“Nothing is less worthy of intellectuals than the wish to be proved correct.”—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1951.
What with the Gestapo tactics of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and his financiers and union-busting supporters, this is a good time to talk about the ideology he and his ilk embrace. I recognize that these days people throw around the word “fascism” as if it were a volleyball on Mass ConfusionBeach. Much as the dominant economic class (and their leisure services at Fox News) exercise their elite freedom in claiming that a form of national socialism took over this country the instant President Obama was elected, the reality is that we have been willfully drifting in that direction for a long time, narcotized and unfeeling as the generation that defeated the Third Reich retires to a world taken over by the political cousins of Adolf Hitler.
If we view World War II as a battle between the prevailing ideologies of democracy and fascism, then there is no shortage of evidence supporting the theory that the Allies lost, the Axis powers won, and that fascism—wearing the rags of democracy—is the dominant economic system in the United States and indeed the world. As editor at large Lewis H. Lapham points out in Harpers: “Now that sixty years have passed since the bomb fell on Hiroshima, it doesn’t take much talent. . . to know that it is fascism. . . that won the heart and mind of America’s ‘Greatest Generation.’” Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, a right-winger about whom no on would ever attach the word “devout” and an economics professor atLoyola University, comes at the problem from a traditional conservative perspective. Funny enough, he agrees with Lapham, although he argues that “economic fascism. . . was adopted in the United States in the 1930s and survives to this day.” Author Naomi Wolf, writing from the left in The Guardian, insists that the fascismization of America was completed under the George W. Bush administration. Somewhere in the intellectualized middle, Dr. Sheldon S. Wolin objects to the term “fascism” as it applies to the current American condition, preferring the less specific phrases “inverted totalitarianism” or “managed democracy.” In his preface, he writes:
Inverted totalitarianism. . . while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.
Regardless of one’s position on the political continuum, overwhelming evidence abounds that the current political, economic and cultural make-up of today’s USA is often fascism disguised as pluralist democracy.
Definitions
Fascism. It’s a lot more fun tossing this word around when nobody demands any clarification. All the same, Columbia University professor C. Wright Mills provided a useful characterization of the term. Although he was writing specifically about the German variety of this pathology, circa 1923-1945, his description remains serviceable.
"The Nazi movement successfully exploits the mass despair, especially that of its lower middle classes, in the economic slump, and brings into closer correspondence the political, military, and economic orders. . . Big business circles are willing to help finance the Nazi Party, which, among other things, promises to smash the labor movement. . . There is a party monopoly of formal communications, including educational institutions. All symbols are recast to reform the basic legitimating of the coordinating society. The principle of absolute and magical leadership (charismatic rule) in a strict hierarchy is widely promulgated, in a social structure that is. . . held together by a network of rackets."
To phrase it somewhat differently, fascism holds that moral conceptions are absurd and, as such, impede the natural course of events. Therefore, nationalism, ethnocentrism, militarism, divine rights and global conquest as an extension of realpolitik dogmatism—while implemented by the domination of the masses through the ideation of Supermen—guide the natural inheritors of human civilization to a series of battles in which the global state apparatus, in conjunction with dependent and unified corporations, subjugate the servile classes of mankind, who ultimately acquiesce in the interests of stability and the presumed harmony that comes from the cemetery.
DiLorenzo describes both the Italian and German varieties of fascism, each possessing four distinct characteristics, and each intended as an indictment of the New Deal, a set of benevolent social programs that scare DiLorenzo the way Jack the Ripper scared prostitutes. In the Italian model, he has written, the state comes before the individual, a central planning board coordinates the economy, government-business partnerships are the industry norm, and government bail-outs of industry indiscretions are standard operating procedure. The German variety is distinguished by vestiges of the welfare state, such as with a social security system, the presence of imminent domain, a government-directed education system, and an assault on private-sector businesses.
For her part, Naomi Wolf sets up “ten easy steps,” the most pertinent of which are to “invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy, set up an internal surveillance system, and control the press.”
Dr. Lawrence Britt, writing in Free Inquiry, defined fourteen characteristics of fascism, including extreme nationalism, unification by enemies, military supremacy, an oligopoly of controlled mass media, a fixation on national security, a bond between religion and government, a bond between government and corporations, and a hatred of the arts.
But let’s go to the big man himself for the solution. Who? The guy who has a brand of wine named after him to this day in Italy. Benito Mussolini answered the question of “What is Fascism” in a pamphlet of that name in 1932.
"Fascism repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism. . . War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it. . . The Fascist. . . conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest. . . Fascism affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind. . . The Fascist state organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual."
Lapham synthesizes the fascist ideology in its current and past form. The truth, he suggests (in the parlance of the Nazi) appears only one time, so it behooves the beholder to grasp it. Only the charismatic leader understands what the people need and any meddling with democracy flies in the face of this. Adhering to dogma is more important than worrying about “false realities” such as scientific method. And in the world of the fascist, dissent is treason. That makes it easy for punks like Scott Walker to call into question the loyalties of the demonstrators in Madison. Of course, this is America. We don’t call dissenters traitors. We hire state senators to call them “slobs,” just as that goose-stepper Nixon called anti-war Vietnam Veterans “bums.”
In his article, one of Lapham’s references is to Italian author and intellectual roustabout Umberto Eco, who wrote a sardonic piece for The New York Review of Books, wherein he discusses the appeal of this ideology. According to Eco, the features of eternal or Ur-fascism are the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, distrust of the intellectual world, an embracing of the idea that disagreement is tantamount to treason, an appeal against intruders, an appeal to a frustrated middle class, obsession with a plot, humiliation at the influence of the enemy, the notion that life is warfare (contempt for the weak), the essential need for everyone to learn to become a hero, love of weaponry with phallic implications, digging the argument that parliamentary governments are no good, and “All the schoolbooks make use of an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
Corporatism. As Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps puts it in the Financial Times, capitalism is a system of free enterprise that embraces and motivates entrepreneurship. Corporatism, on the other hand, is a system in which businesses have to negotiate change with the government and social partners. The social partners and stake holders who are part of the negotiation process are the insiders—those who have the power and influence—established firms and other civil society elites. The arrangement encourages the further marginalization and weakening of those outside the charmed circle of the insiders, unless the government somehow speaks up and asks for them.
Use of the term “corporatism” has both expanded and contracted over the years. In fact, the more the word gets around, the less specific its definition becomes. It may be useful to interpret fascism as one of the ways to arrive at corporatism. Rather than the smashing brutality of Mussolini’s fascism, Hitler’s National Socialism, Spanish Falangism, Portuguese National Syndicalism, the Hungarian Arrow Cross and the Romanian Iron Guard, we can think of corporatism as a transcendental heart and soul transplant where democracy is cast out in favor of decisions by the economic elite. As John Ramelagh would have it:
"The whole arrangement of American power in the world from the nineteenth century was based on commercial concerns and methods of operation. This had givenAmerica a material empire through the ownership of foreign transport systems, oil fields, stocks and shares. It had also given America resources and experience (concentrated in private hands) with the world outside the Americas, used effectively by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, after which American governments were more willing to use their influence and strength all over the world for the first time and to see an ideological implication in the “persecution” of U.S. business interests."
In its simplest form, corporatism grew out of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, an attempt at class collaboration rather than class conflict. It was, in essence, an attempt by the Catholic Church to save capitalism from morphing into socialism. Contemporarily, a corporate state, as NationMaster.com puts it, is marked by:
"The prevalence of very large multinationals that freely move operations around the world in response to corporate, rather than public needs; the push by the corporate world to introduce legislation and treaties which would restrict the abilities of individual nations to restrict corporate activity; and similar measures to allow corporations to sue nations over restrictive policies, such as a nation’s environmental regulations that would restrict corporate activity."
In 1944, the New York Times asked President Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice-President, Henry Wallace, to write an article about the threat of fascism. The American fascist, he said:
"is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. His problem is how best to use the news to deceive the public."
Authoritarian personality. Psychologist Theodor Adorno criticized what he termed the culture industry in post-World War II society. According to Adorno, people were being fed a cheapened culture that not only did not require complex digestion, it actively encouraged nothing more involved than psychological salivation. Rather than encouraging genuine thought, these industries, said Adorno, promoted a form of commodity fetishism wherein interpersonal relations become objectified, meaning that the value of anything is determined by economic factors rather than by subjective pleasure.
Adorno is remembered today for developing the theory of the authoritarian personality. As the head of a research team at the University at Berkeley, he initially sought to examine if certain personality traits predisposed a person to acts of anti-Semitism. To measure this, he developed the F-scale, thirty questions that indicate a person’s degree of authoritarian leanings. This is often mistaken as identifying people who want to give orders. On the contrary, people with these traits want to take orders. Those characteristics are manifested in actions that show a person yearning for stability. These people are extremely intolerant of anything or anyone who challenges their pre-existing worldview. They are superstitious and seek out explanations that support their own absolute views of society. They generalize about all groups of which they are not a part. Their nearly pathological inability to deal with ambiguity is one of the more distinct similarities they share with schizophrenics.
Like Adorno, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich was a member of the Freudian Left—a group that also included Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm. Reich wondered why the German lower middle class would have supported the Nazis. The answer, he concluded, was a combination of authority and rebellion. Leaders such as Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin—and, one could argue, George W. Bush—were rebellious authority figures and as such were responded to with admiration by people craving a strong paternal authority, people whose psychological and physical make-up suggested sexual repressiveness, people who fit Adorno’s typology of the authoritarian personality, and not least of all, those predisposed with reactionary world views. If You would like to take the test online, then click here.
The key element in any act of manipulation or coercion is the perceived authority of those in a presumed position of power over those potentially being controlled. In 1963, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments at Yale devised to test obedience. The subjects of the experiments were told the study related to the effect of aversion on memory. The actual point, however, was to measure the influence of authority in getting people to do things they would not ordinarily do. The test subjects were divided into teachers and learners. The teachers would read a list of words from which the learners were expected to recall a key word. If the learner failed to recall the word, the teacher was instructed to administer one of increasingly high levels of electric shock to the learners, the maximum being 450 volts. Milgram found that sixty-five percent of his teacher subjects were willing to proceed to the maximum voltage level, against the cries of agony from the victim-learners, simply because the authority of the experimenter motivated them to do so. As it turned out, the learners were actually actors and no one was electrocuted, but the test subjects did not know this until after the experiment. As Dr. Milgram described it:
With numbing regularity, good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who in everyday life were responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.
In thinking of recent events (Madison, Columbus, Indianapolis, et cetera), I have come up with what I call The Twelve Features of Modern Fascism. My hope is that these bear no resemblance to an astrology forecast, the kind of writing that can apply to any condition. What I am trying to do is make a useful contribution to the discussion of why people such as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Scott Walker, Sarah Palin and others have their adherents, whereas even thoughtful right wingers such as Michael Steele so often get themselves in trouble with their base. The fit between the features and our contemporary milieu is neither perfect nor exact. However, in many ways, it is far too close for comfort.
1. The state-corporate alliance is paramount. Some balance exists in this relationship, but the alliance is symbiotic: the state protects the wealth for the elite class and the corporations defend the supremacy of the state, evolving to a condition where distinctions between government and big business are blurred, overlapping and occasionally bewildering. The disparity of wealth between the two economic classes widens, causing those who think of themselves as middle class to react in fear and to seek identification with the elites. Supply rather than demand drives the economy, transferring market control to the top producers and away from the consumer class created to feed the suppliers. State power consolidates within the executive branch in a mutually beneficial yet mutually suspicious alliance with multinationals.
2. Internal and external enemies are manufactured. Adversaries are identified to bond the masses with the state-corporate alliance as well as to create a perceived need for military expenditures. Attacks are provoked to insure fierce nationalism as a bi-product of hatred of enemies. Think of it as Fox-Logic. Here’s an example of how it works. Start with one lie or paranoid delusion and follow it up with irrational conclusions that have a sort of populist glow. The President is a secret Muslim. All Muslims are Arabs. Arabs attacked us on 9.11. Therefore, the President of the United States is a terrorist. I must take back my country by voting for someone who is in favor of everything that will hurt me, a small sacrifice to make for the good of my country. Fun, huh? You can try this at home.
3. Symbols of nationalism and religious superiority are internalized and promoted. Flags, signs, lapel pins, door mats, mandalas, crosses, stars, bumper stickers and clothing are merchandised with totemic solemnity as a means of nationalistic identification and as a hedge against outside aggression. Remember, the more flag decals on the outside of your SUV, the less damage the terrorists are allowed to do to you. It’s a rule.
4. A vast intelligence network enforces conformity. I know, I know. That word “vast” just makes everyone assume some type of psychotic conspiracy theory. Well, the only thing more psychotic than the theory is the network of people who are involved in discrediting it. Given the nature of this responsibility, the network comes to view itself as a policy-making enterprise on an equal footing with the state-corporate alliance. Use of this mammoth apparatus is an accountability shared between the network’s director and the government leader. Increasingly, one of this agency’s functions is to demonstrate through the selective release of information that if other nations or political parties adopt forms of government contrary to those of the fascist state, those nations may forfeit their rights to self-determination.
5. The oligopolic mass media mediates between the corporate-state and the populace. That means this blog will likely not be getting linked to CNN. What it also means is that political and socioeconomic options are limited to those conveyed by the mass media. Operating as a consolidated sub-branch of government, the press merges news with entertainment, trivializing both in the process. There is no filtering of fabrications that service the state, which, if I’m right about this, means that Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are about all that separates us from the brownshirts. Panics are initiated and frequent, numbing the public. The press is big business and protects itself accordingly, even allowing for “safety valves,” such as MSNBC.
6. Intellectuals and academics are either discredited or co-opted in favor of Charlie Sheen and Lindsey Lohan, religious organizations and superstition. Science and art become suspect and are viewed as potentially dangerous, which is why institutions such as NPR are always under threat of being defunded. Intellectual options are narrow and few. Freedomfrom religion is tantamount to godlessness. Just ask Reverend Moon.
7. The criminal justice system is crowded with prisoners, partly in order to reduce unemployment (rather than to reduce crime) and partly to contain dissent. Regardless of the actual crime rate, obsession with criminality leads to a support for various forms of detention and incarceration. Fear of terrorists and traitors (invisible, yet somehow, lurking everywhere) is used to justify vicious cruelty and torture, news of which is selectively disseminated by the media to inform the world population of the consequences of dissent. Language is limited, restricted, criminalized, and often void of reason.
8. The labor movement becomes anemic. This is due to a combination of strike-breaking maneuvers, increased spending opportunities, anti-labor legislation, an emphasis on trade unionism (rather than the general strike), and a managed unemployment rate. Key economic indicators exclude the working class majority. The weak are ridiculed and blamed for their own plight.
9. A few vestiges of populism and the welfare state remain. Regulations on business exist only to restrict competition just as social programs are grudgingly funded only to privatize service agencies rather than to benevolent non-profits, serendipitously curtailing the possible appeal of socialism. The state-global economy resembles a Ponzi scheme that would even embarrass Bernie Madoff.
10. The corporate-state is always warring or preparing for war, enhancing the need for secrecy, national security, and the repression of civil rights. A strong military presence reinforces the idea of crisis, which legitimates the need for obedience. The state creates the need for war and feeds spending contracts to select industrials.
11. Elections fall under the control of corporations and are validated by the judiciary rather than by the electorate. Voting tabulation is manipulated. Choices are few and often without distinction. Electioneering becomes an industry.
12. The distinctive feature of the culture is commodity fetishism. Value is determined by cost to the extreme that the slavery of debt is welcomed by the majority. Humans objectify one another. Fashion is substance. Perception is reality. Violence is a product. Technology alters creativity, rendering both dispensable. Consumption frustrates human needs and is “cured” by additional consumption.
When right wing extremists in America beg their followers to help them take back America, what they mean is they want to take it away from the people they thought their ancestors had defeated centuries ago.
Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean in October 1492, launching a process of systematic theft and slavery upon the indigenous population, resulting in liberty for the wealthy and equality for the surviving poor. Immediately before Columbus invaded Haiti, eight million Indians thought of the Caribbean as home. By 1516, only twelve thousand could make that claim. And by 1555 all of them had been removed toSpain or exterminated. As a repository of invading hordes, the New World absorbed, converted and destroyed pre-existing cultures to coincide with the goals of those with the power to accomplish them. This syncretism, which historian James Loewen defines as the merging of Native and European cultures, allowed the European immigrants to learn about liberty, democracy, and meritocracy while conquering, enslaving and rubbing out those same Natives. Neither Machiavelli nor Castillione would list gratitude as a necessary skill.
War against the Indians was a long, arduous and genocidal process, but one for which the Europeans were happy to adapt. Sociopathy came to the New Old World on ships. The Pilgrims neglected to check their weapons at the dock. The country resembled Eden, so it had to be corrupted. The snake had arrived.
The first war enacted by the Europeans against the Indians happened in what is now New Mexico in 1599. A Spanish invasion leader enforced discipline upon the local villagers, made slaves of all women and children, and chopped off one foot of all men over the age of twenty-five. After all, the Spanish reasoned, the Indians looked different, spoke a language, and did not recognize Jesus Christ as their Lord and personal savior.
As Jensen writes in Army Surveillance in America:
"After the Spaniards’ brutal suppression of Acoma Pueblo resistance, the Pueblo were resettled into controlled communities as a captive labor source for the Spanish. Yet the Pueblo never assimilated to the level desired by their Spanish conquerors, who were caught by surprise with the successful Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that was the greatest setback the Natives ever inflicted on European expansion in North America. The Spanish reconquered New Mexico eleven years later."
New England enjoyed its share of massacre and savagery. In 1619, diseases carried by Europeans caused a massive epidemic, killing ninety percent of the native population along the coast of New England. This was at first seen by the Pilgrims as Providence, but soon enough the settlers offered the Natives free blankets crawling with smallpox. God helps those who help themselves.
In a series of battles called the Pequot War of 1636-37, America colonists waged attacks that would resemble the slaughter at My Lai 4 three hundred years later. The preamble to the war began in 1633. When the English wanted to settle in what is now Connecticut, the Pequots welcomed them. However, the English Puritan settlements began expanding into the Connecticut River Valley to accommodate the steady flood of new immigrants from England. In an alliance with a rival tribe, the British invaders, led by William Bradford, burned down the Pequot village, killing more than four hundred people. For the first time, Native tribes experienced war targeted at civilians. A.A. Cave writs in The Pequot War: “The Puritans made their victory over the Pequots a significant factor in the formulation of Euro-American policy over the next three centuries. Not only did the Natives learn there was no limit to European cruelty, the Puritans learned they had the power to dominate the indigenous population.” It was as if the New Eden were infested with weeds, weeds that needed to be killed at the roots. In one early example of linguistic genocide, the Puritans made it illegal to use the word “Pequot.”
Bust of Metacom
The most devastating Indian war in the history of New England ran throughout 1675-76, and was named for the Wampanoag leader Metacom. The war ended with the near-complete destruction of the Wampanoag people—only four hundred survived—and the end of Native American power inNew England.
The government that was fast becoming the United Statesmay have been seeking independence, but the Native Americans would pay for that freedom with their lives. The colonies responded to the Proclamation of 1763—which forbade expansion west of the Appalachian Mountains—by being more determined than ever to wipe out the Natives.
The cause of the War of 1812, for example, was an attempt by the British to prevent the colonists from taking over British possessions in Canada. One result of this war was that the United States agreed to stay out of the Great White North. Another was that the British promised to pull out of their alliances with Native American, thereby insuring the eventual subjugation and extermination of those indigenous millions. And yet another result was a linguistic shift in the meaning of the word “American.” Forever more would it designate the European invaders. White supremacy thus became not only the law, but also an ethical mandate. If the past—as I believe—really is contained in the present, then a definite pattern was established: vini, vidi, vici.
As civil rights attorney William Kunstler relates in his autobiography, My Life as a Radical Lawyer, “On December 29, 1890, three hundred Minnecojou Lakota were destroyed at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota.” Kunstler quotes Black Elk, a survivor of the slaughter:
"I did not know then how much was ended. I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the cracked gulch. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud. A people’s dream died there."
A young Black Elk
With this defeat, the Indian struggle against the European invaders was over. There would be a few militant skirmishes over the next decades, but as far as collective resistance,Wounded Knee was the end. A more passive though no less real form of genocide came to the forefront. It was extermination through condescension and cooptation, a movement to use reservations as repositories for those with the income to feed their own gambling addictions. It is somehow ironic, nevertheless, to see American Indians profiting from the vices of the invaders’ descendants.
The history of racism in the United States emerged as Europeans took land from Indians and enslaved captured Africans to make a profit off that land. This was not, as Loewen points out, merely the enslavement of a less powerful group by a stronger one. This was one race of people ruling another. Psychologically, the way to resolve this barbaric process with the idea that white Americans were good people was for those whites to conclude that African-Americans were inferior. This process is called resolving cognitive dissonance. As Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human, “God made forgetfulness the guard at the threshold of human dignity.”
It remains an image that is difficult to maintain. The South, in the form of the Confederacy, used its resources (climate, soil, moral flexibility) to grow a ruling class whose economy prospered from a free source of labor. Granted, one had to buy the slaves, house them, feed them, separate the families, prevent education and administer the occasional savage beatings, but the emergence of the plantations showed gratitude to God for having provided such abundance, so the effort was only His due. In turn, some of the slaves made for good company, as the children of Thomas Jefferson could attest. As much as one hundred years after the liberation of the South, schools on both sides of the Mason-Dixon taught that one reason for the Civil War was Northern jealousy. Jesus wept.
It is not possible to point to one representative historical incident to illuminate the politics of slavery and of the Civil War for Emancipation. But if such were possible, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 would be that operant incident. The white European pioneers continued to immigrate and many of these found the East Coast too crowded and the Midwest too untamed, eventually concluding that the area that would become Kansas and Nebraska offered desirable opportunities. There were only two problems with their plan to move in. One, Native Americans occupied theKansas Territory, and, two, both areas were part of theLouisiana Purchase which, under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, meant that slavery was forbidden in these territories.
The issue of the Natives was resolved by the U.S. military driving the indigenous either into compressed reservations or across the border into Indian Territory (Oklahoma). As to the issue of freedom, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas proposed that the Missouri Compromise be repealed. And so it was.
Interestingly, passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act led to the formation of the Republican Party. A group calling itself the Free Soil Party objected to the expansion of slavery due to their desire to avoid strengthening the economic boost that slavery provided the South. The Free Soilers ran Martin Van Buren for President in 1848 and lost badly. They ran John Hale in 1852 and did even worse. Two years later, Whigs from the North banded with the Free Soil Party and created the Republican Party. Their candidate for President in 1860 was Abraham Lincoln.
Once the South seceded and the Civil War began, Radical Republicans insisted on emancipation and civil rights for black people. Some advocated this because they believed in equality; others, to form a strong party base in the South.
The Civil War victory for the North would not be complete with the mere defeat of the Confederate forces. On the contrary, Southern behavior would have to change. To affect this, the United States government initiated Reconstruction, an attempt to bring the vanquished South back into the Unionby a series of behavioral modifications. As Jessica McElrath writes in her 2008 overview of the Reconstruction Era:
"The Freedman’s Bureau’s purpose was to assist freed slaves with food, medical care, resettlement, and it was charged with establishing schools. It was also responsible for dispersing land according to General Sherman’s Special Field Order Number 15, which gave freed slaves 400,000 acres of abandoned rice land onGeorgia’s Sea Islands and on the coast of South Carolina."
James City: Home of free slaves
After John Wilkes Booth assassinated president Lincoln, the new Commander-in-Chief, Andrew Johnson, gave this 400,000 acres back to the plantation owners, many of whom set up their own company towns and used the new freed Africans as sharecroppers.
Despite this setback, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the 1866 Civil Rights Act, giving African Americans full citizenship. The following year, Congress enacted theSupplementary Reconstruction Act, which made the government’s intentions quite clear. The former Confederacy found its rebel self divided into five military districts, each under the authority of a Union General. As a result, black delegates became an ordinary sight at state conventions. In the fall of 1867, black men throughout the South showed up at the polls where they cast their ballots. This change in power helped lead to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by six Confederate states and their restoration into the Union.
These days were hardly idyllic for black people in the South. Klan activity was briefly rampant. But Reconstruction did bring a semblance of democracy to an oppressed minority. However, the beginning of the end of Reconstruction came with the Presidential election of 1876. In this election, Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote. The Electoral College vote provided a slight edge for Republican Rutherford Hayes. A compromise of sorts was reached: Hayes would be President and Union troops would withdraw from the South. With this, Reconstruction ended.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The ascension of the new country wasted little time in curtailing the very freedoms it had promised. The stitching ofAmerica’s first flag had not yet relaxed when in 1798, in response to fears that the United States might go to war against France, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Act tripled the waiting period for naturalization, allowing the government to detain visitors from other nations and by granting the president the authority to expel any alien he considered dangerous. The Sedition Laws, on the other hand, restricted and curtailed what Congress saw as the potential excesses of a free press. It became illegal in theUnited States to publish false or malicious writings against the government and to incite opposition to any act of Congress or of the President. It was not until the arrest of Ben Franklin’s grandson that the Alien and Sedition Laws were rescinded.
The years of retreat and regression, 1919 – 1933, witnessed class-based division within the United States that manifested in the most essential breeding grounds for fascism: a loss of personal morale, severe economic disparity, residual nationalism, and a pervasive disenchantment with the spirit of reform.
War, in common with imperialism and racism, can be exhausting. The sense of dread that accompanied the paranoia inherent in these three processes leftAmerica and much of the world tired and cynical. Laws had been applied discriminately, undercutting their own authority. False and bourgeois values grew in their appeal: organized sports, religion, drinking, musical entertainment and Ku Klux Klan rallies became wildly popular. People opposed to such falsity did not disappear. However, their earlier radicalism cooled to a more comfortable liberalism. The new and few reformers saw the system as sound, if only in need of a bit of bandaging here and there.
Reform itself had its place. There had been, certainly, the Populist Movement of the earl 1890s, yielding a political organization called the Populist Party, formed by better than 1,500 delegates of the Farmers Alliance, the Knights of Labor, and a few smaller groups. These folks demanded the nationalization of railroads, telegraphs and telephones, the implementation of a graduated income tax, an eight hour work day, restriction on immigration, and the popular election of United StatesSenators.
From the beginning of the twentieth century until the rise of Franklin Roosevelt as President, a reform movement in the United States attempted to steer public policy to the left. The William Jennings Bryan wing of Progressivism feared largeness in all forms, but feared big government more than it did large industries. Other memorable progressives were the flock fluttering around Herbert Croly, the leading publicist of Theodore Roosevelt’s wing of Progressives, urged the United States to adopt a strong centralized government that would be the people’s instrument for the creation of a modern society. According to this view, the citizenry would morally permit an expansionist proclivity that would sustain a high standard of living for a few hundred people in exchange for a strong and centralized federal government that would protect consumers by regulating giant corporations, using taxation as a means of redistributing wealth, elevating labor unions to the status of organized industry, encapsulate the modern welfare state, and encourage a faith in national leadership so that the overthrow of the government would feel unattractive.
It was not unattractive to everyone. It is reasonable, for example, to call Lincoln Steffens a radical journalist. As editor of McClure’s Magazine, he developed a style of investigation and reportage called muckraking, where the search for truth trumps attempts at objectivity. Recognizing that the rich and powerful often control access to the truth, Steffens went after state and local politicians with an owl-like intensity. Enchanted by the Soviet Revolution of 1917, he soon turned to distrust Russia because of the openly totalitarian nature of Stalinism.
Another notable muckraker was George Seldes, who, despite his distain for much of his own profession, lived to the age of 104. In the early 1920s, he went to Italy for the Chicago Tribune and reported that Mussolini had instigated the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, head of the Italian Socialist Party. Releasing that information got Seldes deported and he ultimately resigned from the newspaper. Working as a freelancer from this point on, he published books about the Catholic Church, the arms industry, Mussolini, the Spanish Civil War, the government’s attack on the left, the power elite, and the corruption of the U.S.media.
Part of the public disenchantment with the reform movement came about as a consequence of the banning of alcohol. On midnight of January 16, 1920, Prohibition became the law, which said that it was henceforth illegal to manufacture, sell or transport alcohol into or out of the United States. As Boardman wrote in America and the Jazz Age:
War, in common with imperialism and racism, can be exhausting. The sense of dread that accompanied the paranoia inherent in these three processes leftAmerica and much of the world tired and cynical. Laws had been applied discriminately, undercutting their own authority. False and bourgeois values grew in their appeal: organized sports, religion, drinking, musical entertainment and Ku Klux Klan rallies became wildly popular. People opposed to such falsity did not disappear. However, their earlier radicalism cooled to a more comfortable liberalism. The new and few reformers saw the system as sound, if only in need of a bit of bandaging here and there.
Reform itself had its place. There had been, certainly, the Populist Movement of the earl 1890s, yielding a political organization called the Populist Party, formed by better than 1,500 delegates of the Farmers Alliance, the Knights of Labor, and a few smaller groups. These folks demanded the nationalization of railroads, telegraphs and telephones, the implementation of a graduated income tax, an eight hour work day, restriction on immigration, and the popular election of United StatesSenators.
From the beginning of the twentieth century until the rise of Franklin Roosevelt as President, a reform movement in the United States attempted to steer public policy to the left. The William Jennings Bryan wing of Progressivism feared largeness in all forms, but feared big government more than it did large industries. Other memorable progressives were the flock fluttering around Herbert Croly, the leading publicist of Theodore Roosevelt’s wing of Progressives, urged the United States to adopt a strong centralized government that would be the people’s instrument for the creation of a modern society. According to this view, the citizenry would morally permit an expansionist proclivity that would sustain a high standard of living for a few hundred people in exchange for a strong and centralized federal government that would protect consumers by regulating giant corporations, using taxation as a means of redistributing wealth, elevating labor unions to the status of organized industry, encapsulate the modern welfare state, and encourage a faith in national leadership so that the overthrow of the government would feel unattractive.
It was not unattractive to everyone. It is reasonable, for example, to call Lincoln Steffens a radical journalist. As editor of McClure’s Magazine, he developed a style of investigation and reportage called muckraking, where the search for truth trumps attempts at objectivity. Recognizing that the rich and powerful often control access to the truth, Steffens went after state and local politicians with an owl-like intensity. Enchanted by the Soviet Revolution of 1917, he soon turned to distrust Russia because of the openly totalitarian nature of Stalinism.
Another notable muckraker was George Seldes, who, despite his distain for much of his own profession, lived to the age of 104. In the early 1920s, he went to Italy for the Chicago Tribune and reported that Mussolini had instigated the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, head of the Italian Socialist Party. Releasing that information got Seldes deported and he ultimately resigned from the newspaper. Working as a freelancer from this point on, he published books about the Catholic Church, the arms industry, Mussolini, the Spanish Civil War, the government’s attack on the left, the power elite, and the corruption of the U.S.media.
Part of the public disenchantment with the reform movement came about as a consequence of the banning of alcohol. On midnight of January 16, 1920, Prohibition became the law, which said that it was henceforth illegal to manufacture, sell or transport alcohol into or out of the United States. As Boardman wrote in America and the Jazz Age:
Men would often spend their money on alcohol, leaving women with no money to provide for their children. Factory owners also supported temperance because of the new work habits that were required of industrial workers—early mornings and long nights. Progressive reformers saw Prohibition as a continuation in the process to improve society in general.
A major impact of this Constitutional Amendment was in maneuvering law enforcement authorities from a local to a federal level. A serendipitous consequence was that the public lost faith and interest in the government’s ability to reform. And without Prohibition, organized criminality could never have consolidated and gained acceptance as a useful institution.
Prohibition could not have become acceptable in the United States had it not been for a pervasive spirit of reform advocated for myriad reasons by various wings of the Progressive Party. John Dewey (progressive education), Thorstein Veblen (conspicuous consumption), Edmund Wilson (conspicuous literatum), and others in the movement became intrigued by the Russian Revolution. But with the crash of the stock market on October 24, 1929, a certain urgency was discernible in the tone of the former reformers. The idea of changing the system from within yielded to the heretofore only marginally palpable concept that there might be something inherently less than divine about the Euro-American economic system.
There are as many explanations for what happened to the United States and world economies during what came to be known as the Great Depression as there are historians and economists willing to write about it. Two considerably different points of view may suffice to illuminate what conventional and radical views have in common and where they diverge. In his ambitious three volume work, The Oxford History of the American People, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote:
"Whilst the boom of 1926-29 made the stock market crash inevitable, there was nothing inevitable about the Great Depression that followed. The national economy was honeycombed with weakness, giving Coolidge prosperity a fine appearance over a rotten foundation. Leaders in business, finance, politics, and the universities, imbued with laissez-faire doctrine and overrating the importance of maintaining public confidence, refrained from making candid statements or taking steps to curb or cure the abuses."
A less clinical and more confrontational view comes from Howard Zinn, who wrote in A People’s History of the United States:
"The stock market crash of 1929, which marked the beginning of the Great Depression, came directly from wild speculation which collapsed and brought the whole economy down with it. John Kenneth Galbraith points to the very unhealthy corporate and banking structures, an unsound foreign trade, much economic misinformation, and bad distribution of income."
The optimistic liberals did not convert without reluctance. Most of them held out hope that recovery would be automatic, swift and self-adjusting. After all, President Herbert Hoover had talked the industrialists into pledging to stabilize prices and wages. And yet, in the parts of America unknown to both theintelligentsia and the corporatistas, people had stopped buying what they did not desperately need. Since companies could not sell what they had on hand—much less the new products—factories went on half shifts and actively laid off employees. Perhaps most frightful to the literary community was the personal effect of early Broadway closings, movies that couldn’t find an audience, and publishers that did not pay huge advances anymore. It was a shame about Joe and Mabel losing the farm and all, but where the hell were the autograph hounds?
Supply-side economics (then as now) enabled the owners and producers to control the economic forces by encouraging investors to put their money in production, regardless of the public’s need for the merchandise. To incentify consumption, an army of advertisers emerged, using advances in the social sciences to manipulate human behavior, creating and frustrating needs at the same time. Because the resulting economic structure was rampant consumerism constructed upon a foundation of speculative investments, all that was required for collapse was a weakening of the money supply: investors distrusted one another and pulled back, causing prices to soar. The resulting inflation frightened consumers into withdrawal. Surpluses could not be divested. Unemployment rose. Despair loomed. People turned to the lawless government for redress and instead spotted a charismatic leader on the outside of the mainstream who told the people that their problems were not their own fault. It was the treachery of others who brought the system down, a subtle truth favored by megalomaniacs. The reformers, the leader said, were effete snobs, incapable of comprehending the essentiality of pure commitment. War, he said, was the answer, for only hate could conquer fear. You say Limbaugh, Palin, or Gingrich, I say Hitler.
Edmund Wilson offered his mea culpa in the pages of the New Republic’s issue of late January 1931. “What we have lost,” he wrote, “is our conviction of the value of what we were doing. Moneymaking is not enough to satisfy humanity. Neither is a social system where everyone is out for himself, with no purpose and little common culture to give life stability and sense.” Wilson exhorted his colleagues in the literary community to get on board. “We have always talked about the desirability of a planned society. . . But if this means anything, does it not mean socialism? And should we not do well to make this perfectly plain?” Or as Philip Slater said in The Pursuit of Loneliness, “When we use money as an inducement, people often forget what they wanted it for and it becomes an instrument of personal or collective narcissism.” Sigmund Freud made a similar argument in Civilization and its Discontents: “It is impossible to escape the impression that people use false standards of measurement—they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and yet they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
If Wilson had not made clear his conversion to Marxism, then other writers such as Michael Gold, John Chamberlain and Lincoln Steffens certainly did. After all, the Soviet experiment and the American quandary did have much in common. Both countries valued mass production, both worshipped machines, both idolized technology, both equated their own Manifest Destiny with a metaphysical virility, and both valued economic efficiency regardless of the whims of the individual. The advantage to American intellectuals in supporting the writings of Marx and Lenin was that it was safer to advocate the Russian Revolution than to risk something similar at home.
How bad were the Depression years? Three measurements may illuminate, however coldly. In 1928, America’s Gross National Product was $100 billion. By 1933 it had fallen to $55 billion. The amount of consumer goods bought in 1928 was $80. By 1933 the expenditure had dropped to $45 billion. And the number of unemployed rose from 2.6 million in 1929 to 11 million in 1935. Many people were hungry and many others feared they soon would be. In answer to the time-honored question “War: What is it good for?” the unspoken response was a sense of duty, a commitment, a job, and a usually full stomach. The other answer was production, which in those days translated into local employment. Discriminating against the other guy was a pleasant diversion, but there was no money in it, at least not in America. The Europeans, from whence so many Americans came, discovered how to bring the horror altogether.
But in America, where capitalists were too contrary to endorse cooperation, even when it stood to benefit them, someone and something needed to control the business of business. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the someone and the something was the New Deal. The 1932 presidential election was a fait accompli or the Democratic Party. Hoover had given the impression of being devoutly inept. The liberals sided with socialist Norman Thomas, the radicals preferred William Foster and the American Communist Party, and the victor was FDR.
Some have said this planned economy sounded like what had been happening in Europe. In a narrow sense, that was correct, except that the New Deal sought to save capitalism rather than to dismantle it. During the first one hundred days of his first term,Roosevelt bailed out the farms, accepted a social responsibility to aid the unemployed, pledged to save homes from foreclosure, guaranteed small bank deposits, and even imposed regulation on Wall Street. Even more exciting was the short-lived National Recovery Act which implemented and enforced fair labor practices designed to force industry into becoming more profitable.
As mentioned, there were then and continue to be today those who maintain that the New Deal was fascistic. And although this view is incorrect, what is true is that the New Deal was a planned economy that discouraged by its very existence both reactionary and radical responses to economic conditions in the United States. Even David Boaz of the far right Cato Institute makes concessions to the New Dealers, although part of his interpretation of events is at odds with the facts. He wrote: “America. . . did not become a one-party state; it had no secret police; the Constitution remained in effect; and there were no concentration camps.” His concessions are flawed. Democrats controlled the executive branch of government for twenty years. The FBI had undercover agents in every major city. FDR tried (and failed) to add members and numbers to the Supreme Court. And Japanese-American internment camps existed throughoutCalifornia.
Boaz tries again:
"Hitler and Roosevelt were both charismatic leaders who held the masses in their sway—and without this sort of leadership, neither National Socialism nor the New Deal would have been possible. This plebiscitary style established a direct connection between the leader and the masses."
Roosevelt, the historical record reveals, never stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and screamed amid orgasmic cheers from the plebiscite that the United States was destined to reveal its true superiority to the rest of the cowering planet, although he did state with quiet pride that: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any controlling private power.”
To their credit, the FDR folks had no more than a passing interest in stabilizing the economy through imperialism, something that could not have been said for the leader of the Third Reich. Just as the Nazis looked to Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSRbecause of the imbalance of power and their proximity, so too might the United States have looked to Cuba, Haiti and Central America. Of course, from both ideological and economic vantages, there was no need to invade because U.S.-friendly dictators already controlled four of Central America’s seven countries. There was, therefore, no impetus for Roosevelt to meddle in any of the few stable economies in theWestern Hemisphere.
What FDR did accomplish was to stave off revolutionary spirit at home. By providing people with economic access to the government (that is, by creating an approximate welfare state), Roosevelt re-grew and strengthened the demand-side of the commercial equation, putting a sense of purpose into the work programs, that purpose unifying many once despondent people who became more comfortable with the idea of spending money. Such recovery is slow and painful, however, so government, industry and even the “common man” kept an eye peeled for war. History whispered that such was only a matter of time.
Sherwood Anderson
Prohibition could not have become acceptable in the United States had it not been for a pervasive spirit of reform advocated for myriad reasons by various wings of the Progressive Party. John Dewey (progressive education), Thorstein Veblen (conspicuous consumption), Edmund Wilson (conspicuous literatum), and others in the movement became intrigued by the Russian Revolution. But with the crash of the stock market on October 24, 1929, a certain urgency was discernible in the tone of the former reformers. The idea of changing the system from within yielded to the heretofore only marginally palpable concept that there might be something inherently less than divine about the Euro-American economic system.
There are as many explanations for what happened to the United States and world economies during what came to be known as the Great Depression as there are historians and economists willing to write about it. Two considerably different points of view may suffice to illuminate what conventional and radical views have in common and where they diverge. In his ambitious three volume work, The Oxford History of the American People, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote:
"Whilst the boom of 1926-29 made the stock market crash inevitable, there was nothing inevitable about the Great Depression that followed. The national economy was honeycombed with weakness, giving Coolidge prosperity a fine appearance over a rotten foundation. Leaders in business, finance, politics, and the universities, imbued with laissez-faire doctrine and overrating the importance of maintaining public confidence, refrained from making candid statements or taking steps to curb or cure the abuses."
A less clinical and more confrontational view comes from Howard Zinn, who wrote in A People’s History of the United States:
"The stock market crash of 1929, which marked the beginning of the Great Depression, came directly from wild speculation which collapsed and brought the whole economy down with it. John Kenneth Galbraith points to the very unhealthy corporate and banking structures, an unsound foreign trade, much economic misinformation, and bad distribution of income."
The optimistic liberals did not convert without reluctance. Most of them held out hope that recovery would be automatic, swift and self-adjusting. After all, President Herbert Hoover had talked the industrialists into pledging to stabilize prices and wages. And yet, in the parts of America unknown to both theintelligentsia and the corporatistas, people had stopped buying what they did not desperately need. Since companies could not sell what they had on hand—much less the new products—factories went on half shifts and actively laid off employees. Perhaps most frightful to the literary community was the personal effect of early Broadway closings, movies that couldn’t find an audience, and publishers that did not pay huge advances anymore. It was a shame about Joe and Mabel losing the farm and all, but where the hell were the autograph hounds?
Supply-side economics (then as now) enabled the owners and producers to control the economic forces by encouraging investors to put their money in production, regardless of the public’s need for the merchandise. To incentify consumption, an army of advertisers emerged, using advances in the social sciences to manipulate human behavior, creating and frustrating needs at the same time. Because the resulting economic structure was rampant consumerism constructed upon a foundation of speculative investments, all that was required for collapse was a weakening of the money supply: investors distrusted one another and pulled back, causing prices to soar. The resulting inflation frightened consumers into withdrawal. Surpluses could not be divested. Unemployment rose. Despair loomed. People turned to the lawless government for redress and instead spotted a charismatic leader on the outside of the mainstream who told the people that their problems were not their own fault. It was the treachery of others who brought the system down, a subtle truth favored by megalomaniacs. The reformers, the leader said, were effete snobs, incapable of comprehending the essentiality of pure commitment. War, he said, was the answer, for only hate could conquer fear. You say Limbaugh, Palin, or Gingrich, I say Hitler.
Edmund Wilson offered his mea culpa in the pages of the New Republic’s issue of late January 1931. “What we have lost,” he wrote, “is our conviction of the value of what we were doing. Moneymaking is not enough to satisfy humanity. Neither is a social system where everyone is out for himself, with no purpose and little common culture to give life stability and sense.” Wilson exhorted his colleagues in the literary community to get on board. “We have always talked about the desirability of a planned society. . . But if this means anything, does it not mean socialism? And should we not do well to make this perfectly plain?” Or as Philip Slater said in The Pursuit of Loneliness, “When we use money as an inducement, people often forget what they wanted it for and it becomes an instrument of personal or collective narcissism.” Sigmund Freud made a similar argument in Civilization and its Discontents: “It is impossible to escape the impression that people use false standards of measurement—they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and yet they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
If Wilson had not made clear his conversion to Marxism, then other writers such as Michael Gold, John Chamberlain and Lincoln Steffens certainly did. After all, the Soviet experiment and the American quandary did have much in common. Both countries valued mass production, both worshipped machines, both idolized technology, both equated their own Manifest Destiny with a metaphysical virility, and both valued economic efficiency regardless of the whims of the individual. The advantage to American intellectuals in supporting the writings of Marx and Lenin was that it was safer to advocate the Russian Revolution than to risk something similar at home.
How bad were the Depression years? Three measurements may illuminate, however coldly. In 1928, America’s Gross National Product was $100 billion. By 1933 it had fallen to $55 billion. The amount of consumer goods bought in 1928 was $80. By 1933 the expenditure had dropped to $45 billion. And the number of unemployed rose from 2.6 million in 1929 to 11 million in 1935. Many people were hungry and many others feared they soon would be. In answer to the time-honored question “War: What is it good for?” the unspoken response was a sense of duty, a commitment, a job, and a usually full stomach. The other answer was production, which in those days translated into local employment. Discriminating against the other guy was a pleasant diversion, but there was no money in it, at least not in America. The Europeans, from whence so many Americans came, discovered how to bring the horror altogether.
But in America, where capitalists were too contrary to endorse cooperation, even when it stood to benefit them, someone and something needed to control the business of business. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the someone and the something was the New Deal. The 1932 presidential election was a fait accompli or the Democratic Party. Hoover had given the impression of being devoutly inept. The liberals sided with socialist Norman Thomas, the radicals preferred William Foster and the American Communist Party, and the victor was FDR.
Some have said this planned economy sounded like what had been happening in Europe. In a narrow sense, that was correct, except that the New Deal sought to save capitalism rather than to dismantle it. During the first one hundred days of his first term,Roosevelt bailed out the farms, accepted a social responsibility to aid the unemployed, pledged to save homes from foreclosure, guaranteed small bank deposits, and even imposed regulation on Wall Street. Even more exciting was the short-lived National Recovery Act which implemented and enforced fair labor practices designed to force industry into becoming more profitable.
As mentioned, there were then and continue to be today those who maintain that the New Deal was fascistic. And although this view is incorrect, what is true is that the New Deal was a planned economy that discouraged by its very existence both reactionary and radical responses to economic conditions in the United States. Even David Boaz of the far right Cato Institute makes concessions to the New Dealers, although part of his interpretation of events is at odds with the facts. He wrote: “America. . . did not become a one-party state; it had no secret police; the Constitution remained in effect; and there were no concentration camps.” His concessions are flawed. Democrats controlled the executive branch of government for twenty years. The FBI had undercover agents in every major city. FDR tried (and failed) to add members and numbers to the Supreme Court. And Japanese-American internment camps existed throughoutCalifornia.
Boaz tries again:
"Hitler and Roosevelt were both charismatic leaders who held the masses in their sway—and without this sort of leadership, neither National Socialism nor the New Deal would have been possible. This plebiscitary style established a direct connection between the leader and the masses."
Roosevelt, the historical record reveals, never stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and screamed amid orgasmic cheers from the plebiscite that the United States was destined to reveal its true superiority to the rest of the cowering planet, although he did state with quiet pride that: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any controlling private power.”
To their credit, the FDR folks had no more than a passing interest in stabilizing the economy through imperialism, something that could not have been said for the leader of the Third Reich. Just as the Nazis looked to Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSRbecause of the imbalance of power and their proximity, so too might the United States have looked to Cuba, Haiti and Central America. Of course, from both ideological and economic vantages, there was no need to invade because U.S.-friendly dictators already controlled four of Central America’s seven countries. There was, therefore, no impetus for Roosevelt to meddle in any of the few stable economies in theWestern Hemisphere.
What FDR did accomplish was to stave off revolutionary spirit at home. By providing people with economic access to the government (that is, by creating an approximate welfare state), Roosevelt re-grew and strengthened the demand-side of the commercial equation, putting a sense of purpose into the work programs, that purpose unifying many once despondent people who became more comfortable with the idea of spending money. Such recovery is slow and painful, however, so government, industry and even the “common man” kept an eye peeled for war. History whispered that such was only a matter of time.
Sherwood Anderson
The literary community did not remain passive during the Great Depression. Edmund Wilson, Sherwood Anderson and James Rorty were among the writers who used the impoverishment of America as an opportunity to explore the documentary as art. Since thy all chose to report without comment, their only artistic concerns were their fascination with the subject matter and the editing process. People directly affected by hard times were the subject matter and editing was accomplished with a blade that reflected dust swimming in the sweat-soaked lines of rugged and tired faces. Wilson wrote Travels in Two Democracies (1936), Anderson wrote Puzzled America (1935), and Rorty wrote Where Life is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey. These three men went as far as reportage could go in illustrating what rural conditions were like. But it was Rorty who concluded that democracy could not be rehabilitated.
When social events cast the inspiration of a work of art such as a novel, the art’s value is to some degree in balance with the work’s ability to help the audience reinterpret these influential events. With varying degrees of success, several popular writers wrote novels inspired by the Depression, which in turn gave their readers something to do when they were not out looking for food. Erskine Caldwell’s smash Tobacco Road (1932) was the weakest of the lot. Better was the first book in James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan (1936) trilogy. In Lonigan’s universe, it was culture and psychology rather than economics that kicked history down the dark staircase to despair. A different type of episodic novel was Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited: A Novel of the 1930s (1933), which took the reader through the life of Larry Donovan to provide the ground for a debate about the nature of the working class. The Land of Plenty had a Steinbeckian title, but the static novel by Robert Cantwell was divided between being a story of the working class’s ability to do its job better than the bosses and a story of a boy’s coming of sexual age, mystically tied to a failed labor strike. The real John Steinbeck novel from this period was of course The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which began as nothing more or less than the common concerns with soil erosion and dust storms. But once the Joad family arrives at the planned economy of the government camp, Tom Joad, the protagonist, takes on a messianic ambiance.
Poetry too (and of all things) was preparing for the fascist invasion, sometimes with tears and sometimes with spit on its lips. Here the victims, through willful blindness, bore responsibility for their own demise. While clear and clever Carl Sandburg and rapturously revealing Robert Frost compared their trade to tennis and potatoes, unfathomable alterations in the fabric of artistic comprehension were underway. Doom and despair, if they came with vaccines, they came quickly. One of the most terrifying of these was by the great Irish poet and aristocratic snob, William Butler Yeats. Although I have already provided “The Second Coming” in an earlier post, it bears repeating here.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
For Robert Frost, the humor was fine, but missing the message was what killed the dinosaurs. Here, then, is “Fire and Ice,” from 1920.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
And here is Carl Sandburg, also writing about cataclysmic climate conditions, in his personification called “Fog.”
The fog comes
On little cat feet.
It sits looking
Over harbor and city
On silent haunches
And then moves on.
All three poems say what they have to say in short and simple words. Their brevity is itself an impact. Of course, while it is true that once the Apocalypse is chosen as the frame of reference, most other subjects acquire a certain triviality, there nevertheless did arise a claque of poets who felt that their own poetry was more worthy than whatever reality their poetry sought by its very nature to obscure. It is fair, in fact, to think of this school as the Counter-Intelligence Poets. Their elitism masked an unwillingness (or inability) to convey to anyone outside the doctoral programs at Ivy League Universities what it was that was being said, the ideas, once revealed, being somewhat dull or inapplicable to contemporary existence. Many of these writers found publication thanks to the efforts of the future leader of the Counter-Intelligence Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, James Jesus Angleton, the orchid-loving good shepherd himself.
The most famous among those poets were Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Unlike, say, Walt Whitman—who wrote clearly and used his fame to extend the grasp of his audience—these three—who could not have written clearly about the weather—used their talents to extend the distance between themselves and their audience, a process of artistic fascism. For instance, here is former insurance company executive Wallace Stevens trying to say something about the death of a prostitute in “The Emperor of Ice Cream”:
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and let him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
There is a point at which a conflux of imagery swelters disingenuously dense. The above is one such. There is also the moral crime of intense brevity stacked alongside imagistic obscurity and elitism. Consider Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.”
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
That is the entire poem, a fact which should come as no surprise to those aware that Pound was an early supporter of Mussolini.
Ezra Pound’s greatest contribution to poetry was his refusal to use any word or words that did not contribute to the presentation of the poem. He took pride in remarks such as “Britain is an old bitch, gone in the teeth,” and “If some man had a stroke of genius and could start a pogrom against Jews. . . there might be something to say for it,” and even “Great literature is simple language charged with meaning to th utmost possible degree.”
Of the three, Eliot was the least consciously alienating, although anyone who has ever disgorged himself from the quagmire of “The Wasteland” (the author’s footnotes to which exceed the length of the poem itself) might be tempted to disagree. But Eliot occasionally forgot the rules and used his art to communicate as well as to create. For poems about death, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” wastes the competition. It is also the funniest poem in the English language.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 18, 1919, symbolizing the end of World War I. Among the former combatants present, France, England and the United States represented the Allies, just as the vanquished Germanyrepresented the Central Powers. At the signing, a letter arrived for the U.S.delegation. Someone calling himself Nguyen Ai Quoc had signed the letter, claiming that the country he represented was the Empire of Annan. In the brief, nearly apologetic missive, Nguyen pleaded for amnesty for his countrymen. He asked for the right of the native inhabitants to a fair trial, for freedom of the press and of speech, and for representation in the French government.
The author of that letter—who may be more familiar as Ho Chi Minh—received no response from the delegation about his country, popularly known as Vietnam. He sent a follow-up letter to the United Statesat the end of World War II, but again received no reply.
Because of the later significance ofAmerica’s war against Vietnam, some historical antecedents and contribution involving not only Vietnam, but France as well, are necessary for a clear view. As the wars in Europe and the Pacific were joined,France was pushing the Vietnamese people into the arms of the Indochinese Communist Party, albeit, unintentionally. For example, in 1938, the French (who had originally invaded Vietnam in 1850) required the Vietnamese to buy millions of dollars of French War Bonds. Early the next year, they forced new taxes on the colony to build air bases to protect Franceitself and also insisted that Indochina provide one-and-a-half million people to fight nations aggressing against Franceand its possessions. With the invasion ofPoland by Hitler on September 1, 1939, andFrance and Great Britain’s declaration of war two days later, Paris made it illegal for political organizations and newspapers to exist—in Vietnam. The French cut wages and increased work hours to seventy-two per week. In the first nine months of 1940, the French shipped 80,000 Vietnamese to Europe to fight, while the Japanese had just conquered China’s Hainan Island, about 150 miles from the Vietnamese border. You read that right. The Japanese were close to invading Vietnam and the French, who “owned” Indochina, sent the Vietnamese against their will across the planet to defend Europe. To compound this lunacy, when the Nazis attacked France in May 1940, the French capitulated in less than a month. The French displayed no more courage overseas than they did at home. When, on September 22 of that year, the Japanese crossed Vietnam’s border with 6,000 troops, colonial governor General Jean Decoux surrendered to the Japanese.
The defeatism of the French allowed Ho Chi Minh to emerge as leader of his country’s revolution. His political and military forces-the Viet Minh—included all social classes and religious groups. In 1945 the Viet Minh initiated a successful general insurrection, known to this day as the August Revolution. By the end of the month, the Viet Minh expelled the Japanese, chased away the French, forced the appointed emperor to abdicate, and experienced an uneasy alliance with the Allies. President Ho Chi Minh stood in theBa Dinh Square in Hanoi, announced the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and read aloud his new country’s Declaration of Independence. Shades of a similar U.S. document were evident near the conclusion.
“A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side y side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.”
Not all the blame can or should be leveled at the French. After all, had the Allies of World War I responded favorably to Ho’s letter at Versailles, had the United States negotiated a peace between Vietnam and France, had the Japanese not launched a defensive imperialism, had Hitler not sought world domination, and had Russia not allowed Hitler’s aggressions—had things not been the same, they would have been different, you might say—the French-Indochinese War would never have happened. Of all these variables, only the last is remotely justifiable. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed three days before Hitler attacked Poland, an invasion Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin agreed to permit because he knew the Soviet Unionneeded time to build up defense, time which the Pact provided. A historian-biographer Isaac Deutscher explains in Stalin:
"In the course of two meetings in the Kremlin, the partners out the main issues of common interest and signed a pact of non-aggression. Stalin could not have had the slightest doubt that the Pact at once relieved Hitler of the nightmare of a war on two fronts and that to that extent it unleashed the Second World War. Yet he, Stalin, had no qualms."
With Mussolini’s execution, Hitler’s suicide and the destruction of Japan’s defenses, WWII was, for all intents and purposes, over by late summer of 1945. One question that has lingered ever since involves whether it was necessary or desirable to use nuclear weapons againstJapan. If the answer is “necessary,” then their use is an amazing but relatively simple detail for students of history. However, if the answer is “desirable,” that is an indication that the United States, at that time leader of the Allies, had adopted a brutality in keeping with that of the vanquished Axis Powers.
A young Joseph Stalin
Even before the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the aerial bombardment of Japan had already devastated that country. As Li Fu-jen—a pen name of activist and writer Frank Glass—wrote in the Fourth International, “The glittering victories which Japan scored in the first months of the Pacific War represented the high pointof Japan’s military offensive.” ThePhilippines had been occupied, Burma was back in British possession and the Allies were poised to retake Thailand, Malaya, and Hong Kong. “Tokyo had already bean laid in ruins. Large parts of Nagoya, Osakaand Kobe had been wrecked by the aerial attack.” Yet, even though the nearbyisland of Okinawa was being readied as a launching site just in case things fell through, President Harry Truman authorized the deployment of nuclear weapons against Japan. On August 6, 1945, a uranium bomb called Little Boy plummeted from a carrier called the Enola Gay, striking Hiroshima. Three days later a plutonium bomb dubbed the Fat Man was presented to the expectant faces of the skyward-watching people of Nagasaki. The Japanese had been willing to surrender prior to these events, but had requested that they retain their Emperor, a man who had a deeply religious significance to them. After the nuclear bombs destroyed their country, the Japanese unconditionally surrendered on September 2, 1945.
Even as one war was ending, another was heating up, as the virus of fascism mutated and spread. By the end of September 1945, a mass of French troops rallied a coup d’etat and soon controlledSaigon. This brought the Cochin (southern) half of Vietnam back under French rule and left Ho Chi Minh in control of Tonkin (the north). Imperialism and dynasties ran contrary to the precepts of both the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the United States’ Declaration of Independence, but when one alliance adopts the ideology of its vanquished opponent, historical mandates become disposable.
World War I had, of course, been fought in two theatres. Germanysurrendered on May 9, 1945, but even before this date the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had been warming to the idea of salvaging the Nazis as a hedge against Soviet expansionism. Two of the key players in this operation were brothers: Allen and John Foster Dulles, both of whom were corporate lawyers working for a firm with notorious business interests. As Glen Yeadon writes in The Roaring 20s and the Roots of American Fascism:
"Throughout [World War I], lawyer John Foster Dulles sought to protect the assets of the Kaiser from seizure by the Alien Property Custodian Act. Dulles sought to derail the peace conference by looking for bribes and misdirecting clients. As a member of the post-war U.S. War Trade Board. . . Dulles was well aware that German bribes went all the way to the Harding Administration’s Attorney General. . . Later, as World War II approached, he and his brother Allen helped conceal Nazi ownership of. . . American corporations from theU.S. government."
The law firm for which the Dulles brothers worked was Sullivan and Cromwell. At the beginning of the twentieth century, financier J. P. Morgan used the law firm to create U.S. Steel, the first American corporation with more than one billion dollars capitalized. The House of Morgan, as the dynasty was known, was not averse to subverting the U.S. economy and war efforts. As far back as the early days of the U.S. Civil War, John Pierpont Morgan used his father’s money to open his own New York bank, J. P. Morgan & Co., an acquisition that allowed him to buy his way out of military conscription, a legal practice at the time. In 1913, the war profiteer died, and his son, J. P. Morgan Jr., seized the helm. During World War I Morgan loaned millions to the Allies. Immediately after the war, he took to funding Italian fascism. Morgan’s partner, Thomas Lamont, gave Mussolini a $100 million loan.
Allen Dulles
Sullivan and Cromwell also facilitated an oligopoly of the U.S. utilities industry, giving three-fourths of the nation’s electric business to only ten companies. And when World War I erupted in 1914, John Foster Dulles took full advantage, what with his uncle, Robert Lansing, now serving as Secretary of State. To borrow from Yeadon again, “Lansing recruited his nephew to go to Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama on the pretext of company business, but in reality to sound out Latin Americans on aiding the U.S. war effort,” a step into the world of clandestine intelligence operations, which is to say, a step into the world of secrecy and lies. Fully ensconced in military intelligence, Dulles recommended invalidating the recent election in Cuba and installing a new leader there. In response, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sent sixteen hundred Marines to protect United Fruit.
According to the company’s own website: “The explosive growth in the American economy and public sector following World War II fueled a dramatic increase in demand for and diversification of client requirements for legal services.” A snapshot from Martindale-Hubbell shows the euphemism-laden description to be perversely accurate, as 39% of their practice today involves securities and 73% of their relationships are in representing corporate defendants.
As the director of the Zurich office of the OSS, the ubiquitous Allen Dulles had kept Sullivan and Cromwell in Germanythroughout World War II, thereby using his business associates as intelligence contacts. Dulles and his OSS counterpart inBucharest, Frank Wisner, made covert contacts with Nazis and their sympathizers as early as 1944 and even arranged for a number of German intelligence specialists to receive OSS support in fleeing the Balkans one step ahead of the Russian Army. In other words, agents of the United States helped intelligence officers working for the enemy to avoid capture.
IBM actively sought business with the Nazis. The National Archives reports that “Dehomag, IBM’s German subsidiary, supplied the Hollerith machines they played a prominent role in the Holocaust.” IBM’s CEO, Thomas Watson (after whom their contemporary “Jeopardy” playing computer was named), supported the fascist movement in Europe. In the depths of the Great Depression, Watson increased IBM’s investment in Germany by nearly a million dollars. Likewise, it is no secret that car manufacturer Henry Ford was giving Adolf Hitler money as early as 1922. Hitler in turn had Ford’s book, The International Jew, translated into twelve languages.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
On September 20, 1945, President Truman ordered the OSS disbanded. This brief moment of post-war peace allowed for a reflection on the need for a worldwide intelligence-gathering device by a nation not actively at war. William Donovan’s organization might have been dismantled, but its former leader intended to have a sy in the make-up of any successor agency. In a memo to Truman, Donovan appended a list of potential sources of information: commercial airlines, communications companies, scientific institutions, news agencies and schools.
To his credit, Truman did express concern and the inadvertent creation of a massive police state. In January 1946, he made an extemporaneous remark to a reporter: “We have to guard against a Gestapo. You must always be careful to keep national defense under the control of officers who are elected by the people.”
These were powerful words. Certain such words, spoken by powerful people, can have monumental consequences. In the years immediately following World War II, the words of Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman would illuminate the way their respective countries were experienced by one another.
In February 1946, Joseph Stalin publicly opined the surprisingly Trotsky-ist view that communism and capitalism were mutually incompatible on the same planet. Partly by way of response, one month later former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke of an “Iron Curtain” separating the two dominant economic systems of the age. According to Clark Clifford, who at the time of this invocation was Special Counsel to Truman, “The speech was not well received in the United States. It was thought to be too tough a speech and the President was criticized by some for having Churchill over.”
In 1947, in response to reports that rebel insurgents in Greece and Turkeywere threatening the right wing monarchies in these countries, President Truman convinced Congress to allocate $400 million in aid for the ruling powers. This investment in the Truman Doctrine strategy to redefine global parameters was meager compared to the Marshall Plan, enacted the following year. Also known as the European Recovery Act, the Plan required a $17 billion investment in rebuilding Europe’s defenses against communist encroachment. But the Marshall Plan was an investment with globalizing ramifications: as a consequence, the U.S. dollar became the international trading standard, America’s foreign markets were enhanced, and Europe was brought into the U.S. banking system.
1947 continued to be a muscle-flexing year for the United States, as that was the year the National Security Act went into effect. The impact of the NSA cannot be overstated. It erected the National Security Council (NSC), the post of Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. Air Force, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA, according to David Wise and Thomas Ross in Invisible Government:
"is organized into four divisions: Intelligence, Plans, Research and Support, each headed by a deputy director. The Support Division is the administrative arm. . . It is in charge of equipment, logistics, security and communications. It devices the CIA’s special codes, which cannot be read by other branches of the government. The Research Division is in charge of technical intelligence. It provides expert assessments of foreign advances in science, technology and atomic weapons. . . The Plans Division is in charge of the cloak-and-dagger activities. It controls all foreign special operations. . . and it collects all of the Agency’s covert intelligence through spies and informers overseas."
William Donovan impressed upon Secretary of Defense James Forrestal that communists were ready to take over the country of France through the time-honored deceit of open and free elections. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first Director of Central Intelligence, authorized use of the Corsican Mafia to join with residual French fascists in murdering striking militant workers. With this intimidation, the communists lost the French election, thereby insuring continuance of French involvement in Southeast Asia.
The author of that letter—who may be more familiar as Ho Chi Minh—received no response from the delegation about his country, popularly known as Vietnam. He sent a follow-up letter to the United Statesat the end of World War II, but again received no reply.
Because of the later significance ofAmerica’s war against Vietnam, some historical antecedents and contribution involving not only Vietnam, but France as well, are necessary for a clear view. As the wars in Europe and the Pacific were joined,France was pushing the Vietnamese people into the arms of the Indochinese Communist Party, albeit, unintentionally. For example, in 1938, the French (who had originally invaded Vietnam in 1850) required the Vietnamese to buy millions of dollars of French War Bonds. Early the next year, they forced new taxes on the colony to build air bases to protect Franceitself and also insisted that Indochina provide one-and-a-half million people to fight nations aggressing against Franceand its possessions. With the invasion ofPoland by Hitler on September 1, 1939, andFrance and Great Britain’s declaration of war two days later, Paris made it illegal for political organizations and newspapers to exist—in Vietnam. The French cut wages and increased work hours to seventy-two per week. In the first nine months of 1940, the French shipped 80,000 Vietnamese to Europe to fight, while the Japanese had just conquered China’s Hainan Island, about 150 miles from the Vietnamese border. You read that right. The Japanese were close to invading Vietnam and the French, who “owned” Indochina, sent the Vietnamese against their will across the planet to defend Europe. To compound this lunacy, when the Nazis attacked France in May 1940, the French capitulated in less than a month. The French displayed no more courage overseas than they did at home. When, on September 22 of that year, the Japanese crossed Vietnam’s border with 6,000 troops, colonial governor General Jean Decoux surrendered to the Japanese.
The defeatism of the French allowed Ho Chi Minh to emerge as leader of his country’s revolution. His political and military forces-the Viet Minh—included all social classes and religious groups. In 1945 the Viet Minh initiated a successful general insurrection, known to this day as the August Revolution. By the end of the month, the Viet Minh expelled the Japanese, chased away the French, forced the appointed emperor to abdicate, and experienced an uneasy alliance with the Allies. President Ho Chi Minh stood in theBa Dinh Square in Hanoi, announced the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and read aloud his new country’s Declaration of Independence. Shades of a similar U.S. document were evident near the conclusion.
“A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side y side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.”
Not all the blame can or should be leveled at the French. After all, had the Allies of World War I responded favorably to Ho’s letter at Versailles, had the United States negotiated a peace between Vietnam and France, had the Japanese not launched a defensive imperialism, had Hitler not sought world domination, and had Russia not allowed Hitler’s aggressions—had things not been the same, they would have been different, you might say—the French-Indochinese War would never have happened. Of all these variables, only the last is remotely justifiable. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed three days before Hitler attacked Poland, an invasion Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin agreed to permit because he knew the Soviet Unionneeded time to build up defense, time which the Pact provided. A historian-biographer Isaac Deutscher explains in Stalin:
"In the course of two meetings in the Kremlin, the partners out the main issues of common interest and signed a pact of non-aggression. Stalin could not have had the slightest doubt that the Pact at once relieved Hitler of the nightmare of a war on two fronts and that to that extent it unleashed the Second World War. Yet he, Stalin, had no qualms."
With Mussolini’s execution, Hitler’s suicide and the destruction of Japan’s defenses, WWII was, for all intents and purposes, over by late summer of 1945. One question that has lingered ever since involves whether it was necessary or desirable to use nuclear weapons againstJapan. If the answer is “necessary,” then their use is an amazing but relatively simple detail for students of history. However, if the answer is “desirable,” that is an indication that the United States, at that time leader of the Allies, had adopted a brutality in keeping with that of the vanquished Axis Powers.
A young Joseph Stalin
Even before the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the aerial bombardment of Japan had already devastated that country. As Li Fu-jen—a pen name of activist and writer Frank Glass—wrote in the Fourth International, “The glittering victories which Japan scored in the first months of the Pacific War represented the high pointof Japan’s military offensive.” ThePhilippines had been occupied, Burma was back in British possession and the Allies were poised to retake Thailand, Malaya, and Hong Kong. “Tokyo had already bean laid in ruins. Large parts of Nagoya, Osakaand Kobe had been wrecked by the aerial attack.” Yet, even though the nearbyisland of Okinawa was being readied as a launching site just in case things fell through, President Harry Truman authorized the deployment of nuclear weapons against Japan. On August 6, 1945, a uranium bomb called Little Boy plummeted from a carrier called the Enola Gay, striking Hiroshima. Three days later a plutonium bomb dubbed the Fat Man was presented to the expectant faces of the skyward-watching people of Nagasaki. The Japanese had been willing to surrender prior to these events, but had requested that they retain their Emperor, a man who had a deeply religious significance to them. After the nuclear bombs destroyed their country, the Japanese unconditionally surrendered on September 2, 1945.
Even as one war was ending, another was heating up, as the virus of fascism mutated and spread. By the end of September 1945, a mass of French troops rallied a coup d’etat and soon controlledSaigon. This brought the Cochin (southern) half of Vietnam back under French rule and left Ho Chi Minh in control of Tonkin (the north). Imperialism and dynasties ran contrary to the precepts of both the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the United States’ Declaration of Independence, but when one alliance adopts the ideology of its vanquished opponent, historical mandates become disposable.
World War I had, of course, been fought in two theatres. Germanysurrendered on May 9, 1945, but even before this date the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had been warming to the idea of salvaging the Nazis as a hedge against Soviet expansionism. Two of the key players in this operation were brothers: Allen and John Foster Dulles, both of whom were corporate lawyers working for a firm with notorious business interests. As Glen Yeadon writes in The Roaring 20s and the Roots of American Fascism:
"Throughout [World War I], lawyer John Foster Dulles sought to protect the assets of the Kaiser from seizure by the Alien Property Custodian Act. Dulles sought to derail the peace conference by looking for bribes and misdirecting clients. As a member of the post-war U.S. War Trade Board. . . Dulles was well aware that German bribes went all the way to the Harding Administration’s Attorney General. . . Later, as World War II approached, he and his brother Allen helped conceal Nazi ownership of. . . American corporations from theU.S. government."
The law firm for which the Dulles brothers worked was Sullivan and Cromwell. At the beginning of the twentieth century, financier J. P. Morgan used the law firm to create U.S. Steel, the first American corporation with more than one billion dollars capitalized. The House of Morgan, as the dynasty was known, was not averse to subverting the U.S. economy and war efforts. As far back as the early days of the U.S. Civil War, John Pierpont Morgan used his father’s money to open his own New York bank, J. P. Morgan & Co., an acquisition that allowed him to buy his way out of military conscription, a legal practice at the time. In 1913, the war profiteer died, and his son, J. P. Morgan Jr., seized the helm. During World War I Morgan loaned millions to the Allies. Immediately after the war, he took to funding Italian fascism. Morgan’s partner, Thomas Lamont, gave Mussolini a $100 million loan.
Allen Dulles
Sullivan and Cromwell also facilitated an oligopoly of the U.S. utilities industry, giving three-fourths of the nation’s electric business to only ten companies. And when World War I erupted in 1914, John Foster Dulles took full advantage, what with his uncle, Robert Lansing, now serving as Secretary of State. To borrow from Yeadon again, “Lansing recruited his nephew to go to Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama on the pretext of company business, but in reality to sound out Latin Americans on aiding the U.S. war effort,” a step into the world of clandestine intelligence operations, which is to say, a step into the world of secrecy and lies. Fully ensconced in military intelligence, Dulles recommended invalidating the recent election in Cuba and installing a new leader there. In response, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sent sixteen hundred Marines to protect United Fruit.
According to the company’s own website: “The explosive growth in the American economy and public sector following World War II fueled a dramatic increase in demand for and diversification of client requirements for legal services.” A snapshot from Martindale-Hubbell shows the euphemism-laden description to be perversely accurate, as 39% of their practice today involves securities and 73% of their relationships are in representing corporate defendants.
As the director of the Zurich office of the OSS, the ubiquitous Allen Dulles had kept Sullivan and Cromwell in Germanythroughout World War II, thereby using his business associates as intelligence contacts. Dulles and his OSS counterpart inBucharest, Frank Wisner, made covert contacts with Nazis and their sympathizers as early as 1944 and even arranged for a number of German intelligence specialists to receive OSS support in fleeing the Balkans one step ahead of the Russian Army. In other words, agents of the United States helped intelligence officers working for the enemy to avoid capture.
IBM actively sought business with the Nazis. The National Archives reports that “Dehomag, IBM’s German subsidiary, supplied the Hollerith machines they played a prominent role in the Holocaust.” IBM’s CEO, Thomas Watson (after whom their contemporary “Jeopardy” playing computer was named), supported the fascist movement in Europe. In the depths of the Great Depression, Watson increased IBM’s investment in Germany by nearly a million dollars. Likewise, it is no secret that car manufacturer Henry Ford was giving Adolf Hitler money as early as 1922. Hitler in turn had Ford’s book, The International Jew, translated into twelve languages.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
On September 20, 1945, President Truman ordered the OSS disbanded. This brief moment of post-war peace allowed for a reflection on the need for a worldwide intelligence-gathering device by a nation not actively at war. William Donovan’s organization might have been dismantled, but its former leader intended to have a sy in the make-up of any successor agency. In a memo to Truman, Donovan appended a list of potential sources of information: commercial airlines, communications companies, scientific institutions, news agencies and schools.
To his credit, Truman did express concern and the inadvertent creation of a massive police state. In January 1946, he made an extemporaneous remark to a reporter: “We have to guard against a Gestapo. You must always be careful to keep national defense under the control of officers who are elected by the people.”
These were powerful words. Certain such words, spoken by powerful people, can have monumental consequences. In the years immediately following World War II, the words of Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman would illuminate the way their respective countries were experienced by one another.
In February 1946, Joseph Stalin publicly opined the surprisingly Trotsky-ist view that communism and capitalism were mutually incompatible on the same planet. Partly by way of response, one month later former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke of an “Iron Curtain” separating the two dominant economic systems of the age. According to Clark Clifford, who at the time of this invocation was Special Counsel to Truman, “The speech was not well received in the United States. It was thought to be too tough a speech and the President was criticized by some for having Churchill over.”
In 1947, in response to reports that rebel insurgents in Greece and Turkeywere threatening the right wing monarchies in these countries, President Truman convinced Congress to allocate $400 million in aid for the ruling powers. This investment in the Truman Doctrine strategy to redefine global parameters was meager compared to the Marshall Plan, enacted the following year. Also known as the European Recovery Act, the Plan required a $17 billion investment in rebuilding Europe’s defenses against communist encroachment. But the Marshall Plan was an investment with globalizing ramifications: as a consequence, the U.S. dollar became the international trading standard, America’s foreign markets were enhanced, and Europe was brought into the U.S. banking system.
1947 continued to be a muscle-flexing year for the United States, as that was the year the National Security Act went into effect. The impact of the NSA cannot be overstated. It erected the National Security Council (NSC), the post of Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. Air Force, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA, according to David Wise and Thomas Ross in Invisible Government:
"is organized into four divisions: Intelligence, Plans, Research and Support, each headed by a deputy director. The Support Division is the administrative arm. . . It is in charge of equipment, logistics, security and communications. It devices the CIA’s special codes, which cannot be read by other branches of the government. The Research Division is in charge of technical intelligence. It provides expert assessments of foreign advances in science, technology and atomic weapons. . . The Plans Division is in charge of the cloak-and-dagger activities. It controls all foreign special operations. . . and it collects all of the Agency’s covert intelligence through spies and informers overseas."
William Donovan impressed upon Secretary of Defense James Forrestal that communists were ready to take over the country of France through the time-honored deceit of open and free elections. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first Director of Central Intelligence, authorized use of the Corsican Mafia to join with residual French fascists in murdering striking militant workers. With this intimidation, the communists lost the French election, thereby insuring continuance of French involvement in Southeast Asia.
Italy was another European country with a tendency towards unfettered elections. Reports indicated the Italians might endorse a system contrary to the ideology of the National Security Council (NSC), so CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter put that old poetry lover James Jesus Angleton in charge of funneling money into right wing Italian parties, thereby swinging the election the CIA’s way.
A pattern of behavior thus in place, the fascismization of America was ready to begin in earnest. The BBC News reported that:
"Files released by the CIA have confirmed that World War II Nazi criminals were employed by Western intelligence agencies. A U.S. Justice Department spokesman said many Nazi was criminals were able to escape justice because East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other that they lost their will to pursue Nazi Persecutors."
Former Congressperson Elizabeth Holtzman, in her testimony before Congress, was a bit less disingenuous. After relating how she had first learned in 1974 from a General Accounting Office report that more than fifty Nazi war criminals were living in the United States and employed by the U.S. government, she turned to more recent discoveries.
"Klaus Barbie, an SS officer responsible for the deaths of countless Jews and French resistance fighters had been employed by the U.S. government after World War II. U.S. government officials spirited Barbie out of Europe to South America in order to avoid having him captured by the French who wanted to try him for war crimes. Another case involves Kurt Waldheim, former Secretary General of the U.N. He has been barred from entry into the U.S. because of information that came to light showing that Waldheim may have participated in war crimes in the Balkans and Greece."
Reinhard Gehlen, according to the National Security Archive, had had the dubious honor of maintaining German intelligence throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR during the 1940s. Once captured, Gehlen rolled over on his sponsors. He surrendered to U.S. troops in May 1945, hoping to save himself by providing intelligence and counter-intelligence prowess to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). William Donovan and Allen Dulles both opposed the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, so rather than recommending that Gehlen be shot repeatedly, both men instead enlisted Gehlen in creating a new post-War intelligence organization known as the Central Intelligence Agency. For his help, Gehlen was placed as head of intelligence for the Federal Republic of Germany.
As the National Security Archive words it,
"Records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, twenty-three other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least one hundred officers within the Gehlen organization were former Gestapo officers."
The argument that Nazis could be used effectively to contain Soviet aggression is preposterous. As Timothy Naftali points out:
"Gehlen was able to use the U.S. funds to create a large intelligence bureaucracy that not only undermined the Western critique of the Soviet Union by protecting and promoting war criminals, but was also arguably the least effective and secure in NATO. As many in U.S. intelligence in the late 1940s had feared would happen, the Gehlen organization proved to be the back door by which the Soviets penetrated the Western alliance."
Dr. Kurt Blome admitted he had performed biological warfare research and experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Yet he was never prosecuted. Instead he was hired by U.S. intelligence to resume work in biological weapons research for the Army Chemical Corp. This intelligence division, known in-house as the Health Alteration Committee, used LSD, germs and venom as tools to effect behavioral modification.
General Walter Dornberger used slave labor to build V-2 rockets for Hitler. Bell Helicopter convinced the government to allow him to help them maintain their competitive edge. So even though Dornberger had been the administrator of the Dora concentration camp, the OSS’s Project Paperclip orchestrated his transfer, as well as those of many German scientists into the United States. One of Dornberger’s enthusiastic subordinates, Dr. Werner von Braun, went on to head NASA.
Project Paperclip was an OSS-sponsored military “rescue” of Nazi scientists from Europe following World War II. More than one thousand scientists and their families were brought into the United States to work in various fields of research, technology and intelligence. According to the American-Israeli Cooperation Enterprise:
"In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists arrived from Germany at Fort Strong in the U.S.: Werner von Braun, Erich W. Newbert, Theodor A Poppel, August Schulze, Eberhard Rees, Wilhelm Jungert and Walter Schwidetzky. Eighty-six aeronautical engineers were transferred to Wright Field. The United States Army Signal Corps employed twenty-four specialists. In 1959, ninety-four Operation Paperclip men went to the U.S., including Friedwardt Winterberg, Hans Dolezalek, and Friedrich Wigand. Through 1990, Paperclip immigrated 1,600 Nazi personnel, with the “intellectual reparations” taken by the U.S. and U.K."
So many Nazis ended up in South America that one wonders how ripe these countries might have been for leftist insurgencies had the fascists not risen to power all over again. Josef Mengele, the evil Doctor Death of Auschwitz, did not require U.S. assistance in resettling. All he needed to do was escape British custody. He turned up in 1986, dead in Brazil without trousers.
Josef Mengele
Being anti-communist is far from being pro-fascist. However, most of the anti-communists in policy-making positions in the United States tended to be fervent right wingers who were certainly happy to practice fascism whenever they deemed it necessary. The plea of anti-communism served as a fine plausible denial.
In 1948 Philippine President Manual Roxas died. The CIA disagreed with the ideology of the party likely to succeed him. The Hukbalahaps—the group in question—were a well-organized collective of nationalist guerrilla fighters popularly known as the Huks. Allen Dulles knew that the replacement for Roxas, Elpidio Quirino, wasn’t much of a leader, but he certainly wasn’t anti-fascist, as were the Huks. With the guidance of U.S. General Edward Lansdale, the CIA committed acts of sabotage and hung the blame on the Huks. In the public mind, the brave guerrilla warriors had become irresponsible traitors. With the Huks unjustly discredited, the CIQA no longer needed to prop up Quirino and so replaced him with Ramon Magsaysay.
That same year the CIA conducted a black operation in Italy, the aim of which was to defeat the communist candidates in the upcoming national elections, thereby keeping the Christian Democrats in power. The NSC dreaded the idea that the Italian Communist Party would gain a majority in Parliament. The CIA gave over $10 million to the Christian Democrats while simultaneously launching a covert program of planting false news stories about the opposition.
For strategic purposes, during World War II, the Allies had occupied Iran and forced the Iranian dictator, Shah Reza Khan, to abdicate. In his place the Allies installed his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, as the new Shah of Iran. In 1951, the Shah appointed Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister. Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company which, in retaliation, withdrew its personnel, leaving Iran without the technical operations needed. In late 1952, the oil company asked a CIA covert operations officer named Kermit Roosevelt to form a coup d’etat against Mossadegh. Norman Schwartzkolph (later of Operation Desert Storm) served as the intermediary between Roosevelt and the Shah. The swift coup in August 1953 resulted in forty percent of Iranian oil rights being divided among Gulf Oil, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Texaco, and Mobil. Roosevelt’s reward was to become vice president of Gulf. The Shah would remain in power for the next twenty-five years. The more long-term consequence was a police state in Iran, enforced by the secret police SAVAK, ultimately leading to the Shah being removed from office and relocated to Hawaii. In his stead came the Ayatollah Khomeini and the interminable hostage crisis.
Kermit Roosevelt: "Why do you think they call it Gulf Oil?"
In 1954, Latin American counterinsurgency specialist David Atlee Phillips enlisted the help of future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt in the overthrow of the democratically-elected President of Guatemala. President Arbenz saw the nationalization of the property of United Fruit as being in the best interests of his country. The CIA disagreed and Phillips broadcast radio reports that Arbenz was an inept tool of the communists. He further spread false reports that rebels were threatening to take control of Guatemala. Hunt, as paymaster, gave money to members of the Civil Air Transport as an inducement to attack the country. Arbenz resigned. Dictator Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas took over, proving to be so unpopular that he was killed by one of his own bodyguards.
United Fruit was saved, not that it had had anything to fear: Sullivan and Cromwell represented the firm. John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State; Allen Dulles was the new Director of Central Intelligence; John Moors Cabot, Assistant Secretary of State of Inter-American Affairs, was a major stockholder in the firm; and the former Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, was vice president of the company.
That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower’s Special Committee on Indochina met and Allen Dulles announced that Edward Lansdale would be heading up the Saigon Military Mission. What he did not announce was that the missionaries were mercenaries—skilled terrorists who saw their proper roles as saboteurs, subverters, strike-breakers and guerrillas operating under the cover of a concerned advisory board dedicated to oversee the end of French colonialism.
Perhaps the greatest treachery of the Saigon Military Mission was the willful transplanting of one million Tonkinese citizens south to the Cochin region. The transplanted million were assured money, food and basic support. They were also promised that if they stayed in the north, the communists would kill them. When the reality turned out that South Vietnam was unable to support the new occupants, many of them turned to stealing to stay alive. Lansdale’s operatives called such disruptions in the painful process of starvation “communist insurgencies,” the punishment for which was a public execution.
The next step in the scheme to require direct military action by the United States by way of civil war resolution was for Lansdale to instruct South Vietnamese President Diem to order the Chinese out of Cochin. So ordered, the Chinese left. Also left was a lot of rice which the Chinese were no longer around to buy. Without the income from this crop, the South Vietnamese could not afford food or drinking water. Thus depleted, entire villages erupted into roving hordes. The CIA claimed this proved Ho Chi Minh’s forces had infiltrated South Vietnam.
Ever insecure about maintaining his presidency, Diem enacted a document of repressive actions that would be taken against those who opposed his leadership. Law 10/59 promised either hard labor for life or execution as punishment for any type of subversive behavior. Rather than Vietnamize the south against the north, these severe tactics united the south against the United States. The direct and immediate result was the formation of the National Liberation Front (NLF), a highly disciplined collection of insurgents sympathetic to Ho and hateful of Diem. Although the NLF’s nominal leader was a Saigon lawyer named Hua Tho, the organization was comprised of more than a dozen political groups.
General Lansdale begged Allen Dulles to quell the NLF uprisings with a few squadrons of Marine Corps choppers, courtesy of Bell Helicopters. By 1960, the Office of Special Operations (OSO) granted the request. Early the next year, newly-elected U.S. President John Kennedy reappointed Dulles Director of Central Intelligence. Bell’s sales would soar during the Vietnam War, hitting two billion dollars in 1967.
In April 1962, Kennedy told General Maxwell Taylor that U.S. involvement in Vietnam “should be reduced at the first favorable moment.” This was in part a furtherance of Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) #57, which shifted Cold War operations away from the control of the CIA and towards the executive branch. Later, Kennedy would learn that between the end of 1960 and the spring of 1963, the United States had supported Diem to the tune of two billion dollars, 12,000 “advisors” had been sent in, and sixty-two Americans had died.
By the fall of 1963, plans were made to remove Diem from Vietnam. President Kennedy, in NSAM #263, called for the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel by year’s end. Better, thought the CIA, at allow Dem to be murdered and hang the assassination on JFK. And so on November 1, 1963, Diem and his brother Nhu boarded a plane for Europe. For unexplained reasons, they disembarked before takeoff, had their driver return them to the palace, and found themselves alone. Genuinely frightened now, they made use of an escape tunnel which led them to the city of Cholen where they were promptly murdered. Subsequently, when CIA agent E. Howard Hunt worked in the Nixon White House, he forged documents to show that Kennedy had ordered the murders, giving the forgeries to Bill Lambert of Time-Life. John Kennedy himself was murdered twenty-one days later, and four days after that, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, reversed the order to withdraw from Vietnam.
With Diem and Kennedy out of the way, the Americanization of the Vietnam War began a rapid escalation. Johnson’s NSAM #273 called for covert military attacks on North Vietnam. If and when the Tonkinese defended themselves, the U.S. could then retaliate overtly, thereby facilitating the escalation of hundreds of thousands of Americans into the war. Here is an excerpt from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution:
"Whereas naval units of the communist regime in Vietnam have deliberately and repeatedly attacked U.S. naval vessels lawfully present in international waters and have thereby created a serious threat to international peace, the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President as Commander in Chief to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the U.S. and to prevent further aggression."
With the Resolution a fait accompli, the Vietnam War raged, allowing Johnson to parade the myth of democracy while actually helping the majority of the American people by implementing many social programs designed to increase access and liberties domestically. The Great Society, as the last national societal program of the twentieth century, introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the Housing and Urban Development Act, and the Truth in Lending Act. Despite the fact that since 1981, every administration has sought to dismantle parts of the Great Society, the economic lives of millions of Americans improved as a result of these reforms, elevating the standard of living at home while reeking havoc elsewhere.
One of those elsewhere places was the Dominican Republic. Salvador Gomez writes that “The U.S.’s newfound non-interventionist philosophy tended to condone or disregard the behavior of individuals such as General Rafael Trujillo.” Even though the U.S. Embassy in Santa Domingo begged Washington to oppose the General’s rise to power, “General Trujillo won the 1930 elections, the results of which were highly suspect. His thirty-one year rule was one full of political corruption, military muscle, torture, murder, nepotism, commercial monopolies and raids on the national treasury.”
President Johnson in April 1965 ordered a Marine invasion of the Dominican Republic. Following the assassination of Trujillo and the ascension of a government called the Triumvirate, Johnson feared a Castro-led insurrection in Santa Domingo. That same year Johnson ordered a bombing campaign called Rolling Thunder, the objective of which was to destroy North Vietnam’s support for the NLF in the South.
One year later, the magazine Ramparts ran an article revealing that the CIA had paid Michigan State University $25 million to hire five Agency employees to train South Vietnamese students in covert police methods. A later Ramparts issue detailed the relationship between the CIA and the National Students Association, showed how the CIA used students to spy, and detailed how the CIA exploited private institutions as conduits for secret funds. The veracity of these articles may be suggested by the CIA’s response: Director Richard Helms prepared a report onRamparts personnel for the White House. Helms equated criticism of covert operations with criticism of the Vietnam War.
Helms put William Colby in charge of Operation Phoenix, a murderous campaign that called for all U.S. intelligence agencies to pool their information about the NLF, the goal being to identify and destroy village leaders who might fit the profile. Colby later admitted to Congress that 20,000 Vietnamese were slaughtered by this operation.
To curb dissent at home, in August 1967, the Johnson White House ordered a black operations group within the counterintelligence staff to watch the activities of all foreign contacts of American anti-war protestors. In this illegal operation, called Chaos, the black ops group compiled files on 7,200 Americans.
Helms realized early on that the United States could not destroy the NLF militarily. Despite the fact that B-52s had bombed seventy percent of North Vietnam’s petroleum storage facilities and inflicted damage on other industrial targets, men and materials continued flowing into South Vietnam.
A pattern of behavior thus in place, the fascismization of America was ready to begin in earnest. The BBC News reported that:
"Files released by the CIA have confirmed that World War II Nazi criminals were employed by Western intelligence agencies. A U.S. Justice Department spokesman said many Nazi was criminals were able to escape justice because East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other that they lost their will to pursue Nazi Persecutors."
Former Congressperson Elizabeth Holtzman, in her testimony before Congress, was a bit less disingenuous. After relating how she had first learned in 1974 from a General Accounting Office report that more than fifty Nazi war criminals were living in the United States and employed by the U.S. government, she turned to more recent discoveries.
"Klaus Barbie, an SS officer responsible for the deaths of countless Jews and French resistance fighters had been employed by the U.S. government after World War II. U.S. government officials spirited Barbie out of Europe to South America in order to avoid having him captured by the French who wanted to try him for war crimes. Another case involves Kurt Waldheim, former Secretary General of the U.N. He has been barred from entry into the U.S. because of information that came to light showing that Waldheim may have participated in war crimes in the Balkans and Greece."
Reinhard Gehlen, according to the National Security Archive, had had the dubious honor of maintaining German intelligence throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR during the 1940s. Once captured, Gehlen rolled over on his sponsors. He surrendered to U.S. troops in May 1945, hoping to save himself by providing intelligence and counter-intelligence prowess to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). William Donovan and Allen Dulles both opposed the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, so rather than recommending that Gehlen be shot repeatedly, both men instead enlisted Gehlen in creating a new post-War intelligence organization known as the Central Intelligence Agency. For his help, Gehlen was placed as head of intelligence for the Federal Republic of Germany.
As the National Security Archive words it,
"Records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, twenty-three other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least one hundred officers within the Gehlen organization were former Gestapo officers."
The argument that Nazis could be used effectively to contain Soviet aggression is preposterous. As Timothy Naftali points out:
"Gehlen was able to use the U.S. funds to create a large intelligence bureaucracy that not only undermined the Western critique of the Soviet Union by protecting and promoting war criminals, but was also arguably the least effective and secure in NATO. As many in U.S. intelligence in the late 1940s had feared would happen, the Gehlen organization proved to be the back door by which the Soviets penetrated the Western alliance."
Dr. Kurt Blome admitted he had performed biological warfare research and experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Yet he was never prosecuted. Instead he was hired by U.S. intelligence to resume work in biological weapons research for the Army Chemical Corp. This intelligence division, known in-house as the Health Alteration Committee, used LSD, germs and venom as tools to effect behavioral modification.
General Walter Dornberger used slave labor to build V-2 rockets for Hitler. Bell Helicopter convinced the government to allow him to help them maintain their competitive edge. So even though Dornberger had been the administrator of the Dora concentration camp, the OSS’s Project Paperclip orchestrated his transfer, as well as those of many German scientists into the United States. One of Dornberger’s enthusiastic subordinates, Dr. Werner von Braun, went on to head NASA.
Project Paperclip was an OSS-sponsored military “rescue” of Nazi scientists from Europe following World War II. More than one thousand scientists and their families were brought into the United States to work in various fields of research, technology and intelligence. According to the American-Israeli Cooperation Enterprise:
"In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists arrived from Germany at Fort Strong in the U.S.: Werner von Braun, Erich W. Newbert, Theodor A Poppel, August Schulze, Eberhard Rees, Wilhelm Jungert and Walter Schwidetzky. Eighty-six aeronautical engineers were transferred to Wright Field. The United States Army Signal Corps employed twenty-four specialists. In 1959, ninety-four Operation Paperclip men went to the U.S., including Friedwardt Winterberg, Hans Dolezalek, and Friedrich Wigand. Through 1990, Paperclip immigrated 1,600 Nazi personnel, with the “intellectual reparations” taken by the U.S. and U.K."
So many Nazis ended up in South America that one wonders how ripe these countries might have been for leftist insurgencies had the fascists not risen to power all over again. Josef Mengele, the evil Doctor Death of Auschwitz, did not require U.S. assistance in resettling. All he needed to do was escape British custody. He turned up in 1986, dead in Brazil without trousers.
Josef Mengele
Being anti-communist is far from being pro-fascist. However, most of the anti-communists in policy-making positions in the United States tended to be fervent right wingers who were certainly happy to practice fascism whenever they deemed it necessary. The plea of anti-communism served as a fine plausible denial.
In 1948 Philippine President Manual Roxas died. The CIA disagreed with the ideology of the party likely to succeed him. The Hukbalahaps—the group in question—were a well-organized collective of nationalist guerrilla fighters popularly known as the Huks. Allen Dulles knew that the replacement for Roxas, Elpidio Quirino, wasn’t much of a leader, but he certainly wasn’t anti-fascist, as were the Huks. With the guidance of U.S. General Edward Lansdale, the CIA committed acts of sabotage and hung the blame on the Huks. In the public mind, the brave guerrilla warriors had become irresponsible traitors. With the Huks unjustly discredited, the CIQA no longer needed to prop up Quirino and so replaced him with Ramon Magsaysay.
That same year the CIA conducted a black operation in Italy, the aim of which was to defeat the communist candidates in the upcoming national elections, thereby keeping the Christian Democrats in power. The NSC dreaded the idea that the Italian Communist Party would gain a majority in Parliament. The CIA gave over $10 million to the Christian Democrats while simultaneously launching a covert program of planting false news stories about the opposition.
For strategic purposes, during World War II, the Allies had occupied Iran and forced the Iranian dictator, Shah Reza Khan, to abdicate. In his place the Allies installed his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, as the new Shah of Iran. In 1951, the Shah appointed Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister. Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company which, in retaliation, withdrew its personnel, leaving Iran without the technical operations needed. In late 1952, the oil company asked a CIA covert operations officer named Kermit Roosevelt to form a coup d’etat against Mossadegh. Norman Schwartzkolph (later of Operation Desert Storm) served as the intermediary between Roosevelt and the Shah. The swift coup in August 1953 resulted in forty percent of Iranian oil rights being divided among Gulf Oil, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Texaco, and Mobil. Roosevelt’s reward was to become vice president of Gulf. The Shah would remain in power for the next twenty-five years. The more long-term consequence was a police state in Iran, enforced by the secret police SAVAK, ultimately leading to the Shah being removed from office and relocated to Hawaii. In his stead came the Ayatollah Khomeini and the interminable hostage crisis.
Kermit Roosevelt: "Why do you think they call it Gulf Oil?"
In 1954, Latin American counterinsurgency specialist David Atlee Phillips enlisted the help of future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt in the overthrow of the democratically-elected President of Guatemala. President Arbenz saw the nationalization of the property of United Fruit as being in the best interests of his country. The CIA disagreed and Phillips broadcast radio reports that Arbenz was an inept tool of the communists. He further spread false reports that rebels were threatening to take control of Guatemala. Hunt, as paymaster, gave money to members of the Civil Air Transport as an inducement to attack the country. Arbenz resigned. Dictator Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas took over, proving to be so unpopular that he was killed by one of his own bodyguards.
United Fruit was saved, not that it had had anything to fear: Sullivan and Cromwell represented the firm. John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State; Allen Dulles was the new Director of Central Intelligence; John Moors Cabot, Assistant Secretary of State of Inter-American Affairs, was a major stockholder in the firm; and the former Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, was vice president of the company.
That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower’s Special Committee on Indochina met and Allen Dulles announced that Edward Lansdale would be heading up the Saigon Military Mission. What he did not announce was that the missionaries were mercenaries—skilled terrorists who saw their proper roles as saboteurs, subverters, strike-breakers and guerrillas operating under the cover of a concerned advisory board dedicated to oversee the end of French colonialism.
Perhaps the greatest treachery of the Saigon Military Mission was the willful transplanting of one million Tonkinese citizens south to the Cochin region. The transplanted million were assured money, food and basic support. They were also promised that if they stayed in the north, the communists would kill them. When the reality turned out that South Vietnam was unable to support the new occupants, many of them turned to stealing to stay alive. Lansdale’s operatives called such disruptions in the painful process of starvation “communist insurgencies,” the punishment for which was a public execution.
The next step in the scheme to require direct military action by the United States by way of civil war resolution was for Lansdale to instruct South Vietnamese President Diem to order the Chinese out of Cochin. So ordered, the Chinese left. Also left was a lot of rice which the Chinese were no longer around to buy. Without the income from this crop, the South Vietnamese could not afford food or drinking water. Thus depleted, entire villages erupted into roving hordes. The CIA claimed this proved Ho Chi Minh’s forces had infiltrated South Vietnam.
Ever insecure about maintaining his presidency, Diem enacted a document of repressive actions that would be taken against those who opposed his leadership. Law 10/59 promised either hard labor for life or execution as punishment for any type of subversive behavior. Rather than Vietnamize the south against the north, these severe tactics united the south against the United States. The direct and immediate result was the formation of the National Liberation Front (NLF), a highly disciplined collection of insurgents sympathetic to Ho and hateful of Diem. Although the NLF’s nominal leader was a Saigon lawyer named Hua Tho, the organization was comprised of more than a dozen political groups.
General Lansdale begged Allen Dulles to quell the NLF uprisings with a few squadrons of Marine Corps choppers, courtesy of Bell Helicopters. By 1960, the Office of Special Operations (OSO) granted the request. Early the next year, newly-elected U.S. President John Kennedy reappointed Dulles Director of Central Intelligence. Bell’s sales would soar during the Vietnam War, hitting two billion dollars in 1967.
In April 1962, Kennedy told General Maxwell Taylor that U.S. involvement in Vietnam “should be reduced at the first favorable moment.” This was in part a furtherance of Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) #57, which shifted Cold War operations away from the control of the CIA and towards the executive branch. Later, Kennedy would learn that between the end of 1960 and the spring of 1963, the United States had supported Diem to the tune of two billion dollars, 12,000 “advisors” had been sent in, and sixty-two Americans had died.
By the fall of 1963, plans were made to remove Diem from Vietnam. President Kennedy, in NSAM #263, called for the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel by year’s end. Better, thought the CIA, at allow Dem to be murdered and hang the assassination on JFK. And so on November 1, 1963, Diem and his brother Nhu boarded a plane for Europe. For unexplained reasons, they disembarked before takeoff, had their driver return them to the palace, and found themselves alone. Genuinely frightened now, they made use of an escape tunnel which led them to the city of Cholen where they were promptly murdered. Subsequently, when CIA agent E. Howard Hunt worked in the Nixon White House, he forged documents to show that Kennedy had ordered the murders, giving the forgeries to Bill Lambert of Time-Life. John Kennedy himself was murdered twenty-one days later, and four days after that, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, reversed the order to withdraw from Vietnam.
With Diem and Kennedy out of the way, the Americanization of the Vietnam War began a rapid escalation. Johnson’s NSAM #273 called for covert military attacks on North Vietnam. If and when the Tonkinese defended themselves, the U.S. could then retaliate overtly, thereby facilitating the escalation of hundreds of thousands of Americans into the war. Here is an excerpt from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution:
"Whereas naval units of the communist regime in Vietnam have deliberately and repeatedly attacked U.S. naval vessels lawfully present in international waters and have thereby created a serious threat to international peace, the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President as Commander in Chief to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the U.S. and to prevent further aggression."
With the Resolution a fait accompli, the Vietnam War raged, allowing Johnson to parade the myth of democracy while actually helping the majority of the American people by implementing many social programs designed to increase access and liberties domestically. The Great Society, as the last national societal program of the twentieth century, introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the Housing and Urban Development Act, and the Truth in Lending Act. Despite the fact that since 1981, every administration has sought to dismantle parts of the Great Society, the economic lives of millions of Americans improved as a result of these reforms, elevating the standard of living at home while reeking havoc elsewhere.
One of those elsewhere places was the Dominican Republic. Salvador Gomez writes that “The U.S.’s newfound non-interventionist philosophy tended to condone or disregard the behavior of individuals such as General Rafael Trujillo.” Even though the U.S. Embassy in Santa Domingo begged Washington to oppose the General’s rise to power, “General Trujillo won the 1930 elections, the results of which were highly suspect. His thirty-one year rule was one full of political corruption, military muscle, torture, murder, nepotism, commercial monopolies and raids on the national treasury.”
President Johnson in April 1965 ordered a Marine invasion of the Dominican Republic. Following the assassination of Trujillo and the ascension of a government called the Triumvirate, Johnson feared a Castro-led insurrection in Santa Domingo. That same year Johnson ordered a bombing campaign called Rolling Thunder, the objective of which was to destroy North Vietnam’s support for the NLF in the South.
One year later, the magazine Ramparts ran an article revealing that the CIA had paid Michigan State University $25 million to hire five Agency employees to train South Vietnamese students in covert police methods. A later Ramparts issue detailed the relationship between the CIA and the National Students Association, showed how the CIA used students to spy, and detailed how the CIA exploited private institutions as conduits for secret funds. The veracity of these articles may be suggested by the CIA’s response: Director Richard Helms prepared a report onRamparts personnel for the White House. Helms equated criticism of covert operations with criticism of the Vietnam War.
Helms put William Colby in charge of Operation Phoenix, a murderous campaign that called for all U.S. intelligence agencies to pool their information about the NLF, the goal being to identify and destroy village leaders who might fit the profile. Colby later admitted to Congress that 20,000 Vietnamese were slaughtered by this operation.
To curb dissent at home, in August 1967, the Johnson White House ordered a black operations group within the counterintelligence staff to watch the activities of all foreign contacts of American anti-war protestors. In this illegal operation, called Chaos, the black ops group compiled files on 7,200 Americans.
Helms realized early on that the United States could not destroy the NLF militarily. Despite the fact that B-52s had bombed seventy percent of North Vietnam’s petroleum storage facilities and inflicted damage on other industrial targets, men and materials continued flowing into South Vietnam.
Discouraged but unwilling to admit defeat, the Pentagon implemented the total destruction of Vietnamese society. The U.S. military burned villages and placed suspected leaders in concentration camps. While the U.S. fired nonstop into areas governed by the National Liberation Front(NLF), B-52s bombed densely populated villages, while gunners in helicopters mowed down everything in sight, the sick joke of the time being that anyone who ran was NLF and anyone who stood still was a highly disciplined NLF. The United States sprayed crops with poison, bulldozed massive fields of rice paddies, seeded clouds to cause floods, and napalmed forests to keep NLF out in the open.
The NLF responded with total war. They allowed the enemy’s actions to mobilize an entire society, the most effective manifestation of which was the Tet Offensive, an operation which brought the war into the cities. To regain control of those cities, the U.S. would have to attack them, thereby losing whatever allegiance it might have had with the middle class. Troop morale would falter and NFL morale would soar. South Vietnam would see their real enemy and the war would become unwinnable for the United States.
This strategy was successful.
If a parallel need be drawn between the World War II-era fascists and those operating in Southeast Asia twenty-odd years later, there exists no more graphic an example than the treatment, or mistreatment, or slaughter by the United States of the residents of My Lai 4 in the Quang Ngai province during the response to the Tet Offensive. On March 16, 1968, United States servicemen gathered up old men, women and children by the hundreds and systematically tortured, stabbed, choked, strangled and raped them until they were dead. This attack was not a misunderstanding or the result of over-enthusiasm. This was the mass slaughter of people in forced villages who were unarmed, defenseless and just sitting down to breakfast.
In his column of December 5, 1969, Harlan Ellison wrote in the Los Angeles Free Press:
"If ever there was an apocalyptic incident that speaks to the death of the past in this country, this week we have it. We can ignore the pollution, we can permit the political corruption, we can deny the paranoia and racism of our culture, we can substitute personal experience for a careful, reasoned understanding of the human condition—but we cannot ignore this massacre."
The NLF in May 1969 came to the Paris Peace Talks between Hanoi and Washington, offering a ten-point plan for peace in Indochina. Although the Nixon administration rejected the proposal at the time, four years later it accepted the same exact terms.
Violence was felt in the jungles of America as well. During the winter of 1972-73, hundreds of Oglala Sioux commemorated the massacre at Wounded Knee by staging the second siege at the Pine Ridge Reservation. Adding to the pre-existing militancy of the Oglala Sioux was the behavior of a tribal leader picked for them by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This leader, Dick Wilson, was a law and order enthusiast who was determined to keep the peace no matter who got hurt. Into this political fray marched the American Indian Movement, the members of which had a few years earlier led an occupation of the island of Alcatraz and in 1972 had initiated the takeover of the BIA offices in Washington. At Pine Ridge, the Oglala Sioux invited AIM to join them.
In retaliation, the FBI, federal marshals, state troopers, BIA police and the U.S. military occupied the reservation, demanding that AIM surrender. The Native Americans responded that they wanted public hearings on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, a probe of the BIA, and criminal indictments brought against Wilson. The Nixon government made a counter offer: the freedom fighters at Pine Ridge could lay down their weapons and surrender and nobody would get hurt. When this proved unacceptable, Nixon ordered his troops to withdraw, knowing that without confrontation to film, the media would soon depart.
Defeat in Vietnam and retreat from an Indian uprising were not the only accomplishments of the Nixon years. The Milhous regime could add to their resume the break-in and burglary of the Democratic National Committee, only the first revealed of the many crimes that lurked in the oil puddles and shadows of Watergate. The much-celebrated wiretapping itself is best understood within the context of a much large series of activities that included the administration’s response to publication of The Pentagon Papers, attacks upon the anti-war movement, the discrediting of potential opponents in the 1972 election, and the cover-up of these and other illegal activities.
The Pentagon Papers made interesting reading in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other national dailies. The documents had been released by Daniel Ellsberg and focused on U.S. involvement in Vietnam during the JFK and LBJ administrations. But Nixon fumed that negative war reports were being made public. If there were leaks in the White House, then Nixon wanted Plumbers, people who would act as an in-house intelligence outfit. The Plumbers illegally interfered in the prosecution of Ellsberg, set up a secret police squad, and forged documents about their political opponents. Nixon did win a second term, capturing more than sixty percent of the popular vote, a combination of dirty tricks, illegalities and happenstance making this inevitable.
Seeing covert actions as a useful tool, Nixon controlled the CIA better than had his predecessors. In February 1970, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, acting on Nixon’s orders, established the Committee Forty to oversee Agency black operations.
But Nixon and the CIA were not always at loggerheads. For instance, they had mutualities of interest in negating the freely-elected socialist Salvador Allende in Chile. Concerned over anticipated nationalization of industries involved ITT, Nixon authorized Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms to use his best agents to stop Allende at al costs. He was stopped dead. His replacement was the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet.
If the Gerald Ford Presidency was expected to breathe new life into American democracy, people did not have to hold their breath for long. As one-time Watergate journalist Bob Woodward wrote, “As a result of Nixon’s actions, presidents would not only be subject to doubt and second guessing; they would be suspected of outright criminality.” It is perhaps reasonable that a public as often deceived and later disabused as the one under consideration would be suspicious of potential deceptions. The resolution of this cognitive dissonance is a likely explanation: I am a good American, yet I go out of my way to vote for crooked politicians; therefore, to avoid feeling stupid, I must increase my commitment to the process. Or, to again quote Nietzsche: “Memory says I did this. Pride says I could not have done this. Eventually memory yields.”
Saigon fell to the forces of Ho Chi Minh in April 1975. Less than one month later, president Ford reestablished faith in the American myth when Cambodian forces captured the S.S. Mayaguez, an American merchant vessel. The new revolutionary regime in Cambodia stopped the ship, brought the crew to the mainland, and asked them if they worked for the CIA. Ford ordered U.S. planes to bomb Cambodian ships, including the one on which theMayaguez crew had been transported. Once the crew was released from its two-day detainment, Ford ordered a retaliatory Marine invasion of Tang Island, an attack which left more than sixty Marines dead.
Three other adventures during the Ford regime illustrate that neither the Executive Branch nor the CIA had changed their propensity over the years.
In 1975, the CIA supplied financial and military aid to Kurdish rebels in Iraq through officials of the Shah of Iran. Fearing the Kurds might not stop with taking over their own country, the Shah cut off this aid, leaving 200,000 Kurdish refugees.
The African nation of Angola, weakened by its liberation from Portugal, consideration a variety of political affiliations, including those supported by the USSR and Cuba. The CIA initially flirted with destabilizing the country, but abandoned the idea for fear of losing another war.
Australia, a U.S. ally, found out what happens when free elections result in leadership that runs contrary to United States objectives. After twenty-three years of Conservative Party rule, the populace elected a Labor Party Prime Minister, E. Gough Whitlam. The CIA immediately funded the Conservative opposition: Sir John Kerr, the Queen’s Australian governor-general, dismissed Whitlam and replaced him with Conservative Malcolm Fraser.
It had been a rough presidency for Ford, who of course recognized that both he and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller were the first two people in those positions who had not been popularly elected. As Sidney Blumenthal summarizes the Ford years:
"His selection of Rockefeller triggered Reagan’s decision to run against him for the Republican nomination. Ford had a dismally low regard for Reagan. “I didn’t take him seriously.” Ford’s battles with the Democratic Congress made him seem impotent. He issued sixty-five vetoes. Meanwhile Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Chief of Staff Dick Cheney created a team of hawks within the Pentagon."
As Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter had within his grasp the opportunity to build upon America’s strengths, to transform hope into reality, to decimate the forces of reaction and empower the prospects of positive change. Instead, he mobilized the most conservative elements available while alienating the American Left. Carter’s early cabinet appointments indicated the direction he desired. Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger had been Nixon’s Secretary of Defense as well as Director of Central Intelligence. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski sought the corporatization of America as a defense against communism; and Defense Secretary Harold Brown had been a hawk during the Vietnam War.
The one issue with which Carter’s name forever will be linked is the November 4, 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. Having tired of watching their countrymen be massacred by the Shah’s military forces and SAVAK, militants demonstrated daily in the oil-rich country. The Shah was forced to flee Iran and hid out in Hawaii. In the process of expelling American interests from Iran, the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini held fifty-two hostages for 444 days.
Although in attempting to free the hostages Carter used diplomacy, patience and the extortion of twelve billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets, it turned out that the President had not been the only person negotiating with the captors. In October 1980, one month before the U.S. presidential election, William Casey, campaign manager for the Ronald Reagan-George Bush ticket and future Director of Central Intelligence, met with some of the more radical members of the Iranian Parliament. The deal Casey offered was that in exchange for delaying the release of the hostages until Reagan was sworn in, the Republican administration would provide the Iranians with guns and ammunition to kill Iraqis.
From the successful delay of the release of the hostages to the Iran-Contra affair, from the war against Nicaragua to the firing of striking air traffic control workers, from invasions of Grenada and Panama to exacerbations in the disparity of income between economic classes, the Reagan-Bush years (1981-92) saw a vast treachery not only reminiscent of Nixon, but—in its use of rationalization—evocative of the spirit of German and Italian fascists.
Robert Parry, an investigative journalist for the Associated Press,Newsweek and National Public Radio, and later an author of books about the media in the Reagan-Bush years, accuses that government of bullying the press, an institution which, Parry argues, was all to happy to capitulate. “When I got there in 1977 as a Watergate press corps, it was there as the watchdog. What we have now, and it’s continuing into this new era, is the Reagan-Bush press corp.” How did this happen? Parry explains: “It’s the press corps Reagan-Bush helped create—that they created partly by purging those, or encouraging the purging of those who were not going along.”
One of the key figures in this administration was Jeane Kirkpatrick who, while sitting out the Carter presidency, wrote an article that later became known as the Reagan Doctrine. As Steve Bergstein says inPsychsound: “What made Kirkpatrick famous was her attempt to distinguish between authoritarian governments and totalitarian governments. She acknowledged that authoritarian states did not meet democratic standards, but wrote that they were preferable to totalitarian regimes.” Reagan appointed Kirkpatrick Ambassador to the United Nations, where she served from 1981 until 1985. As Harold Jackson noted in her obituary, Kirkpatrick “observed that most right wing dictatorships were reliably pro-American. Their leaders might favor the rich and keep the masses in poverty,” but poor people were accustomed to misery, so they could bear up well. In addition to the Reagan Doctrine and the accusation that Costa Rica was the home of Latin American communism, Kirkpatrick further distinguished herself with a unique version of the Domino Theory. According to Kirkpatrick, not only would the fall of any one Central American country lead to the ruin of all of them, but communism would drive at least ten percent of all Latin Americans north to the United States, a prospect xenophobic American citizenry looked forward to with the same glee reserved for a Bolshevik-like invasion of herpes simplex. As Parry summarized his experiences:
"Even when there was something horrible happening in those countries, even when thousands of human beings were being taken out and killed, the role of the U.S. government became to hide it, to rationalize it, to pretend it wasn’t that serious, and to try to discredit anyone who said otherwise. And the main targets were the reporters in the field."
There was more to come. As the architect of oppression during the first four years of Reagan-Bush, Kirkpatrick was not content with subjugation of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Bill van Auken reminds us: “She backed the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the bombing of Libya and the multimillion-dollar support for Islamic guerillas—Osama bin Laden among them—battling the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan.”
The Reagan-Bush agenda was to finance war by arming and funding the Contras, a loose collective of resistors to the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. All the Contras shared a hatred of the Sandinistas as well as the fact that they had self-exiled into Honduras and Costa Rica, from where they waged sporadic attacks on their former homeland.
Sensing another unwinnable conflict might well be in the making, Congress passed the Boland Amendment which forbade the CIA from arming Contras for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua. The Reagan-Bush team countered that they were not overthrowing the Sandinistas so much as they were harassing them. To avoid overt defiance of Congress, Reagan-Bush arranged for money and weapons to be transferred by foreign conduits. To this end, they employed a special White House operative.
Lieutenant-Colonel Marine Oliver North had been an intelligence operative in Vietnam. In the Reagan-Bush regime, his role was to organize multinational funds to the Contras in their war against the people of Nicaragua. So, while North was circumnavigating U.S. law, Secretary of State and former Nixon cabinet member George Schultz made public statements that actions taken in the name of democracy were justified. In other words, aggressive “harassment” of Central American countries and their freely-elected governments was de facto legitimate if those governments adhered to political ideologies out of favor with the U.S. regime.
Nicaragua’s army chief of staff reported to the world press that Reagan-Bush had authorized additional CIA support for the Contras in Honduras and Costa Rica, this support being an 8,000-man failed invasion of Nicaragua. Soon enough, Reagan-Bush authorized the CIA to mine the country’s harbors, an act which not only violated international law but which was deemed a crime against humanity by the International Court in The Hague. That overt act of war was part of a larger scheme, as was discovered in 1984 when journalists discovered a Contra manual written by a CIA contract agent named John Kirkpatrick. The manual, called Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, was a textbook instruction on how to kidnap, rig terror bombs, blackmail and assassinate.
Iran and Iraq declared war on one another in 1980, in the midst of the Iranian-American hostage crisis. Iran needed more ammunition to continue. Israel had an abundance of weapons to supply, but was forbidden to do so because of a U.S. arms embargo against Iran. Oliver North worked out an “arms for hostages” arrangement with Israel and Iran that encouraged the latter to persuade Lebanese Hezbollah agents to release American hostages who had been spying for the CIA in Beirut. By early 1986, Israel was no longer needed as a broker and Reagan-Bush authorized direct sales to Iran, a fact which did not endear the United States to Iraq and one which explains much about the animosity of Saddam Hussein towards America. The profits of these arms sales were funneled to the Contras through Swiss bank accounts administered by Oliver North.
Perhaps most significantly, back on Christmas Day, 1979, the Soviet Red Army had marched into Kabul, Afghanistan, to prop up the faction-heavy communist party already in power there. Afghan Islamic fundamentalists outmaneuvered 100,000 Soviet troops. By 1985 and the first weeks of the second Reagan-Bush term, the CIA was supplying these zealous Afghans with Stinger ground-to-air missiles to use against the Soviets. This U.S. attempt to unsettle yet another government generated the regional instability that led to the ascension of the Taliban government and to the events of September 11, 2001.
The NLF responded with total war. They allowed the enemy’s actions to mobilize an entire society, the most effective manifestation of which was the Tet Offensive, an operation which brought the war into the cities. To regain control of those cities, the U.S. would have to attack them, thereby losing whatever allegiance it might have had with the middle class. Troop morale would falter and NFL morale would soar. South Vietnam would see their real enemy and the war would become unwinnable for the United States.
This strategy was successful.
If a parallel need be drawn between the World War II-era fascists and those operating in Southeast Asia twenty-odd years later, there exists no more graphic an example than the treatment, or mistreatment, or slaughter by the United States of the residents of My Lai 4 in the Quang Ngai province during the response to the Tet Offensive. On March 16, 1968, United States servicemen gathered up old men, women and children by the hundreds and systematically tortured, stabbed, choked, strangled and raped them until they were dead. This attack was not a misunderstanding or the result of over-enthusiasm. This was the mass slaughter of people in forced villages who were unarmed, defenseless and just sitting down to breakfast.
In his column of December 5, 1969, Harlan Ellison wrote in the Los Angeles Free Press:
"If ever there was an apocalyptic incident that speaks to the death of the past in this country, this week we have it. We can ignore the pollution, we can permit the political corruption, we can deny the paranoia and racism of our culture, we can substitute personal experience for a careful, reasoned understanding of the human condition—but we cannot ignore this massacre."
The NLF in May 1969 came to the Paris Peace Talks between Hanoi and Washington, offering a ten-point plan for peace in Indochina. Although the Nixon administration rejected the proposal at the time, four years later it accepted the same exact terms.
Violence was felt in the jungles of America as well. During the winter of 1972-73, hundreds of Oglala Sioux commemorated the massacre at Wounded Knee by staging the second siege at the Pine Ridge Reservation. Adding to the pre-existing militancy of the Oglala Sioux was the behavior of a tribal leader picked for them by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This leader, Dick Wilson, was a law and order enthusiast who was determined to keep the peace no matter who got hurt. Into this political fray marched the American Indian Movement, the members of which had a few years earlier led an occupation of the island of Alcatraz and in 1972 had initiated the takeover of the BIA offices in Washington. At Pine Ridge, the Oglala Sioux invited AIM to join them.
In retaliation, the FBI, federal marshals, state troopers, BIA police and the U.S. military occupied the reservation, demanding that AIM surrender. The Native Americans responded that they wanted public hearings on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, a probe of the BIA, and criminal indictments brought against Wilson. The Nixon government made a counter offer: the freedom fighters at Pine Ridge could lay down their weapons and surrender and nobody would get hurt. When this proved unacceptable, Nixon ordered his troops to withdraw, knowing that without confrontation to film, the media would soon depart.
Defeat in Vietnam and retreat from an Indian uprising were not the only accomplishments of the Nixon years. The Milhous regime could add to their resume the break-in and burglary of the Democratic National Committee, only the first revealed of the many crimes that lurked in the oil puddles and shadows of Watergate. The much-celebrated wiretapping itself is best understood within the context of a much large series of activities that included the administration’s response to publication of The Pentagon Papers, attacks upon the anti-war movement, the discrediting of potential opponents in the 1972 election, and the cover-up of these and other illegal activities.
The Pentagon Papers made interesting reading in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other national dailies. The documents had been released by Daniel Ellsberg and focused on U.S. involvement in Vietnam during the JFK and LBJ administrations. But Nixon fumed that negative war reports were being made public. If there were leaks in the White House, then Nixon wanted Plumbers, people who would act as an in-house intelligence outfit. The Plumbers illegally interfered in the prosecution of Ellsberg, set up a secret police squad, and forged documents about their political opponents. Nixon did win a second term, capturing more than sixty percent of the popular vote, a combination of dirty tricks, illegalities and happenstance making this inevitable.
Seeing covert actions as a useful tool, Nixon controlled the CIA better than had his predecessors. In February 1970, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, acting on Nixon’s orders, established the Committee Forty to oversee Agency black operations.
But Nixon and the CIA were not always at loggerheads. For instance, they had mutualities of interest in negating the freely-elected socialist Salvador Allende in Chile. Concerned over anticipated nationalization of industries involved ITT, Nixon authorized Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms to use his best agents to stop Allende at al costs. He was stopped dead. His replacement was the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet.
If the Gerald Ford Presidency was expected to breathe new life into American democracy, people did not have to hold their breath for long. As one-time Watergate journalist Bob Woodward wrote, “As a result of Nixon’s actions, presidents would not only be subject to doubt and second guessing; they would be suspected of outright criminality.” It is perhaps reasonable that a public as often deceived and later disabused as the one under consideration would be suspicious of potential deceptions. The resolution of this cognitive dissonance is a likely explanation: I am a good American, yet I go out of my way to vote for crooked politicians; therefore, to avoid feeling stupid, I must increase my commitment to the process. Or, to again quote Nietzsche: “Memory says I did this. Pride says I could not have done this. Eventually memory yields.”
Saigon fell to the forces of Ho Chi Minh in April 1975. Less than one month later, president Ford reestablished faith in the American myth when Cambodian forces captured the S.S. Mayaguez, an American merchant vessel. The new revolutionary regime in Cambodia stopped the ship, brought the crew to the mainland, and asked them if they worked for the CIA. Ford ordered U.S. planes to bomb Cambodian ships, including the one on which theMayaguez crew had been transported. Once the crew was released from its two-day detainment, Ford ordered a retaliatory Marine invasion of Tang Island, an attack which left more than sixty Marines dead.
Three other adventures during the Ford regime illustrate that neither the Executive Branch nor the CIA had changed their propensity over the years.
In 1975, the CIA supplied financial and military aid to Kurdish rebels in Iraq through officials of the Shah of Iran. Fearing the Kurds might not stop with taking over their own country, the Shah cut off this aid, leaving 200,000 Kurdish refugees.
The African nation of Angola, weakened by its liberation from Portugal, consideration a variety of political affiliations, including those supported by the USSR and Cuba. The CIA initially flirted with destabilizing the country, but abandoned the idea for fear of losing another war.
Australia, a U.S. ally, found out what happens when free elections result in leadership that runs contrary to United States objectives. After twenty-three years of Conservative Party rule, the populace elected a Labor Party Prime Minister, E. Gough Whitlam. The CIA immediately funded the Conservative opposition: Sir John Kerr, the Queen’s Australian governor-general, dismissed Whitlam and replaced him with Conservative Malcolm Fraser.
It had been a rough presidency for Ford, who of course recognized that both he and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller were the first two people in those positions who had not been popularly elected. As Sidney Blumenthal summarizes the Ford years:
"His selection of Rockefeller triggered Reagan’s decision to run against him for the Republican nomination. Ford had a dismally low regard for Reagan. “I didn’t take him seriously.” Ford’s battles with the Democratic Congress made him seem impotent. He issued sixty-five vetoes. Meanwhile Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Chief of Staff Dick Cheney created a team of hawks within the Pentagon."
As Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter had within his grasp the opportunity to build upon America’s strengths, to transform hope into reality, to decimate the forces of reaction and empower the prospects of positive change. Instead, he mobilized the most conservative elements available while alienating the American Left. Carter’s early cabinet appointments indicated the direction he desired. Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger had been Nixon’s Secretary of Defense as well as Director of Central Intelligence. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski sought the corporatization of America as a defense against communism; and Defense Secretary Harold Brown had been a hawk during the Vietnam War.
The one issue with which Carter’s name forever will be linked is the November 4, 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. Having tired of watching their countrymen be massacred by the Shah’s military forces and SAVAK, militants demonstrated daily in the oil-rich country. The Shah was forced to flee Iran and hid out in Hawaii. In the process of expelling American interests from Iran, the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini held fifty-two hostages for 444 days.
Although in attempting to free the hostages Carter used diplomacy, patience and the extortion of twelve billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets, it turned out that the President had not been the only person negotiating with the captors. In October 1980, one month before the U.S. presidential election, William Casey, campaign manager for the Ronald Reagan-George Bush ticket and future Director of Central Intelligence, met with some of the more radical members of the Iranian Parliament. The deal Casey offered was that in exchange for delaying the release of the hostages until Reagan was sworn in, the Republican administration would provide the Iranians with guns and ammunition to kill Iraqis.
From the successful delay of the release of the hostages to the Iran-Contra affair, from the war against Nicaragua to the firing of striking air traffic control workers, from invasions of Grenada and Panama to exacerbations in the disparity of income between economic classes, the Reagan-Bush years (1981-92) saw a vast treachery not only reminiscent of Nixon, but—in its use of rationalization—evocative of the spirit of German and Italian fascists.
Robert Parry, an investigative journalist for the Associated Press,Newsweek and National Public Radio, and later an author of books about the media in the Reagan-Bush years, accuses that government of bullying the press, an institution which, Parry argues, was all to happy to capitulate. “When I got there in 1977 as a Watergate press corps, it was there as the watchdog. What we have now, and it’s continuing into this new era, is the Reagan-Bush press corp.” How did this happen? Parry explains: “It’s the press corps Reagan-Bush helped create—that they created partly by purging those, or encouraging the purging of those who were not going along.”
One of the key figures in this administration was Jeane Kirkpatrick who, while sitting out the Carter presidency, wrote an article that later became known as the Reagan Doctrine. As Steve Bergstein says inPsychsound: “What made Kirkpatrick famous was her attempt to distinguish between authoritarian governments and totalitarian governments. She acknowledged that authoritarian states did not meet democratic standards, but wrote that they were preferable to totalitarian regimes.” Reagan appointed Kirkpatrick Ambassador to the United Nations, where she served from 1981 until 1985. As Harold Jackson noted in her obituary, Kirkpatrick “observed that most right wing dictatorships were reliably pro-American. Their leaders might favor the rich and keep the masses in poverty,” but poor people were accustomed to misery, so they could bear up well. In addition to the Reagan Doctrine and the accusation that Costa Rica was the home of Latin American communism, Kirkpatrick further distinguished herself with a unique version of the Domino Theory. According to Kirkpatrick, not only would the fall of any one Central American country lead to the ruin of all of them, but communism would drive at least ten percent of all Latin Americans north to the United States, a prospect xenophobic American citizenry looked forward to with the same glee reserved for a Bolshevik-like invasion of herpes simplex. As Parry summarized his experiences:
"Even when there was something horrible happening in those countries, even when thousands of human beings were being taken out and killed, the role of the U.S. government became to hide it, to rationalize it, to pretend it wasn’t that serious, and to try to discredit anyone who said otherwise. And the main targets were the reporters in the field."
There was more to come. As the architect of oppression during the first four years of Reagan-Bush, Kirkpatrick was not content with subjugation of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Bill van Auken reminds us: “She backed the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the bombing of Libya and the multimillion-dollar support for Islamic guerillas—Osama bin Laden among them—battling the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan.”
The Reagan-Bush agenda was to finance war by arming and funding the Contras, a loose collective of resistors to the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. All the Contras shared a hatred of the Sandinistas as well as the fact that they had self-exiled into Honduras and Costa Rica, from where they waged sporadic attacks on their former homeland.
Sensing another unwinnable conflict might well be in the making, Congress passed the Boland Amendment which forbade the CIA from arming Contras for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua. The Reagan-Bush team countered that they were not overthrowing the Sandinistas so much as they were harassing them. To avoid overt defiance of Congress, Reagan-Bush arranged for money and weapons to be transferred by foreign conduits. To this end, they employed a special White House operative.
Lieutenant-Colonel Marine Oliver North had been an intelligence operative in Vietnam. In the Reagan-Bush regime, his role was to organize multinational funds to the Contras in their war against the people of Nicaragua. So, while North was circumnavigating U.S. law, Secretary of State and former Nixon cabinet member George Schultz made public statements that actions taken in the name of democracy were justified. In other words, aggressive “harassment” of Central American countries and their freely-elected governments was de facto legitimate if those governments adhered to political ideologies out of favor with the U.S. regime.
Nicaragua’s army chief of staff reported to the world press that Reagan-Bush had authorized additional CIA support for the Contras in Honduras and Costa Rica, this support being an 8,000-man failed invasion of Nicaragua. Soon enough, Reagan-Bush authorized the CIA to mine the country’s harbors, an act which not only violated international law but which was deemed a crime against humanity by the International Court in The Hague. That overt act of war was part of a larger scheme, as was discovered in 1984 when journalists discovered a Contra manual written by a CIA contract agent named John Kirkpatrick. The manual, called Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, was a textbook instruction on how to kidnap, rig terror bombs, blackmail and assassinate.
Iran and Iraq declared war on one another in 1980, in the midst of the Iranian-American hostage crisis. Iran needed more ammunition to continue. Israel had an abundance of weapons to supply, but was forbidden to do so because of a U.S. arms embargo against Iran. Oliver North worked out an “arms for hostages” arrangement with Israel and Iran that encouraged the latter to persuade Lebanese Hezbollah agents to release American hostages who had been spying for the CIA in Beirut. By early 1986, Israel was no longer needed as a broker and Reagan-Bush authorized direct sales to Iran, a fact which did not endear the United States to Iraq and one which explains much about the animosity of Saddam Hussein towards America. The profits of these arms sales were funneled to the Contras through Swiss bank accounts administered by Oliver North.
Perhaps most significantly, back on Christmas Day, 1979, the Soviet Red Army had marched into Kabul, Afghanistan, to prop up the faction-heavy communist party already in power there. Afghan Islamic fundamentalists outmaneuvered 100,000 Soviet troops. By 1985 and the first weeks of the second Reagan-Bush term, the CIA was supplying these zealous Afghans with Stinger ground-to-air missiles to use against the Soviets. This U.S. attempt to unsettle yet another government generated the regional instability that led to the ascension of the Taliban government and to the events of September 11, 2001.
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