Interview with Thomas Goodrich

hellstorm [1]9,462 words

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V. S. of the Counter-Currents Radio interview with Tom Goodrich. To listen in a player, click here [2]. To download the mp3, right-click here [2] and choose “save target as.”

Greg Johnson: I’m Greg Johnson. Welcome to Counter-Currents Radio! I’m joined today by Matt Parrott and author Tom Goodrich.

Tom, I understand that you actually go by Mike as your middle name, is that right?

Tom Goodrich: People who know me, Greg, they call me Mike, call me Tom, call me Michael, call me Thomas.

GJ: Okay, but can we call you Tom just because that’s the name that appears on the books?

TG: That’ll work!

GJ: Okay. Good. Well, Tom, welcome to the show! Tom Goodrich is the author of ten books. He’s been published by university presses: the University of Nebraska, Indiana University, Kent State University. He’s also been published by commercial publishers. He’s a historian and he focuses on American history, and he also has an interest in war. Not specifically so much war as the aftermath of war.

So, Tom, I understand you’ve written a book on the occupation of the South after the end of the Civil War, that you’re writing a book about the occupation of Japan, and your ninth book, one of your most recent ones, is called Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947.

Let’s begin by talking about Hellstorm, because that’s really the first book of yours that I came across and I’ve read that book and it made a tremendous impression on me. So, why don’t you tell us a bit about Hellstorm and how that book came about and what you think the significance of it is?

TG: Okay. First, Greg, let me say this. I’ve got to take this opportunity to thank you personally for lighting a fire under my keister. When the book first came out – Hellstorm, that is – I was all set to do a lot of publicity. I thought that people who had reviewed my other books, who had had me on radio interviews, would be more than willing to jump all over this. I, of course, was wrong. The books that they talked about and reviewed weren’t nearly as controversial as this.

Long story short, I was sort of left there all dressed up there with nowhere to go you, you might say. But for about a year, I did virtually nothing with the book. Whatever it did, it did on its own. It was only when I read on the Counter-Currents Website a wonderful, heartfelt, emotional review by J. A. Sexton. That’s what kicked me off the pity-potty, so to speak. It was so graphic, so heartfelt, so powerful that I thought, “Man, what am I doing with this? I mean, if it touches somebody like this . . .” And so eloquently, too, I must say that, “I’ve got to do whatever it takes.”

And that’s when I started coming up with these ideas of why not go with alternative radio, Revolution Radio, if you will, and I really didn’t realize how many outlets there were out there. Needless to say, over the last six months, I’ve been gainfully employed talking on Revolution Radio.

But back to you guys. I just want to thank you first and foremost for providing that outlet for Mr. Sexton and for basically getting me moving on this thing. Counter-Currents, by the way, it’s one of my favorite Websites. I consider it the spiritual and intellectual epicenter, if you will, of White nationhood worldwide. I cannot believe the curiosity and the honesty of the people who write on it. Anyway, again, I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for this book.

But back to this book and the books I’ve written prior to this. You’re right. I do have a fascination with war. I’m not so sure it’s about the blood and guts itself as it is war and what has been said about it. Better yet, what has been lied about it. And that’s where I come in. I’ve always smelled rats, so to speak. Everything from the Civil War, the Indian Wars out on the High Plains, and of course to World War Two here. I always knew that the winners write history and the losers, of course, they get vilified, denigrated, and cast into the den of ignominy after the war, and so I think that’s what I was put on this Earth for, Greg, is to basically smell the rats and then write about what really happened all the way from the American Civil War, the Lincoln assassination as well, to World War Two. Never have there been greater lies been told than about World War Two. Of course, the Allies were the victors in that case, and for the last seventy years we’ve gotten nothing but lies.

Let me say this: what World War Two is to me was the greatest crime in history. Nothing even comes close to this. So many large crimes were committed in this war, and I think almost as terrible as the crimes committed against the defeated Germans and their allies is the crime of the last seventy years of silence. Nothing’s been said about this. It’s been hushed up. It takes someone like me with a rather small book to come out and cast some light upon it. Whereas in the past I had cast very small light, you might say, on subject matters – the Civil War, the Indian Wars, Abraham Lincoln – this is a large spotlight.

This is the only book available that is all-encompassing. It brings in all the numerous crimes committed by the Allies against the Germans into one book. Some folks, bless their hearts, have gone to task and talked about various aspects of this creating pride in your own history, as I call it. But this book, Hellstorm, brings it all together: the enormity, the totality, the criminal nature. And that’s where I go with this book. Basically, I itemize.

Let me say this: I do it in the words of the folks themselves. People might kill me, but it’s pretty hard to kill the folks who are actually doing the talking in this book, the people who were raped one hundred times without stop, the people who escaped the infernos of Hamburg and Dresden and Berlin and every other German city after the firebombing of the Allies, the people who suffered torture, had their testicles smashed, had their teeth knocked out at the end of the war by Americans. It’s pretty hard to dismiss people when they’re talking in their own words about what happened to them.

I don’t know if I’m answering your question.

GJ: No, you’re giving us a very clear picture of what it’s about and the passion behind it. What are the three or four main areas that these crimes fall into? You mentioned the firebombings, you mentioned rapes, you mentioned torture. Can you just sort of hit on some of those major areas for our listeners?

TG: Yeah. I think the devastation wrought by the American Eighth Air Force and the British RAF against the German cities may be the greatest crime in world history. If you had to nail one. If you had to say, “This is A.” Because it was so massive, so deliberate, and so lied about afterwards. This was a deliberate attempt to kill every man, woman, and child below them, below where the bombs fell in these cities. In the late stages of the war, virtually the only people remaining in these towns were the old men, women, and children, and the disabled German soldiers. Most of the young men, of course, were off on the Eastern Front or the Western Front, and yet this continued until the end of the war, this massacre from above. That is certainly a great war crime.

Probably the mass rape, now, this is the thing I hate the most about the crimes committed by the Allies, was the deliberate attempt to destroy German womanhood spiritually and in some cases physically, of course, but spiritually. To take them for your own. For instance, Ilya Ehrenburg, a Jewish propagandist in the Soviet Union, one of the most read publicists in the Soviet Union, when the Soviet troops first got ready to break into Germany in the Autumn of 1944, Ilya Ehrenburg was ready to go. He sent out broadsides and pamphlets to flutter down on the front lines after they were dropped out of airplanes, encouraging Red soldiers to do their absolute worst once they got into Germany.

This is a quote: “Kill them all: the men, the old men, children, and the women after you have amused yourself with them. Kill! Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the living nor the yet unborn. Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet army! Kill!”

Now, that’s just one example of Ilya Ehrenburg and his venom. You can see where it’s directed. It’s directed as much at the women as anything else. But he sent many, many more of these pamphlets fluttering down, these leaflets, these fliers. Of course, the young Soviet soldier, when he read things like that, he already hates the Germans, because number one they may have destroyed his village when they came through, or he may have lost a good friend, whatever, and so he’s already filled with hatred, and when you encourage an unsophisticated person like that to do their damn level best worst – best worst, that’s not very good, but anyway – he will. Generally, nine times out of ten, he will. I was in the military once. I know what soulless characters are running loose there. Some really desperate people, quite honestly.

And so, when they did get into Germany, the Russian soldier went crazy raping women. And I must say this: a lot of the worst of the raping was done by the rear echelon, which it’s always been that way as far as I know. It’s always the supply side or the rear echelons, the B-team so to speak, who comes in. The shock troops are way too busy worrying about survival to be doing all sorts of mischief like stealing and raping and murdering. They did a lot of that, but not like the second echelon. These were Mongolians, these were the Asiatics, and everybody, including the Russian officers themselves, warned the people about the second line of troops coming through.

Anyway, I’ll talk about that a little bit more. I just wanted to set the stage with this rape. It was pervasive. It was massive. It was violent. It was vicious.

GJ: And it was policy. It was Soviet policy. That’s the thing that’s most extraordinary.

TG: Well put. The penis was another weapon, just like the rifle that the Soviet soldier carried.

Then I did another piece for your beautiful Website on the expulsion of roughly eleven million Germans who lived either in eastern provinces, Silesia, Pomerania, Prussia, or they lived in the German enclaves of various Central European countries like Czechoslovakia or Hungary. The deliberate expulsion of roughly eleven million folks and the consequent death of about a million and a half to two million people. Who’s counting? But anyway, that’s also a high crime and no one’s ever been brought to account for that, turning eleven million people out of their homes, sometimes with only a few minutes’ warning into the dead of winter and, as you might imagine, people perished by the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and by the millions.

That’s another high crime, but, Greg, we could throw a dart at a wall and come up with a war crime committed by the Allies. Interestingly enough, the same crimes that the Allies pointed to the Germans and said, “Yes, you did this!” – this is what they did to the Germans. I find it a really nifty bit of projection to turn it back around on the vanquished, the victims.

There are many other things. For instance, the world’s largest nautical massacre. A lot of folks think it was the Titanic. I just saw something last night. It seems like they never get tired of talking about the Titanic. And for good reason; it’s full of drama and pathos and it stirs something in our stomachs when we think about a cold night at sea and hitting an iceberg and the ship sinking. It does something to us. But how many people have heard about the Baltic Sea Massacre at the end of the war in which countless refugee ships were sunk, deliberately I might add, by Soviet submarines and American and British bombers? These are not warships. Sometimes they were converted steamers, passenger ships, that Hitler had used for his workers during the 1930s to send them on cruises. These were taken by the German authorities and filled with refugees to escape the Soviet juggernaut, the onslaught from the East.

Everyone’s heard of the Titanic, rightly so, and the Lusitania, probably, but how many people have ever heard of the Wilhelm Gustloff or the Cap Arcona or the Goya or on and on and on? On the first-named ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff, seven thousand women and children, almost entirely women and children, drowned after it was sunk by a Soviet submarine on a very cold, icy Baltic Sea one night. Same with the Goya: about four or five thousand died there, dwarfing the numbers of the Titanic and the Lusitania (fifteen hundred and twelve hundred).

Robert Ballard, he’s one of our great explorers . . .  Let’s face it. I’m so happy and excited that he found the Titanic and has done so much with it, but hey, I’m telling you this: up in the Baltic there are a lot of greater disasters than that and much closer to the surface. It wouldn’t take that much to go down and explore and find these ships with the holes in their sides from the Soviet torpedoes. Of course, that would not be politically correct to go down and find these skeletons, these men, women, and children at the bottom with their pathetic possessions that they took with them. That is a horror story, this slaughter at sea.

It’s just another facet of this abomination that I call World War Two, this great crime. And we’re talking civilians here. The Geneva Convention, it’s a dead letter. Let’s face it. It sounded nice. They got together. Men wanted to regulate war because it was getting out of hand, but World War Two . . .  Take for example terror bombing, to kill as many civilians as they possibly could, targeting of civilians, the wholesale massacre of civilians. Rape as a weapon of war on a massive scale. And, by the way, when I talk about rape, this isn’t just the Soviets. This is the Americans and the Brits and the French. The Americans, as one sergeant said, “We’re also an army of rapists,” and other soldiers said, “Boy, would the folks back home, would their toes curl in horror if they knew what we did over here.” And what they’re talking about is rape. Yes, maybe not as pervasive and violent as the Russians, because as often as not a Russian soldier was as likely to kill his rape victim, but it still nevertheless happened on the Western Front.

The beastly and pervasive torture that occurred after the war in the American torture pens, and I don’t even have to mention the ones in the Polish and Russian zones because these are so fiendish and horrible it’s hard to recite some of things that occurred there.

But the Geneva Convention, if you can get away with committing these crimes that the Americans, British, and French, and the Allies did, what good is a piece of paper? The Geneva Convention, the rules of land warfare. They tried the Germans after the war, of course, for breaking these sacrosanct laws of the Geneva Convention, but the Allies had committed ten times the number of crimes and killed probably a thousand times more the victims, and nobody went to jail on the Allied side for breaking one of the Geneva Convention laws.

I could go on about the crimes. The crimes, of course, Operation Paperclip, the idea of basically stealing a country’s physical wealth. When the war was over the Russians took the German factories down to the last bolt and moved them by rail east, whereas the Americans stole the brainpower, the scientists, the entrepreneurs, the great economists, and brought them to America. Of course, we landed on the Moon because of Wernher von Braun and his team. That’s another crime. You’re not supposed to do that. It’s in the Geneva Convention. I mentioned the expulsion of these folks. You could go on and on. I know I’m leaving some things out. The totality becomes so overwhelming that you become numb to the whole thing.

GJ: Well, Tom, what’s the sort of practical cash value for present-day politics and present-day society for bringing this side of the war to light? Because the Second World War, of course, was a “good war,” people say. It was a righteous war. The people who fought it were our “greatest generation” and so forth. And the Second World War, because it is this “good war,” is always being used as the analogy for starting every new war or intervention that the United States gets involved in.

So, for me at least, revisionism about the causes and the prosecution and the consequences of the Second World War is absolutely indispensable for peace. We’re never going to be able to shut up the warmongers or trump the warmongers in America today unless we do some work to demythologize the Second World War.

TG: Very well put, Greg. I agree with you. You know, this war, World War Two, was so vicious, so violent, so evil. It was anything but a good war, of course. We know that and I’m sure many of your listeners already know that. It was such a terrible war, the worst war in world history, that there should have never been another war after that. The price was so horrible. I really do believe that had the people of the world known what took place, they would have with a unified voice said, “Never again!” And I’m talking about what happened to the Germans, the vanquished, after the war. I think they would have said, “Never again! This is just too much. These horrors will never, ever be perpetrated ever again. Not in our lifetime!”

But that’s the problem with this whole thing. The book itself . . .  This is the only book, the first book. People didn’t learn from the history, because no one told them about the history. Seventy years have gone by and I dare say there’s a few things that I’m saying right now that you might not even know, Greg, although that may be a stretch, but some of your listeners for sure. And I guarantee in the book itself there will be plenty that they’ve never heard about and probably didn’t want to hear about, quite honestly.

But if we don’t know about our own history, I know it’s an old maxim, we’re doomed to repeat it and right now we’re repeating it. You know, in my opinion, the Muslims of the twenty-first century are simply the Germans of the twentieth century. They’re getting the same treatment and the usual suspects are administering the treatment right now. We did not learn from that history because we did not know about that history. That’s what this book is about. Agreed, it’s a small book. It will probably never get to be a big book, but people like you, your help, and others, maybe enough people, maybe enough mind-molding people will learn about this and say, “Hey, my vote is against war for the rest of eternity. We will stop it. It will never happen again.”

And that’s where I come in. If I never write another damn book in my life, this is the one I’m sticking with and I refuse to be quiet. I will not shut up.

You prefaced your question about the monetary value or the economic side of it. I’m not seeing any of that. I would, of course, love to get rich telling the truth, but that’s incidental. That’s secondary right now. It’s secondary to my nature.

GJ: Well, I was sort of being metaphorical talking about the political cash value, the effect that it’s going to have on the world today.

Let’s just repeat the title again. The title is Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947. It was published in 2010 by Aberdeen Books. That is available through Amazon.com globally, I would imagine. You also have copies. Do you want to give information on how people can order this?

TG: Yes. Unfortunately, it is not available globally on Amazon. It ends right here at our borders. The UK doesn’t have it or anyone else as far as I know. Let me say this first, Greg, the object is to sell out the publisher – a bold and intrepid publisher, by the way, who took this book – is to sell out his hardback inventory, which I think has about five or six hundred left so that we can do an inexpensive, accessible paperback and, above all, a Kindle version of this.

As you mentioned, the publisher is Aberdeen Books. The book can be ordered through him, the publisher out there. They’re a small press. Maybe one or two people. The phone number is 303-795-1890 and, like I said, every book you buy hardback is another book closer to doing a cheap paper and a very affordable Kindle, by the way. If I have my say about it, the Kindle will be somewhere around $7, so that’s going to be nice.

Again, you can order it through Amazon. I think it’s $39. They’ll send it the following day. You can get it in one day from Amazon, which is lovely, but I can’t even do that. Or you can order it through me. I’ve got some paperback. I keep getting paperback. I’ve been on other radio programs and I’ve told people I only had five left, or ten or whatever, and the publisher had held back a cache of paperbacks for publicity’s sake that never happened, of course. So, now I’m buying them from him out of my royalty. I don’t think I’ll ever see a royalty check from this, but that’s why I’m getting some now. So, I do have some of those. I’m selling them for $25. That’s postage included. Anybody who wants to buy one of those or the hardback, which I also have for $35, just drop the money in my PayPal bucket. My Paypal ID is [email protected] [3]. That’s also my e-mail address, so you can e-mail me any of your thoughts, and any questions you might have, or any concerns about the book.

Let me say this: the book is . . .  I hesitate to call it beautiful, because nothing this gory and graphic and grim is beautiful. It’s a quality book. Very well done. Very well edited too, I’ve got to say. And it’s about four hundred pages fully annotated.

Let me say this also, Greg: I’ve been writing history for quite a while. That’s the gene I have in me: the history gene. I’ve never had a notion to write fiction. There’s just too much good history out there. Truth, that is. When I read a history book, unlike my interviews that I’m doing now and that I’ve done in the past where I can let her fly, the history book is not where I do that. I try to basically tell a story of a historical subject as honestly and as objectively and as neutrally as I possibly can. This is not performance, this is not propaganda, and this is not an attempt to sway people. I’m basically just letting the truth lay out there, and if you want to take it, take it. If you don’t, you want to close the book, well, then go join the mob back out there, the herd that really is terrified of the truth.

And so, if you think that by buying this book you’re going to be getting me and my ranting and raving, it’s not going to happen. Like every other book, I’ve never been criticized for being biased in a book.

I take that back. I wrote a book on the precursor to the American Civil War, and John Brown is in it. By the way, it may seem strange to some of your listeners, I have a high admiration for many of the things that John Brown did. He was an activist. He got off his ass. He did things. He fought for what he believed in. He actually died for what he believed in. But I’m also a critic of John Brown. I mean, who goes around chopping up people into little bitty pieces? He’s a fanatic, a nutjob in many ways. And some people did not like my even-handed approach to John Brown. Just like Lincoln. Some people don’t like my profile, my portrait of Abe Lincoln or Mary Todd. Hey, that’s history. Get used to it. There’s the good and the bad.

And that’s the same thing with Hellstorm here. Now, I will say that there is no attempt on my part in Hellstorm to present the other side of this. The Allied side, that is. If you want that side you just turn on the TV or go see a movie or, better yet, go to the library and see one of the thousands of copies they’ve got there on the “Good War,” the “Good War” scenario, the “greatest generation.” This is not that. There’s not enough room in this book.

This is basically what the war looked like through the eyes of the Germans, the defeated, the men, the women, the children, and mostly the civilians, I’ve got to say. Even though there is some fighting on the Eastern Front – ferocious stuff – and then the fighting on the Western Front until the final climactic Battle of Berlin takes place. This is mostly about civilians and how they escaped, how they got along, how they didn’t escape, how they were killed and murdered.

So, with that said, that’s where the book is at right now. Let me say this also, Greg. I’ve said this before and I think it bears repeating. I’ve never been the same person since I’ve written this book. The book changed me. You cannot write a four hundred page book and then rewrite it and write it again and think about it night and day, and then of course the research that you’ve done . . .  You become a part of the book. You are the book. It is you. I’ve never been the same since I wrote this book.

But I can say this: anyone who reads this book, and bless their hearts if they do, but anyone who can read this book and then puts it down and puts it up on the bookshelf to gather dust and does nothing, in my opinion, they are complicit with the crime they just read about. Anyone who reads this and does nothing, says nothing, is no better than an accessory to the crime. What I want people to do is read this book and then read it again if necessary. Read it until you understand every evil aspect of this, what was done in our name to these helpless people during and after the war. There is no excuse any longer. Once you know the truth then it’s up to you to do something. Silence is acquiescence, in my opinion.

Like I said, I refuse to be complicit in the crime. And I refuse to remain silent. Although these beastly atrocities were committed before I was even born, I still feel a sense of responsibility. I know what happened and so it’s my job to tell other folks what happened, and that’s what this book is about. And that’s what great programs like yours are about. Basically, to spread the word.

GJ: Well, thank you! I think that everybody who goes through a war breathes a great sigh of relief the day the armistice is signed, and most people don’t realize that much of the killing in wars happens after the peace has officially been declared. That certainly happened to the Germans and the people in Central Europe at the end of the First World War. It happened in Germany at the end of the Second World War. It happened in the South after the end of the Civil War. And it happened to the Japanese as well.

I understand you’re doing a book about Japan in the aftermath of the Second World War. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

TG: Yeah, I can talk a bit about it and, of course, it was what happened to the Germans in the Eastern field of operations happened in spades to the Japs – and I say “Japs,” because the working title of the book is Dirty Japs – but it happened to the Japanese in the East. Unlike the Germans, despite the ferocious, vicious anti-German propaganda, it was still kind of a hard sell, because I’m part German despite the name Goodrich. I am about a half German and fifty million of us in America are part German. Those people look like us, the Germans. It’s pretty hard to just slaughter in cold blood a mother who in fact reminds you of your own mother, but it’s a much easier thing to do that if they’re small and slant-eyed, as the Japanese were, and if they’d been demonized to the point that they’re animals. As far as I know, as vicious as the propaganda against Germany was, they were never demonized to the point that they were cloven-footed animals. The Japanese were monkeys, of course.

Let me say this: the genesis for the book, of course, is the Hellstorm book, the book we’re talking about right now, but I can still remember as a kid, me and my cousin, I was an only child but I loved my cousin like a brother – but I can still remember in the ‘70s watching the “dirty Jap” movies from the 1940s and early ‘50s, and what a joy I got whenever John Wayne or whoever blew a Jap out of a palm tree which he happened to be sneakily hiding in. I grew up hating the Japanese. Fearing them and hating them at the same time. It was only later in my life when I got around the world quite a bit that I realized they’re some of the best people on Earth, the Japanese. I’m serious. I’m very serious about that. They really are the Prussians of the Orient. They are some of the finest people I’ve ever met in my life. Some of the most honest, generous, decent, just good folks. And I don’t think that was any different during World War Two. I know they were a militaristic society, but nevertheless.

Like I said, I’m just in the research for this book right now, and the things I’ve already found just make your hair stand up, what happened. I had two fathers who fought in World War Two. One was a biological father who fought in the Pacific. He was an island-hopping Marine. A private, I suppose, or corporal. I never knew him. The other father fought in the European theater. He was my adopted dad. I loved them both in their own special way, but I know what my dad did now after the research for this book. I know what happened over there. They took no prisoners. When was the last time you saw any Japanese faces behind barbed wire in that war. They just weren’t taking prisoners. That’s the powerful price of propaganda in a nutshell. Take no prisoners. Kill the animals. And that’s where the atom bombs come in. And some of the things that happened in Germany also happened in Japan: the rape, the slaughter of innocents, the killings.

Most of your listeners have probably heard of the firebombing of the Japanese cities. Tokyo: a hundred thousand in one night. And, of course, the atomic bombs.

There’s not much more I can talk about. Well, let me say this: there’s some really grisly facets to the Japanese story and so far I haven’t read about any of that on the German side, but one of the penchants American Marines had after a battle was chopping off Japanese heads, boiling the meat off of the skulls, and then selling the polished skull to American seamen who didn’t see a lot of land-battling so they would buy these ghoulish tokens of battle as souvenirs. It was quite a lucrative industry going on, selling Japanese body parts. That’s what happens when you vilify and demonize your opponent. That’s when words get people killed. You know, if I had another go at the subtitle to this book it would probably be The Powerful Price of Propaganda and how words do get people killed. Words get people raped. Words get people tortured. Words count in war and that’s why we need to be much more guarded in what we call our enemies, because we send off these 18, 19, 20-year-old numbskulls, some of them about as sadistic and soulless as anything you could send off – witness the characters at Abu Ghraib prison – and then we’re surprised when they come back with heads and fingers and commit atrocities like Abu Ghraib, or rapes like occurs in Afghanistan or Iraq. We need to do a better job on that. If there’s no other methods, if even the people who hate my guts for writing this book or people who are indifferent to it – God forbid – if all they can say is, “Hey, propaganda has really gotten out of control,” then my job is done.

Of course, the propaganda didn’t begin with World War Two. It didn’t begin with World War One, although it got a rolling start let’s say in the twentieth century. That’s when mass communication became so instrumental in war and then the wrong people, of course, got ahold of the media, and we’re getting things like we are right now in the Middle East.

GJ: Right. Matt, you’ve been silent, holding your peace. Do you have any questions or thoughts you want to volunteer?

Matt Parrott: Yeah. I’ve just been fascinated listening to his accounts. A couple thoughts. You’ve written about the Plains Indians in another book of yours and quite a bit on the Frontier and stuff, so you’re sort of in a position to contrast pre-propaganda, pre-civilized warfare versus the industrialized, hyper-civilized or post-civilized, if you will, warfare. I understand that both were quite grisly, but do you have any contrasts, any differences that you see in the nature and style of the atrocities?

TG: I go back to what I said when I began this interview with you guys. You certainly are the intellectual and spiritual epicenter of the White nationhood world, in my opinion. That’s a very trenchant question you’re asking, and I’ve never thought about it until you just said it.

It was refreshing – yes, now that you mention it – the lack of propaganda during the Indian Wars. The lack of it. Nevertheless, it was very, very vicious. Again, this is a book about the way it was, not the way we wanted it to be. That is, the Indian Wars. Indians were some of the most sadistic people I’ve ever read about or researched in my life. Of course, their propaganda . . .  I don’t know what they said around the campfires. They didn’t leave a written legacy. Maybe they said, “I can’t wait to cut this guy into inches when I get ahold of him tomorrow in the battle.” Maybe that was their form of propaganda.

But that’s really interesting, Matt, that you bring this up. Let me preface this with a comment. Though I wrote one book on the Indian Wars, and though I wrote one book on World War Two, that doesn’t necessarily make me an expert in either one of these wars. I am, however, an expert in these books.

The Scalp Dance book you’re mentioning about the Indian warfare on the Plains is in the words, again, of the folks themselves. It’s pretty hard to dismiss the account of a soldier who walks upon the scene of a massacre in which the women are staked out and raped to death and then their throats cut when they’re no longer in use and little tiny babies and kids who were crying were brained on rocks. When a soldier is describing that, you can very well understand why excesses did occur, and I suppose they were their own form of propaganda, if you will. The evidence of massacre and slaughter and rape and mayhem . . .

MP: I know through my own grandparents and great-grandparents. They would even relay stories from southern Indiana, where I’m from, about the children being kidnapped and women being raped and that sort of thing. So, yeah, whether it’s war propaganda or what have you, that’s definitely always been a powerful thing.

TG: Let me say this to you guys. You’ll probably find this interesting. Sometimes history, nineteenth century history especially, the American Civil War and the Indian Wars, it seems like it occurred back in the Stone Age, back in the Iron Age. So far removed that there’s no way we can be close to it. Well, let me say this, when I was researching the Indian War book I actually did a live interview with a woman whose mother was captured by Indians in 1877.

MP: Wow!

TG: That’s how close we’re talking about. Two generations removed right there. That close. Just a little side note I thought I’d throw in there.

But anyway, there have been a few people who, every once in a while, they’ll raise their heads and they’ll say, “This guy gets off on blood and guts and murder and mayhem.” And I don’t know if I can argue with what they say, because if you look at the books I’ve written . . .  The first one was about travel abroad and living in Europe, but even my most recent book is a true crime account about a young, beautiful mother who was abducted, raped, and murdered by some guy who had no rap sheet. This was a bolt out of the blue. She was a cop’s daughter. So, even that has elements of violence in it. The Lincoln books I’ve written, too, are filled with violence. But maybe I do get off on that. I don’t think so. I’ve got to have some self-respect here.

MP: Well, no, it’s fascinating and it’s so important. Going back to my grandparents again, when they grew up they were a little bit too young for World War Two, but they weren’t too young to suck up the anti-Japanese propaganda. They knew sort of on a cerebral, superficial level that we were now friends and they were human, but once you get a kid that young and the alienness of the Japanese people . . .  It was so easy to de-humanize them. You tell a pre-teen girl out on the farm that these bizarre-looking, nasty little critters are trying to kill your uncle and your cousin. You can’t help but sort of understand the de-humanizing propaganda.

I’m a huge admirer of the Japanese people as well.

TG: Good!

MP: But the bizarre thing about World War Two, though, is our World War Two propaganda against the Germans didn’t just sort of fade away the same way the Japanese did. It metastasized into our collective national religion.

If you were to take me and Greg and have me go to one side of town with a sandwich sign saying, “I hate God,” and Greg – we’d have Greg do this one, I wouldn’t have the courage – and he’d have one that says, “I hate Jews,” who do you think would last longer before somebody attacked one of us?

TG: Great point.

MP: And if you get somebody angry enough they don’t say, “You’ve got a devil in you!” or “Bob, you’re just Satanic!” No, it’s “Bob, you’re a Nazi!” That’s the worst thing you can be in the American psyche seventy years on from the war.

TG: Good point, and you know something? Greg, too, you’re bringing up, it occurs to me. That didn’t happen with the American Indian Wars. They buried the hatchet. Do you know that term “bury the hatchet”? As soon as the last hostile put down his bow and arrows, unlike World War Two . . .  You’re right, and we both know the answer to that. All three of us.

Let me say it, though, just right out front. The Germans came within a whisker of winning that thing and that scared the hell out of worldwide Jewry. And that’s the reason we’ve got this going to this very day, because National Socialism is a very attractive political philosophy. It brings back manhood again. It’s talking about independence and self-assuredness. It’s a very attractive economic, political, spiritual philosophy.

MP: It’s a successful economic philosophy.

TG: That’s what scared them then and that’s what still scares them to this day. That’s why seventy years later it’s still the dirty, filthy Germans in these silly movies they’ve got coming out. But yes, you’re really hitting some notes that are jogging my brain a little bit. I haven’t thought of these things.

Even while they’re still vilifying Germans in more indirect ways today than, of course, before and during the war. For instance, today . . .  Tomorrow’s Easter. I see also that the local Jewish synagogue is having a Holocaust remembrance day and everybody’s been invited to come. I guess it hurts to not have the corner on religion or suffering, whatever you will, but right now the propaganda guns are turned towards the Muslims. Muslims will become demonized and vilified.

I don’t claim to be an expert on world politics. You guys are certainly people I would class as professionals who probably have some very good answers to this. So, correct me if I’m wrong.

MP: Thank you.

TG: But right now I feel as if, as I mentioned earlier, that the Muslims of the world have become the new Nazis of the world and that there’s nothing you can say bad enough about them. You can’t kill enough of them. You cannot do enough bad things against them, just like World War Two. Correct me if I’m wrong on any of this, because we’ve got some of the same things at play here.

We don’t like a certain country, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, and we bomb them back to the Stone Age. In the case of Afghanistan, of course, that was pretty easy to do.

MP: Yeah, well, with the Muslims I do object to their immigration into Europe very strongly.

TG: So do I.

MP: But as far as the dehumanization of Muslims in the Middle East and the Jewish dehumanization of Muslim civilians, it is truly despicable and it’s in the same frame. You see that locally and it upsets me. It troubles me, because, as much as I’m supposedly like a “racist” or whatever, I just instinctively and intuitively don’t like when ordinary people of any race or ethnicity are vilified, and you see that as far as, “Yeah, we should just take Iran and turn it into a big glass parking lot,” or whatever, or “Just nuke those A-rabs.” They’re not technically A-rabs, not that that’s a distinction . . .

TG: Right now, it seems like the only people standing up against worldwide Jew hegemony. I agree with you. I think the Arabs should stay in the Arab world. I think the Europeans should stay in Europe. I don’t like this open immigration that’s going on in the Western world. But right now they are being massacred, slaughtered, threatened, abused, and to me it seems as if these are the only people standing up now against Jewish supremacy worldwide.

MP: Well, what’s powerful about your book and standing up against Jewish supremacy is there’s been quite a bit of “Holocaust denial” or “revisionism,” and Lord knows that the Holocaust has been exaggerated and exploited and taken grossly out of context, with people like Elie Wiesel declaring it a historically unique event. That that genocide is sort of on a pedestal, and to even compare it or discuss it alongside other atrocities like the ones you’re discussing is simply intolerable to them. It’s heresy to the actual religion of most Americans. They think they’re Christians, but I think if they really reflected on what they care about most deeply, they’ll find that they actually believe in Holocaustianity, if you will.

And what’s powerful about Hellstorm is it doesn’t hug that tar-baby of Holocaust revisionism where you appear to be downplaying suffering, and I believe that plenty of what happened to the Jewish peasants on the Eastern Front was excessive, unnecessary, and unacceptable. I’m sure some of our more staunch listeners would take offense to that, but I think that rather than trying to minimize that, a better way to deconstruct the sort of secular religion, this sinister anti-religion, in my opinion, is to show what you’re showing here in Hellstorm:  that no, we were not the supreme moral actors. We were also mass rapists. The Germans had absolutely no monopoly whatsoever on dehumanizing other people or monstrosity in this Godawful brothers’ war.

TG: Again, I’m no expert on World War Two. Let me say this. I only know what I read and research, and basically what’s in this book. As far as the Geneva Convention, the German military and government adhered much closer to the Geneva Convention than the Allies did. It’s a fact that the Red Cross reports, I think, that as much as ninety-six percent of American and British POWs returned home healthy, safe, and sound, which is almost better than if they had been in the countries all by themselves not even in the war.

Churchill wanted to douse Germany with poison gas, and his advisors said, “Let’s not do that because Germany has its own stock of poison gas they can douse us with.” But nevertheless, Churchill wanted to do it and he was finally told no.

Neutral Switzerland was bombed not by the Germans, but by the Americans. Not once, not twice, at least three or four times. Probably to blast Germans who had sought refuge there toward the end of the war. But again, it wasn’t Germany who broke Switzerland’s neutrality. It was the Americans. Invading Norway, invading Iceland, invading other countries; it wasn’t the Germans that did it first, it was the Americans and Brits.

I’m sure there were excesses committed. I mean, let’s face it. The libraries are full of such atrocity accounts. There’s got to be some truth there. I have not become an expert on that, though. So, what I’m talking about is what was done against the Germans and their allies, and most of them were civilians.

MP: But that breaks the narrative right there.

TG: Although I’ve read more than my share about the so-called Jewish Holocaust, even if it’s actual, factual truth all the way through, what kind of people would turn such a terrible event into a multi-billion dollar annual industry? And then basically say all debate is off, it’s verboten. You cannot talk about this. We’ll turn it, as Greg mentioned, into a state religion. That’s very unbecoming. Very seamy. Very suspicious. But again, I come back to this, but I’m no expert, so I cannot really talk about it with high authority, but it seems that the same things they accused the Germans of, the Jews were more than willing to commit against them at the end of the war.

A lot of these torture chambers, especially behind the Soviet area of influence, were committed by Jews. Jews ran some of the camps in Poland. Many of the camps, as a matter of fact. As you can imagine, the Germans in these camps which I talk about, they were shown no mercy. Things like, “Were you a Nazi?” And, of course, the guy goes, “No,” and he’s hit over the head with a chair. He says, “You liar! You pig!” Go on down the line and he keeps asking the same question, the Jewish interrogator, and they keep saying, “No.” Finally, when they start saying, “Yes,” they still get hit because, “You pig! That’s for being a Nazi!”

The torture, the G2, which was intelligence in the American army, a lot of these folks were German émigrés who had fled Germany in the ‘30s and who had come back with a vengeance. They understood the language, they understood the culture, they understood the nuances of the German mind, so they were in a perfect position to “interrogate.” Actually, it was just sadistic torture, quite honestly. The war was over and there was very little information they could get from these people. It was all about sadism and torture.

When I think about the torture, I do have a couple of chapters that go through that. Back to that complaint that I’ve gotten from several folks who make these offhanded comments about me getting off on torture and violence and blood . . .  Maybe I do, like I said, but let me say this also. If Hellstorm is graphic to a sickening degree, I didn’t do that. This is what happened to those people. These things were done to these victims. A lot of times it’s in their own words. It happened to them. It was committed against them. I’m not making this up or embellishing accounts for some sadistic pleasure.

MP: Well, when I was a child at school they showed us Holocaust movies. Yeah, they certainly don’t hold back in any way for decency’s sake or resist the urge to colorfully describe and even embellish what happened to the Jewish people in World War Two.

GJ: And they do it to children. It’s child abuse, really.

MP: Systematically.

GJ: Systematic child abuse by the American educational system. And it’s astonishing to me that parents across the country are not mad as hell about this and organizing to try and stop it, but I guess we know why that’s the case.

I think it’s about time that we do wrap up. This has been a really, really enjoyable discussion. One of the things that strikes me about the Second World War and discussion of the Second World War is that today it is almost entirely carried on in terms of propaganda clichés, and the propaganda clichés are so obvious sometimes.

For instance, people say, “Adolf Hitler started World War Two.” Even I knew that just from looking at history books when I was in tenth grade. We were reading world history and that was said and I said, “Well, wait a second here. Hitler invaded Poland. It was the British and the French who declared war on him. It takes a world to have a world war.” And yet all the guilt is laid on Germany and its allies.

And until we get over that, until we start spreading the guilt and responsibility around a little bit and draining away some of the gross excesses of American self-righteousness, if that’s even possible given our psychology, I don’t think we’re going to be able to avoid World War Three or World War Four. And so, I think that what you’re doing is really part of a larger project which is an attempt to guard world peace, and I think that that’s a tremendously important thing to do.

So, anyway, Tom, thank you so much. Matt, do you have any last questions for Tom?

MP: No, I just want to make sure he gets his info out on how people can go about purchasing these books, especially Hellstorm.

TG: Okay. I’d be happy to. Again, you can go through Amazon. I think they’re $39 for the hardback and they’ll get it to you the next day, or you can go through the publisher, Aberdeen Press. That’s 303-795-1890. Just leave a message there and pay however. Or you can go through me. I can sell you a softback at $25 or a hardback at $35, and those book prices include postage. And I’ve got a PayPal account. If you do, just drop the money into that account at [email protected] [3] and I’ll get a copy in the mail, probably Monday, Tuesday, or whatever day. The day following your order I will try to get it in the mail. I’ll sign the book for you. Again, I hope whoever orders the book that they read it, if necessary read it again, and never ever forget it. And then I hope they do something. Rather than just put the book away, I hope they do something, whether it’s a letter to an editor or contributing to wonderful Websites and publishers like Counter-Currents Publishing. I know you guys could always use the money and you do great work.

Boy, if we lose these lights, the world gets very dark very quickly. So, I encourage everyone, if you don’t buy my book, contribute. Do something. Write a letter. Give some money to your favorite political cause, whether it’s Counter-Currents or another upright group.

GJ: Well, Tom, thank you so much for that. One of the things that I would really recommend that people do is if they read this book and like it, they buy five more copies and hand it out to their friends. It’s a very, very handsomely produced hardcover and makes a great gift. It’s a somber and terrifying story, but it’s a story that needs to be told.

I remember one time a minister that I knew who was a chaplain for the US military was going on about the Iraq War and he said, “You’ve got to understand! Americans are good people!” And I said to him, “Well, how does this fit in with the theology that you supposedly accept, namely about original sin and so forth?” And he got all upset with me, because Americans really have this deep sense of righteousness and goodness and good intentions, and it’s that very conviction that we’re so good and that we’re doing the world a favor that leads us to behave so savagely when these ungrateful people don’t accept the light that we’re trying to bring them. And so, I think that part of American savagery really has to do with American exceptionalism and an American sense that we’re basically on the side of the angels at all times, and no one ever has any good reason to resent us or to want to attack us, and therefore if people do, well, we feel totally righteous in behaving in a really savage way towards them.

Books like Hellstorm, I think, go a long way to helping Americans realize that we’re just human with all the bad things that entails, too. But I think that coming to grips with our own humanity, including our own potential for evil, actually make us less evil in the future, and that’s a very good thing.

TG: Greg, also, I’m not so naïve as to think that I and my book are going to change the world. I am going to continue to work as if it were, but I don’t think we’re going to have any radical departure from the past and the present until the day comes and America gets into a real war and has their teeth thoroughly kicked out to the point that the word “war” is not even whispered a thousand years after the defeat. That’s the only thing I’m seeing. It’s a terrible, Armageddon look at the future, but that’s the reason I’m promoting this book. That’s the reason I’m on your program. Maybe we can avoid that. Maybe one more drop into the lake will break the dam. That’s the premise I’m working under. One more drop might break that dam and let the water flow.

GJ: Well, I think everybody should think that way, too, and not get intimidated by the vastness of it. There’s a poster that I like from this company called Demotivators, which is a company that sells parodies of those motivational posters you see up in corporate cubicles. My favorite Demotivators poster is called Teamwork, and it shows a snowball rolling down a hill gathering size and it says, “A few harmless flakes coming together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.” And that’s what I like to think of us as. A few harmless flakes, maybe sticking together, and unleashing an avalanche of truth.

So, Tom, thank you so much for joining us on Counter-Currents Radio, and I’m sure that this will be one of our most popular broadcasts.

TG: Well, thank you, Matt and Greg, both of you guys. You’re wonderful.

MP: Our pleasure.