If there is one lesson to be learned from the war in Iraq it is that We The People are lied to by our government on a grand scale. There is no reason to think that such horrific lies are a new phenomenon. Indeed the safest assumption is that the government has been lying to us all along. Therefore, nothing we have ever been taught in the state controlled schools or by the state controlled media should be presumed truthful absent hard scientific proof.

Much of the mythology surrounding WW2 has already been debunked, such as the soap and lampshade stories. Even the "Big Lie" attributed to Hitler was spun. Those who have actually read "Mein Kampf" know that Hitler was not advocating the use of the "Big Lie" but warning against its use by others.

Documents declassified in 1994 confirm that Franklin Roosevelt knew the Japanese were planning to attack Pearl Harbor, but presented the attack to the American people as a surprise, to anger them into war. Hence, it is reasonable to question all other aspects of WW2 as possibly being propaganda as well.

Real history, true history, need never fear re-examination. The facts will always withstand closer and closer looks. All that may change are the fine details. As an example, the finding of the RMS Titanic revealed that the ship had indeed split in two as it sank, but the reality of the sinking itself never changed, despite a fleet of submersibles visiting the wreck.

Likewise, the real story of history may be refined by closer examination, but is never substantially changed. Only lies foisted on the public for political gain need fear the light on re-examination.

History is laced with instances of extreme cruelty by one group against the other. In almost every instance, the victims of that cruelty long for closer examination of their persecutors, hope for it, lobby for it, demand it. Only in the case of what happened in Germany's slave labor camps in WW2 do the purported victims work so hard to PREVENT any examination of what happened. Is this not a strange dichotomy?

There is no question that the Nazis were evil people as anyone who marches armed into another's lands to steal them are evil, whether it be Iraq or Palestine. And there is no question that Germany had slave labor camps. And there is no question than a great many people died in those camps.

What begs examination is whether the inmates at those camps died of the typhoid epidemics that swept across Germany towards the end of the war, or whether there was a deliberate program of extermination.

The modern nation of Israel owes its very existence to the latter version of events. Here you had the entire world sacrificing much blood and treasure on the principle that one nation did not have the right to simply grab the land belonging to another people, and you had the founders of Israel seeking the world's permission to do exactly that in Palestine. Without a propaganda device to persuade the world that Israel be allowed to do to Palestine what Germany could not be allowed to do to France, Israel would not exist. So there is no question that motive existed to amplify the events of WW2 in a way that supported the creation of Israel.

Well, Israel exists, and nobody seriously thinks it will go away any time soon, nor should it because the people living there today had nothing to do with the events of WW2.

But as WW2 is now history from the middle of the last century it is time to go back and shed the politically expedient lies that colored our perceptions and establish once and for all the facts of what really happened.