So they would trust the Germans more than Japanese because of racial considerations?
The racial thing was so strong that I think young people in the United States would be genuinely shocked were they to look back at the propaganda images of the war against Japan. Regardless of what Japan had done, the so-called yellow peril, the vicious portrayal of the Japanese in US propaganda as “yellow devils” went very deep indeed. And we know that racism has played a very strong part in the United States. People sometimes forget that the Ku Klux Klan wasn’t just a tiny group of idiots who went around dressed in white, lynching Black people, but was probably one of the largest political movements this country has ever had with millions and millions of members. It was a genuine, popular, mass movement of poor whites. That is a reality. And so playing to that audience in the United States was very easy. And, of course, there had already been restrictions on migration of Chinese workers into the United States itself. So it went very deep.
An embargo is serious. An American embargo is the declaration of war, so to speak.
It was.
Like our Cuban blockade.
Yes, it was serious.
And the Japanese I think decided they had to either take on the United States now or never.
I think you’re right. The other choice they had, of course, if they’d been thinking strategically, is to have attacked Russia, which made much more sense from their point of view, and then they could’ve linked up with their German comrades halfway between and occupied Russia. Instead they decided to hit the United States, which immediately brought the United States into the war. And that was ultimately that.
There seems to have been a lack of coordination between Japan and Germany. That’s astounding on many fronts.
It is astounding.
Especially in the Russian situation because the Japanese withdrew from Siberia in about 1940, I think, and they moved the Russian general Zhukov from Siberia to Stalingrad.
Once Russian intelligence concluded that the Japanese had decided not to invade the Soviet Union, they could move all their troops and throw them into battle against the Germans. One of the top spies the Russians had, a very, very brilliant old Bolshevik spy, Richard Zorga, came from an old German family of Bolsheviks and fled to Russia. He spoke perfect German, looked like a perfect Aryan. He was based in Japan, and was so close to the German embassy in Tokyo that when the ambassador went back to Berlin, Zorga virtually ran the embassy. So he saw all the reports. And he warned the Russians, he warned Stalin, that the Germans are preparing to invade Russia. He sent them the planned date of Operation Barbarossa (though Stalin didn’t believe him). So Russian intelligence in Japan was very good. And the minute they knew Japan isn’t attacking us, all the troops were thrown into battle against the Germans.
Could it have been that Hitler was very confident that Russia would be his and that he didn’t want the Japanese coming in the back door and taking part of his treasure?
It could well be, actually.
And would Germany have gone on to smash the Japanese if they had won?
I think they would have done a deal. You know, you keep the Greater Japanese Empire, but keep it to the east, and we will run Europe and Greater Russia.
What were the Germans thinking about the United States in all this? Do we know?
They thought they would make a deal with the United States. They were absolutely convinced of this, precisely because of what you said about the large German American population. And so the hostility to the United States wasn’t so great, which is why in all the propaganda used by the Third Reich against the United States, they used to say that the problem with the United States is the plutocracy, and the Jewish wing of that plutocracy, which is going to drag the United States into war; that Roosevelt is a prisoner of the Jewish plutocracy, because they couldn’t bring themselves to attack a country in which a large section of the population came from Germany.
Chapter 2
The Post–World War II Order
Oliver Stone: You’ve written that the self-sufficiency in essential raw materials that characterized the United States came to an end after the Second World War. The United States found it needed to import oil, iron ore, bauxite, copper, manganese, nickel, oil. Can you talk a bit about the US need for raw materials after World War II and what happened after it had become the richest country in the world?
Tariq Ali: After the war, people’s expectations were much higher than they had been in earlier periods. The manufacture of cars, for instance, the explosion of that particular industry, the explosion of the military-industrial complex, was on the scale that no American leader could have conceived of prior to the First World War. So they were making sure that they were never short of supplies in order to keep the country going, and in order to protect and preserve US imperial interests, especially oil. So they needed raw materials. Eisenhower actually once even spoke in terms of the importance of Vietnam in terms of the raw materials the United States needed. And the deal with Saudi Arabia, which later came to haunt the United States in the twenty-first century, was very interesting because it showed the transition from one empire to another before the first empire had officially collapsed. The United States took over the role of guarding the Saudi royal family and all their interests from the British during the Second World War. The meeting where this took place was on a boat, a special boat in the Suez Canal. That’s where the deal was signed.
Protect the family from who?
To protect the family from its own people.
Even then?
Even then. The Saudi royal family, and especially the brand of religion that it believed in, the Wahabi faith, represented a tiny number of people in Saudi Arabia. So they used the strength they gained first from their deals with the British Empire and subsequently with the United States in order to preserve their stranglehold over their own people and to impose this particular religion on the people in Saudi Arabia, who really didn’t share it. So that goes back to the Second World War. But increasingly the United States was thinking, even while the war was going on, the French have collapsed, what is happening to the French colonies? The Dutch can’t fight, they’re occupied by the Germans. What’s going to happen in Indonesia? What is going to happen in Indochina? What is going to happen to India? Can we let the Japanese take India? Because at one point there was a real danger.
Can you talk about that briefly?
After the fall of Singapore in 1942, the Indian nationalists, Gandhi in particular, and Nehru, felt that they might end up discussing Indian independence, not with the British, but with the Japanese. So for the first time Gandhi made a strategic error, or a tactical error. He said, let us call on the British to leave India now. And the British said to him, wait until the war is over. We’re going to go. He said, no, you have to go now. So they withdrew all their people from governments within Indian provinces, and waged a civil disobedience movement called Quit India. Now people see this just as a national movement, which it was, but it was linked to the big Japanese offensive after the fall of Singapore, which was seen as the biggest defeat for the British military in Asia. And the British felt the Japanese are moving on, they’re reaching Burma. Soon they will occupy Bengal. And after they occupy Bengal, well, who knows? They might take Delhi. So the British government, Churchill in particular, panicked and sent left-wing politicians from Britain to see Gandhi, and say to him, look, we’ll give you whatever you want, but just hang on a bit. We’re giving you a blank check. And Gandhi replied, what is the point of a blank check from a bank that is failing? He really thought that the Brits were finished. But of course, the Japanese never made it to Delhi, though it is worth remembering that lots of Indian soldiers captured by the Japanese were transformed into an Indian national army. And there was one central leader of the Indian Congress Party, Subhas Chandra Bose, who flew to Tokyo and Berlin on the nationalist slogan “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and did deals with Hitler and the Japanese to launch a military offensive within India against the British. This was the Indian National Army, which was very popular.