Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of "The Good War" [Hardcover]

Micky Z (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2000

Saving Private Power questions the ultra-patriotic assumptions we have been taught since birth. The U.S. did not enter WWII to end the Holocaust, to make the world a safer place, or to stop fascism. The opposite is true. The U.S. business class traded with Hitler and Mussolini up to and even during the war. Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh's public Hitlerphilia were symbolic of big business's admiration for Hitler's anticommunism.

Using techniques gleaned from modern advertising, the U.S. Office of War Information injected anti-Japanese bloodlust and hysteria into the population. When the U.S. killed 672,000 Japanese through indiscriminate bombing, even Secretary of War Henry Stimson wondered why "there has never been a protest over...such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. There is something wrong with a country where no one questions that".

Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation are cashing in on the revived interest in World War II. But time's up for the trafficers of cheap nostalgia. The media elite have sold us the myth about the U.S.'s noble role in the "Good War" for too long and the facade is beginning to crack. The recent release of John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope is only the beginning. Saving Private Power digs deeper, to find the truth about the this war and the world it left in its wake.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 220 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press; 1st edition (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 188712845X
• ISBN-13: 978-1887128452
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,081,237 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The first overdue indictment of the guilty since Nuremberg, October 10, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of "The Good War" (Hardcover)

The author really hasn't exposed that much any well informed person wouldn't already know. This may, however, be the first time all of this "other" history of WWII has been put into a compehensive volume and made availabe in retail book stores coast to coast. It's long overdue. Like a lot of people, I thought the opening sequence of "Saving Private Ryan" was terrifying in the extreme, and one cannot help but feel a sense of awe and profound respect for aged veterans who experienced this. But was establishing concentration camps for Japanese-Americans in an already racially and economicaly segregated nation really the right thing to do? Having done it can we really claim the moral high-ground with any credibility when we combat Nazism? Is a nuclear weapon used against a largley CIVILIAN population (already conventionaly bombed around the clock) really an appropriate response to a nation that launched a preemptive strike against US MILITARY targets? Did our beloved FDR knowingly invite such a preemptive strike as a means of galvanizing an otherwise isolationist and economically crippled nation? Did US diplomacy really try to avert war with Imperial Japan? Did Americas barons of capitalism make faustian deals with the Nazis in order to please shareholders and line their own pockets in the process? Did a United States Army court authorize the firing squad execution of Pvt. Eddie Slovak for "cowardice"? Or what of the betrayal of thousands of Canadian troops sacrificed at Dieppe? Before this book one could only read such alternative view points in novels like "Slaughterhouse 5", "Catch 22", "A Midnight Clear" or non-fiction works like John Hersey's "Hiroshima". These books did not necessarily toe the line that "Saving Private Power" does but they were the first to enlighten me beyond the conventional, sterile, censored, patriotic histories of WWII. One could read Stephen Ambrose forever and come away feeling damn good to be American but where the hell is the challenge in that? The Author will undoubtedly be attacked for his blasphemy, and outrageously and irrationaly accused of excusing the likes of Aushwitz and Nanking, but it's crap and don't let those "keepers of the flame" control the debate. They have done it far too long. My only complaint is the author's obvious reverence for the Soviets. They made their own faustian bargains with Hitler and Stalin's Red Army as "liberators" is analageous to...say....the United States as an innocent victim of Japanese agression.

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good antidote to Spielberg's flagwaving exercise, July 18, 2002

By 

Wade Frazier (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of "The Good War" (Hardcover)

From its Hitler-satire book cover to the book jacket photos of Mr. Zezima in his bandana, the Gex-X nature of his book is evident. However, as to serving its stated purpose - an antidote to the flag-waving exercise of Saving Private Ryan - the books works admirably. As Howard Zinn and others have made clear, nearly all war movies are anti-war movies, but though Spielberg brought gore to the big screen as never before, it was ultimately a pro-war movie. Being an American Jew, we must consider Speilberg's bias. Historian David Wyman would not share Spielberg's enthusiasm for America's noble war.

Zezima's book is not a thorough historian's effort, but it does what virtually no American historian has developed the courage to do: challenge all the self-serving myths that Americans believe about World War II. On that score, Zezima is to be commended for standing up to the propaganda barrage, a situation that has become much worse during the post 9/11 era. As a single-volume work, it succeeds as no other book I have seen on the subject, and that includes the work of Fussell, Adams, Zinn and other professional iconoclasts.

Works such as Zezima's predictably earn one star reviews from people who rarely offer any substantive criticism, but write witty ad hominem attacks. The one-star reviews he has garnered say a lot more about the sorry state of the American political scene than they do about Zezima's book.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One myth at a time, March 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of "The Good War" (Hardcover)

Saving Private Power tackles many specific myths surrounding World War II, including the "necessity" of bombing Japan, the "anti-fascism" of the US in the 1920s and 1930s, and the "inevitability" of Hitler's rise to power. The reviews that whine about Zezima's left politics or falsely claim that he equates the petty theft of American GIs with the horrors of the SS are either missing the point or just don't care. Zezima isn't claiming that the US was as bad as Hitler (indeed, he explicitly denies it) he is simply pointing out that World War II, like any other war, isn't about good vs, evil, it is about power vs. power. He is glad that the US power won and Hitler and the Axis was defeated, but US power helped build up the Cold War,the "age of the atom" and other things which disqualify the US from simply being the "good" in a right-wing blowhard's simplistic fairy tale.