
The Toronto Star Weekly did its wartime duty in boosting morale and enthusiasm for the seemingly worthy cause – the preservation of freedom and justice and protection from purportedly-looming world-wide dictatorship. Ironically, the fundamental freedoms, especially freedom of expression, have been steadily eroded throughout the world – not least in Canada – largely because of the war, and the dictatorship of the New World Order could well be at hand….”
~ Ian Verner Macdonald
2009
(End of Part 2)
