Through this product page, you can purchase two issues
of a very obscure left-sectarian magazine, “The Bulletin”, published by a small
group of people in New York City during the 1930's and 1940's. Known as the
Marlenites to outsiders, after their leader George Marlen, the group called
itself the Leninist League until 1946, when they changed their name to the more
unwieldy Workers League for a Revolutionary Party.
The Marlenites were super-sectarian and somewhat bizarre. Thus, the name “Marlen” is really a conflation of “Marx” and “Lenin”! George Marlen's real name was George Spiro. The issue dated January-February 1946 is wholly devoted to the main Marlenite conspiracy theory, the idea that World War II was a “sham war”. The June-July 1946 issue also contains some material on World War II.
According to the Marlenites, the Western Allies and the Axis colluded with each other. The British and the Americans deliberately handed over Malaya, Singapore and the Philippines to Japan. The attack on Pearl Harbor was staged by Japan and Roosevelt acting together. Later, Japan freely gave back all its conquered territories to the Allies! Something similar happened on the Western front in Europe. Sure, there was fighting and widespread destruction during the war, but this was all staged to dupe the masses. Why did the United States attack an insignificant island like Iwo Jima, and why did the Japanese insist on defending it? The massive bombings of working class neighborhoods were real enough, but part of another covert strategy: to stop socialist revolution. The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki played the same role in the Pacific. Only the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, and the Soviet resistance, were real. The original plan of the “imperialists” was to pretend to fight a war, while waiting for the defeat of the Soviet Union – the real goal of both the Axis and the Western powers. When the Soviets stopped the Nazi offensive at Stalingrad, the conspiracy began to unravel…
This is, of course, a projection of the so-called Phoney War or Sitzkrieg on all of World War II, an absurd proposition. The Marlenites have obvious problems with it. What about the Resistance movements, for instance? They seem to have been real enough. What about Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union? What about the alliance between Stalin and the Western powers? Was that fake, too? At one point, “The Bulletin” suggests that Hitler was given secret orders by the Western Allies (!) to retreat on the Eastern Front while sabotaging the German war effort, so that Germany could be dismembered and the German proletariat smashed. One also wonders about MacArthur's occupation of Japan. Another "sham"?
The Marlenites make all the usual mistakes of conspiracy theorists. Let's assume that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. That doesn't prove that the *Japanese* were conspiring with the U.S. administration. It could simply mean that they fell into FDR's trap. There's also a difference between “objective” collusion and conscious ditto. The British may have felt that the Phoney War was in their best interest, without actively colluding with the Nazis on the battlefield. Conspiracy theory also assumes that no mistakes are ever made by anyone. The fall of Singapore or the bloody battle of strategically insignificant Iwo Jima simply *must* have been the work of deliberately malicious men. Nor can there be genuine factional infighting between different wings of the establishment, say between Chamberlain and Churchill. No, everyone is mysteriously united behind The Plan (even Hitler takes orders from mystical Western superiors in his bunker). The final mistake is the idea that just because some aspect of a complex series of events is a conspiracy (say Pearl Harbor), everything else must be a conspiracy, too. One wonders what would happen if the Marlenites had applied this method to capitalism or class society. Perhaps they are “conspiracies” by the Illuminati of ancient Babylon...
Three stars - for the revelations.
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