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BlogviewEric Margolis Archive
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World War II
 BlogviewEric Margolis Archive
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World War II

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No Bad Peace; No Good Wars
• November 11, 2024
• 600 Words • 11 Comments • Reply
This week we observe the end of the `War to End All Wars,’ also known as World War I. The memorial week will be filled with the usual platitudes and patriotic guff designed to benefit the politicians who sent millions of young men to their deaths in this most stupid of all wars. I consider... Read More
Stop Concealing Soviet Crimes
• February 2, 2024
• 600 Words • 30 Comments • Reply
As we rightly remember the Auschwitz death camp and the rest of the Jewish Holocaust, let’s take a moment to recall the greatest mass killer of prisoners during World War II, the by now forgotten Soviet Major General Vasily Blokhin. Blokhin claimed to have personally executed tens of thousands of prisoners in the Soviet Gulag.... Read More
The Soviet Union Defeated Germany in World War II - Not the Western Forces
• May 11, 2020
• 1,000 Words • 172 Comments • Reply
President Donald Trump claimed last week that the US and Britain had won World War II. This was a shameless lie and distortion of the facts. Many Americans and Canadians like to believe their nations won the war in Europe and give insufficient recognition to the decisive Soviet role. Most Europeans would rather not think... Read More
Remember Stalin's Gulag
• February 8, 2020
• 700 Words • 27 Comments • Reply
Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, we remain fixated on some of its worst crimes. But only some. The incessant use of Holocaust remembrance has been cynically used by some on the hard right to justify Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people and the expansion of the Jewish state. For example, Israel’s... Read More
Leave Franco Alone
• October 26, 2019
• 700 Words • 47 Comments • Reply
n 1936, as Spain’s brutal civil war was raging, Republican-leftist forces were besieging Toledo’s fortress, the Alcazar. They took hostage the 16-year old son Luis of the citadel’s commander, Col. Moscardo. `Surrender the Alcazar or we will shoot him,’ threatened the leftists. Moscardo replied, ‘put him on the phone.’ When his terrified son came on,... Read More
Study the Maginot Line Before Building Any Walls
• January 19, 2019
• 800 Words • 33 Comments • Reply
`Good fences make good neighbors,’ wrote American poet Robert Frost. But not according to President Donald Trump whose proposed Great Wall is supposed to protect the nation from hordes of rabid, murderous, drug crazed rapists and unwhites from south of the border. I’m a life-long student of military architecture, with a particular passion for modern... Read More
Germany Was Defeated on the Eastern Front, Not Normandy
• June 9, 2018
• 700 Words • 138 Comments • Reply
On my many walking visits to the vast Normandy battlefield in France, I kept recalling the ever so wise dictum of Prussia’s great monarch, Frederick the Great: ‘he who defends everything, defends nothing.’ On this 74th anniversary of the D-Day landings, it’s well worth recalling the old warrior-king. Adolf Hitler, a veteran of the infantry,... Read More
Midway - the US Navy Rules the Waves
• June 11, 2017
• 1,100 Words • 47 Comments • Reply
There’s not a lot to be proud of in today’s America: the Punch and Judy show in Washington; brutal but inept colonial wars in the Mideast against poorly armed enemies; pollution of the climate, and culture of trash and violence. To see America as it once was, go back to the three days from 4... Read More
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Japan's "Nobility of Failure" in 1941
• December 10, 2016
• 800 Words • 173 Comments • Reply
Seven decades after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor some truth is finally beginning to emerge from the miasma of propaganda that still clouds our vision of World War II. It seems clear by now that President Franklin Roosevelt’s White House knew from deciphered codes that Japan was planning an attack on America’s key naval... Read More
How Metz Gave Patton a Bloody Nose
• May 21, 2016
• 800 Words • 50 Comments • Reply
For those, like this writer, who esteem the arts of modern fortification, Metz is the Florence of military architecture. I greet the spring each year in Metz. This imposing city combines the dazzling, art modern architecture of the France’s Maginot Line with the pre-World War I older forts of the great builder, Serré de Rivières.... Read More
China's Forgotten Victory in WWII
• September 5, 2015
• 700 Words • 11 Comments • Reply
The huge military parade held in Beijing this week was billed as a commemoration of China’s role in World War II. Over 15 million Chinese died in its eight-year resistance to Japanese invasion. China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, dressed in a finely tailored Mao suit, stood atop the Forbidden City’s Gate of Heavenly Peace to... Read More
Why Do We Lament A-Bombs and Not Fire-Bombs?
• August 8, 2015
• 800 Words • 40 Comments • Reply
All war is a crime. There is no such thing as a “good war.” As the great Benjamin Franklin said, “there is no good war; and no bad peace.” We are now in the midst of the annual debate over the atomic bombing of Japan by the United States. Seventy years ago this week, the... Read More
France's Disaster of June 1940
• June 13, 2015
• 1,100 Words • 84 Comments • Reply
METZ, FRANCE - The dramatic seaborne rescue of 328,000 Allied troops from Dunkirk in June, 1940 is well known. But the tragic effort of almost 300,000 French troops to break out of encirclement in eastern France along the Maginot Line is almost totally unknown. On 10 May, 1940, Germany unleashed a new form of mobile... Read More
Stalin's Soviet Union Defeated Germany --- We Should Not Forget
• May 9, 2015
• 1,000 Words • 48 Comments • Reply
It was churlish for western leaders to boycott this week’s Victory Parade in Moscow that commemorated the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany 70 years ago. Historic events are facts that should not be manipulated according to the latest political fashions. Being angry at Moscow for mucking about in Ukraine does not in any way... Read More
"On Ne Passe Pas!" the Unknown Victory of the Southern Maginot Line
• June 22, 2013
• 800 Words • Leave a Comment
  SOSPEL, FRANCE – The wild Maritime Alps are the most remote and least known part of this country, a chain of vertiginous, snow-capped peaks and narrow defiles running due south along the Franco-Italian border from Switzerland down to the Mediterranean on the Riviera. As a military historian, I’ve come here to remember the heroic... Read More
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Did FDR Lure Japan Into Attacking Pearl Harbor?
• December 10, 2012
• 700 Words • Leave a Comment
Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor 71 years ago this month was a “day that will live in infamy” according to US President Franklin Roosevelt. Seven decades later, it increasingly appears that the president’s surprise and outrage may have been synthetic. Roosevelt had been maneuvering for more than a year to bring the United States... Read More
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Let's Bury These Phony Myths About World War II
• May 24, 2011
• 1,200 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
METZ, FRANCE — In this ancient fortress city on the Mosel River that stand guard on the traditional invasion route into France, one is surrounded by the ghosts of great wars past — and the often cruel myths that still linger. As a former instructor of military history and specialist in France's 20th century wars,... Read More
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Yalta: The Great Betrayal
• June 28, 2010
• 1,200 Words • Leave a Comment
YALTA – As Russian imperial residences go, Livadia is a rather small palace, even modest. Czar Nicholas II had this pretty palace of white limestone built as a family vacation residence in the sunny Crimea. Livadia overlooks one of the Crimea’s amazingly lush sub-tropical forests and the shimmering Black Sea. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail... Read More
Teuton and Gaul Will Never Again Fight
• November 17, 2009
• 900 Words • Leave a Comment
PARIS — Armistice Day is always a very solemn event here in Paris and across France. Even the weather provides a dramatic backdrop: dark, thick, low-lying clouds and rain showers add to the aura of wartime loss and tragedy. But this year's ceremony held special significance. Last week, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh... Read More
Getting to the Truth About World War II
• June 9, 2009
• 1,200 Words • Leave a Comment
METZ, France — President Barack Obama's visit to Normandy to commemorate the 65th anniversary of D-Day makes us think about the entire course of World War II, and the lingering propaganda or myths that still becloud it. As a former instructor of military history and lover of history, let me address four of these myths... Read More
Deflating the Churchill Myth
• November 18, 2008
• 700 Words • 20 Comments • Reply
Much of the Western world just honored the millions of soldiers fallen in the two world wars. But we also need to look beyond postwar myths and understand the tragic political mistakes that sent these soldiers to die in wars that might have been avoided. In his powerful new book, Hitler, Churchill and the Unnecessary... Read More
The Bogus Mythology of WWII
• August 12, 2008
• 700 Words • 4 Comments • Reply
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died this week aged 89, will rank with literary immortals Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as a great chronicler of Russia's soul and its profound suffering. Solzhenitsyn's epic works Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago are literary monuments for all mankind. After years as a political prisoner in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn declared, "a... Read More
The Forgotten Genocide
• June 3, 2008
• 1,000 Words • Leave a Comment
Toronto — Canada will soon make an important contribution to the cause of historical accuracy, human rights, and justice. To coincide with last week's visit to Ottawa of Ukraine's president, Viktor Yushchenko, the Canadian government announced it planned to recognize the mostly forgotten 1932—1933 genocide in Ukraine. Ottawa's decision was motivated as much by ethnic... Read More
The West's Deal with the Devil
• November 7, 2007
• 800 Words • Leave a Comment
BANFF — This seems to be a month of historic guilt. Germany just opened a new memorial to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Armenians demand Turkey admit Ottoman-era massacres were genocide. Japan is being blasted anew for denying wartime atrocities. Spain is again racked by memories of crimes committee during its bloody civil war. Yet... Read More
"World War II" Items Across Entire Archive
Eric Margolis
About Eric Margolis

Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation – Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia.

He is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, Lew Rockwell. He appears as an expert on foreign affairs on CNN, BBC, France 2, France 24, Fox News, CTV and CBC.

His internet column www.ericmargolis.com reaches global readers on a daily basis.

As a war correspondent Margolis has covered conflicts in Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Sinai, Afghanistan, Kashmir, India, Pakistan, El Salvador and Nicaragua. He was among the first journalists to ever interview Libya’s Muammar Khadaffi and was among the first to be allowed access to KGB headquarters in Moscow.

A veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain’s Sky News TV as “the man who got it right” in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq.

A native New Yorker, he maintains residences in Toronto and New York, with frequent visits to Paris.


Personal Classics
9/11: The Mother of All Coincidences
“America’s strategic and economic interests in the Mideast and Muslim world are being threatened by the agony in...
• 168 Comments • Reply
Are We Becoming What We Once Hated?
Living in the USSA
• 4 Comments • Reply
Osama's Ghost
Bin Laden is dead, but his strategy still bleeds the United States.
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Fall of the Raj
Egyptians revolted against American rule as well as Mubarak’s.
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The Greater Threat
A menace grows from Bush’s Korean blind spot.
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Afghanistan: The Victory That Wasn't
Far from being a model for a “liberated” Iraq, Afghanistan shows how the U.S. can get bogged down Soviet-style.
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