If Truth be Told: Secrecy and subversion in an age turned unheroic
Stan Winer
Newton (Wales): Superscript, 2004, £10, p/back
ISBN 0 9542913 36
available from <www.gardners.com/>
This arrived with a note from the publisher which began: ‘We are a tiny radical press operating from a council house in mid-Wales. We aim to make heavy stuff readily available at affordable prices for people who kind of realise something is up but have never had the benefit of a socialist education.’ Well, amen to that!
The book is a short (115 pages plus notes and index) account of various deceptions (and alleged deceptions) by governments in the past 100 years or so – the ‘long and hidden history of official lies and military-political manoeuvring’ – most of which will be familiar to readers of this magazine. The list begins with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915; skips through Pearl Harbour, and into WW2, for example the fall of Singapore, the British-American refusal to open a ‘second front’ in 1941-43 (to let the Germans and Soviets destroy each other) the (deliberate?) failure of the assault on Dieppe, civilian bombing by the RAF and so forth. After WW2 we get the CIA in Europe, IRD, and the Korean war (US biological warfare). From the 1950s we skip to the 1980s and Reagan-era disinformation about the Soviets (shooting the Pope etc); and finally we arrive at the two assaults on Iraq and a long list of countries which the US has attacked/invaded/subverted in the post-war era.
‘Add it all up, and the picture which emerges is of a veritable World War III, in which the US government is the chief protagonist and the US military-industrial complex the chief beneficiary’. ( p.109)
In his introduction Winer writes:
‘Progressive ideology cries out for a new kind of critical analysis and an enhanced quality of historical interpretation’.
‘Progressive ideology’? Yes, the author is apparently an apologist for the Soviet Union. For example he writes:
‘The Soviet Union had [in 1945] never invaded any part of Europe except in answer to the Nazis and as a liberator’ (p. 88).
Wasn’t there an invasion of Finland?
He explains away the post-war Soviet repression of Eastern Europe by blaming it on disinformation and paranoia spread by the US and the UK. The failure of the Soviet revolution is apparently the result of chicanery by its Western opponents.
This is reasonably well documented and straightforwardly written. It just feels slightly like a cartoon strip with all the detail and complexity removed. But maybe that was the author’s intention.