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Kilsoo K. Haan/OSS (CIA) Copy

Lechner¹, John R. The Inside Story of our Domestic Japanese Problem. (1944) American Legion of California. 10”x 7”, 18pp. Provenance: Kilsoo K. Haan², to Phillip H. Cummings, who gave this to the Library of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, precursor of the CIA), and from there to the Library of Congress. Rubber stamps for the OSS library and for the Library of Congress.

Only 5 copies located in WorldCat (all in the U.S.) There is also an OSS borrowing slip (with two entries) in the rear pocket of the pamphlet.

Condition: there is an old vertical fold that runs through the pamphlet. A GOOD copy. $350

Lechner—a one-time champion of the Japanese in the U.S. Turned completely against his old allies following some extended interlude after Pearl Harbor, and became a virulent proponent for the military control and incarceration of Japanese-descent people in the U.S. He also proposed the incarceration of all people of Japanese descent in the U.S., including Hawaiians. This pamphlet outlines some of his theories about people of Japanese descent in the U.S., how they planned to sabotage the country, and how they must be removed from the areas around the U.S. and never be allowed to be part of national society again without adopting certain Japanese principles (including the renouncing of Shintoism).

To give you some ides of the depth of Lechner's anti-Japanese thinking, here are some of the pamphlet's section subheads: “Japanese Language Schools” under consideration for subversive activity; “Japanese Children Attending Public School” (to “preserve the magnificent Japanese culture”; “Imperial Educational Association”, “...the control exercised by Japan...over Japanese-American youth”; “Nisei as Propaganda Agents for Japan”; “The Future Road of the Nisei”(on the role of Nisei working for the interests of Japan); “Kebei Organizations (“...brazen violation of mutual friendship ...(via) an enticement of Nisei to pursue cultural training in Japan”); “Kebei Organizations” (stating that these cultural organizations are part of Japan's “shrewd” conduct of their total war against the U.S.); “Japanese Conscription of the Nisei”; “Local Japanese Subversive Organizations”; “Imperial Comradeship Society”, (“arm of the Imperial Black Dragon Society, most powerful and most feared secret organization in the Japanese Empire...to eradicate Occidental influence in the Far East”); “Behind the Scenes at Manzanar”, (on riot and resistance at the camp); and of course “Bacteria Warfare”, (“this was to be accomplished by dropping vials containing germs, to spread bubonic plague...”). Finishing up the pamphlet is “No Time for Sentiment” (“No Christian leader can find fault with the the human treatment if the Japanese by our government”) and that there was no “race hatred” because there was a fallacious logic involved in “not understanding the meaning of race hatred”. Lastly there is a small section called “American Appeasers” listing nine U.S. Organizations working in the interest of Japanese Americans (including the (American) Civil Liberties Union

Lechner addresses the fact that no sabotage had been committed by any Japanese-American to 1944 as an instance of them being instructed by Japan “NOT to commit sabotage in the first stage of the war”, a classic bad logic (that I've seen often in these documents) where something is proved to be so precisely because there was no existing evidence to show it to be the case.

Notes

1. "Americanization" and anti-Communist activist. "Dr." John Lechner (1900–67), first allied himself with Nisei patriotic efforts just prior to World War II, then became one of the most strident voices for the mass eviction of Japanese Americans from the West Coast and against their return --https://encyclopedia.densho.org/search/

2. “Kilsoo Haan was a Korean nationalist figure who rose to prominence in Hawai'i in the 1930s and the U.S. mainland in the early 1940s, engaging in intelligence activities through the Sino-Peoples League. Claiming that Koreans in Manchuria, Siberia, China, and America could be indispensable in aiding the United States against Japanese militarism, Haan drew considerable attention from the American public as well as from U.S. government and military officials.” https://encyclopedia.densho.org/search/

Polish Flag on Monte Cassino, 1944

Ryszard Mossin, Polish Flag on Cassino Monastery. Glasgow, 1944, "a Polish Library Pamphlet".  Published by J, Haraowska (Glasgow), and printed by William McLellan & Co., (Glasgow). 27.5x22cm, 14pp, including 30 photographic illustrations.  Original photo-illustrated wrappers. Good Condition--with two old vertical folds through the pamphlet. Provenance: Library of Congress with their routing stamp and small "Pamphlet Collections" rubber stamp. An acceptable copy of a scarce publication heralding the Polish contribution in the deadly/bloody 123-day assault on Monte Cassino in the fight against the German Winter Line, January-May 1944.  There are five record/entries for this title in WorldCat/OCLC but altogether there are only 7 copies found.  Also, there's scant record of the publication in other sources and only four hits for it in Google. $95

British Anti-Nazi Propaganda 1940

The German News Agency and the News.  This was a piece of British gray propaganda¹ designed to be distributed throughout Europe. There is no publisher listed nor place of publication note, nor date. As this copy was in the Library of Congress collection, there is a receiving date stamped on it of April 16, 1940, so I know that this publication is no older than that. 10x8", 28pp. Good condition. Provenance: Library of Congress, with their surplus/duplicate rubber stamp on the rear cover. $95

The pamphlet is presented to show the different forms of journalism in reporting one particular event--the pursuit of the Graf Spee, from December 14^th-21^st 1939, from final pursuit to the scuttling on the 17^th ,  and a few days afterwards. The idea was to present coverage that was real and neutral compared to one that was biased and propagandized. To that end the news coverage of events were to be followed by the AP and UP on the one hand and the Detusches Nachrichten bureau on the other. Each section of news (noted by day and hour) were summarized in two columns, for the reader to make comparisons. The end result are long columns of blank space where the German News Agency makes no comment, while there is running commentary by the AP and UP. Also there is a substantial difference in reporting when the Allies and Germans report on the same thing--for example, in the battle that led to the eventual end of the Graf Spee, the German agency reported it as a successful battle, which was hardly the case. From where I sit, this is a convincing document. 

Notes:

1. This is definitively identified so by J. Michael Waller in Strategic Influence: Public Diplomacy, Counterpropaganda, and Political Warfare, pg 141.

Some Current Catalogs: WWII, the Soviet Union, Nuclear Weapons, WWI Photographs, and of course Large Color Lithographs of San Marco

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Weimar-Era to 1944 German Social, Political, and Military Pamphlets  

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Nuclear Weapons and Planning the Post-Apocalypse Society

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The Soviet Union and Communism (1920's-1945)

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WWI News Photo Service Archive, 1918 

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Lavish Architectural Chromolithographs, 1886

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23pp 4 meg pdf

The King and the Swastika, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2607

"Danmark", by Joe Congress, September 30, 1941. Radio Station WBYN, Brooklyn, NY (1430 Kilocycles).  Transcript printed by Free Denmark, Inc., 80 Broad Street, NYC.  My copy was received by the Library of Congress less than a month later. WorldCat/OCLC locates 0 copies.  11x8", offset mimeographic process. 3 leaves. Good copy. $450

This is certainly an early telling of this story, now so often repeated--it occurs in the address "Danmark", given by Joe Congress on the radio station WBYN (1430), Brooklyn, on September 30, 1941, at 10:15 p.m. The address came about a year and a half after the occupation of Denmark by Germany (April 9, 1940)--there was an mortifying existence between the Nazis and the Danes from that point out to the end of the war.  It is in this broadcast where Congress tells the story of the King of Denmark and the Nazi flag.

The king, Christian X (1870-1947), observed a Nazi flag flying from a public building in Copenhagen, which was "a rank violation of the terms which Adolf Hitler imposed on Denmark". The King, riding on a horse, reigned it in, and addressed a German officer standing by the building with the flag:

 

 

 

 

"Take it down !" the King ordered a German officer in front of the building.

"Orders from Berlin," replied the officer.

"The flag must be removed before 12 o'clock; otherwise I will send a soldier to do it," the monarch declared.

"The soldier will be shot," warned the Nazi officer.

"I am the soldier!" said the King.

The Swastika came down.

It is  a terrific story, and Congress heaps the praise on the king and on the Danes in general--but, on the other hand, he laments that there's little of this behavior going on presently in Denmark, and talks about the neutering of the police and branches of government.  He does however talk about the growth of patriotic songs and poetry, which has become a new resistance weapon for the Danes.  

Congress asks, "do not the Danes sing today, as they did years ago:

Fill up holes of ignorance, and bury

narrow selfishness beneath the sod. 

Of the meek and soft evoke a people

That will bend its will alone to God."

Evidently they did, because Congress reports that in the growing community sings of Copenhagen that hundreds of thousands of people were turning out to sing in the squares and parks--10,000 stood in Faelldepark. It is a patriotic weapon "that the Nazis cannot match". 

I looked up Mr. Congress and found this review of his broadcast, in Radio-News, for Auguast 9, 1941. It is remarkable in the small-world category because in this shrt review there is mentioned an interview with Alexander Uhl, foreign editor for PM newspaper, and someone who works and papers are here in  my store.  

A War by Many Other Names: the Japanese Invasion of China, 1931-1945; How to Trivialize 20 Million Killings Without Really Trying

JF Ptak Science Books 

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
--Marcel Duchamp

I have a good number of English-language propaganda pieces published by such Hearts and Minds institutions as the Foreign Affairs Association of Japan describing, through the merriest and most defensive eyes, the Japanese viewpoint of exactly what it was that was going on in China between 1931 and 1945.  This leaflet, Why? Who? How? Questions and Answers on the Sino-Japanese Conflict (1937), is particularly worth noting because of how quickly and cleverish-cleanly the issue of the war and the fault of fighting was dispatched, and done with such astonishing condescending alacrity, and with such an enormous bodyguards of lies,as to be staggering.  I guess this is why the Duchamp quote came to me just now.  Old Marcel, the supremely gifted magician, certainly meant to be an enormous, itchy pain in the butt and a source of confusion, an artistic anarchist;  the thinking behind the quote served him well, and I think that it can be well-applied here.                             

• 11x", 4pp, map on rear page. Old fold.  Provenance:  Library of Congress, Carnegie Institution of Washington. Small "LC" perforation in front and rear page, bottom.  Good condition. Scarce.  $150

The first issue is in the subtitle:  the “Sino-Japanese Conflict” implies that the Chinese were at fault for having the Japanese invade Manchuria back in 1931; secondly,  the Chinese started a conflict and not a war. 

Actually, the naming of the war there is quite an issue, and an issue still—and an issue at it most base level:  the word “war” is not generally used in Japan.  It wasn’t used in Japan during the war, or at least until the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Until 1941, the millions of Chinese who were being killed by the Japanese armed forces were the result of a series of ”incidents”.  Even though there was a war raging from the beginning in 1931 to the start of total Japanese-Chinese war on 15 July 1937, the stuff that was happening from ’37 to ’42  was still an “incident” except for a period of 1940-ish to Pearl, when the idea of the Holy War (“Seisan”, eight corners of the world under one roof, etc.) was introduced by the Japanese Diet in 1940.  After that there was the occasional use of the “Great East Asian Conflict”, with the word “war” not being the part of any Japanese vocabulary.

An interesting phrase that entered into the parlance though, if not “war”, was “Sanko Sakusen”, the “Three Alls”, as in KILL All, LOOT All, BURN All.  The Japanese wound up getting part of the Chinese All, eventually killing 20 million people or so in those 15 years.  But it wasn’t a war.

This four-page document asks twenty questions, and answers them usually, emphatically, with simplicity, starkness, and with total complicity of innocence on the side of Japan.  For example, in discussing the “incident” in Beiging in 1937 which led to the total war between the two countries, asking the reader “why did the attempts to settle the incident locally at its early stage fail?,  we are told “Because the Chinese never meant to do so”.  Which of course is not the case.

An incredible bit of thinking comes next, when the question “If Japan is on the defensive, how can the dispatch of large military and naval forces be accounted for?” Indeed!  Its hard to explain the invasion of another country as a purely defensive action. (We have seen this rather recently ourselves, the fictionalized account of terror-sponsorship in Iraq being about the only fuel necessary for a full-fledged defensive invasion and 2000-day long war.)  But the answer in 1937 was the Chinese defensive maneuver of massing troops for an impending invasion of China by Japan was then threatening Japanese interests in China, thus necessitating a defensive invasion of China which was mobilizing to defend itself from a Japanese offensive, which wouldn’t have come if the Chinese hadn’t adopted a defensive posture.  Basically, to paraphrase the immortal Mayor-for-Life of Washington, D.C, Marion S. Barry, “basically, the man dead”. (This was Barry’s response to reporters who were clamoring to find out what exactly had happened to a crazy man who climbed into a step van in a Buck Rogers suit and threatened to blow up the Washington Monument with a bucket of pee, an old rifle, and spray paint and then was shot about 200 times by cops of every shape and description. True story.)

(This is a picture of a baby survivor of a Japanese bombing "incident" at  South Station, Shanghai, 1937--sometimes it is better to see what something is than have someone define it for you..)

We further find out that the attacks on the schools and hospitals in China were carried out, somehow, by Chinese troops; that a Chinese fishing fleet that was attacked and pulverized by Japanese submarines really wasn’t, and that they just disappeared; that Japan was protecting the rights of third party powers by “removing” Chinese troops occupying foreign-owned properties; that the Japanese fight against the “Sovietization” of China would “protect” foreign democracies, and so on.  The questions hardly matter, as the answers are all sort of the same.  Japan would “reach a settlement” (the word “peace” is not used anywhere here) however, if China “realized the error if her ways”. 

Word do control mental images, and the further you get away from the situation described the more powerful the words become.  Somehow the Korean Conflict seems less so than a war because it wasn't "legally" so; it was a "police action".  And the Japan-China War isn't a "war" in name in most Japanese histories of the period.  I think you can dissolve things with loose undefined language to such a point that the thing itself no longer exists; the only stuff that survives are the words used to hide it. 

On American vs. Japanese Propaganda in Occupied Peking, Sino-Japanese/WWII

JF Ptak Science Books   

I stumbled upon this very interesting bit of information in the hoard of materials I purchased of the Library of Congress years ago.  "Report on the Effect of OWI'S Radio Program on Public Moral in Peiping During the Period of Japanese Occupation", by written by George F. Winfield (November 12, 1945) might sound fairly high and dry, but it brings out a very interesting series of points, one of which was that the Chinese of Peking were far more informed on the progress of the war than their Japanese occupiers.

 

•  "Report on the Effect of OWI'S Radio Program on Public Moral in Peiping During the Period of Japanese Occupation", written by George F. Winfield (November 12, 1945) . 3 carbon typed sheets, 1945. Very good copy. SOLD

Anti-Roosevelt Propaganda--"The New Deal Has Worn Out" (1940)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

• We Planned It So. Published by the Loyal American Group, Norfolk, Va., 1940. 42pp, 11.5 x 8.5".  Original printed wrappers.  A fair copy, as the pages were printed on cheap paper that has become brittle.  Intact, but guardedly so--it could easily be ripped in half with just  a faint notion. That said, it exists, and other copies are very scarce.  This pamphlet was not printed to weather the ages, and was ephemeral, even when it was "topical".  $125

This 42-page oversized pamphlet renders its vicious criticism mostly by cartoon, a cartoon on every page, and mostly a lie (or a group of them) to go along with it.  The work is ostensibly that of a republican (the pamphlet "priced low enough to enable every Republican to buy a copy for his Democratic friends" but it is really far beyond that.  It is tremendously anti-Communist, and anti-Socialist, and so much so that it swings far to the right of right-winger Conservatives who are beyond the reach of right-wing Republicans, all the way over to fascism.
 The work was publish by the Loyal American group, an organization under the direction of W.Henry MacFarland jr, whose organization "promptly identified as a fascist organization by the U.S. Attorney General", and hung around long enough to be added to a list of fascist/hate groups in the Preliminary Report on Neo-fascist and Hate Groups by the Committee on Un-American Activities (December 17, 1954).  I'd reproduce more of the artwork, but the pamphlet is brittle and won't go onto the scanner without breaking. The remarkable front and back pages should serve the purpose of the publication....

 

(Curiously, on the copyright page the printer notes that teh book has been assembled "by organized labor in the U.S.A.")

Propaganda: America Has No Enemies in Asia (1938)!

JF Ptak Science Books

Ralph Townsend provided one of the oddest, least-time-conscious, and pernicious titles (printed in 1938!) in my experience with pulpy propagandistic quick-publications of the 1930's. Townsend (1900-1976) was a Columbia School of Journalism product, but something happened, and emerged in the 1930's as a deep Sinophobe, an anti-Roosevelt anti-interventionist far-right apologist for the imperialism of the Japanese government.

He got into trouble after Pearl Harbor, deeper in 1942, for being an unregistered agent of the Japanese government and was sent to jail. He survived himself and had a career writing about his very far right-wing ideas, and is evidently a favorite of some out-on-the-end-of-the-spectrum Right Wing folks today for his isolationist and ultra-orthodox America-for Americans views.  

• Townsend, Ralph. America has No Enemies in Asia. Seemingly self-published, 7x5", 48pp. Provenance: Library of Congress Pamphlet Collection; noted on the back of the title page the pamphlet was "a gift of the author" to the L.C. Small "LC' perforation on cover, otherwise nice condition.  $50 

What it boils down to in Asia, for Townsend, is that the Sino-Japanese war as the fault of the Chinese, and that Japan simply fought to protect its interests, and then, with the occupation of China, to further protect itself and (yes) China.  This sort of thing still happens.