A big lie to justify war - 90 years ago

Before the billionaires can start a big war they have to spread the Big Lie.

Everybody knows Bush fibbed about “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) in Iraq. There weren’t any.

That didn’t prevent the White House from scaring people with images of mushroom clouds. And it doesn’t stop Bush and the Pentagon from lying about Iran today.

It isn’t just Fox News and right-wingers on the radio promoting a new war. So is the “liberal” New York Times with its hostile coverage of Iran.

The Times and the rest of the capitalist media regurgitated Bush’s lies prior to the invasion of Iraq. The WMD fiasco was so embarrassing that the New York Times later criticized its own coverage. The Times also acknowledged earlier examples of war propaganda, especially the Gulf of Tonkin hoax.

President Lyndon Johnson lied in 1964 when he claimed Vietnamese PT boats attacked the U.S. Navy. By 1975 millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people had died, along with 58,000 GIs.

An earlier big lie that’s almost never mentioned is the “Sisson papers.”

“The world must be made safe for democracy,” declared President Woodrow Wilson when he entered World War I in April 1917. Three months later Wilson did nothing when 200 African Americans were murdered by white mobs in East St. Louis. W.E.B. Du Bois, a Black political leader and renowned intellectual, organized a march down New York’s Fifth Avenue to protest this massacre.

Millions of workers and poor people were killed in World War I. But it was a gold mine for capitalists in the U.S. The Du Ponts made so much money selling dynamite to imperialist Britain, France and the U.S. military that they bought General Motors.

The Russian Revolution pulled massive Russia, then allied with Britain and France against the German and Austrian empires, out of this bloodbath. Led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the working class took power in Russia on Nov. 7, 1917. Workers councils, called soviets, started to build a new society. A year later the German and Austrian emperors were overthrown by revolutions inspired by the Bolsheviks.

Every big capitalist and landlord from Tokyo to Toledo wanted to strangle the Russian Revolution. A dozen foreign armies invaded Russia. Wilson sent thousands of U.S. troops to help occupy Siberia and Archangelsk.

It was hard to justify military intervention against the Soviet republic simply because workers were taking over factories and peasants were driving out landlords in Russia. The millionaires didn’t even want U.S. workers and farmers to know about this stuff. It might give them some dangerous ideas!

Edgar Sisson was then stationed in Russia as a representative of Wilson’s war propaganda agency, the “Committee on Public Information.” Sisson spread far and wide a series of documents claiming the Bolsheviks were agents of the German Kaiser or emperor. This Kaiser had already been demonized by U.S. war propaganda, while the Bolsheviks were relatively unknown internationally.

The “Sisson papers” were absolute forgeries. They were concocted by agents like those who had manufactured “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a notorious anti-Semitic pamphlet.

But for months they were a sensation that swept the U.S. Edgar Sisson’s lies helped pave the way for U.S. intervention in Russia.

At that time, too, the New York Times played a key role in promoting these lies. On Sept. 15, 1918, the Times printed a 10,979-word article with these screaming headlines: “Documents prove Lenin and Trotsky hired by Germans. ... Berlin financed revolt.” Lenin and Trotsky were the best-known Bolshevik leaders.

Along with the Times’ support for the U.S. joining World War I, its publication of the Sisson papers made the Times the leading “paper of record” in the country.

Racism was also embedded in the Times’ pages. Articles in the Times in 1910 raised fears of the consequences if Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion, should successfully defend his title against James Jefferies. Its May 12, 1910, editorial stated, “If the black man wins thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors.”

The trouble with making the Sisson papers believable was that hi-tech in 1918 consisted of manual typewriters, like the popular Underwood model. These Sisson documents were supposedly typed in different European capitals. But even untrained eyes saw these typewritten copies all looked the same.

That’s because they were almost all pecked out on the same typewriter. This was easily proved by the position of letters in these documents.

Even the phony WMD in Iraq didn’t explode as quickly as these forgeries did nearly 90 years ago. The exposure of the Sisson papers helped deflate the war drive against the Soviets.

While the Soviet Red Army fought back, one out of seven industrial workers in the U.S. went on strike in 1919. Dockworkers in Seattle smashed rifle crates instead of shipping them to counter-revolutionary “White Guards” in Siberia. Marcus Garvey rallied millions of African Americans. Even U.S. troops sent to Russia were refusing to fight.

This movement of the working class and oppressed people stopped Wall Street from immediately strangling the Russian Revolution. It’s just such a movement that’s needed to get the troops out of Iraq and stop a new war against Iran.