From: "William E. Elston" <william-e-AT-elston.net>
To: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:29:25 -0800
Subject: Re: [Puptcrit] Gift Economy


I've read your "thoughts" on the matter. The CIA was created with the  
National Security Act of 1947. How were they then operating in Asia in  
1941? Or am I nitpicking?

Aside from that, you miss what was perhaps the real meaning of  
Stinnett's allegations. From Wikipedia:

> Stinnett wrote:
> Opinion polls in the summer of 1940 indicated that a majority of  
> Americans did not want the country involved in Europe's war. Yet  
> FDR's military and State Department leaders agreed that a victorious  
> Nazi Germany would threaten the national security of the United  
> States. They felt that Americans needed a call to action [=85]  
> Roosevelt believed that his countrymen would rally only to oppose an  
> overt act of war on the United States. The decision he made, in  
> concert with his advisors, was to provoke Japan through a series of  
> actions into an overt act: the Pearl Harbor attack.
> Himself a Navy veteran of the Pacific war drawn in by Pearl Harbor,  
> Stinnett's overarching message was that engineering the attack was,  
> at least arguably, a grim necessity. The American public was  
> complacent in the face of Nazi aggression in Europe, but Roosevelt  
> saw the bigger picture and felt that the United States had to get  
> involved to save Britain and the world from Nazi aggression. The  
> provocation policy Roosevelt adopted was based on an October 1940  
> memo written up by Arthur McCollum at the Office of Naval  
> Intelligence that promoted eight actions to elicit a Japanese  
> "mistake". One of these, point "F" recommended: "keep the main  
> strength of the US Fleet [=85] in the vicinity of the Hawaiian  
> islands". Stinnett was assisted greatly in his research by the  
> Freedom of Information Act (explicitly thanking the act's author,  
> Rep. John Moss, D-CA) and by Oliver Stone's film, JFK, which had put  
> public pressure on President Clinton to declassify sheaves of secret  
> files in the mid-1990s. McCollum's memo was apparently among those  
> files.


Far from proving that FDR pushed us into WWII to polish his legacy, it  
seems Stinnett believed that FDR and others engineered our entry into  
the war because no one else in the country was farsighted enough to  
see the consequences of Nazi conquest and rule. If true, I'd have to  
side with FDR on this one. None of your grab-bag of thoughts refutes  
this.

Aside from that the Stinnett book is problematic with regards to the  
interpretation of FOIA materials. Many of the intercepted Japanese  
bulletins leading up to the Pearl Harbor were not decrypted until  
after the attack, a fact which Stinnett fails to mention.

I repeat what I said. The Germans and Japanese started WWII. I don't  
believe (nor did Robert Stinnett believe) that FDR entered the war to  
save our economy.

That being said, I agree that the topic is getting a bit far afield  
from puppetry, unless you agree that heads of state, along with popes  
and other figures are often satirized as puppets. This is my last post  
on the subjects of "gift economy" and WWII.

-Bill Elston

On Nov 19, 2008, at 9:46 AM, Michael Moynihan wrote:

> In regard to the WWII, the facts do not support Mr. Elson's thoughts.
> My thoughts:
> http://how-of-why.blogspot.com/

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