I believe that there's a book on BARD about Operation Paperclip and the book
by the NY Times reporter that he refers to is one that I think I read from
Bookshare. I do remember reading a devastating book about the Dulles brothers
and about Allen Dulles' connections to Nazis. Wen I read this today, I was oh
so very tempted to send it to Nolan Crabb who is the moderator of the DB Review
list and who constantly reads books which praise our warriors who fought in
WW2. Just the other day, he again referred to, "the greatest generation".
Deborah Murray is scanning a book by David Swanson about the second world war
which I suggested and have paid for, for Bookshare because the book debunks so
much of the mythology.
The problem is, all of the lies, the deceit, the denial of reality that is
engaged in by the American public, has all come home to roost now. We reap what
we sow and the Trump administration and Covid 19 is the result.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, October 18, 2020 2:37 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: delores selset <dselset@xxxxxxx>; Jennifer Ford <dandjford88@xxxxxxxx>;
jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: THE US DID NOT DEFEAT FASCISM IN WWII
Gabriel Rockhill's article is a most important writings demonstrating the
immense and complex nature of the fight for democracy in a very hostile world
climate.
In no way should this article discourage us from our efforts to remove Donald
Trump and his ruthless gang from power. But it does point to the overwhelming
challenge in our struggle for equality.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/18/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
THE US DID NOT DEFEAT FASCISM IN WWII
By Gabriel Rockhill, Counterpunch.
October 17, 2020 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: Nathaniel St. Clair.
It Discretely Internationalized It.
“The U.S. has established itself as the mortal enemy of all people’s
government, all scientific-socialist mobilization of consciousness
everywhere on the globe, all anti-imperialist activity on earth.”
– George Jackson
One of the founding myths of the contemporary Western European and
American world is that fascism was defeated in WWII by liberal
democracies, and particularly by the United States. With the
subsequent Nuremburg trials and the patient construction of a liberal
world order, a bulwark was erected—in fits and starts, and with the
constant threat of regression—against fascism and its evil twin in the
East. American culture industries have rehearsed this narrative ad
nauseum, brewing it into a saccharine ideological Kool-Aid and piping
it into every household, shack and street corner with a TV or
smartphone, tirelessly juxtaposing the supreme evil of Nazism to the freedom
and prosperity of liberal democracy.
The material record suggests, however, that this narrative is actually
based on a false antagonism, and that a paradigm shift is necessary in
order to understand the history of actually existing liberalism and
fascism. The latter, as we shall see, far from being eradicated at the
end of WWII, was actually repurposed, or rather redeployed, to serve
its primary historical
function: to destroy godless communism and its threat to the
capitalist civilizing mission. Since the colonial projects of Hitler
and Mussolini had become so brazen and erratic, as they shifted from
playing more or less by the liberal rules of the game to openly
breaking them and then running amok, it was understood that the best
way to construct the fascist international was to do so under liberal
cover, meaning through clandestine operations that maintained a
liberal façade. While this probably sounds like hyperbole to those
whose understanding of history has been formatted by bourgeois social
science, which focuses almost exclusively on visible government and
the aforementioned liberal cover, the history of the invisible
government of the national security apparatus suggests that fascism, far from
being defeated in WWII, was successfully internationalized.
The Architects Of The Fascist International When the United States
entered WWII, the future head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, bemoaned that
his country was fighting the wrong enemy. The Nazis, as he explained,
were pro-capitalist Aryan Christians, whereas the true enemy was
godless communism and its resolute anti-capitalism. After all, the
U.S. had, only some 20 years prior, been part of a massive military
intervention in the U.S.S.R., when fourteen capitalist countries
sought—in the words of Winston Churchill—to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in
its crib.”
Dulles understood, like many of his colleagues in the U.S. government,
that what would later become known as the Cold War was actually the
old war, as Michael Parenti has convincingly argued: the one they had
been fighting against communism since its inception.
Towards the end of WWII, General Karl Wolff, formerly Himmler’s
right-hand man, went to see Allen Dulles in Zurich, where he was
working for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor
organization to the CIA. Wolff knew that the war was lost, and he wanted to
avoid being brought to justice.
Dulles, for his part, wanted the Nazis in Italy under Wolff’s command
to lay down their arms against the allies and help the Americans in
their fight against communism. Wolff, who was the highest-ranking SS
officer to survive the war, offered Dulles the promise of developing,
with his Nazi team, an intelligence network against Stalin. It was
agreed that the general who had played a central role in overseeing
the Nazi’s genocidal machine, and who expressed his “special joy” when
he secured freight trains to send 5,000 Jews a day to Treblinka, would
be protected by the future director of the CIA, who helped him avoid the
Nuremberg trials.
Wolff was very far from being the only senior Nazi official protected
and rehabilitated by the OSS-CIA. The case of Reinhard Gehlen is
particularly telling. This general in the Third Reich had been in
charge of Fremde Heere Ost, the Nazi intelligence service directed
against the Soviets. After the war, he was recruited by the OSS-CIA
and met with all of the major architects of the postwar National
Security State: Allen Dulles, William Donovan, Frank Wisner, President
Truman. He was then appointed to head the first German intelligence
service after the war, and he proceeded to employ many of his Nazi
collaborators. The Gehlen Organization, as it was known, would become
the nucleus of the German intelligence service. It is unclear how many
war criminals this decorated Nazi hired, but Eric Lichtblau estimates
that some four thousand Nazi agents were integrated into the network
overseen by the American spy agency. With an annual funding of half a
million dollars from the CIA in the early years after the war, Gehlen
and his strong men were able to act with impunity. Yvonnick Denoël
explained this turnaround with remarkable clarity: “It is hard to
understand that, as early as 1945, the army and the US intelligence
services recruited without qualms former Nazi criminals. The equation
was, however, very simple at the
time: the United States had just defeated the Nazis with the help of
the Soviets. They henceforth planned to defeat the Soviets with the
help of former Nazis.”
The situation was similar in Italy because Dulles’ agreement with
Wolff was part of a larger undertaking, called Operation Sunrise,
which mobilized Nazis and fascists to end the Second World War in
Italy (and begin the Third World War across the globe). Dulles worked
hand in hand with the Agency’s future chief counterintelligence
officer, James Angleton, who was then stationed by the OSS in Italy.
These two men, who would become two of the most powerful political
actors of the twentieth century, showed what they were capable of in
this close collaboration between the American intelligence services,
the Nazis and the fascists. Angleton, on his end, recruited fascists
to end the war in Italy so as to minimize the power of the communists.
Valerio Borghese was one of his key contacts because this hardline
fascist in Mussolini’s regime was ready to serve the Americans in the
anti-communist struggle, and he became one of the international
figureheads for postwar fascism. Angleton had directly saved him from
the hands of the communists, and the man known as the Black Prince was given
the opportunity to continue the war against the radical Left under a new boss:
the CIA.
Once the war was over, Senior U.S. intelligence officials, including
Dulles, Wisner and Carmel Offie, “worked to ensure that denazification
only had a limited scope,” according to Frédéric Charpier: “Generals,
senior officials, policemen, industrialists, lawyers, economists,
diplomats, scholars and real war criminals were spared and put back in
their positions.” The man in charge of the Marshall Plan in Germany,
for instance, was a former adviser to Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief
of the Luftwaffe (air force).
Dulles drafted a list of high functionaries of the Nazi state to be
protected and passed off as opponents to Hitler. The OSS-CIA proceeded
to rebuild the administrative states in Germany and Italy with their
anti-communist allies.
Eric Lichtblau estimates that more than 10,000 Nazis were able to
immigrate to the United States in the post-war period (at least 700
official members of the Nazi party had been allowed into the U.S. in
the 1930s, while Jewish refugees were being turned away). In addition
to a few hundred German spies and thousands of SS personnel, Operation
Paperclip, which began in May 1945, brought at least 1,600 Nazi
scientists to the U.S. with their families. This undertaking was aimed
at recovering the great minds of the Nazi war machine and putting
their research on rockets, aviation, biological and chemical weapons,
and so forth, in the service of the American empire. The Joint
Intelligence Objectives Agency was set up specifically to recruit
Nazis and find them positions in research centers, the government, the
army, the intelligence services or universities (at least 14 universities
participated, including Cornell, Yale and MIT).
Although the program officially excluded ardent Nazis, at least at the
beginning, in actual fact it allowed for the immigration of chemists
from IG Farben (which had supplied the deadly gases used in mass
exterminations), scientists who had used slaves in concentration camps
to make weapons, and doctors who had participated in hideous
experiments on Jews, Roma, communists, homosexuals and other prisoners
of war. These scientists, who were described by an official in the
State Department opposed to Paperclip as “Hitler’s angels of death,”
were received with open arms in the land of the free. They were given
comfortable accommodations, a laboratory with assistants and the
promise of citizenship if their work bore fruit. They went on to
conduct research that has been used in the manufacturing of ballistic
missiles, sarin gas cluster bombs, and the weaponization of the bubonic
plague.
The CIA also collaborated with MI6 to set up secret anti-communist
armies in every country in Western Europe. On the pretext of a
potential invasion by the Red Army, the idea was to train and equip
networks of illegal stay-behind soldiers, who would remain behind
enemy lines if the Russians moved westward. They would thus be
activated in the newly occupied territory and charged with missions of
exfiltration, espionage, sabotage, propaganda, subversion and combat.
The two agencies worked with NATO and the intelligence services of
many Western European countries to build this vast sub-rosa
organization, establish numerous weapons and ammunition caches, and
equip their soldiers of the shadows with everything they needed. To do
this, they recruited Nazis, fascists, collaborationists and other
anti-communist members of the extreme Right. The numbers vary
according to the country, but they are estimated between a few dozen
and several hundred, or even a few thousand, per country. According to
a report from the television program Retour aux sources, there were 50
stay-behind network units in Norway, 150 in Germany, more than 600 in Italy
and 3,000 in France.
These trained militants would later be mobilized to commit or
coordinate terrorist attacks against the civilian population, which
were then blamed on the communists in order to justify ‘law and order’
crackdowns. According to the official numbers in Italy, where this
strategy of tension was particularly intense, there were 14,591
politically motivated acts of violence between 1969 and 1987, which killed
491 people and injured 1,181.
Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of the far-right group Ordine Nuovo and
the perpetrator of the bombing near Peteano in 1972, explained that
the fascist “Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo, were being
mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-Communist strategy
originating not with organizations deviant from the institutions of
power, but from the state itself, and specifically from within the
ambit of the state’s relations within the Atlantic Alliance.” An
Italian parliamentary commission that undertook an investigation of
the stay-behind armies in Italy, reached the following conclusion in
2000: “Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been
organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state
institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the
structures of United States intelligence.”
The U.S. National Security State was also involved in overseeing
ratlines that exfiltrated fascists from Europe and allowed them to
resettle in safe havens around the world, in exchange for doing its
dirty work. The case of Klaus Barbie is but one among thousands, but
it speaks volumes regarding the internal functioning of this process.
Known in France as ‘the butcher of Lyon,’ he was head of the Gestapo
office there for two years, including the time when Himmler gave the order to
deport at least 22,000 Jews from France.
This specialist in ‘enhanced interrogation tactics,’ known for
torturing to death the coordinator of the French Resistance, Jean
Moulin, organized the first roundup of the General Union of Jews in
France in February 1943 and the massacre of 41 Jewish refugee children
in Izieu in April 1944. Before arriving in Lyon, he had led savage
death squads, which had killed more than a million people on the
Eastern Front according to Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
But after the war, the man whom these same authors describe as third
on the most-wanted list of SS criminals was working for the Counter
Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the U.S. Army. He was hired to help build
the stay-behind armies by recruiting other Nazis, and to spy on French
intelligence services in the French and American controlled regions in
Germany.
When France learned what was happening and demanded Barbie’s
extradition, John McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner of Germany,
refused by claiming that the allegations were based on hearsay.
Nevertheless, it ultimately proved too expensive, symbolically, to
keep a butcher like Barbie in Europe, so he was sent to Latin America
in 1951, where he was able to continue his illustrious career.
Settling in Bolivia, he worked for the security forces of the military
dictatorship of General René Barrientos and for the Ministry of the
Interior and the counter-insurgency wing of the Bolivian Army under
the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer, before actively participating in the
Cocaine Coup in 1980 and becoming the director of security forces
under General Meza. Throughout his career, he maintained close
relationships with his saviors in the U.S. National Security State,
playing a central role in Operation Condor, the counter-insurgency
project that brought together Latin American dictatorships, with the
support of the United States, to violently crush any attempt at
egalitarian uprisings from below. He also helped develop the drug
empire in Bolivia, including organizing gangs of narco-mercenaries
whom he named Los novios de la muerte, whose uniforms resembled those
of the SS. He traveled freely in the 1960s and 1970s, visiting the U.S. at
least seven times, and he most likely played a role in the manhunt organized
by the Agency to kill Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
The same basic pattern of integrating fascists into the global war
against communism is readily identifiable in Japan, whose system of
government prior to and during the war has been described by Herbert
P. Bix as “Emperor-system fascism.” Tessa Morris-Suzuki has
convincingly demonstrated the continuity of intelligence services by
detailing how the U.S. National Security State oversaw and managed the
KATO organization. This private intelligence network, very much like
the Gehlen organization, was stocked with former leading members of
the military and intelligence services, including the Imperial Army’s
Chief of Intelligence (Arisue Seizō), who shared with his American
handler (Charles Willoughby) a deep admiration for Mussolini. The U.S.
occupation forces also cultivated tight relationships with senior
officials in Japan’s wartime civilian intelligence community (most
notably Ogata Taketora). This remarkable continuity between prewar and
postwar Japan has led Morris-Suzuki and other scholars to map Japanese
history in terms of a transwar regime, meaning one that continued from
before to after the war. This concept also allows us to make sense of
what was happening above ground in the realm of the visible
government. For the sake of concision, suffice it to cite the
remarkable case of the man known as the “Devil of Shōwa” for his
brutal rule of Manchukuo (the Japanese colony in Northeast China):
Nobusuke Kishi. A great admirer of Nazi Germany, Kishi was appointed
Minister of Munitions by Prime Minister Hideki Tojo in 1941, in order
to prepare Japan for a total war against the U.S., and he was the one
who signed the official declaration of war against America. After
serving a brief prison term as a war criminal in the postwar era, he
was rehabilitated by the CIA, along with his cell mate, the kingpin of
organized crime Yoshio Kodama. Kishi, with the support and generous
financial backing of his handlers, took over the Liberal Party, made
it into a rightwing club of former leaders of imperial Japan, and rose
to become Prime Minister. “The [CIA] money flowed for at least fifteen years,
under four American presidents,” writes Tim Wiener, “and it helped
consolidate one-party rule in Japan for the rest of the cold war.”
U.S. national security services have also established a global
educational network to train pro-capitalist combatants—sometimes under
the leadership of experienced Nazis and fascists—in the tried-and-true
techniques of repression, torture and destabilization, as well as
propaganda and psychological warfare. The famous School of the
Americas was established in
1946 with the explicit goal of training a new generation of
anti-communist warriors worldwide. According to some, this school has
the distinction of having educated the greatest number of dictators in
world history. Whatever the case may be, it is part of a much larger
institutional network. It is worth mentioning, for example, the
educational contributions of the Public Safety Program: “For about
twenty-five years,” writes former CIA officer John Stockwell, “the
CIA, […] trained and organized police and paramilitary officers from
around the world in techniques of population control, repression, and
torture. Schools were set up in the United States, Panama, and Asia,
from which tens of thousands graduated. In some cases, former Nazi officers
from Hitler’s Third Reich were used as instructors.”
Fascism Goes Global Under Liberal Cover The American imperium has thus
played a central role in the construction of a fascist international
by protecting right-wing militants and enlisting them in the Third
World War against ‘communism,’ an elastic label extended to any
political orientation that entered into conflict with the interests of
the capitalist ruling class. This international expansion of fascist
modes of governance has led to a proliferation of concentration camps,
terrorist and torture campaigns, dirty wars, dictatorial regimes,
vigilante groups and organized crime networks around the world. The
examples could be enumerated ad nauseum, but I will curtail them in
the interests of space and simply invoke the testimony of Victor
Marchetti, who was a senior CIA official from 1955 to 1969: “We were
supporting every half-assed dictator, military junta, oligarchy that
existed in the Third World, as long as they promised to somehow
maintain the status quo, which would of course be beneficial to U.S.
geopolitical interests, military interests, big business interests, and other
special interests.”
The record of U.S. foreign policy since WWII is probably the best
measure of its unique contribution to the internationalization of
fascism. Under the banner of democracy and freedom, the United States
has, according to William
Blum:
+ Endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments.
+ Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
+ Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
+ Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
+ Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
The Association for Responsible Dissent, composed of 14 former CIA
officers, calculated that their agency was responsible for killing a
minimum of 6 million people in 3,000 major operations and 10,000 minor
operations between
1947 and 1987. These are direct murders, so the numbers do not account
for premature deaths under the fascist-backed capitalist world system
due to mass incarceration, torture, malnutrition, lack of drinkable
water, exploitation, oppression, social degradation, ecological
illness or curable disease (in 2017, according to the U.N., 6.3
million children and young adolescents died from avoidable causes
linked to the socio-economic and ecological inequalities of the
Capitalocene, which amounts to one child dying every 5 seconds).
To establish itself as the global military hegemon and international
guard dog of capitalism, the U.S. government and National Security
State have relied on the help of the significant number of Nazis and
fascists it integrated into its global network of repression,
including the 1,600 Nazis brought into the U.S. through Operation
Paperclip, the 4,000 or so integrated into the Gehlen organization,
the tens or even hundreds of thousands that were reintegrated into the
‘postwar’—or rather transwar—regimes in fascist countries, the large
number who were given free passage to Empire’s backyard—Latin
America—and elsewhere, as well as the thousands or tens of thousands
integrated into NATO’s secret stay-behind armies. This global network
of seasoned anti-communist assassins has also been used to train
armies of terrorists around the world to participate in dirty wars,
coups d’état, destabilization efforts, sabotage, and terror campaigns.
All of this has been done under the cover of a liberal democracy, and
with the assistance of its powerful culture industries. The true
legacy of WWII, far from being that of a liberal world order that had
defeated fascism, is that of a veritable fascist international
developed under liberal cover in order to try and destroy those who
had actually fought and won the war against fascism: the communists.
Gabriel Rockhill is a Franco-American philosopher, cultural critic and
activist. He the founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and
Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. His books include
Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into
Globalization, Technology, Democracy (2017), Interventions in Contemporary
Thought:
History, Politics, Aesthetics (2016), Radical History & the Politics
of Art
(2014) and Logique de l’histoire (2010). In addition to his scholarly
work, he has been actively engaged in extra-academic activities in the
art and activist worlds, as well as a regular contributor to public
intellectual debate. Follow on twitter: @GabrielRockhill
