Saving Private Power is the most provocative history of the "Good War" ever published. It 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.

Kurt Vonnegut has come up with as exemplary a rationalization as I've ever heard for being a writer: "Many people desperately need to receive this message: 'I feel and think as much as you do, care about many things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.'" I wrote Saving Private Power to tell the truth and to challenge a powerful myth in the hope this act could expose the fragility of all myths. However, I could never discount those small, yet uncommon moments made imaginable because Soft Skull Press took a chance on me. Indeed, I've learned, I am not alone.

The publication of Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of "The Good War" has made possible many remarkable moments for me. From seeing the book adopted for course work in a couple of US colleges to having my work compared to the likes of Chomsky, Zinn, and Galeano, this has been a singular experience. I've given several talks, reached many more people on the radio, and been invited to contribute an article to the new Disinformation book, You Are Being Lied To. Just a few years ago, I might have opened a book like that and moaned to my wife that I should have been included in it. I may have scanned through the Brecht Forum catalog and daydreamed of giving my own talk there or switched on WBAI and wished I had the chance to speak my mind or walked past Revolution Books and imagined it was my book in the window.

Thanks,
Mickey Z

Mickey Z., a.k.a. Michael Zezima, has worked as editor-in-chief of the Curio magazine. His writing has appeared in the Village Voice, Z Magazine, In These Times, Street News, Mouth, Poets & Writers, Anarchy, and Alternative Press Review. He lives in New York City.